All this talk about storage costs... if you only cared about storage costs, you'd be running tapes, not platters. We don't ONLY care about cost per gigabyte. We care about getting the right balance of price, capacity, transfer rate, latency and IOPs* for the workload we plan to use.
modern tapes do indeed have the lowest cost per gigabyte for bulk storage but they are let down by insane seek times, high drive costs (which means the cost per gigabyte for smaller ammount of storage is high). Afaict they aren't bootable either (not that you would want to with the kind of seek times a tape drive offers). In other words they aren't a practical option for ordinary computer users.
SSDs meanwhile have the highest performance but thier cost per gigabyte is far higher than hard drives as is the cost of entry.
Hard drives are the option that offers a low cost of entry, more storage than most people will need even with the cheapest products and performance that is acceptable most of the time.
Are the people who only use their computers as glorified word processors and internet terminals (and the corporate buyers who buy for them) really going to pay extra for a SSD? I doubt it unless there is a REALLY big marketing campaign to convince them and maybe not even then .
* average latency and IOPs are directly linked for a drive that can only do one operation at a time but not for devices that can do multiple operations at a time.
I doubt this was a case of wikimedia deliberately going green. I suspect it's far more likely that they happened to be in the right place and happened to make an offer that wikimedia liked.
One downside I see of the two drive setups is the user eduction requirement. I bet most lusers will think their computer is full when they fill up c: (i'm assuming c: is the HDD and a higher drive letter is the SSD).
Plus dual drives isn't really an option in laptops unless you go for the really big monster machines.
It's a good option for the power users but it's not a setup I expect to see much in off the shelf systems.
As time goes on, everything gets faster and everything grows in storage capacity - but they all stay the same relative to each other on the list.. No they don't, different technologies advance at different rates, and sometimes a technology gets squeezed out completely because another techonology fills thier niche better.
For example removable magnetic disks are mostly gone ( a few people are still using floppies for legacy reasons ) replaced by USB flash sticks and to a lesser extent external hard drives and optical drives (CDRW drives had a chance to take over the removable media market for a while but they were hampered by the non-standard status of packet writing software and by the large physical size of the disks).
Magnetic tape hasn't been completely pushed out but afaict only the enterprise backup market really uses it these days due to the huge cost of the drives
While the concept of solid state drives is nothing new solid state drives that are competitive enough that many people are seriously considering replacing hard drives with them are. The probablly won't completely replace hard drives in the next five years but beyond that it's hard to tell.
CD's are 800MB. You could easily replace them with SD cards without significantly affecting what the music industry earns. I dunno what the real price of SD cards of that capacity is, I see most places selling them 512mb SD cards (a bit smaller than a CD but you could easily use some kind of compression on there to make up for that) are selling them at prices in the $5 range though a few are selling them a lot cheaper (most likely surplus stock), lets assume the bulk price is a quarter of that or $1.25 plus you have the cost of duplicating, labeling, boxing etc, so say $2 per copy.
CD duplication in bulk seems to be about a $1 in medium quantity including cases and inserts http://www.discmakers.com/products/CD100S.asp , I suspect they get much cheaper in huge bulk.
Given that many CDs retail for less than $10 I suspect an extra dollar would be a pretty big chunk of the profit.
For capacities too large to fit on one side of one 2.5 inch platter I suspect making the platter 3.5 inch will always be cheaper than adding a second read/write head.
Firstly the bandwidth just isn't there in many places. Even areas with supposedly high speed connections often have very limited upstream speeds.
Secondly there is reliability, home and small buisness internet connections aren't always very reliable and there is usually no service level agreement on them at all.
Thirdly there is mobility, mobile broadband is even less fast and reliable than fixed line broadband.
fourthly there is security, would you really trust confedential buisness data to a cloud provider who likely has far more exposure than you do.
We don't even have the computers in our offices running diskless from local servers let alone running diskless across the internet.
One problem I see with having your backups on media that remains powered is if there is a seriously bad power surge (e.g. a lightning strike very close by) then anything connected to either the mains or a wired network is likely to be fried.
On the other hand, the current drain from these things is probably so low that I'm not sure if it will make enough difference to worry about.:-) Agreed, reading the datasheet for the X25-M the typical power consumption its given as 75mW idle and 150mW active. That is just a fart in the wind by PC standards.
I suspect the girls will only be paid for the time spent actually serving clients. Lets say there are 40 hours a week when the service gets significant demand and each girl manages to actually find a client 50% of the time. Even if the girls get 60% of what is spent on them (seems a bit high to me) that is only about $30K a year.
and personally I think even that is pretty optimisitic.
2TB of SSD storage is unrealistically expensive Agreed.
if you can even find a way to get that much in one system. You can get a 512GB 2.5 inch 9.5mm high SSD now. You can stick two of those in one 3.5 inch bay so putting four of them in should be possible in almost any case. I'm quite sure that if one of the major vendors tried they could make a 2TB 3.5 inch SSD.
Software, games, and media are ever increasing in size. While true to some extent in my experiance most PCs sold to normal lusers are still sold with drives of 320GB-500GB and this is more than enough for most people (with the exception of those who like to keep movie collections on thier computers but afaict most people don't).
Drastically reducing the size of drives is not realistic in peoples computers. Some SSDs that are as big as typical HDDs in consumer machines are already on the market. That leaves two things to happen, firstly SSDs of acceptable size need to come down a lot in price, secondly someone needs to convince users that SSDs are worth it.
It used to be that saving conversion steps was a good thing both from an efficiancy and a cost point of view and so PSUs delivered at 5V which was what the logic of the day ran on. They also supplied a (relatively) small ammount of 12V for running drive motors.
When components started needing 3.3V initially they were run from local regulators but when ATX was introduced it added a dedicated rail for 3.3v.
However things changed again, firstly even lower voltages started to be used. Secondly chips started having seperate core and IO voltages with the core voltage often being highly chip specific (some chips even have multiple internal voltages).
These voltages could not be reasonably supplied from the PSU both because there are so many different ones and because the resistance of long cables would be such a big deal at those voltages (both in terms of power loss and in terms of voltage stability) so these voltages HAVE to be supplied by local regulation.
Now initially they used the 5V and 3.3V lines to derive lower voltages but it tends to be more efficiant overall to use a higher voltage for the PSU-local regulation link. Therefore from the pentium 4 onwards intel switched to using 12V (the highest voltage in use in standard PCs) for this link.
Now the same would be true for SSDs, afaict 2.5 inch SSDs like laptop HDDs currently run on 5V because that is the only voltage that can be relied on. This voltage almost certainly gets downconverted internally and moving to 12V as a source for that would probably improve efficiency a bit.
Having said that looking at the power consumption figures of a well known SSD series I don't think SSD power consumption is significant anyway even in a system with an atom processor.
Yes there has been the odd card that sacrificed something to make room for the odd RCA connector. For example rhe awe64 gold (but NOT the lower models of awe64) sacrificed the speaker output to make room to use RCA connectors for the line out. Line in (the subject of this discussion) was still on a 3.5mm stereo jack.
RCA was NEVER common on PC sound cards simply because with the fact you need two of them for stereo you'd never get all the connections a typical PC soundcard has on the expansion slot plate. Also they barely fit on the backplate which may cause issues with some cases.
RF stuff is done on the basis of matched impedances (maximum power transfer configuration and also avoids reflection issues). Audio stuff is generally done on the basis of a low impedance source driving a high impedance load (maximum voltage transfer configuration) so to attenuate the signal you ideally want a potential divider with a resistance much greater than the impedance of the source and much less than the impedance of the load (generally not a problem as the two are usually VERY different)
However having said all this attenuating the signal and feeding it into a laptop mic input is about the worst solution I can think of. Low level audio signals and laptops DO NOT mix well. .
To properly read most PDFs you want a screen that can display the equivalent of an A4/letter page (some scaling down is acceptable but there are limits) and for long battery life it needs to be e-ink.
Afaict the cost of such a screen is the main driver of the cost of something like a kindle dx. If/when the screens come down to the point where it is economical to do so i'd expect minimal e-readers to appear on the market pretty quickly.
There are currently some printers out there that handle special paper that can be erased. With a decade of R&D more we could have affordable, erasable paper and pens and markers to go along with that paper. The thing that strikes me is that in my experiance documents (particulally short unbound ones) that are used more than a trivial ammount tend to get rather dog-eared.
After a few rounds of being used, put though the eraser and put back through the printer will this paper really be in a good enough condition to go through automatic feeders without jamming them up?
when that happens it will be just as tricky to find something that will run them. Maybe it will but I doubt it. Despite how fragmented the 8-bit computing world was there are readily available emulators for all the 8-bit home computers. Given that there are vastly larger numbers of PCs than there were of any of those 8-bit home computers what makes you think it will be difficult to get a PC emulator down the line?
Still archiving digital data requires some proper planning to maximise the chances of successful recovery. IMO the best thing to do is to always store the following for digitally documents.
1: the original format since this will have the most information 2: a format that preserves the printed layout of the document perfectly. pdf is the obvious choice for this since it's both well established and doesn't look like it's going anywhere any time soon. 3: if possible a format that preserves some of the document structure (but not nessecerally exact layout) in an open format.
A bigger issue is moving vast quantities of information (which we are generating at an exponentially-increasing rate) from obsolete media to whatever is current at any given time before the ability to read the older media disappears. Agreed, computerised archives need basically continuous maintinance to remain viable. Paper archives don't.
OTOH one modern hard drive can store the equivilent many boxes of paper (a quick back of the envelope calculation: if we assume 1MB per page and 5000 pages per box a 1TB HDD would hold the equivilent of about 200 boxes of paper)
The article is a bit vauge but my reading of it is the flaw was that the system along with instructions given to staff combined to give a situation where the response was detemined by something other than the worst thing the staff member was told about.
That is someone with just the fall should have been class B but someone with the fall AND other issues could get misclasified as class B when they should have got a higher class from one of the other issues (in this case the person was unconscious and had breathing problems).
If you don't have UPSs then any power failure means all servers lose power. Afaict standby generators can't kick in quick enough
If you do have UPSs then when one fails at worst it takes out the power to connected devices. Which is worse, a few servers losing power every so often or all your servers losing power at once?
Pluss really important servers should have redundant power supplies connected to supplies from different UPSs so even if a UPS goes down the server keeps going.
Ah yes, the joys of trying to figure out if there is something wrong with the iron of if I just plugged the wrong tool into the temperature control box (I have two soldering irons of different sizes and a set of heated tweezers in my office that all use the same control box).
Microsoft has a proven track record of ill will, negligence and general contempt for its customers. Therefor it is generally met with suspicion and distrust and has to proof there case every time because of it.
Karma is a bitch.
I dunno I don't think they are as bad as MS but i'm not sure I trust either the firefox codebase or the mozilla guys.
The memory "leak" saga and the fact that afaict they don't treat all crash bugs as high priority becausue they are potential vulnerabilities (until you figure out what causes a crash you don't know if it's exploitable) don't exactly inspire confidence. Neither does delaying an exploit to the next regular release rather than adding the fix to the latest current release and making release ASAP specifically for the security update.
This seems like a very risky strategy to me. If the vulnerability is already in the wild they should be pushing out the fix ASAP. If it's not in the wild they should be keeping details quiet until they can make a proper release.
Support length of Software version X should be calculated from the release date of Software the X+1, or from the date where sale of version X stopped. Indeed and MS are one of the few companies who does this.
IIRC according to thier lifecycle policy mainstream support will last 5 years after release of the product and at least two years after the release of the successor while extended support will last at least 5 years after the end of mainstream support and at least 2 years after the release of the second successor.
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All this talk about storage costs... if you only cared about storage costs, you'd be running tapes, not platters.
We don't ONLY care about cost per gigabyte. We care about getting the right balance of price, capacity, transfer rate, latency and IOPs* for the workload we plan to use.
modern tapes do indeed have the lowest cost per gigabyte for bulk storage but they are let down by insane seek times, high drive costs (which means the cost per gigabyte for smaller ammount of storage is high). Afaict they aren't bootable either (not that you would want to with the kind of seek times a tape drive offers). In other words they aren't a practical option for ordinary computer users.
SSDs meanwhile have the highest performance but thier cost per gigabyte is far higher than hard drives as is the cost of entry.
Hard drives are the option that offers a low cost of entry, more storage than most people will need even with the cheapest products and performance that is acceptable most of the time.
Are the people who only use their computers as glorified word processors and internet terminals (and the corporate buyers who buy for them) really going to pay extra for a SSD? I doubt it unless there is a REALLY big marketing campaign to convince them and maybe not even then
.
* average latency and IOPs are directly linked for a drive that can only do one operation at a time but not for devices that can do multiple operations at a time.
I doubt this was a case of wikimedia deliberately going green. I suspect it's far more likely that they happened to be in the right place and happened to make an offer that wikimedia liked.
One downside I see of the two drive setups is the user eduction requirement. I bet most lusers will think their computer is full when they fill up c: (i'm assuming c: is the HDD and a higher drive letter is the SSD).
Plus dual drives isn't really an option in laptops unless you go for the really big monster machines.
It's a good option for the power users but it's not a setup I expect to see much in off the shelf systems.
As time goes on, everything gets faster and everything grows in storage capacity - but they all stay the same relative to each other on the list. .
No they don't, different technologies advance at different rates, and sometimes a technology gets squeezed out completely because another techonology fills thier niche better.
For example removable magnetic disks are mostly gone ( a few people are still using floppies for legacy reasons ) replaced by USB flash sticks and to a lesser extent external hard drives and optical drives (CDRW drives had a chance to take over the removable media market for a while but they were hampered by the non-standard status of packet writing software and by the large physical size of the disks).
Magnetic tape hasn't been completely pushed out but afaict only the enterprise backup market really uses it these days due to the huge cost of the drives
While the concept of solid state drives is nothing new solid state drives that are competitive enough that many people are seriously considering replacing hard drives with them are. The probablly won't completely replace hard drives in the next five years but beyond that it's hard to tell.
Punched cards and paper tape are gone.
CD's are 800MB. You could easily replace them with SD cards without significantly affecting what the music industry earns.
I dunno what the real price of SD cards of that capacity is, I see most places selling them 512mb SD cards (a bit smaller than a CD but you could easily use some kind of compression on there to make up for that) are selling them at prices in the $5 range though a few are selling them a lot cheaper (most likely surplus stock), lets assume the bulk price is a quarter of that or $1.25 plus you have the cost of duplicating, labeling, boxing etc,
so say $2 per copy.
CD duplication in bulk seems to be about a $1 in medium quantity including cases and inserts http://www.discmakers.com/products/CD100S.asp , I suspect they get much cheaper in huge bulk.
Given that many CDs retail for less than $10 I suspect an extra dollar would be a pretty big chunk of the profit.
When 3.5" go obsolete once and for all the 2.5" drives will stop costing a premium
If you don't want all that much capacity and don't care about speed then the 2.5 inch drive is already sometimes cheaper. For example looking at newegg the cheapest 160GB laptop drive ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148443 ) is $39.99 with free shipping while the cheapest 160GB desktop drive ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148511 ) is $37.99 plus 6.25 shipping.
For capacities too large to fit on one side of one 2.5 inch platter I suspect making the platter 3.5 inch will always be cheaper than adding a second read/write head.
I doubt it for a few reasons.
Firstly the bandwidth just isn't there in many places. Even areas with supposedly high speed connections often have very limited upstream speeds.
Secondly there is reliability, home and small buisness internet connections aren't always very reliable and there is usually no service level agreement on them at all.
Thirdly there is mobility, mobile broadband is even less fast and reliable than fixed line broadband.
fourthly there is security, would you really trust confedential buisness data to a cloud provider who likely has far more exposure than you do.
We don't even have the computers in our offices running diskless from local servers let alone running diskless across the internet.
One problem I see with having your backups on media that remains powered is if there is a seriously bad power surge (e.g. a lightning strike very close by) then anything connected to either the mains or a wired network is likely to be fried.
On the other hand, the current drain from these things is probably so low that I'm not sure if it will make enough difference to worry about. :-)
Agreed, reading the datasheet for the X25-M the typical power consumption its given as 75mW idle and 150mW active. That is just a fart in the wind by PC standards.
I suspect the girls will only be paid for the time spent actually serving clients. Lets say there are 40 hours a week when the service gets significant demand and each girl manages to actually find a client 50% of the time. Even if the girls get 60% of what is spent on them (seems a bit high to me) that is only about $30K a year.
and personally I think even that is pretty optimisitic.
2TB of SSD storage is unrealistically expensive
Agreed.
if you can even find a way to get that much in one system.
You can get a 512GB 2.5 inch 9.5mm high SSD now. You can stick two of those in one 3.5 inch bay so putting four of them in should be possible in almost any case. I'm quite sure that if one of the major vendors tried they could make a 2TB 3.5 inch SSD.
Software, games, and media are ever increasing in size.
While true to some extent in my experiance most PCs sold to normal lusers are still sold with drives of 320GB-500GB and this is more than enough for most people (with the exception of those who like to keep movie collections on thier computers but afaict most people don't).
Drastically reducing the size of drives is not realistic in peoples computers.
Some SSDs that are as big as typical HDDs in consumer machines are already on the market. That leaves two things to happen, firstly SSDs of acceptable size need to come down a lot in price, secondly someone needs to convince users that SSDs are worth it.
It used to be that saving conversion steps was a good thing both from an efficiancy and a cost point of view and so PSUs delivered at 5V which was what the logic of the day ran on. They also supplied a (relatively) small ammount of 12V for running drive motors.
When components started needing 3.3V initially they were run from local regulators but when ATX was introduced it added a dedicated rail for 3.3v.
However things changed again, firstly even lower voltages started to be used. Secondly chips started having seperate core and IO voltages with the core voltage often being highly chip specific (some chips even have multiple internal voltages).
These voltages could not be reasonably supplied from the PSU both because there are so many different ones and because the resistance of long cables would be such a big deal at those voltages (both in terms of power loss and in terms of voltage stability) so these voltages HAVE to be supplied by local regulation.
Now initially they used the 5V and 3.3V lines to derive lower voltages but it tends to be more efficiant overall to use a higher voltage for the PSU-local regulation link. Therefore from the pentium 4 onwards intel switched to using 12V (the highest voltage in use in standard PCs) for this link.
Now the same would be true for SSDs, afaict 2.5 inch SSDs like laptop HDDs currently run on 5V because that is the only voltage that can be relied on. This voltage almost certainly gets downconverted internally and moving to 12V as a source for that would probably improve efficiency a bit.
Having said that looking at the power consumption figures of a well known SSD series I don't think SSD power consumption is significant anyway even in a system with an atom processor.
Yes there has been the odd card that sacrificed something to make room for the odd RCA connector. For example rhe awe64 gold (but NOT the lower models of awe64) sacrificed the speaker output to make room to use RCA connectors for the line out. Line in (the subject of this discussion) was still on a 3.5mm stereo jack.
RCA was NEVER common on PC sound cards simply because with the fact you need two of them for stereo you'd never get all the connections a typical PC soundcard has on the expansion slot plate. Also they barely fit on the backplate which may cause issues with some cases.
Actually two resistors.
RF stuff is done on the basis of matched impedances (maximum power transfer configuration and also avoids reflection issues). Audio stuff is generally done on the basis of a low impedance source driving a high impedance load (maximum voltage transfer configuration) so to attenuate the signal you ideally want a potential divider with a resistance much greater than the impedance of the source and much less than the impedance of the load (generally not a problem as the two are usually VERY different)
However having said all this attenuating the signal and feeding it into a laptop mic input is about the worst solution I can think of. Low level audio signals and laptops DO NOT mix well. .
To properly read most PDFs you want a screen that can display the equivalent of an A4/letter page (some scaling down is acceptable but there are limits) and for long battery life it needs to be e-ink.
Afaict the cost of such a screen is the main driver of the cost of something like a kindle dx. If/when the screens come down to the point where it is economical to do so i'd expect minimal e-readers to appear on the market pretty quickly.
There are currently some printers out there that handle special paper that can be erased. With a decade of R&D more we could have affordable, erasable paper and pens and markers to go along with that paper.
The thing that strikes me is that in my experiance documents (particulally short unbound ones) that are used more than a trivial ammount tend to get rather dog-eared.
After a few rounds of being used, put though the eraser and put back through the printer will this paper really be in a good enough condition to go through automatic feeders without jamming them up?
when that happens it will be just as tricky to find something that will run them.
Maybe it will but I doubt it. Despite how fragmented the 8-bit computing world was there are readily available emulators for all the 8-bit home computers. Given that there are vastly larger numbers of PCs than there were of any of those 8-bit home computers what makes you think it will be difficult to get a PC emulator down the line?
Still archiving digital data requires some proper planning to maximise the chances of successful recovery. IMO the best thing to do is to always store the following for digitally documents.
1: the original format since this will have the most information
2: a format that preserves the printed layout of the document perfectly. pdf is the obvious choice for this since it's both well established and doesn't look like it's going anywhere any time soon.
3: if possible a format that preserves some of the document structure (but not nessecerally exact layout) in an open format.
A bigger issue is moving vast quantities of information (which we are generating at an exponentially-increasing rate) from obsolete media to whatever is current at any given time before the ability to read the older media disappears.
Agreed, computerised archives need basically continuous maintinance to remain viable. Paper archives don't.
OTOH one modern hard drive can store the equivilent many boxes of paper (a quick back of the envelope calculation: if we assume 1MB per page and 5000 pages per box a 1TB HDD would hold the equivilent of about 200 boxes of paper)
The article is a bit vauge but my reading of it is the flaw was that the system along with instructions given to staff combined to give a situation where the response was detemined by something other than the worst thing the staff member was told about.
That is someone with just the fall should have been class B but someone with the fall AND other issues could get misclasified as class B when they should have got a higher class from one of the other issues (in this case the person was unconscious and had breathing problems).
If you don't have UPSs then any power failure means all servers lose power. Afaict standby generators can't kick in quick enough
If you do have UPSs then when one fails at worst it takes out the power to connected devices. Which is worse, a few servers losing power every so often or all your servers losing power at once?
Pluss really important servers should have redundant power supplies connected to supplies from different UPSs so even if a UPS goes down the server keeps going.
Ah yes, the joys of trying to figure out if there is something wrong with the iron of if I just plugged the wrong tool into the temperature control box (I have two soldering irons of different sizes and a set of heated tweezers in my office that all use the same control box).
What I would to know is why the banks fall for it.
Mozilla has earned the benefit of the doubt.
Microsoft has a proven track record of ill will, negligence and general contempt for its customers. Therefor it is generally met with suspicion and distrust and has to proof there case every time because of it.
Karma is a bitch.
I dunno I don't think they are as bad as MS but i'm not sure I trust either the firefox codebase or the mozilla guys.
The memory "leak" saga and the fact that afaict they don't treat all crash bugs as high priority becausue they are potential vulnerabilities (until you figure out what causes a crash you don't know if it's exploitable) don't exactly inspire confidence. Neither does delaying an exploit to the next regular release rather than adding the fix to the latest current release and making release ASAP specifically for the security update.
This seems like a very risky strategy to me. If the vulnerability is already in the wild they should be pushing out the fix ASAP. If it's not in the wild they should be keeping details quiet until they can make a proper release.
Support length of Software version X should be calculated from the release date of Software the X+1, or from the date where sale of version X stopped.
Indeed and MS are one of the few companies who does this.
IIRC according to thier lifecycle policy mainstream support will last 5 years after release of the product and at least two years after the release of the successor while extended support will last at least 5 years after the end of mainstream support and at least 2 years after the release of the second successor.