Uh, didn't it pass the Senate with 99-1 votes for vs. against? It wasn't particularly Bill Clinton's baby. Not that he would have vetoed it even if the vote was closer, but there are few politicians out there that show much opposition to increasing copyright restrictions. And Rich Boucher isn't running for president.
Did I mention I'm also waiting for fast, inexpensive flash-based hard drives?:-) Oh, and a version of Wine that will run all Windows apps seamlessly?
(Yes, I know a single flash card is slower than a hard drive, but there are devices that use multiple cards in parallel for extremely high speeds and quick access.)
Amazon has at least one 8800GTS for $300, so perhaps we can use that for an approximation of the decent performance price point.
I'd love to see a website devoted solely to synthetic benchmarks, where you enter your existing specs and it gives you an idea of comparative performance/image quality improvements with various graphics cards. It's hard to keep track of the alphanumeric soup!
Oh and DirectX 10 parts start at around $60, not $600 and the cost of excelent gaming hardware still starts at around 250-300 dollars, same as for the previous generation.
I wonder how many of these differences would be more apparently with some motion and several sequential frames. I know there are texture effects that look OK when the user isn't moving but terrible when he is, although DX9 already has enhancements for that.
Still, nothing there makes me want to jump out and buy a $600 graphics card. Someday I'll have to move to PCIe, SATA, and multi-core; perhaps that will be the time. If it's with a 64 bit OS, so much the better.
The Sandisk 32 GB flash notebook drive was measured at 0.6 ms access time, and another article tagged one jump drive at 0.8 ms access time, both much better than a very fast hard disk. (I did see other, slower devices, but one just wouldn't use the slower tech.) And clearly we can boost flash's transfer speed by using multiple chips in parallel.
BitMicro has their own version using standard SATA. Not nearly as fast in transfer speed, but they claim 0.03 to 0.1 ms access time: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4331778531.html So these other guys aren't alone. One wonders how SATA vs. PCIe bus affects the performance.
AFAIK for flash, sequential access is still faster than random access, even for NOR flash.
Flash has to be read in blocks, so it's true that I'm oversimplifying quite a bit. I'm also not clear on whether there has to be the "seek" time between all blocks, or whether it has blocks that can be sequentially read together to avoid the "seek".
However, the access time numbers I see quoted online are dramatically different than yours. For example, AMD says their access times are 45 ns to 150 ns. Could your numbers be the total for a USB flash drive, including interface overhead? A flash "hard drive" could probably get much closer to the chip speeds, and certainly you would use faster chips, as they must be doing here.
Oh yeah, how does a solid state drive handle fragmentation? I have heard that they don't fragment, but not from reliable sources, and I just don't see how that is possible unless there is some built in mechanism to close gaps on the fly or something.
Hard disks have a fragmentation issue because sequential accesses are much faster than random ones with a spinning disk. Each time the next sector to get isn't right after the previous one, the head must seek to the start of the next track. Solid state "disks" have true random access, where accessing blocks in random order costs no more than sequential accesses. So while solid state will fragment, it doesn't matter for performance or reliability.
Is there any sign they have a significant patent on this tech, or are they just counting on being first to market? If there are no patents, we could expect the price to go down fast, just price flash drives.
But, isn't your time valuable? I mean, why not save time and buy a DRM-free song to begin with?
I back up any songs I buy to CD anyway, so it's not that time-consuming. More so than other CDs, though, because of the lack of CDDB-like databases for home-burned discs.
I have a few songs purchased from the iTunes store that I burned and re-ripped. I have above-average hearing, but I listen to these MP3s without caring about the quality. At least to this listener, it's not a big difference.
Having it be flippable would mean duplicating wires and/or contacts and would make the cables more susceptible to damage and more expensive.
I don't think the idea is to have the cable flippable, but instead to have some indication in the shape of which way around it goes. Firewire connects have a rounded end and a squared off one, for example.
And you're not the only one who did things like this.
Although it may have read like it, I wasn't meaning to claim I was the only or first one who did this. I'm pretty sure the RISKS digest had this functionality before I did, and probably was my most immediate inspiration.
In 1989 I wrote various shell scripts for automating the retrieval of back issues of an electronic magazine I edited. Ill-formed ones would come to me.
Hmm, on my second reading, I think you're confused. Vapor Trails has terrible dynamic range on CD. I didn't say anything about MP3 making it worse. My point is if you've thrown away half your data already (but without compressing it) compressing it isn't going to harm it much. I'd worry much more about good quality source material.
So I get to pay a fee to reduce the expenses of a landfill company?
Landfills are typically government run, AFAIK. If they're not, they're generally government or neighborhood contracts, and get paid by the amount dumped. So you're reducing your tax bill, not giving a private enterprise money.
If it's profitable to obtain raw metals in this fashion, why do they need to charge a fee to do it?
Who said it was profitable? The raw materials value and energy produced may be worth less than the cost of running the operation. However, it reduces the expense of landfilling the items, and reduces the amount of certain unpleasant chemicals in the landfill. It also might encourage the reuse of certain parts of the system (say, doing a motherboard swap instead of buying a new system) which would further reduce the amount of trash.
Que the fan-boys who will yell that burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and then pushing that power over hundreds of miles of cable is more efficient and environmentally sound that directly powering a vehicle via fossil fuel.
Power plant generators are greatly more efficient than car ICEs. Transmission losses are, as others have said, about 7%. In terms of CO2 production, one directly comparable measure, even with a coal or gas-fired plant, the electric car would be much more efficient. It's on that sort of measure that the Tesla claims 135 MPG equivalence.
No, Worst Case is (for example), police catch politician sneaking into hotel with his mistress, and then the recording gets used to blackmail said politician into supporting some unsavory law. Ever heard of the files of J. Edgar Hoover?
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We have Bill fucking Clinton to thank for that.
Uh, didn't it pass the Senate with 99-1 votes for vs. against? It wasn't particularly Bill Clinton's baby. Not that he would have vetoed it even if the vote was closer, but there are few politicians out there that show much opposition to increasing copyright restrictions. And Rich Boucher isn't running for president.
How about we have a per child tax of $50/year to account for music piracy, starting from birth, of course.
Don't worry, you don't have to pay the tax if you're deaf, and tone-deaf get half off.
Huh? Tolkien died in 1973, so by my reading, the Hobbit loses copyright protection in 2043.
Did I mention I'm also waiting for fast, inexpensive flash-based hard drives? :-) Oh, and a version of Wine that will run all Windows apps seamlessly?
(Yes, I know a single flash card is slower than a hard drive, but there are devices that use multiple cards in parallel for extremely high speeds and quick access.)
Amazon has at least one 8800GTS for $300, so perhaps we can use that for an approximation of the decent performance price point.
I'd love to see a website devoted solely to synthetic benchmarks, where you enter your existing specs and it gives you an idea of comparative performance/image quality improvements with various graphics cards. It's hard to keep track of the alphanumeric soup!
Oh and DirectX 10 parts start at around $60, not $600 and the cost of excelent gaming hardware still starts at around 250-300 dollars, same as for the previous generation.
From a quick look on Amazon.com, I sit corrected.
I wonder how many of these differences would be more apparently with some motion and several sequential frames. I know there are texture effects that look OK when the user isn't moving but terrible when he is, although DX9 already has enhancements for that.
Still, nothing there makes me want to jump out and buy a $600 graphics card. Someday I'll have to move to PCIe, SATA, and multi-core; perhaps that will be the time. If it's with a 64 bit OS, so much the better.
The Sandisk 32 GB flash notebook drive was measured at 0.6 ms access time, and another article tagged one jump drive at 0.8 ms access time, both much better than a very fast hard disk. (I did see other, slower devices, but one just wouldn't use the slower tech.) And clearly we can boost flash's transfer speed by using multiple chips in parallel.
BitMicro has their own version using standard SATA. Not nearly as fast in transfer speed, but they claim 0.03 to 0.1 ms access time: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4331778531.html
So these other guys aren't alone. One wonders how SATA vs. PCIe bus affects the performance.
AFAIK for flash, sequential access is still faster than random access, even for NOR flash.
Flash has to be read in blocks, so it's true that I'm oversimplifying quite a bit. I'm also not clear on whether there has to be the "seek" time between all blocks, or whether it has blocks that can be sequentially read together to avoid the "seek".
However, the access time numbers I see quoted online are dramatically different than yours. For example, AMD says their access times are 45 ns to 150 ns. Could your numbers be the total for a USB flash drive, including interface overhead? A flash "hard drive" could probably get much closer to the chip speeds, and certainly you would use faster chips, as they must be doing here.
Oh yeah, how does a solid state drive handle fragmentation? I have heard that they don't fragment, but not from reliable sources, and I just don't see how that is possible unless there is some built in mechanism to close gaps on the fly or something.
Hard disks have a fragmentation issue because sequential accesses are much faster than random ones with a spinning disk. Each time the next sector to get isn't right after the previous one, the head must seek to the start of the next track. Solid state "disks" have true random access, where accessing blocks in random order costs no more than sequential accesses. So while solid state will fragment, it doesn't matter for performance or reliability.
Is there any sign they have a significant patent on this tech, or are they just counting on being first to market? If there are no patents, we could expect the price to go down fast, just price flash drives.
But, isn't your time valuable? I mean, why not save time and buy a DRM-free song to begin with?
I back up any songs I buy to CD anyway, so it's not that time-consuming. More so than other CDs, though, because of the lack of CDDB-like databases for home-burned discs.
I have a few songs purchased from the iTunes store that I burned and re-ripped. I have above-average hearing, but I listen to these MP3s without caring about the quality. At least to this listener, it's not a big difference.
Having it be flippable would mean duplicating wires and/or contacts and would make the cables more susceptible to damage and more expensive.
I don't think the idea is to have the cable flippable, but instead to have some indication in the shape of which way around it goes. Firewire connects have a rounded end and a squared off one, for example.
Your behavior sounds a lot like my son's. What did you do for treatment?
And you're not the only one who did things like this.
Although it may have read like it, I wasn't meaning to claim I was the only or first one who did this. I'm pretty sure the RISKS digest had this functionality before I did, and probably was my most immediate inspiration.
In 1989 I wrote various shell scripts for automating the retrieval of back issues of an electronic magazine I edited. Ill-formed ones would come to me.
Hmm, on my second reading, I think you're confused. Vapor Trails has terrible dynamic range on CD. I didn't say anything about MP3 making it worse. My point is if you've thrown away half your data already (but without compressing it) compressing it isn't going to harm it much. I'd worry much more about good quality source material.
So what do you use, FLAC/Apple Lossless?
And that is really the problem. Listen to a Rush cd compressed to MP3 format.
Wow, what a poor choice. Have you ever seen what they did to the dynamic range on Vapor Trails?
I think their equipment went up to 11 and stayed there.
King Arthur
Say what? Arthur is the product of Uther Pendragon and the Lady Igraine, Uther having been magically disguised as her husband by Merlin.
According to Excaliber, Uther didn't even take his armor off to do the deed.
and shall call his name Immanuel.called Immanuel.
----
You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: `let me sing you a song to comfort you.'
`Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
`It's long,' said the Knight, `but very, VERY beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it -- either it brings the TEARS into their eyes, or else -- '
`Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
`Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' EYES."'
`Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.
`No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. `That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."'
`Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?' Alice corrected herself.
`No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!'
`Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
`I was coming to that,' the Knight said. `The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.'
So I get to pay a fee to reduce the expenses of a landfill company?
Landfills are typically government run, AFAIK. If they're not, they're generally government or neighborhood contracts, and get paid by the amount dumped. So you're reducing your tax bill, not giving a private enterprise money.
If it's profitable to obtain raw metals in this fashion, why do they need to charge a fee to do it?
Who said it was profitable? The raw materials value and energy produced may be worth less than the cost of running the operation. However, it reduces the expense of landfilling the items, and reduces the amount of certain unpleasant chemicals in the landfill. It also might encourage the reuse of certain parts of the system (say, doing a motherboard swap instead of buying a new system) which would further reduce the amount of trash.
Que the fan-boys who will yell that burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and then pushing that power over hundreds of miles of cable is more efficient and environmentally sound that directly powering a vehicle via fossil fuel.
Power plant generators are greatly more efficient than car ICEs. Transmission losses are, as others have said, about 7%. In terms of CO2 production, one directly comparable measure, even with a coal or gas-fired plant, the electric car would be much more efficient. It's on that sort of measure that the Tesla claims 135 MPG equivalence.
7.5KM round trip is too far for a bike ride? How lazy are you? That's less than a half-hour bike ride each way.
You may live such an idle life that an extra hour a day is easily spent; many of us do not.
During the school year, I have no idle period greater than five minutes between 7:15 am and 9:30 pm.
No, Worst Case is (for example), police catch politician sneaking into hotel with his mistress, and then the recording gets used to blackmail said politician into supporting some unsavory law. Ever heard of the files of J. Edgar Hoover?