One interesting side effect of having a legitimately fast SSD is even though you save power power on not spinning a platter around you can end up using that power (or more) with increased CPU usage. Ex: Semi-Random reads from mechanical drive might be pulling data ~40MB/sec on a good day... the CPU doesn't have a lot to process at once or just does in chunks so all that nice power saving tech comes into play (reduced clock or cores or what have you). Now, pop an SSD in and start getting 300-500MB+ semi-random read speeds and your CPU will find itself a hell of a lot more busy having to actually process all of that.
It's a good "problem" to have, if you can even call it a problem;)
The advantage of this is on the technical side, and it's for those who mix the sound. Watch the middle of the video again. With the sounds being object oriented they only have to make *one* mix. When it is passed down to the theater they present the mix as they can with what they have. This is quite brilliant from a workflow perspective and can end up saving studios money as they theoretically shouldn't need to waste time testing and optimizing the downmixes anymore (except for other formats like DTS).
Sure the gimmick factor is still there but hell I'd love to hear it in a true IMAX theater.
While you appear to have a solid technical knowledge base, it is clear you have little to no practical knowledge or experience with SSDs other than off the cuff comments you've read here or there.
Let's go through some of your misconceptions shall we...
Price. Yes they are more expensive than mechanical hard drives. But the speed boost is substantial and worth it. I remember paying $200 for a 30GB HDD a long time ago. Now I can get a 128GB SSD for $160. My 128GB Crucial M4 is limited by my 3Gbs SATA 2 connection. It maxes out at ~280MB/sec for reads due to the pipe. It is actually much faster than that (over 400MB/sec fast). Pretty amazing difference for the otherwise slowest piece of hardware in any computer. Plus with TLC NAND arriving drives are going to start getting cheaper. Pair the cheaper flash with more mature controllers and within the next year or so SSDs will be in their prime.
Yes they are not tolerant of vast amount of write cycles. That is what wear levelling and TRIM are for. Even if new 25nm MLC flash could *only* handle 3000 write cycles, do you think you will ever use it that much? Highly unlikely. New Intel drives in the worst case scenarios running MySQL databases are still expected to last for a few years. Are home users ever going to continuously do 1TB of writes per day on an SSD? Most enterprise systems won't even touch that.
Take a look at SSD caching. In particular Intel Smart Response. It's a great way to get the speed benefit of SSDs much of the time with a lower cost.
You are dead wrong about SSD speed. Where did you even come up with those numbers? My USB 3.0 32GB flash drive reads at over 120MB/sec. As already stated my SSD totally maxes out 3gb/sec SATA: something mechanical HDDs can only do in RAID. And that's only talking about sequential reads/writes. I dare you to open up firefox, photoshop, and start a 1080p movie off of a mechanical HDD, and then off of an SSD. Access times on SSDs are near instant. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/20
Yes SSDs are still relatively young and immature in some areas. That doesn't change the fact that support for them is substancial and they are above and beyond mechanical drives in anything related to performance.
The real problem is that no one is taking the short amount of time it would take to research Gen IV+ reactor designs (CANDU & LFTR) that do not have these problems you speak of.
LFTR can power humans for millennia. It can be mined in space and power us travelling through the stars. The storage time for the final waste put out by LFTR is in the hundreds of years, which we can develop sufficient containment for.
If you think comments like this help a healthy scientific debate then by all means continue.
However, if you like to be the same as the side you berate and hurl insults with whatever you pull out your arse then please proceed.
The problem with your notion is that mankind has rendered much more of the earth incapable of turning this situation around.
You're claiming that we can damage the Earth beyond a point which it can repair itself? Really?
This planet was around long before us. This planet will be around long after us.
Even if everything about AGW were true and we wiped ourselves out, the earth would survive. It would adapt, repair, and thrive.
The Earth has been in climate change since it was first formed as a planet. The Earth has seen VAST changes in temperature while humans and other life has lived on it. Why is right NOW the perfect temperature that needs to be kept preserved at all cost? Why not 500 years ago? Or 1000? or 10000?
But that doesn't even matter. The post you replied to already proved your point wrong. Read it again.
Thank you for this comment, you are so very right.
Seasons 9 & 10 of Stargate were nothing short of awesome. They reinvented the show well and these two seasons have been faaaaar superior to seasons 2 & 3 of Atlantis.
here's hoping they don't screw up their new SG spinoff.
the miniseries, first season, and start of the second season were all fantastic. then the fillers came, and we dealt with them ("Scar" anyway?). Then they do the craziness with New Caprica and don't even use it for all it's worth (a whole 4 eps... you wasted that story arc on only 4 eps... wow) which ended with my personal favorite ep of the whole show "Exodus part 2". After that they just kinda took a shat and swam in it. I haven't even watched the last two episodes of the season because I've been so disappointed with what it has been up to this point. I know they'll be good... they always pull something out of their ass for the finale... but what the hell is the point of watching a show just for finales? I'm also glad they are ending the show. That means there's hope for a good fourth season.
But on to specifics... Rome, it was $100M for the first season and originally was only going to be a "mini-series" type show (think Band of Brothers)... but since the cost was so high they figured they may as well throw a couple million in for another season (they already had sets, equipment, locations, planning done, etc) to even it out a bit. So really the second season was a bonus and we should be thankful for that.
The current system can't output the full 1080p via component out. That is why they are even thinking of releasing an updated version. They know that HDMI & 1080p are both selling points in their own right.
The 360 might be able to support 1080p games, as it is already rendering that resolution for 1080i. The problem is that the system just isn't powerful enough to drive this resolution at a proper frame rate. when that's the case it doesn't matter if it's interlaced or progressive.
1080p games would be utterly amazing. progressive really shines when it comes to motion by it's shear nature compared to interlace. let me try to explain...
an interlaced signal, say 1080i, displays the odd pixels in the one frame and then changes the even pixels of the next frame. thus, at any given time it is displaying 540 lines of resolution. a progressive source however, displays the entire image, all 1080 lines, and takes up twice the bandwidth doing it too.
now things get complicated by the way tv's and HD receivers handle them. say you've got a tv that displays 720p natively but can accept 1080i inputs. when it recieves the 1080i, it drops the res to 540, and upscales that to 720. make sense?
but the biggest selling point in my opinion is still the 1080p output via HDMI, because now the HD-DVD drive can output thru the 360 at it's native resolution, which is just awesome. but yeah... dropping the price a little would sell it to me even quicker:)
and with a whopping 3gbps the fanciest of SDI connectors cry when a simple HDMI cable can carry twice as much data. And that's just HDMI 1.0, 1.3 double's HDMI's bandwidth. i agree that it's "nice" that it uses coax connectors... but that is also its downfall. with the lack of data transfer it's far from future proofed. hell, 1080p is the max it can keep up with. want a screen bigger then that? no can do.
I know they are expensive, but the Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones are incredible. I use them almost every day to cut out most of the noise of the servers and AC units in the data center. You still hear a bit of the higher pitch noises coming from the fans but its bearable. Once you've had the headphones on for awhile and take them off you realize just how big the difference in sound is. It still surprises me sometimes.
The difference from a cheaper set (say the Sony noise-cancelling) and the the Bose is really noticable.
Also, the battery life is more then excellent. It goes for about 30+ hours on a 1 hour charge. Plus it comes with a nice case and airplane plug and 1/8" extender.
Hell, you don't even have to plug them into anything. Sometime I just put them on when I'm reading and it takes care of the noise of my roommate playing CounterStrike.
i half agree with you. i don't think the show should be canceled, because there is far too few true sci-fi shows on anymore. (there's a lot of wannabes popping up on network tv, but they all want to incorporate crime or medical crap).
i generally like atlantis, other then the first season by far had the best episodes and everything out now does seem like a bad copy off an old sg-1 ep. that and i like the lt. ford better then i like ronin (he's just not a good actor, what more do i have to say?)
who knows... maybe daniel jackson will transfer to atlantis and next season may have some potential.
1 Million litres may be a decent start, but it sure isn't much. There's a corn-fuled ethanol producing plant in Kansas that produces 26 million gal of ethanol a year, and that hardly makes a dent (src: popular mechanics). (and yeah I know bio-diesel has a higher BTU then corn-based ethanol, but it still wouldn't reach even close to the output of another alt fuel plant).
If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol. They will be oil-independent by next year. Sugar-based ethanol is something like 8 times more efficient then corn-based. Shows what we know right?
and without hesitation or thought the hardcore flamers launch into a barrage of ignorant and cliche remarks.
it makes sense. they follow the same cliche xbox and ps mold for doing the same thing countless times.
come on guys... you can at least try to be original.
oh, you can also wait until you've played the system yourself or you might have to eat your flaming words (take whatever way you will).
people will get used to it. i thought low of "xbox" when i first heard it. could MS get any more generic? not to mention "opteron" which i'm still not too fond of, but its not bad anymore.
it kinda makes me sad that this is considered a lot (with something useful in science) when AOL has petabytes of AIM logs sitting at their server farms. sad indeed.
the only film format that is shoot in fullscreen and gives you the fullscreen presentation (the way it was shot) is Super 35. the original print is 4:3 but is made 16x9 or (2.35x1) for the theatre. movies like Air Force One, T2, Titanic and The Abyss were shot in this format.
otherwise, the movie is pan & scanned or just croped
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That an issue of some sort, that's for sure. How was it partitioned/formatted? It might be un-aligned or a bad disk controller or something.
Is it really news that a spy agency is spying? "oh look at them doing their job!"
One interesting side effect of having a legitimately fast SSD is even though you save power power on not spinning a platter around you can end up using that power (or more) with increased CPU usage. Ex: Semi-Random reads from mechanical drive might be pulling data ~40MB/sec on a good day... the CPU doesn't have a lot to process at once or just does in chunks so all that nice power saving tech comes into play (reduced clock or cores or what have you). Now, pop an SSD in and start getting 300-500MB+ semi-random read speeds and your CPU will find itself a hell of a lot more busy having to actually process all of that.
It's a good "problem" to have, if you can even call it a problem ;)
The advantage of this is on the technical side, and it's for those who mix the sound. Watch the middle of the video again. With the sounds being object oriented they only have to make *one* mix. When it is passed down to the theater they present the mix as they can with what they have. This is quite brilliant from a workflow perspective and can end up saving studios money as they theoretically shouldn't need to waste time testing and optimizing the downmixes anymore (except for other formats like DTS).
Sure the gimmick factor is still there but hell I'd love to hear it in a true IMAX theater.
Can we also cite where in the Constitution the President has the right to execute "executive orders" and why anyone has to follow them?
While you appear to have a solid technical knowledge base, it is clear you have little to no practical knowledge or experience with SSDs other than off the cuff comments you've read here or there.
Let's go through some of your misconceptions shall we...
Price. Yes they are more expensive than mechanical hard drives. But the speed boost is substantial and worth it. I remember paying $200 for a 30GB HDD a long time ago. Now I can get a 128GB SSD for $160. My 128GB Crucial M4 is limited by my 3Gbs SATA 2 connection. It maxes out at ~280MB/sec for reads due to the pipe. It is actually much faster than that (over 400MB/sec fast). Pretty amazing difference for the otherwise slowest piece of hardware in any computer. Plus with TLC NAND arriving drives are going to start getting cheaper. Pair the cheaper flash with more mature controllers and within the next year or so SSDs will be in their prime.
Yes they are not tolerant of vast amount of write cycles. That is what wear levelling and TRIM are for. Even if new 25nm MLC flash could *only* handle 3000 write cycles, do you think you will ever use it that much? Highly unlikely. New Intel drives in the worst case scenarios running MySQL databases are still expected to last for a few years. Are home users ever going to continuously do 1TB of writes per day on an SSD? Most enterprise systems won't even touch that.
Mostly wrong about the swap file. Microsoft recommends putting the pagefile onto an SSD. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx
Take a look at SSD caching. In particular Intel Smart Response. It's a great way to get the speed benefit of SSDs much of the time with a lower cost.
You are dead wrong about SSD speed. Where did you even come up with those numbers? My USB 3.0 32GB flash drive reads at over 120MB/sec. As already stated my SSD totally maxes out 3gb/sec SATA: something mechanical HDDs can only do in RAID. And that's only talking about sequential reads/writes. I dare you to open up firefox, photoshop, and start a 1080p movie off of a mechanical HDD, and then off of an SSD. Access times on SSDs are near instant. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/20
Yes SSDs are still relatively young and immature in some areas. That doesn't change the fact that support for them is substancial and they are above and beyond mechanical drives in anything related to performance.
I got my WD Live for $80 about a year or so ago. Plays 1080p mkv flawlessly off of a samba share from a linux server. It just works.
Looks different and a little more expensive then mine, but probably still worth getting: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136997
The real problem is that no one is taking the short amount of time it would take to research Gen IV+ reactor designs (CANDU & LFTR) that do not have these problems you speak of. LFTR can power humans for millennia. It can be mined in space and power us travelling through the stars. The storage time for the final waste put out by LFTR is in the hundreds of years, which we can develop sufficient containment for.
If you think comments like this help a healthy scientific debate then by all means continue.
However, if you like to be the same as the side you berate and hurl insults with whatever you pull out your arse then please proceed.
The problem with your notion is that mankind has rendered much more of the earth incapable of turning this situation around.
You're claiming that we can damage the Earth beyond a point which it can repair itself? Really? This planet was around long before us. This planet will be around long after us. Even if everything about AGW were true and we wiped ourselves out, the earth would survive. It would adapt, repair, and thrive.
The Earth has been in climate change since it was first formed as a planet. The Earth has seen VAST changes in temperature while humans and other life has lived on it. Why is right NOW the perfect temperature that needs to be kept preserved at all cost? Why not 500 years ago? Or 1000? or 10000?
But that doesn't even matter. The post you replied to already proved your point wrong. Read it again.
just to point out...e -promotions-a-success/
$300 HD-DVD players ARE here. Over memorial day weekend you could pick one up at Costco for under $300. Toshiba had a $100 off rebate that helped a bit:
http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/05/30/hd-dvd-rebat
I saw a story a few days ago with actual numbers but I couldn't find it when searching.
Thank you for this comment, you are so very right.
Seasons 9 & 10 of Stargate were nothing short of awesome. They reinvented the show well and these two seasons have been faaaaar superior to seasons 2 & 3 of Atlantis.
here's hoping they don't screw up their new SG spinoff.
I agree.
the miniseries, first season, and start of the second season were all fantastic. then the fillers came, and we dealt with them ("Scar" anyway?). Then they do the craziness with New Caprica and don't even use it for all it's worth (a whole 4 eps... you wasted that story arc on only 4 eps... wow) which ended with my personal favorite ep of the whole show "Exodus part 2". After that they just kinda took a shat and swam in it. I haven't even watched the last two episodes of the season because I've been so disappointed with what it has been up to this point. I know they'll be good... they always pull something out of their ass for the finale... but what the hell is the point of watching a show just for finales? I'm also glad they are ending the show. That means there's hope for a good fourth season.
But on to specifics... Rome, it was $100M for the first season and originally was only going to be a "mini-series" type show (think Band of Brothers)... but since the cost was so high they figured they may as well throw a couple million in for another season (they already had sets, equipment, locations, planning done, etc) to even it out a bit. So really the second season was a bonus and we should be thankful for that.
The current system can't output the full 1080p via component out. That is why they are even thinking of releasing an updated version. They know that HDMI & 1080p are both selling points in their own right.
The 360 might be able to support 1080p games, as it is already rendering that resolution for 1080i. The problem is that the system just isn't powerful enough to drive this resolution at a proper frame rate. when that's the case it doesn't matter if it's interlaced or progressive.
1080p games would be utterly amazing. progressive really shines when it comes to motion by it's shear nature compared to interlace. let me try to explain...
an interlaced signal, say 1080i, displays the odd pixels in the one frame and then changes the even pixels of the next frame. thus, at any given time it is displaying 540 lines of resolution. a progressive source however, displays the entire image, all 1080 lines, and takes up twice the bandwidth doing it too. now things get complicated by the way tv's and HD receivers handle them. say you've got a tv that displays 720p natively but can accept 1080i inputs. when it recieves the 1080i, it drops the res to 540, and upscales that to 720. make sense?
but the biggest selling point in my opinion is still the 1080p output via HDMI, because now the HD-DVD drive can output thru the 360 at it's native resolution, which is just awesome. but yeah... dropping the price a little would sell it to me even quicker :)
a few years ago my cousin said, "i'm not gonna waste money upgrading to dvd, you can't even tell a difference"
and with a whopping 3gbps the fanciest of SDI connectors cry when a simple HDMI cable can carry twice as much data. And that's just HDMI 1.0, 1.3 double's HDMI's bandwidth.
i agree that it's "nice" that it uses coax connectors... but that is also its downfall. with the lack of data transfer it's far from future proofed. hell, 1080p is the max it can keep up with. want a screen bigger then that? no can do.
I know they are expensive, but the Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones are incredible. I use them almost every day to cut out most of the noise of the servers and AC units in the data center. You still hear a bit of the higher pitch noises coming from the fans but its bearable. Once you've had the headphones on for awhile and take them off you realize just how big the difference in sound is. It still surprises me sometimes. The difference from a cheaper set (say the Sony noise-cancelling) and the the Bose is really noticable. Also, the battery life is more then excellent. It goes for about 30+ hours on a 1 hour charge. Plus it comes with a nice case and airplane plug and 1/8" extender. Hell, you don't even have to plug them into anything. Sometime I just put them on when I'm reading and it takes care of the noise of my roommate playing CounterStrike.
i half agree with you.
i don't think the show should be canceled, because there is far too few true sci-fi shows on anymore. (there's a lot of wannabes popping up on network tv, but they all want to incorporate crime or medical crap).
i generally like atlantis, other then the first season by far had the best episodes and everything out now does seem like a bad copy off an old sg-1 ep. that and i like the lt. ford better then i like ronin (he's just not a good actor, what more do i have to say?)
who knows... maybe daniel jackson will transfer to atlantis and next season may have some potential.
1 Million litres may be a decent start, but it sure isn't much. There's a corn-fuled ethanol producing plant in Kansas that produces 26 million gal of ethanol a year, and that hardly makes a dent (src: popular mechanics). (and yeah I know bio-diesel has a higher BTU then corn-based ethanol, but it still wouldn't reach even close to the output of another alt fuel plant).
If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol. They will be oil-independent by next year. Sugar-based ethanol is something like 8 times more efficient then corn-based. Shows what we know right?
and without hesitation or thought the hardcore flamers launch into a barrage of ignorant and cliche remarks. it makes sense. they follow the same cliche xbox and ps mold for doing the same thing countless times. come on guys... you can at least try to be original. oh, you can also wait until you've played the system yourself or you might have to eat your flaming words (take whatever way you will).
people will get used to it.
i thought low of "xbox" when i first heard it. could MS get any more generic?
not to mention "opteron" which i'm still not too fond of, but its not bad anymore.
it kinda makes me sad that this is considered a lot (with something useful in science) when AOL has petabytes of AIM logs sitting at their server farms. sad indeed.
the only film format that is shoot in fullscreen and gives you the fullscreen presentation (the way it was shot) is Super 35. the original print is 4:3 but is made 16x9 or (2.35x1) for the theatre. movies like Air Force One, T2, Titanic and The Abyss were shot in this format. otherwise, the movie is pan & scanned or just croped