Hdds require some complex precision parts, namely the heads and the assemblies that move those heads. They also require very stable motors.
BUT afaict the actual data storage platters are relatively simple to make just a uniform coating of material on a platter base.
A SSD OTOH requires a very large silicon area all patterned in many stages at an extreme density. Furthermore since huge ICs have unnaceptable failure rates many seperate ICs must be used to make up the SSD. These in turn need to be mounted on circuit boards which need to be stacked together and connected to further chips that provide a fast interface between all those flash chips and the host computer.
Very different types of manufacturing so it's hard to say which is more "complex". Complicating matters further is the fact that a lot of the costs (on both sides) are in R&D.
Flash scales down better which is one of the reasons it's taken over the portable market.
It's probablly not possible to be entirely perfect in this regard but accepting the adverts as images which you encode yourself into the appropriate format (don't let them attack the browsers image format implementation) would go a very long way.
Letting the advertisers supply javascript, flash etc is just asking for trouble.
IIRC within the EU system larger (in terms of how much they export to a given country) merchants must handle the VAT for each country they sell to seperately but smaller ones are allowed to treat foreign buyers which aren't VAT registered buisnesses* as if they were domestic buyers.
The EU system has a couple of things that let this work though. Firstly VAT rates are done on a per country basis so even if you have to deal with all of them seperately it's not that much of a burden. Secondly countries in the EU are given relatively limited scope to set thier VAT rates.
If you let distance sellers in the US charge sales tax based on thier own location they would just set up shop in states without sales tax and we would be back to square one.
*Foreign buisness to buisness transactions are handled differently but that's beyond the scope of this post.
so seeing the prices go up as the manufacturers deliberately cut capacity... that I'll call unkosher. Not nessacerally when you consider delayed reactions.
Consider each company in the market for widget X (lets assume for the moment that different brands of widget X are interchangable) has a minimum price at which they consider it worthwhile to make widget X. Each customer also has a maximum price they will pay for widget X. This gives us graphs of production VS cost and demand VS cost. Where these graphs cross is the natural price of the product.
However it takes time to react to things. When demand at a given price point drops there are still half-made products, products sitting in warehouses and so on that the manufacturers want to shift. So it takes time for production to adjust downwards. It also takes time for production to adjust upwards when the market price rises. In other words the rate of production is a function not just a function of the current price but also a function of previous prices.
hmm, the info on that page only seems to go back to january of this year and it shows a lot of fluctuation but little in the way of overall downward trend.
In the case of HDDs, the "sweet spot price" is somewhere between 5 and 10 cents a GB. However, the sweet spot is measured in 1-2 TB devices. If you, say, only needed 20GB, you would be unable to find anybody to sell you a 20GB drive for $1-$2. A quick look a newegg suggests that the cheapest retail HDDs are around $30-$35. You do get 80GB to 160GB for your $35; but you basically can't spend any less. The cost of a machined housing, hiqh quality spindle motor, packing, shipping, etc. just make that impossible. For the same $30-$35, retail, you are looking at around 16GB of flash Sort of
You can get a USB stick for that price but USB sticks are notdesigned to be mounted in a PC case (you could probablly tie one in and link it to an internal port somehow but I would consider it a bodge), usually not optimised for speed or high write cycle use and the USB interface and the fact they show up as removable drives will cause complications with using them as a boot drive (especially if you are a windows user).
Compactflash cards can also be got in that price range but you need an adaptor to connect them up and mount them and then since those adaptors are usually designed for laptop or small form factor use you will probablly need an adaptor to mount the adaptor driving up the overall cost. Once again they also don't tend to be optimised for speed and high write cycle use like proper SSDs.
Proper SSDs with SATA interfaces and a standard drive form factor seem to start at arround $90 (slightly less if you count after rebate prices) for 30GB (there are 16GB ones on the market but they cost MORE than the 32GB ones) . Further the form factor is a laptop one meaning you may also need to buy an adaptor plate (some but not all SSDs come with this in the box afaict) which costs another $15.
You also talk about the "boot volume" as if it's a dedicated drive. There are probablly some enterprise conditions where that is the case but afaict for most desktops the same drive serves as boot drive and data drive. Granted some people don't have much data though.
but couldn't the 5.25" get away with a slower rotational speed end up having the same angular velocity as a 3.5" at the outer parts of the disk? The angular velocity is by definition the same across the disk. The linear velocity increases the further you move from the center (assuming a constant motor speed). So a larger disk can in principle get higher transfer rates from the same spin speed.
However transfer rate is not the dominant issue in many applications. Total request time is made up of
1: time to move to the right track (seek time) 2: time to wait for the sector to come under the head (rotational latency) 3: time to actually read the data
For the small reads that are common in many desktop applications 1 and 2 dominate on a hard disk. Making the disk bigger will increase the time to move to the right track while slowing the rotation speed (needed to physically realise a larger platter) will increase the time waiting for the right sector to come under the head.
It depends on what you mean by SSD prices dropping.
Some manufacturers introduced some drives below the $100 mark but they were very low capacity. So the minimum price of entry dropped by the cost per gigabyte stayed about the same.
Train tickets are sold out on all international routes. I keep seeing claims like this on/. but every time i've checked eurostar's site they have had tickets available within a few hours of the present time.
Right now there still seem to be tickets availible on the 05:25.
only those going across the pond are in a really big mess I'd expand that to anyone trying to go from europe to america, austrilia, east asia, southern africa and so on. You could try heading south or east hoping to pick up a plane further along but you run the risk of the cloud following you and you gaining nothing and after a while the good rail links start to peter out as you go into africa or eastern europe/western asia. I guess you could take the trans-siberian but that takes as long as taking a cargo ship to america afaict.
Those trying to come in to europe at least have the advantage that if the plane heads for europe it will most likely land them somewhere in the vicinity.
There is also the possible issue of being trapped by visa issues. Afaict this has already happened to some people on diverted planes.
Factories also needs their materials to work. I'd think most full scale factory production would get it's materials brought in by ship. Air frieight is really a pretty expensive option for moving stuff around. A shortage of fancy fruit will be annoying but it isn't exactly going to cripple stuff.
Still if this goes on it will be a major PITA for some of us E.G. those of us doing prototyping or who otherwise want small quantities of something in a hurry. I wonder what UPS and FEDEX are doing and will do. For packages within europe they can probablly truck them around and only add a day or so to delivery times but for packages from outside europe they are probably in far more of a mess. I have some boards being made in china at the moment and also need to procure some components that are only available on the other side of the pond.
Liquid fuels similar to those from oil can be made in other ways. Biodiesel, bioethanol, coal to liquids, gas to liquids etc.
The end of cheap liquid fuel will certainly make air travel a lot more expensive (as well as having a lot of other hits on the economy) but i'd expect it to continue for sufficiantly high value operations.
mmm heavy torrenters (whether downloading legal or illegal torrents but there aren't all that many legal ones out there) are a nightmare from a network point of view. Thats why so many providers take steps to deprioritise, throttle or even outright block it.
TCP/IP works on the principle of throttling back when it sees congestion. If every connection follows the same rules for throttling back (and there is no traffic shaping in place) then every connection will get about the same amount of bandwidth.
A bittorrent client in use by a heavy torrenter is likely to have multiple downloads going on AND multiple connections for each download. Therefore it can grab a very large share of the available bandwidth compared to a more conventional app that uses one connection at a time.
I don't think energy density is really the problem here. All our existing flying machines use chemical fuels and apart from the most exotic ones afaict fuel weight isn't too much of an issue.
As to the practicality of flying cars it depends what exactly you mean by flying car.
If you mean something that can land vertically in a relatively small space such that it can be used for end to end travel those already exist, they are called helicopters. The trouble with them is because of the high power to weight ratios required they have very high purchase and maintenance costs. Afaict they are also relatively difficult to fly compared to fixed wing aircraft.
If you mean a vehicle that can both fly and be driven on the road then those exist too though none have been commercialised yet (a company is currently trying though).
If you mean a vehicle that is capable of both vertical take off and driving on the road that is where it gets harder. VTOL craft already have power to weight issues (note: power to weight is pretty unrelated to energy density of the fuel) and the road adds a very nasty width restriction an obvious restriction on the emmision of hot gasses and a whole load of annoying environmental and safety rules.
A governement trying to weed out corrution could set up an independent body to investigate crimes commited by law enfocement but there is of course the risk of that becoming corrupt too.
Not worried about the open-source version since you can't really kill it Note that there doesn't seem to be (at least I haven't seen it) an opensource version of the guest additions. Using "install guest additions" in the OSE version downloads a CD image containing an installer that claims to be under the "virtualbox personal use and evaluation license":(
Those dealing with such countries are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they don't bribe they won't suceed, if they do bribe and someone decides to make an example of them for whatever reason then they may end up doing time.
And even if the addresses were a little unusual between looking at the old website on archive.org and watching which addresses still get spam in the mailserver logs it's probablly pretty easy to figure out what addresses used to be used on a domain.
P&O seem to have put up a special website but apparently they are fully booked for foot passengers today anyway.
Eurostar'a website on the other hand seems to be operating fine and they still seem to be selling tickets from london to paris and brussels for later this afternoon (they aren't cheap though:( ).
Actually, volcano or no volcano, traveling Europe by train is the way to go. Depends on your critera and how far you are going.
For short to moderate journeys train travel often makes sense due to the lower end effects but for longer journeys it is both slower and more expensive to go by train.
If I want to get from stockport (my nearest mainline station) to say paris (one of the easiest big cities in mainland europe to get to from the UK) i've got to first travel to london (about 2 hours), then cross london and get my connection (about another hour, maybe more given that I will have to deal with passport control) then travel to paris (another two and a half hours) so five and a half hours total. A direct flight can do it in three hours but you have more end effects so it's probablly a wash overall. Cost also seems about the same. Go any further than paris or brussels and flying is almost certainly the quicker option and probablly cheaper too.
If you want to see the sights and have plenty of time and money (in my experiance train travel isn't particulally cheap, especially if you want flexible tickets which you DO on a long journey with lots of changes some of them between different countries networkes) it might be nice to go on a long train journey (hell people ride the trans-siberian railway for pleasure).
Slashdot Mirror
One of the many disadvantages (along with reliability) of networks that directly connect end devices together.
Thank god for modern switched ethernet.
It's difficult to say.
Hdds require some complex precision parts, namely the heads and the assemblies that move those heads. They also require very stable motors.
BUT afaict the actual data storage platters are relatively simple to make just a uniform coating of material on a platter base.
A SSD OTOH requires a very large silicon area all patterned in many stages at an extreme density. Furthermore since huge ICs have unnaceptable failure rates many seperate ICs must be used to make up the SSD. These in turn need to be mounted on circuit boards which need to be stacked together and connected to further chips that provide a fast interface between all those flash chips and the host computer.
Very different types of manufacturing so it's hard to say which is more "complex". Complicating matters further is the fact that a lot of the costs (on both sides) are in R&D.
Flash scales down better which is one of the reasons it's taken over the portable market.
It's probablly not possible to be entirely perfect in this regard but accepting the adverts as images which you encode yourself into the appropriate format (don't let them attack the browsers image format implementation) would go a very long way.
Letting the advertisers supply javascript, flash etc is just asking for trouble.
IIRC within the EU system larger (in terms of how much they export to a given country) merchants must handle the VAT for each country they sell to seperately but smaller ones are allowed to treat foreign buyers which aren't VAT registered buisnesses* as if they were domestic buyers.
The EU system has a couple of things that let this work though. Firstly VAT rates are done on a per country basis so even if you have to deal with all of them seperately it's not that much of a burden. Secondly countries in the EU are given relatively limited scope to set thier VAT rates.
If you let distance sellers in the US charge sales tax based on thier own location they would just set up shop in states without sales tax and we would be back to square one.
*Foreign buisness to buisness transactions are handled differently but that's beyond the scope of this post.
so seeing the prices go up as the manufacturers deliberately cut capacity... that I'll call unkosher.
Not nessacerally when you consider delayed reactions.
Consider each company in the market for widget X (lets assume for the moment that different brands of widget X are interchangable) has a minimum price at which they consider it worthwhile to make widget X. Each customer also has a maximum price they will pay for widget X. This gives us graphs of production VS cost and demand VS cost. Where these graphs cross is the natural price of the product.
However it takes time to react to things. When demand at a given price point drops there are still half-made products, products sitting in warehouses and so on that the manufacturers want to shift. So it takes time for production to adjust downwards. It also takes time for production to adjust upwards when the market price rises. In other words the rate of production is a function not just a function of the current price but also a function of previous prices.
Overshoot is hardly surprising in such a system.
hmm, the info on that page only seems to go back to january of this year and it shows a lot of fluctuation but little in the way of overall downward trend.
In the case of HDDs, the "sweet spot price" is somewhere between 5 and 10 cents a GB. However, the sweet spot is measured in 1-2 TB devices. If you, say, only needed 20GB, you would be unable to find anybody to sell you a 20GB drive for $1-$2. A quick look a newegg suggests that the cheapest retail HDDs are around $30-$35. You do get 80GB to 160GB for your $35; but you basically can't spend any less. The cost of a machined housing, hiqh quality spindle motor, packing, shipping, etc. just make that impossible. For the same $30-$35, retail, you are looking at around 16GB of flash
Sort of
You can get a USB stick for that price but USB sticks are notdesigned to be mounted in a PC case (you could probablly tie one in and link it to an internal port somehow but I would consider it a bodge), usually not optimised for speed or high write cycle use and the USB interface and the fact they show up as removable drives will cause complications with using them as a boot drive (especially if you are a windows user).
Compactflash cards can also be got in that price range but you need an adaptor to connect them up and mount them and then since those adaptors are usually designed for laptop or small form factor use you will probablly need an adaptor to mount the adaptor driving up the overall cost. Once again they also don't tend to be optimised for speed and high write cycle use like proper SSDs.
Proper SSDs with SATA interfaces and a standard drive form factor seem to start at arround $90 (slightly less if you count after rebate prices) for 30GB (there are 16GB ones on the market but they cost MORE than the 32GB ones) . Further the form factor is a laptop one meaning you may also need to buy an adaptor plate (some but not all SSDs come with this in the box afaict) which costs another $15.
You also talk about the "boot volume" as if it's a dedicated drive. There are probablly some enterprise conditions where that is the case but afaict for most desktops the same drive serves as boot drive and data drive. Granted some people don't have much data though.
but couldn't the 5.25" get away with a slower rotational speed end up having the same angular velocity as a 3.5" at the outer parts of the disk?
The angular velocity is by definition the same across the disk. The linear velocity increases the further you move from the center (assuming a constant motor speed). So a larger disk can in principle get higher transfer rates from the same spin speed.
However transfer rate is not the dominant issue in many applications. Total request time is made up of
1: time to move to the right track (seek time)
2: time to wait for the sector to come under the head (rotational latency)
3: time to actually read the data
For the small reads that are common in many desktop applications 1 and 2 dominate on a hard disk. Making the disk bigger will increase the time to move to the right track while slowing the rotation speed (needed to physically realise a larger platter) will increase the time waiting for the right sector to come under the head.
It depends on what you mean by SSD prices dropping.
Some manufacturers introduced some drives below the $100 mark but they were very low capacity. So the minimum price of entry dropped by the cost per gigabyte stayed about the same.
2c) same as 2a but there are some near misses* and things go back into lockdown.
*Defined as an incident that comes close to disaster and does severe damage to the plane but doesn't actually result in a crash.
Train tickets are sold out on all international routes. /. but every time i've checked eurostar's site they have had tickets available within a few hours of the present time.
I keep seeing claims like this on
Right now there still seem to be tickets availible on the 05:25.
only those going across the pond are in a really big mess
I'd expand that to anyone trying to go from europe to america, austrilia, east asia, southern africa and so on. You could try heading south or east hoping to pick up a plane further along but you run the risk of the cloud following you and you gaining nothing and after a while the good rail links start to peter out as you go into africa or eastern europe/western asia. I guess you could take the trans-siberian but that takes as long as taking a cargo ship to america afaict.
Those trying to come in to europe at least have the advantage that if the plane heads for europe it will most likely land them somewhere in the vicinity.
There is also the possible issue of being trapped by visa issues. Afaict this has already happened to some people on diverted planes.
Factories also needs their materials to work.
I'd think most full scale factory production would get it's materials brought in by ship. Air frieight is really a pretty expensive option for moving stuff around. A shortage of fancy fruit will be annoying but it isn't exactly going to cripple stuff.
Still if this goes on it will be a major PITA for some of us E.G. those of us doing prototyping or who otherwise want small quantities of something in a hurry. I wonder what UPS and FEDEX are doing and will do. For packages within europe they can probablly truck them around and only add a day or so to delivery times but for packages from outside europe they are probably in far more of a mess. I have some boards being made in china at the moment and also need to procure some components that are only available on the other side of the pond.
Liquid fuels similar to those from oil can be made in other ways. Biodiesel, bioethanol, coal to liquids, gas to liquids etc.
The end of cheap liquid fuel will certainly make air travel a lot more expensive (as well as having a lot of other hits on the economy) but i'd expect it to continue for sufficiantly high value operations.
mmm heavy torrenters (whether downloading legal or illegal torrents but there aren't all that many legal ones out there) are a nightmare from a network point of view. Thats why so many providers take steps to deprioritise, throttle or even outright block it.
TCP/IP works on the principle of throttling back when it sees congestion. If every connection follows the same rules for throttling back (and there is no traffic shaping in place) then every connection will get about the same amount of bandwidth.
A bittorrent client in use by a heavy torrenter is likely to have multiple downloads going on AND multiple connections for each download. Therefore it can grab a very large share of the available bandwidth compared to a more conventional app that uses one connection at a time.
Well the eurostar site claims there are still tickets from london to paris and from paris to london available for travel this evening.
I don't think energy density is really the problem here. All our existing flying machines use chemical fuels and apart from the most exotic ones afaict fuel weight isn't too much of an issue.
As to the practicality of flying cars it depends what exactly you mean by flying car.
If you mean something that can land vertically in a relatively small space such that it can be used for end to end travel those already exist, they are called helicopters. The trouble with them is because of the high power to weight ratios required they have very high purchase and maintenance costs. Afaict they are also relatively difficult to fly compared to fixed wing aircraft.
If you mean a vehicle that can both fly and be driven on the road then those exist too though none have been commercialised yet (a company is currently trying though).
If you mean a vehicle that is capable of both vertical take off and driving on the road that is where it gets harder. VTOL craft already have power to weight issues (note: power to weight is pretty unrelated to energy density of the fuel) and the road adds a very nasty width restriction an obvious restriction on the emmision of hot gasses and a whole load of annoying environmental and safety rules.
It's really a question with no good answer.
A governement trying to weed out corrution could set up an independent body to investigate crimes commited by law enfocement but there is of course the risk of that becoming corrupt too.
Not worried about the open-source version since you can't really kill it :(
Note that there doesn't seem to be (at least I haven't seen it) an opensource version of the guest additions. Using "install guest additions" in the OSE version downloads a CD image containing an installer that claims to be under the "virtualbox personal use and evaluation license"
Those dealing with such countries are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they don't bribe they won't suceed, if they do bribe and someone decides to make an example of them for whatever reason then they may end up doing time.
I personally consider use of a remote signature update system as a kill switch to be abuse of the update system.
And even if the addresses were a little unusual between looking at the old website on archive.org and watching which addresses still get spam in the mailserver logs it's probablly pretty easy to figure out what addresses used to be used on a domain.
P&O seem to have put up a special website but apparently they are fully booked for foot passengers today anyway.
Eurostar'a website on the other hand seems to be operating fine and they still seem to be selling tickets from london to paris and brussels for later this afternoon (they aren't cheap though :( ).
Actually, volcano or no volcano, traveling Europe by train is the way to go.
Depends on your critera and how far you are going.
For short to moderate journeys train travel often makes sense due to the lower end effects but for longer journeys it is both slower and more expensive to go by train.
If I want to get from stockport (my nearest mainline station) to say paris (one of the easiest big cities in mainland europe to get to from the UK) i've got to first travel to london (about 2 hours), then cross london and get my connection (about another hour, maybe more given that I will have to deal with passport control) then travel to paris (another two and a half hours) so five and a half hours total. A direct flight can do it in three hours but you have more end effects so it's probablly a wash overall. Cost also seems about the same. Go any further than paris or brussels and flying is almost certainly the quicker option and probablly cheaper too.
If you want to see the sights and have plenty of time and money (in my experiance train travel isn't particulally cheap, especially if you want flexible tickets which you DO on a long journey with lots of changes some of them between different countries networkes) it might be nice to go on a long train journey (hell people ride the trans-siberian railway for pleasure).
Interesting map!
It seems if you want to get out of europe atm you should head by train to italy, spain or poland.