Posts by David D. Hagood
1103 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
How about containers?
One way to speed up web site loading is to load as few files as possible - so what about adding an extension to HTTP and HTML to allow a web site to specify files within a container (e.g. a tarball, or a ZIP), and to allow the browser to fetch the whole container?
So even on a site like the reg - you could have a container with all the static stuff (images like the boffin graphic on this post), a container with all JS and CSS (since that might change), and then the content. Like all files, your browser should only fetch the images and scripting containers if modified, so one fetch once, and then the content can work with them.
Posted in UK.gov gives nod to .scot
We need .scot
We need .scot, if for nothing more than:
great.scot - a site for Dr. Brown fans
mr.scot - with such subdomains as i.need.those.engines
My responses:
"We want your Facebook profile and password"
Response 0:
"You first"
Response 1:
"I want your bank account ID and password".
Response 2:
"I want a unicorn pony. The difference is, with genetic engineering, I might one day get what I want."
Response 3:
"Either this is a test of how well I manage security, or a gross invasion of my privacy. If the former, I am not sure I want to work for you. If the latter, I definitely don't want to work for you. I am sorry you have wasted my time - this interview is over."
Response 4:
(I shan't write it, but it is one of the shortest English language sentences, consisting of seven letters, a space, and a period, a vulgar imperative verb and a second person pronoun.)
Posted in Revealed: Google's SECRET London office
Re: All working for Google?
"All Working for Google?
I thought we'd all be working for the government within ten years?"
Your two statements are not incompatible.
You will be working for the Government.
Which shall be Google.
All hail our newer, darker overlords! "Don't be evil - facilitate it!"
Re: Energy, power, cabbages, whatever...
You beat me to it. Thank you.
If you talk about "energy at any instant in time" you are talking nonsense, as energy is power * time - let time go to zero (an instant) and energy by definition goes to zero too.
And I'd hope anybody working on fusion would know the difference - and I'm sure they did. But the meatbag of a distorter^Wreporter didn't.
Re: What innovations will the next 18 years bring?
"ultraviolet QR codes?"
That actually is a pretty neat idea. Use a UV LED to cause the pattern to fluoresce, and take the picture (without flash, of course). It would be a good way to de-uglify things, and would also make a dandy way to introduce a bit of obscurity to a link (e.g. stamp your property with the code - bad guy doesn't see it, gets busted, cops scan swag with UV light, scan code, call you.)
You could even do a real Indiana Jones moment: arrange some pattern of objects in the world that, when illuminated by the sun on a give day and time, forms the pattern. I'm surprised some artsy type hasn't done this.
Dumb companies
First: Used properly, QR codes are great - they are everything that the Cue-Cat should have been, but wasn't.
BUT: I've seen some stupid companies use them. I got a post-card sized item of junk mail in my mailbox (US Postal Service: about all we do now is advertising), with NOTHING but:
The company's name.
A QR Code.
That's it. No info on what these jokers do, or why I should want to scan their code. If they think I'm going to just blindly follow a link like that - they've never seen a certain Christmas Islands domain, have they?
So, what did I do? Not scan their QR code, that's for damn sure. But being a curious monkey, I searched for the company name, found out what they did (avoiding their actual web site like the plague), and decided that yes, I really didn't give a frip, and fed their missive into the shredder.
Anybody who goes around scanning random QR codes stuck to random objects by random people should be forced to live in an Amish community as an Amish person - they clearly are not ready to live in this technological world.
It's the hardware, stupid!
The thing that made the Amiga great was the hardware: when PCs were doing good to have simple FM synthesis, or *maybe* 8 bit PCM, the Amiga had multiple channels of variable-rate PCM, with envelope modulation. At a time when PCs had dumb frame buffer graphics, or *maybe* simple line drawing hardware, Amigas had hardware accelerated 2D blitting and sprites, and the ability to switch video pages and modes on a scanline by scanline basis. At a time when PCs had very SMALL framebuffer memories (tens of kilobytes to maybe hundreds of kilobytes), Amigas had megabytes of chipRAM that could be used a frame buffer.
Yes, the Amiga OS was multitasking, etc. But it was the hardware that allowed a 7.9MHz 68K to whup up on X86 CPUs, even after years had passed and the X86s were an order of magnitude faster.
Now-a-days, what do you get? The same video and audio hardware I can get in my PC.
If *anybody* wants to build "the Amiga for the 21st century" they are going to have to do something special at the hardware level (and that will mean it won't be commodity hardware, and thus not cheap). The PS3 "coulda been a contenda" had Sony truly wanted to be in the home computer market, not the video game market, but... they didn't. If somebody did something special - maybe hardware accelerated IO (offload everything from Ethernet to USB to Firewire to SATA to an ancillary processing system), maybe a display system where every window is a polygon in a 3D engine, with hardware video decode for everything, maybe something the rest of us are so hidebound by our current experience we cannot image - that somebody would be building "the Amiga of the 21st century".
But as it is, this is Yet Another Linux Box (which is still infinitely preferable to YAWindowsB).
So, meh.
Just don't Jar-Jar Jeremy, please!
I just hope they resist the urge to "improve" things:
* Making Jeremy Hillary Boob PhD into a Jar-Jar ripoff
* Adding a kid-friendly sub-racing section instead of the Sea of Holes
* "correcting" Max's accent into something more "socially conscious"
And of course, changing the Apple Bonkers because of a certain computer company...
The one with half a hole in the pocket.
Posted in N7Player
Metadata driven players have a weakness...
The problem I have with all these metadata driven players is they all have a severe weakness: if your metadata is bad (incorrect or missing ID3 tags), they fall down. They all fail to take into account one of the most common, and useful, pieces of metadata that a music file can have: what directory it is in!
If one album is by "Paul McCartney & Wings" and one by "Paul McCartney and Wings", guess what - that's 2 artists! Nevermind they are under the same directory.
Or the case I ran into: I had 2 albums named "Greatest Hits" - one by Linda Ronstadt, one by the Little River Band. Guess what: even though they were in two separate directories, my phone's built-in player decided they were the same album.
So: does *this* music player (and, no matter how pretty this is, its main goal should be to play music, not ogle the album covers) have sense enough to work if the metadata isn't perfect?
Posted in So, what IS the worst film ever made?
The Third Eye
a.k.a. The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066592/
You'd think that with James Mason, Burgess Meredith, and little Jeffrey Bridges in his first role this would have to have some redeeming value - but you'd be wrong.
Horribly, horribly wrong.
Posted in Belkin Dual-Band Travel Router
And how many ads does it ram down your throat?
Give Belch-kin's history of using their Ethernet routers to redirect you to their advertising, I wouldn't let one of their devices be in my path to the Internet if you paid me.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=belkin%20router%20hijack&spell=1&sa=X
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1039_3-5104863.html
Of course, the fact that most Belch-kin gear is overpriced by a factor of 2 is just another reason to avoid them like a drunken, broke in-law.
European or African?
"Shaq is 22.x flaccid penises."
Are those European or African?
The Python-esque one.
Significant digits, people!
I hate it when people don't handle significant digits correctly: all of these conversions have WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYY to many digits - your bowel movements would have to be controlled to picogram levels to be able to use that many digits.
Yes, it's for fun - but that doesn't mean you cannot get it right, as well.
Posted in Poynt
GasBuddy
I use GasBuddy on my Android - but I don't know if that has data for other than the US.
What I find advantageous is using it on a long trip - I can look down the highway a few hundred miles and decide where to fill up, avoiding the "crap - the prices are going up, I should have filled up 100 miles ago".
And I agree: you do that sort of thing *when you are stopped* - not rolling (unless you are a passenger).
I can't wait until this hits Reddit
I cannot wait until this hits Reddit - the sound of all the Redditors brains attempting to process this will be deafening:
10 ACTA BAD!
20 HIM SAY ACTA BAD!
30 HIM GOOD!
40 HIM REPUBLICAN
50 REPUBLICANS BAD!
60 HIM BAD!
70 GOTO 10
Run that loop for a while and it will be like a cross between Scanners and Lemmings (when you command them all to explode).
Re: Leaky cable
A "leaky" cable is a cable that leaks RF. It has slots in it to allow a precisely controlled amount of RF out (and in) - think of it as the radio equivalent of a soaker hose in your garden. You put it on the inside of the tunnel where the people are (and the air is), not the outside where the fishes and water are.
The solution
Build a BIG round-a-bout - think CERN here. Have no exit, or have an exit with a big "DO NOT EXIT" sign and a LOT of cops stationed there.
Put a road going to it. Allow for several places to pull out and turn around. Put signs up: "No outlet - last chance to exit - your satnav is wrong!"
Tell the sat-nav folks to randomly route people to that round-a-bout.
The smart ones will see the signs and turn around. The dumb ones get trapped on the round-a-bout. If you were nice and provided exits, then you bust them for exiting and take their license away. If you were NOT nice and provided no exits - after a while the problem sorts itself out, and you can hose the cars out and sell them again.
Posted in iOnRoad Augmented Driving
Re: Safe driving distance
Sorry, but that doesn't wash. The two second rule was to allow you to not plow into the the vehicle in front. Sure, you have better brakes now - so does he. And if HE needs to make a panic stop, he is going to be slowing down much faster now-a-days, so guess what? you need that 2 seconds just as much now as before.
If anything, I'd argue we need more than 2 seconds now, precisely because of all the things in the car that are vying for your attention. Plus, it has been demonstrated that if people would maintain more following distance, we wouldn't see the standing waves of slow moving traffic - the first person brakes hard, the second can brake more easily, the third just hits the brakes enough to light the brake lights, the fourth just taps their brake pedal and then takes their foot off the gas, the fifth just eases off the gas, and instead of a long-lived clump of cars going slowly (with fresh cars entering the clump, and cars leaving - hence the "standing wave") you just have smooth flow.
Posted in Future car tech
Re: SATRE - step backwards
Yes, several times.
Never been on Amtrak, have you? I have.
Re: He'll get his pink slip soon enough.
"His radio station isn't going to wait around for a Republican to take office if more advertisers bail on them. "
Rush, and other "people" like him, do not work for a radio station. They work for a syndication house, which then sells the content to the radio stations, usually along with an advertising package. The radio stations then add some ads of their own.
The syndication house will continue the show so long as either a) the radio stations are willing to buy the package and/or b) advertisers are willing to pay to be a part of the advertising package of the show.
Of course, the radio stations only care that they can sell ads during the show, and thus, indirectly, if people are listening - if somebody were willing to pay for ads on a show with no listeners the stations would be willing to air the show (assuming they couldn't make more money running a show that people wanted to listen to, of course).
So saying "the radio station will sack him" is incorrect. Moreover, the syndication house that handles his show is, in large part, owned by Rush himself.
That said: Rush used to have relevance, back in the 1990's. Back then, he wasn't quite the shrill Republican shill he is now - he often criticized the party for doing things he didn't agree with. However, after Bush lost to Clinton, the Republican party decided that they needed to co-opt Rush, and they played to his weakness - his ego. They stroked him, fluffed him, and brought him totally into the fold, and now he is such a Republican mouth[piece|breather] that it isn't funny. Moreover, back in the 1990s his assertion of "I *AM* equal time" was, to an extent, true - the media was over-all biased to the left, and while he was extremely right-wing, when you have 5 kids sitting on one side of the teeter-totter, to balance it with one kid means he's got to be pretty far out.
However, that has changed - there are several media outlets on both sides of the wooden nickel that is the Left/Right divide, and his show has been steadily losing relevance. So he is doing what all hacks do - what Madonna has done, what Lady GaGa is doing, etc. - he is deliberately trolling to kick up a fuss, and it is working. That drives listenership to his show, and makes him money. They very fact we are discussing it here shows the plan is working.
And while he may lose a few sponsors, if he gains enough listeners, rest assured there will be folks willing to push their ads with his show.
Troll face, for that is what Rush is doing.
Missing something
The vehicle in the picture seems to be missing some things:
1) A big old wing on the back - too high to actually spoil the lift of the car, and certainly not sturdy enough to stand up to high speed.
2) A big old phart-pipe muffler, preferably chromed, with LEDs circling it.
3) Blue "ground effect" lighting.
4) No "Type R" stickers, no "NOX" stickers
5) With those wheel covers, how can you show off your rims? Or the little rubber bands you call tires around them?
6) "No Fear" is missing from the window
Come on guys, know your market!
Posted in Future car tech
SATRE - step backwards
All this guff about putting sensors in the car to allow it to act "train car like" on the road is, IMHO, a step backwards - how about, you know, a REAL TRAIN? One engine rather than many, a much better coefficient of drag because it's a single long tube, much lower rolling resistance due to the metal on metal rails, the ability to have a catenary power feed. One set of equipment maintained by professionals, rather than many that may not even be maintained. And forget what happens when an older car that lacks this gear pulls in (what, are you going to ban all older cars and force people to buy new? The auto unions will love that, the people won't.) Or when a deer jumps out onto the road?
And the fact that if I can put my car on the train and sit in a decent seat, I can tolerate a smaller car on longer trips because I won't be in it? I can get up and wander to the dining car for food, I can go to the viewing car if the area is scenic.
You Brits and Euros have decent train systems - this is going to screw it up! Look what happened when we stopped funding our rail in favour of the interstates and airports - we almost totally killed our passenger rail service.
How does this work over there?
I can see how spim works here in the US - find a free web-to-SMS gateway, rape it to send a bazillion spims, find three suckers, profit, lather rinse repeat. Since the cost is borne by the recipients of the spim, ANY suckers are pure profit.
But I thought over there that the rule was "sender pays" - so how are they sending these spim cheaply enough to make money?
GUN license
I think that's Eric Smith Raymond's favorite license....
The NRA life member one, please
Better still - screw DNS
Rather than "Screw ICANN", what about we screw DNS? - or rather, create an alternative that can be used in parallel.
Consider all the "OMFG We must block <domain> FER DER CHILDRENZ!" and "We must block <domain> to protect this business". DNS is a single point of failure.
What if we take the distributed hash table idea, as used in the newer versions of the Bittorrent protocol, and use that to locate resources - in other words, isn't it about time we move to Tim Berners-Lee's idea of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) rather than Uniform Resource Locators (URL) - why not specify WHAT we want, not WHERE we want?
Now, I am not saying "punt DNS and go DHT" - DHT is chatty, can be slower than DNS, etc. But what if we established a standard for using DHT to resolve URIs, and modified the resolver libraries to look for domain names in DHT *in parallel with* DNS? Also, what if we move up the stack, and let clients look for URI's as well as URLs in DHT, again in parallel with DNS?
Wireless power: all well and good....
Wireless power is all well and good until we all start to develop myasthenia gravis - has nobody read Heinlein's Waldo?
Mine's the one with the Faraday lining.
But seriously - My phone grips at me to unplug the charger from the wall every time I unplug the phone from the charger. Somehow, I think these wireless charger systems will waste more energy than leaving my highly efficient switching power supply charger plugged into the wall.
Posted in SUSE Linux moves to 3.0 kernel with SP2
Why no ext4?
I am curious why there's no built-in support for ext4?
Re: Re: What is the point of TextFree?
"My understanding is that in the US especially, people still pay for their SMS messages and pay to receive calls rather than all the fees being paid by the initiator of the call, adds a whole new level of annoyance to cold calling."
You have to understand something about how cellular works in the US. Due to number portability, there is no way you can know a priori if a number is a cellular number or not: there's no special area code or exchange. In fact, I can have a wireline phone number and move that to a cellular line. As a result, the idea of "caller pays" for cellular is difficult, as you could get bit by calling a perfectly innocent number - indeed, that very number might have been a land line (thus free) last week and now is a cell.
Now, as for they way SMS works - well, that's just plain greed, and I agree the UK method (sender pays) is better. Indeed, the reason I have SMS totally blocked on my cell is that I refuse to have to go through the BS to remove spim charges, and I refuse to pay ANYTHING for "unlimited" SMS, but if things were as they are in the UK, I might very well have SMS since I decide when I will incur a charge.
Do you know what the difference is...
Do you know what the difference is between the subject of this article, and a triple-breasted whore?
Making a triple-breasted whore could be done for a reasonable amount of money with our current level of technical knowledge.
Seriously: This is such "pie in the sky" (double entendre intended).
Posted in Molesworth and the New Latin
As bad as ICHC
That was like reading the comment threads on I Can Haz Cheezeburger.
Folks: Limited use of such writing for effect is OK - limited being about the space of an ICHC caption.
aftur dat, it getz rilly anoing, amirite?
No
"I on the other hand am pretty sure the Sun is weightless."
No, because the galactic gravitational field pulls on the sun, else it wouldn't stay in the galaxy - so the sun has a weight relative to that field.
Re: Re: The Ancient Round Table does Hollywood ..... Holywood MonarchIC Quantum Style
Better still, a "remove posts from this malfunctioning carbon unit from my view of the site".
Re: Calor gas
The big difference is that a propane tank is ca. 10kg. It's relatively easy to secure it.
An e-car's battery pack is many hundreds of kilograms. To keep it from ripping loose in a collision takes a LOT of bolts, trusses, and such to hold it down. Undoing all those bolts, swapping out the pack (with some form of handtruck, unless your mechanic is Robocop, Kal-El, or an angry Bruce Banner) and retightening all those bolts is a LOT of labor - read: a lot of cost. And automating the system is VERY complex.
Re: Defeating the object.
"Hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe."
True, but the problem is that most of the hydrogen on Earth has already been burned - it's already oxidized (read: water). So to use it as a fuel you have to un-burn it first.
And to un-burn one thing, thermodynamics demands you "burn" something else (increase the entropy). Either you burn oil, you burn gas, you "burn" uranium, or you use that "fire" about 8.3 light-minutes away (and the problem with that is that solar and wind are very low density power sources).
Re: Re: Tesla did several major fails
"Many states in the US have maximum speed limits of 75 mph, and Texas and Utah have a maximum speed limit of 80 mph."
AND you have to remember that, due to the 55 MPH laws of the late 70's to early 90's, most people automatically add AT LEAST 10MPH to the posted speed limit to determine the "real" limit. If you are on an interstate with a posted speed of 75MPH and you are not doing AT LEAST 85, you are going to be passed constantly.
Then add the NHTSA regulations that pretty much demand that you should be able to drive into a bridge abutment at 50MPH while not wearing your seat belt and walk away, and you pretty much HAVE to have heavier and larger cars.
Not quite
Your example isn't correct. Putting a response code in the body as well as the headers is stupid, but not "illegal".
What happened here is more like:
Customer: I want you to put the number of returned records into the HTTP status code.
Me: If I do that, it flat won't work - unless you always return 200 records. The status code CANNOT contain other data.
Customer: DO IT ANYWAY.
Me: If I do that, it won't work, and you will right back here bitching at me that it didn't work, even after I told you it wouldn't work. I don't need the hassle. If you are that stupid, I don't want your business - it isn't worth it to me.
can you still cry with both eyes gouged out?
"...can you still cry with both eyes gouged out?"
Yes, as the lachrymal glands are in the eyelids and eye socket, not the eyeball.
Re: Who would have thought that.
"Intel producing ARM processors?"
Too late - Intel actually used to do so (StrongARM). They have stopped *for now*, but if Win8 on ARM takes off, Intel may very well decide to go with the flow, re-license ARM, implement it with their Tri-Gate tech, and start to seriously hammer on everybody else's power consumption - remember, they've been able to make the X86 (that dog of an "architecture") run on low power, image what they could do with an ARM.
WTF was their lawyer doing?
"
The company says its lawsuit “was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no-one’s property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our complaint.”
"
WTF was their legal team doing - playing Angry Birds? It's the lawyers' damn jobs to detect and correct any such "flawed understandings" - they SHOULD have told their clients they were dead wrong, and STFDASTFU (sit down, shut up).
IMHO, the lawyers who handled this case should at a minimum be censured, and ideally disbarred.
"Astrolabe has also apologized to the two...."
As well they should - apologies involving many pictures of dead US presidents on green linen.
Funny, but I can't see the keys when I am using...
Funny, but I can't see the keys when I am using a keyboard because my fingers are in the way. I don't care how my keyboard LOOKS, I care how it WORKS. Can I reasonably touch-type? Heck, the Compaq keyboard I am using at work is so mushy compared to the Model M I have at home that it really does slow my typing down.
This reminds me of the old Gallager joke about scented toilet paper: Why? who will this impress? My thumb?
Cue XKCD
Cue XKCD in 3... 2... 1....
OK, so how does that work?
DRM "works" with Flash because:
1) the Adobe Flash player is not open source
2) entities like Hulu can push an encryption algorithm to the flash player via an encrypted channel.
3) the user cannot see the algorithm, because Adobe Flash is a black box.
4) so a degree of protection is provided.
Now, if you add DRM to HTML5, you either
a) make it a plug-in, which means it is little better than what we have now from a user convenience standpoint.
b) build it into EVERY big name browser.
But to do b) you have to release the source as a part of Firefox, and then you can intercept the data needed to decrypt the data, OR you make the source for the DRM plug-in not a part of the Firefox release (and thus create a distinction between Firefox-that-Mozilla-built and Firefox-that-I-built).
DRM is logically flawed - you want me to be able to read this data, but you also want me to NOT be able to read this data.
Redirect all sites
Force all names to resolve to one set of servers. Make them serve pages that say "your computer is infected. It is being used for illegal activity. Get it fixed before we kick in your door. Love - DHS".
Or just redirect everything to goatse.
Re: Asshole sounds about right
There's an old joke:
The various body parts were discussing who was most important:
The hands said "Without us, you wouldn't get any food!"
The eyes said "Without us, you couldn't FIND food!'
The brain said "Without me, you wouldn't know what food was!"
The asshole said "I think I'm pretty impor..."
and the rest of the body said "SHUT UP, ASSHOLE!"
And so the asshole did: he shut up. Nothing passed. For days.
And the hands grew shaky.
And the eyes grew watery and blurry.
And the brain grew feverish.
So remember: just because somebody's an asshole doesn't mean they don't have an important job to do, or that they can't make your life a living hell.
Posted in Heatmiser PRT-TS Wi-Fi RF thermostat
Is it truly self contained?
Is it truly self contained? By that, I mean "does it work without the need for an external web site?" I have a Filtrete WiFi thermostat, and while you could say it has a built in web server, that is only used to set up the WiFi WPA2 PSK - once that is done, you don't talk to the thermostat directly, but rather to the Filtrete site. Your thermostat then polls the site every couple of minutes for any configuration changes (and updates the site with data such as temperature).
The "advantage" of this approach is that you don't need to do anything with your firewall (you DO have a firewall between you and the Internet, don't you?) other than allow the thermostat to access a web server (which most SOHO firewalls do by default) - no need to allow externally initiated traffic to reach the thermostat, which makes it much more Granma friendly.
The disadvantage is that should the company go away, your thermostat won't work. AND you have an external entity that now knows when you are away, and can make a pretty good guess about your sleep/wake habits.
I looked at several WiFi thermostats, and I saw none that actually hosted their configuration pages themselves - all the ones I found used the "pull stuff from an external web site" model. I settled on the Filtrete because a) it was reasonably priced and b) it was available at my local DIY store.
Re: Tightening a connector?
The way things like this work is:
The GPS receiver outputs a pulse once a second (the 1PPS output).
You have a very stable oscillator at a high frequency, such as a cesium or rubidium oscillator. These types of devices can be "tweaked" a bit to run slow or fast, but once tweaked, will be very stable. That gives you a very fast clock (sub-nanosecond per click), that won't change in rate unless you tweak it.
Now, you need to tweak that clock to match the clock at the far end. You do that via GPS like this:
You make a 1PPS signal from your clock. You compare that with the GPS 1PPS signal - FOR A VERY LONG TIME (like, days), averaging the time difference between the pulses from your clock and from GPS. Any single pulse may show a lot of jitter (random noise-like errors), but if you average them over long enough you can remove the noise and get a good measurement of how they are drifting. You use that very averaged signal to make very small tweaks to your clock. Eventually, your 2 clocks are in sync. You can then use the very high frequency output of them to make very precise time measurements.
Now, if that 1PPS signal cable from the GPS is a bit loose, then the rise time of the pulse will be slower, and the pulse will act like it is delayed by the slower rise time. Thus, you will sync your clock with a built-in delay due to that slower rise time.
(If you want more info, look up NTP (network time protocol) and PTP (precise time protocol, a.k.a. IEEE-1588) and that will go into more detail about getting things synced up.)
>180km from London
I have to agree with the comments about how
Probability of location <= 180 km from London, given time of story <= 10 years from now := .99
And look at the highly hyped "Doctor goes to the US" - did they send him someplace really interesting, like Yellowstone? Or the Grand Canyon? Or if the National Parks Service isn't cooperating, maybe Palo Duro canyon? You mean to tell me that with a friggin TARDIS the Doctor's never gone sight-seeing?
One or two almost throw-away shots (e.g. Hoover Dam), and that's it.
We need a change on file systems
We need a change on how file systems are implemented. Back in the old days, storage was a file of small sectors (ca. 512 bytes) that could be written largely independently of one another. File systems were designed around that idea.
It is no longer true at the physical level: your basic modern hard drive will re-write the whole track when modifying a sector, since the sectors are so close together that trying to rewrite just one would very likely slop into the next. And if you are running RAID it just gets worse, as you now should really be working in quanta of a RAID stripe. Flash is the same: you have rather large erase blocks that it would be ideal to write as a unit. However, we keep forcing the physical layer to pretend it can write each small sector independently of the others.
Worse yet, the overhead of fetching a small sector vs. grabbing a huge block of data is killing performance on things like SATA, SAS, and PCIe-connected storage. You can spend as much time on overhead as you do on the actual data.
What we need is to have file systems that are designed to work in arbitrarily large blocks - e.g. a single Flash erase block, or a track of a hard disk, or a stripe of an array - and deal with things like file packing to make good use of that. We need the OS to be smarter about grouping updates into blocks. We need the physical layers to CORRECTLY indicate their ideal block size, and to transfer those blocks efficiently. Move "flash translation layer" OFF the media, and into the OS, which has the information to optimally access the data.
Do that, and we can continue to see improvements in flash density (as you can remove much of the overhead of the FTL).
Posted in BOFH: The Cloud Committee Calamity
8 blackmailers, 8 corpses,
Actually, if Simon gets really creative with this, it could get interesting.
There are 8 people who potentially have blackmail material against the BOFH. How can he insure they won't turn on him? Failing that, how can he knock off all 8, quickly enough that none of his marks get word before the hammer falls? Can he perhaps turn one against another? Will the next episode start with "I want to play a game...."?
