Anandtech discovered that write performance on JMICRON controllers (not used by Intel) went to practically zero with time. The writer (and other publications I believe) went looking for the same issue in non-JMICRON controllers, and discovered that while Intel controllers were by far the least affected, they still suffered some degradation. Intel quickly updated their firmware, while everyone else (who had much more severe issues) either fixed it later or not at all.
It was my understanding that the performance degradation was a known drawback to first-generation SSDs, but that Intel's controller was specifically designed to work around it and other SSD performance issues at the time. So their SSD was expected to not have the problem, which was why they were surprised when some little-known reviewer showed that the disks could suffer semi-permanent performance degradation under certain circumstances.
Disclaimer: I have an X25-M supposedly affected by the issue, and I haven't bothered to upgrade the firmware.
And you probably won't ever have to, because as I remember the description of the problem, it's not usually triggered in normal use.
Would be a shame if they go bust and there's no replacement.
Well, no, YouTube won't last forever but since it's owned by Google, it's surely not going away anytime soon. The biggest long-term risk to user generated content hosting is growing corporate and government control over the Internet.
They plans to get control of a power tool & medium: the internet.
Power tool nothing. After the development of agriculture, the Internet is easily most important achievement that mankind has devised. We would do more than well to ensure that it remains an open and decentralized medium. Communication is what puts the people in control of the government. It's one of the cornerstones of democracy. This is why countries like Germany, Australia, and China are already censoring their citizens. I really really hope I'm wrong, but I think that within my daughter's lifetime, some entity or another will make a power grab (perhaps sudden, perhaps gradual) for the whole Internet. We should work now to make that goal less achievable.
The problem with this legislation is that, on one hand, we might get a win on the net neutrality front, but on the other hand, the same companies that are in power are going to stay in power and find some other way to abuse their customers.
So it sounds like "net neutrality" is basically going to be defined by the FCC. This is the same FCC that bends over backward (and forward, I suppose) to please the mega corporations that they're supposed to be regulating. The one that has sold off almost all of our public airwaves to private commercial interests. The same one that thinks the First Amendment isn't really that big a deal after all.
The performance degradation in the Intel X-25 is not because of a "firmware bug". All SSD's will suffer performance degradation whether or not their writing/wear leveling algorithms have been updated via firmware.
You're missing several months of history here.
Back in February, several reviewers found that the X-25s performance fell to unacceptably low levels after a certain threshold was reached. Intel tried to deny it, saying that you'd never see the problem in real-world usage and only benchmarking the disk in a certain way would trigger the behavior. Which may be true, but the hardcore "Pimp My PC" crowd aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on a disk that has even a remote chance of being triggered into a non-recoverable slow mode.
Intel relented and released a firmware to fix the issue, and the benchmarkers and reviewers saw the fragmentation problem vanish. It was a big deal because Intel positioned the disks to be the high-end in the SSD market and they were able to overcome most of the downsides to using SSDs in place of mechanical disks. (Except the price.)
Don't believe me? Go spend a few hours on youtube.
THIS.
The music industry's days are numbered. They've shown themselves to be nothing but a boatload of evil over the last decade, but that's not why they're going down. They're going down because they have been replaced by technology. As many (and I do mean many) here on Slashdot have noted again and again, the record company's job is two-fold:
1. Production 2. Promotion
As far as #1, a few hundred bucks will get you good low end--but good enough--equipment to put together a few tracks or even an entire album that sounds decent enough to play on the radio. Sure, you'll need some practice and theoretical knowledge of audio production to get a good result. But that's hardly an insurmountable barrier. If an artist can learn the science and art of their instruments well enough to make good music, they can learn too how to record it properly. I totally do not buy the whole "you need an expensive veteran producer to get anywhere" argument.
And for #2, there are multiple outlets locally and on the web for an artist to get themselves noticed. YouTube being a prime example. Technology is making it incredibly easy to self-promote. Social networking sites are freakin' gold when it comes to word-of-mouth style advertising. They're allowing people to share cool stuff with their circle of friends in a way that never existed before. Yes, you have to put in a tremendous amount of effort to distinguish yourself as a signal among the noise, but that's true whether you're signed with a major label or not.
I hope I'm right about the future and that we'll start to see a lot more changes for the better in terms of music culture. From where I stand, the traditional music industry's days are certainly numbered and I believe their actions indicate that they are fully aware of it.
Civilian positions are one thing, but it seems to me if you put a smart and independent thinking person through the military's recruit-crusher, you're either going to get a non-independent-thinking person, a smart and independent thinking person who has been faking non-independent thinking and hates the military for it, or a corpse.
Hackers & discipline... probably not the best combination ever.
Be careful not to overgeneralize. Not all geeks/hackers are anti-authority by nature. Many of those that are learn to get over it as they mature. To get very far in the real world, you have to be willing to accept that other people (often daft ones) will get to boss you around once in awhile. If you want to succeed, you have to learn to take it in stride. By all means, stand up for what you believe in, but don't think that being a belligerent idealist will win you many friends in any field or environment.
While I wouldn't necessarily call myself a hacker, I am a pretty independent geek and despite that I enjoyed most of my time in the active duty military. Granted, I worked on autopilots rather than PCs, but if I could hack it, I think any geek can. Plus, the discipline that the military provides is exactly what a lot of young hackers need to turn their raw skills and knowledge into a career that can propel them into positions where they can call the shots and do what's needed for the security of the nation's infrastructure.
The fact that the DoD is starting to see hackers as resources rather than adversaries is extremely encouraging and should be applauded. Just a decade or two ago, this was the stuff of science fiction.
And we, the consumers, continue to get screwed like sheep.
People I feel no sympathy towards:
- Those who bought an iPhone knowing full well that Apple and AT&T have absolute and full control over the software running on it, including (but not limited to) which programs you can install and even going so far as to have a "kill switch" to terminate applications that they don't like. - Those who bought a Kindle and didn't stop to think that Amazon can do whatever they want with your book purchases, including reversing the purchase, sell your reading habits, or even change the contents of your books after the sale. - Anyone who buys a DRM-encumbered device, system, or software and then complains about it. It's like going to the dealership, buying a red car, and then going around whining about how much you hate the color.
Not really. The last two times I ordered a Dell laptop (well, one laptop and one notebook), I just went to their Open Source PCs page, picked a model, and purchased.
If I'm going to buy a notebook then I want to make sure it comes unbundled and with a clean HDD so I can put what I need onto it. The problem is I can't seem to get any one to send me a blank notebook that I can install a proper OS to,
You're doing it wrong. Yes, they make you chose either Ubuntu or FreeDOS, but what's the difference between buying a laptop with a blank disk and one with Linux or FreeDOS that you can install whatever you want over it anyway?
if I spend the 100 dollar software package bundle then I'll wipe the notebook when I get it wasting the 100 dollars, but when I tell the computer store / company I'm going to wipe it so don't sell me the bundle they tell me they can't.
When you buy a laptop with an open source OS, you aren't paying anything extra for the OS. Ubuntu is a free operating system, they have no incentive or reason to pay Canonical for it and thus have nothing to pass onto you. They certainly aren't paying anyone for each copy of FreeDOS shipped.
Yeah, just try it on eBay. Microsoft and eBay have an arrangement where their customers are completely forbidden from selling previously-used (or entirely unused) Windows licenses second-hand. All Microsoft has to do is flag an auction and eBay pulls it down with no human intervention and little in the way of explanation.
A few years back I bought a laptop with a Win2k license. I was putting Linux on the laptop, so I didn't need the license and tried to sell it on ebay. The auction was up for 6 days before eBay shut it down, claiming (in not so many words) that I was trying to hawk pirated software. Despite the fact that I explained the situation clearly in the auction, have been an eBay seller for years, and have a spotless feedback record. There is nothing in Microsoft's EULA, nothing in eBay's terms of service, nothing in the copyright laws that says I cannot sell a legitimate software license to someone else.
A few weeks later, Microsoft sent me a fuckload of identical cease-and-desist letters claiming (vaguely) that I was infringing on their copyright somehow. This was when I vowed never to purchase another piece of Microsoft software again, not even a computer with Windows pre-installed.
Say what? I was going to mod this a troll, but I think it's high time someone pointed out that Slashdot commenters seriously need to stop blaming consumers for exercising their own freedom of choice in the marketplace. Companies ought to be held responsible for their actions 100% of the time without all the cynical "Oh this guy is hurting every other consumer because he refused to take X company's bullshit lying down."
One wonders if FOSS is becoming too much of a soap opera and less of a collaborative development model.
There is no less bickering or drama in open source software development now than there has been in the past. The difference today is that:
1. Open source is a lot bigger now than it was. Every company having anything to do with I.T. either uses it or fears it. This summer is when the business world finally really realized that there is value in open source as a business model. You can't walk into a store selling consumer electronic gear and not find some device powered by an embedded open source operatins system. Linux is within an inch of being a household name. The majority of people installing Linux for the first time are not geeks, they're normal people.
2. Everyone's on the web now. (Well, anyone worth mentioning.) Blogs are the new tabloids, twitter and facebook are the new gossip. And people love drama more than ever before. I subscribe to the Linux Today RSS feed and every other entry on there anymore is either "10 Ways to Improve Your Ubuntu Experience" or "Why Open Source Does or Does Not Suck for Grandmothers of Eight in Rhode Island".
In the old days, bickering on open source discussion forums (mailing lists or usenet) never got much attention because only a vanishly small group of people were even watching the threads, and even fewer probably cared about the topic at hand. Now, the blogs catch fire whenever two prominent kernel hackers have a spat.
The logical alternative for new deployments would be Debian, if you wanted to dump RPM based systems.
Ubuntu Server is (so far) almost entirely Debian underneath. The relationship between Ubuntu and Debian is analogous to the relationship Red Hat and CentOS.
It's not like they have a Marine Exepditionary Force and a Carrier Battle Group waiting off the coast to enforce the will of these companies.
What they do have is millions of dollars set aside for gifts, kickbacks, and fancy lunches to help "persuade" people in powerful places of their point of view. Those of us who want strong fair use laws (artists and consumers alike) don't.
And also note that every government computer network that I've ever heard of already prohibits running basically anything but Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, so a law banning P2P on government networks is completely superfluous and would only serve to make legislators look like they're actually doing something.
"Personal approval" is rather different than a legally enforceable contract.
Getting your app shot down without rhyme or reason is the danger any iPhone developer faces. Not only does it lock out open source, but it locks out commercial development as well because nobody wants to face that risk. Eventually, the only people who will be developing iPhone apps are "bottom-feeders" who spend about an hour whipping up some trivial crap and then putting it up for sale hoping that once in a while, somebody will accidentally click the Buy button.
I might be in the market for an SSD soon, so I put some note together based on my reading of the articles in the topic and elsewhere. I thought I'd share them here so I can just Google them later.
The first and second-gen Intel X25-M disks don't have a huge performance delta. (The 2G is slightly faster in most cases.)
Sequential read is maxed out around 260MB/sec on all high-performance SATA-II SSDs.
The M models suck at sequential writes, but the E models are great.
The M models (MLC) outperform all other disks on random operations.
The X25-M second-gen models are supposed to be about half the price of first-gen models.
Conclusions:
If sequential write speed is important, get the X25-E.
If sequential write is not important, either an X25-M first-gen or second-gen is acceptable, it will mainly come down to whichever is cheaper at the time.
Also note that Kingston sells licensed clones of the X25 disks, although currently they are actually a bit more expensive than the Intel-branded ones on newegg.
This is an moodle plugin for microsoft's own groupware. Like their previous driver offering, it's not a wholehearted contribution to making an open source project better, but instead just a thing to make microsoft's own services work better when people need to use open source.
After over a decade of hearing about it, Microsoft is finally just starting to realize that they can't play the vendor lock-in game as hard as they used to and still retain customers. It's just not a Microsoft world any more. They wanted these projects to interoperate better with their own offerings, so they put up the code to do it. That's what open source is all about.
I'd also like to point out that this is far from the first open source activity that Microsoft has engaged in. In fact, Microsoft has a few open source projects under its belt already, and my understanding is that they're under an OSI-approved license. (I can't find them just now, but I want to say one of them is a wiki? Or an application installer?) They also provide a SourceForge clone called CodePlex which claims to host over 10,000 open source projects. (Most of them only run on Windows-based technologies, I'm sure, but still.)
No, Microsoft is no longer a stranger to open source. It's just that they want to contribute and donate on their own terms, which is what they are fully entitled to do, and is the only way that makes business sense. These days, only their most assed-backwards shareholders and managers see Open Source as some kind of conspiracy to undermine their vision of The Great Microsoft Kingdom.
So in order to find out if your personal information has been breached, you have to disclose said information AND pay a fee. Seems a little fishy to me.
More than a little fishy. I read this as, "British fraud officer leaves the force, collects the personal information of 40 million people from the black market and his buddies in law enforcement, and is now using it to make money. Oh, but it's not unethical this time because he used to be a policeman." If it was illegal for the phishers and fraudsters to have this ill-gained information, why is it not illegal for a former police officer to have it?
I know there are no privacy laws in Britain, but here in the U.S., I would hope that there's a law providing for the destruction of personal and/or financial details that were obtained illegally once they are no longer considered evidence in an ongoing prosecution.
I'm surprised nobody has linked to it yet, but there's this guy who made a physical Lunar Lander arcade game. No flashy vector graphics here! You control an actual model of a lander using real gauges and everything.
Slashdot Mirror
It was my understanding that the performance degradation was a known drawback to first-generation SSDs, but that Intel's controller was specifically designed to work around it and other SSD performance issues at the time. So their SSD was expected to not have the problem, which was why they were surprised when some little-known reviewer showed that the disks could suffer semi-permanent performance degradation under certain circumstances.
And you probably won't ever have to, because as I remember the description of the problem, it's not usually triggered in normal use.
Well, no, YouTube won't last forever but since it's owned by Google, it's surely not going away anytime soon. The biggest long-term risk to user generated content hosting is growing corporate and government control over the Internet.
Power tool nothing. After the development of agriculture, the Internet is easily most important achievement that mankind has devised. We would do more than well to ensure that it remains an open and decentralized medium. Communication is what puts the people in control of the government. It's one of the cornerstones of democracy. This is why countries like Germany, Australia, and China are already censoring their citizens. I really really hope I'm wrong, but I think that within my daughter's lifetime, some entity or another will make a power grab (perhaps sudden, perhaps gradual) for the whole Internet. We should work now to make that goal less achievable.
So it sounds like "net neutrality" is basically going to be defined by the FCC. This is the same FCC that bends over backward (and forward, I suppose) to please the mega corporations that they're supposed to be regulating. The one that has sold off almost all of our public airwaves to private commercial interests. The same one that thinks the First Amendment isn't really that big a deal after all.
I am not hopeful.
You're missing several months of history here.
Back in February, several reviewers found that the X-25s performance fell to unacceptably low levels after a certain threshold was reached. Intel tried to deny it, saying that you'd never see the problem in real-world usage and only benchmarking the disk in a certain way would trigger the behavior. Which may be true, but the hardcore "Pimp My PC" crowd aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on a disk that has even a remote chance of being triggered into a non-recoverable slow mode.
Intel relented and released a firmware to fix the issue, and the benchmarkers and reviewers saw the fragmentation problem vanish. It was a big deal because Intel positioned the disks to be the high-end in the SSD market and they were able to overcome most of the downsides to using SSDs in place of mechanical disks. (Except the price.)
THIS.
The music industry's days are numbered. They've shown themselves to be nothing but a boatload of evil over the last decade, but that's not why they're going down. They're going down because they have been replaced by technology. As many (and I do mean many) here on Slashdot have noted again and again, the record company's job is two-fold:
1. Production
2. Promotion
As far as #1, a few hundred bucks will get you good low end--but good enough--equipment to put together a few tracks or even an entire album that sounds decent enough to play on the radio. Sure, you'll need some practice and theoretical knowledge of audio production to get a good result. But that's hardly an insurmountable barrier. If an artist can learn the science and art of their instruments well enough to make good music, they can learn too how to record it properly. I totally do not buy the whole "you need an expensive veteran producer to get anywhere" argument.
And for #2, there are multiple outlets locally and on the web for an artist to get themselves noticed. YouTube being a prime example. Technology is making it incredibly easy to self-promote. Social networking sites are freakin' gold when it comes to word-of-mouth style advertising. They're allowing people to share cool stuff with their circle of friends in a way that never existed before. Yes, you have to put in a tremendous amount of effort to distinguish yourself as a signal among the noise, but that's true whether you're signed with a major label or not.
I hope I'm right about the future and that we'll start to see a lot more changes for the better in terms of music culture. From where I stand, the traditional music industry's days are certainly numbered and I believe their actions indicate that they are fully aware of it.
Be careful not to overgeneralize. Not all geeks/hackers are anti-authority by nature. Many of those that are learn to get over it as they mature. To get very far in the real world, you have to be willing to accept that other people (often daft ones) will get to boss you around once in awhile. If you want to succeed, you have to learn to take it in stride. By all means, stand up for what you believe in, but don't think that being a belligerent idealist will win you many friends in any field or environment.
While I wouldn't necessarily call myself a hacker, I am a pretty independent geek and despite that I enjoyed most of my time in the active duty military. Granted, I worked on autopilots rather than PCs, but if I could hack it, I think any geek can. Plus, the discipline that the military provides is exactly what a lot of young hackers need to turn their raw skills and knowledge into a career that can propel them into positions where they can call the shots and do what's needed for the security of the nation's infrastructure.
The fact that the DoD is starting to see hackers as resources rather than adversaries is extremely encouraging and should be applauded. Just a decade or two ago, this was the stuff of science fiction.
People I feel no sympathy towards:
- Those who bought an iPhone knowing full well that Apple and AT&T have absolute and full control over the software running on it, including (but not limited to) which programs you can install and even going so far as to have a "kill switch" to terminate applications that they don't like.
- Those who bought a Kindle and didn't stop to think that Amazon can do whatever they want with your book purchases, including reversing the purchase, sell your reading habits, or even change the contents of your books after the sale.
- Anyone who buys a DRM-encumbered device, system, or software and then complains about it. It's like going to the dealership, buying a red car, and then going around whining about how much you hate the color.
Not really. The last two times I ordered a Dell laptop (well, one laptop and one notebook), I just went to their Open Source PCs page, picked a model, and purchased.
You're doing it wrong. Yes, they make you chose either Ubuntu or FreeDOS, but what's the difference between buying a laptop with a blank disk and one with Linux or FreeDOS that you can install whatever you want over it anyway?
When you buy a laptop with an open source OS, you aren't paying anything extra for the OS. Ubuntu is a free operating system, they have no incentive or reason to pay Canonical for it and thus have nothing to pass onto you. They certainly aren't paying anyone for each copy of FreeDOS shipped.
Yeah, just try it on eBay. Microsoft and eBay have an arrangement where their customers are completely forbidden from selling previously-used (or entirely unused) Windows licenses second-hand. All Microsoft has to do is flag an auction and eBay pulls it down with no human intervention and little in the way of explanation.
A few years back I bought a laptop with a Win2k license. I was putting Linux on the laptop, so I didn't need the license and tried to sell it on ebay. The auction was up for 6 days before eBay shut it down, claiming (in not so many words) that I was trying to hawk pirated software. Despite the fact that I explained the situation clearly in the auction, have been an eBay seller for years, and have a spotless feedback record. There is nothing in Microsoft's EULA, nothing in eBay's terms of service, nothing in the copyright laws that says I cannot sell a legitimate software license to someone else.
A few weeks later, Microsoft sent me a fuckload of identical cease-and-desist letters claiming (vaguely) that I was infringing on their copyright somehow. This was when I vowed never to purchase another piece of Microsoft software again, not even a computer with Windows pre-installed.
Say what? I was going to mod this a troll, but I think it's high time someone pointed out that Slashdot commenters seriously need to stop blaming consumers for exercising their own freedom of choice in the marketplace. Companies ought to be held responsible for their actions 100% of the time without all the cynical "Oh this guy is hurting every other consumer because he refused to take X company's bullshit lying down."
To be fair, netcraft never actually confirmed it.
There is no less bickering or drama in open source software development now than there has been in the past. The difference today is that:
1. Open source is a lot bigger now than it was. Every company having anything to do with I.T. either uses it or fears it. This summer is when the business world finally really realized that there is value in open source as a business model. You can't walk into a store selling consumer electronic gear and not find some device powered by an embedded open source operatins system. Linux is within an inch of being a household name. The majority of people installing Linux for the first time are not geeks, they're normal people.
2. Everyone's on the web now. (Well, anyone worth mentioning.) Blogs are the new tabloids, twitter and facebook are the new gossip. And people love drama more than ever before. I subscribe to the Linux Today RSS feed and every other entry on there anymore is either "10 Ways to Improve Your Ubuntu Experience" or "Why Open Source Does or Does Not Suck for Grandmothers of Eight in Rhode Island".
In the old days, bickering on open source discussion forums (mailing lists or usenet) never got much attention because only a vanishly small group of people were even watching the threads, and even fewer probably cared about the topic at hand. Now, the blogs catch fire whenever two prominent kernel hackers have a spat.
Ubuntu Server is (so far) almost entirely Debian underneath. The relationship between Ubuntu and Debian is analogous to the relationship Red Hat and CentOS.
What they do have is millions of dollars set aside for gifts, kickbacks, and fancy lunches to help "persuade" people in powerful places of their point of view. Those of us who want strong fair use laws (artists and consumers alike) don't.
I'd like to agree.
And also note that every government computer network that I've ever heard of already prohibits running basically anything but Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, so a law banning P2P on government networks is completely superfluous and would only serve to make legislators look like they're actually doing something.
"Personal approval" is rather different than a legally enforceable contract.
Getting your app shot down without rhyme or reason is the danger any iPhone developer faces. Not only does it lock out open source, but it locks out commercial development as well because nobody wants to face that risk. Eventually, the only people who will be developing iPhone apps are "bottom-feeders" who spend about an hour whipping up some trivial crap and then putting it up for sale hoping that once in a while, somebody will accidentally click the Buy button.
Well then we should take the humans out of the equation. Using the weapons.
It's one of the reasons I don't use DD-WRT. For an Internet-facing security device, the author seems to have little regard for security.
Also, the firmware isn't really open source and the author is a humongous hypocrite.
Use Tomato or OpenWRT.
I take back all the nice things I said about them yesterday.
I might be in the market for an SSD soon, so I put some note together based on my reading of the articles in the topic and elsewhere. I thought I'd share them here so I can just Google them later.
Conclusions:
Also note that Kingston sells licensed clones of the X25 disks, although currently they are actually a bit more expensive than the Intel-branded ones on newegg.
Good luck with that, the registrars pretty much run ICANN.
After over a decade of hearing about it, Microsoft is finally just starting to realize that they can't play the vendor lock-in game as hard as they used to and still retain customers. It's just not a Microsoft world any more. They wanted these projects to interoperate better with their own offerings, so they put up the code to do it. That's what open source is all about.
I'd also like to point out that this is far from the first open source activity that Microsoft has engaged in. In fact, Microsoft has a few open source projects under its belt already, and my understanding is that they're under an OSI-approved license. (I can't find them just now, but I want to say one of them is a wiki? Or an application installer?) They also provide a SourceForge clone called CodePlex which claims to host over 10,000 open source projects. (Most of them only run on Windows-based technologies, I'm sure, but still.)
No, Microsoft is no longer a stranger to open source. It's just that they want to contribute and donate on their own terms, which is what they are fully entitled to do, and is the only way that makes business sense. These days, only their most assed-backwards shareholders and managers see Open Source as some kind of conspiracy to undermine their vision of The Great Microsoft Kingdom.
More than a little fishy. I read this as, "British fraud officer leaves the force, collects the personal information of 40 million people from the black market and his buddies in law enforcement, and is now using it to make money. Oh, but it's not unethical this time because he used to be a policeman." If it was illegal for the phishers and fraudsters to have this ill-gained information, why is it not illegal for a former police officer to have it?
I know there are no privacy laws in Britain, but here in the U.S., I would hope that there's a law providing for the destruction of personal and/or financial details that were obtained illegally once they are no longer considered evidence in an ongoing prosecution.
I'm surprised nobody has linked to it yet, but there's this guy who made a physical Lunar Lander arcade game. No flashy vector graphics here! You control an actual model of a lander using real gauges and everything.
Lunar Lander