Posts by Nexox Enigma

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I can only imagine you were thumbs-downed because your idea isn't really useful. First, if you were worried about security, you shouldn't be using an OS that offers a defragable filesystem. And if you were using a decent OS, it would be trivial to store your Firefox temp files wherever you want, through mount points or symlinks.

But mostly, thumb drives are crap. You're usually lucky to get 2MB/s sequential write on most of them, and that will add significant latency to your browsing, even on relatively slow connections. And a thumbdrive is about the last thing you should be using if you're worried about security.

Also, though I can't be bothered to figure out, I would be willing to bet that you /can/ change the profile path in Firefox, with a bit of work, but probably without recompiling.

Not that bad...

I know we pay less for electronics on this side of the Atlantic, but I wouldn't really call E-Readers 'expensive.' I think you can get the cheapest Kindle for under $120, which is about what I spend on gas over 2 weeks' commute - not really out of my price range for a device that I use every day.

I still like books quite a lot, and I still buy first editions from certain authors (Just ordered Stephenson's latest,) nothing is quite like high quality printing on paper.

But I have used my kindle daily for about a year now, and most of your complaints are pretty much off base. Battery life on a Kindle just isn't an issue. I plug mine in maybe once every 3 weeks, when I feel like it's been a while since I charged it. Just a micro-usb cable on my computer at work, which I need for a few other devices anyway.

I've dropped my kindle plenty of times, packed it inconsiderately with hard objects, grabbed it with muddy/oily hands and covered it in finger prints, etc. Aside from a little extra flexability in the case, where I presume I snapped off a plastic clip or two, and a bit of a dent on a corner, it works perfectly. The screen isn't glass, so it hasn't broken, and scratches barely show up at all.

I solve most of the other problems you mention by mostly avoiding paying for the content I read. I'm sure enterprising minds could figure out how that might work.

And I don't "need" 500 books (it would get quite tiring browsing that many,) but it is nice to have quite a varied selection in my jacket pocket. I never know what I'll want to read next, and I tend to finish books frequently, I'm glad that I'm never really short of books.

I will say that the regular kindle is pretty poor for reading scanned PDFs (especially since these tend to be textbooks, with quite a lot of text,) and the idea of e-textbooks in general bothers me, since, when I need textbooks, I generally need no less than 6 of them at a time, with a handful of bookmarks (rulers, string, other books) in each. That sort of use case is quite tricky on one screen, no matter how big it is.

That doesn't work everywhere...

"""If the sun isn't overhead, I should probably be sleeping."""

I would advise you not to travel too close to either of the poles with that theory : -)

Probably not the drives you're looking for

If you only want one or two, and not enough to fill at least a few 1U boxen, then just get yourself whatever Sandforce drive looks best this week. You really won't be able to tell the difference in a workstation, aside from the presence of a giant pile of cash which you didn't spend on bleeding edge enterprise tech.

Won't take a weekend

If you're writing data which the drive cannot magic too much (IE don't write blocks of zeros, or repeating patterns) then, under a random (sequential too, probably, but I've never bothered running quite such a useless test) write test, from a fresh drive, you'll inevitably see a drop in performance once you've written one drive capacity (In your case 60GB.) Since the drive should be quite fast while it's fresh (secure erase to re-freshen) this does not take long at all. And since your drive doesn't have much spare capacity (60GB advertised, 64GiB actual, call that 14%, which is low for a SandForce drive,) it should look quite ugly once you've run it out of already-erased blocks. If you run it for a weekend, I imagine the performance you end up with will make you cry a little bit.

This is why we use TRIM. Without TRIM, you'll fill up all but the 14% spare blocks, even at low write speed. With TRIM, any empty space on your filesystem should be available as erased blocks, though if you're writing full speed, the drive probably won't have time to process the TRIMs.

It's just a patent...

"""It's still possible to work on the genes, it's just not possible to insert the gene into a bacterial plasmid and produce shed loads of the protein it codes for."""

My understanding of patents (admittedly I think about them in the scope of mechanisms, not molecules) is that patents only grant you the right to prevent another party from selling the thing you've patented. IE If party A patents a widget, party B can make (and give away, or use them internally) a million of them, and party A can't stop them. This is why, for instance, Microsoft sued TomTom for using patented code within the Linux kernel, instead of suing the kernel devs. Since the kernel devs give the code away for free, patents don't grant MS any ability to sue them.

In any case, that would indicate to me that you could produce all the protein you wanted, as long as you didn't sell it.

The entertaining thing to do here would be to immediately patent all possible uses for the DNA which aren't specified in the original patent, just to irritate the patent holder, and for the chance of screwing them in the future. Yes, you can patent a new use for a previously-patented object/substance/etc.

(IANAL)

Never

"""and when are they going to have AA/AAA sizes to power other consumer kit?"""

Short answer: Never.

Long answer: Cell voltage depends on the chemicals inside the battery. Your standard Alkaline battery runs at 1.5V, and a rechargeable NiCd or NiMH will do 1.2V - close enough. Unfortunately most lithium-ion batteries produce around 4V per cell, and I imagine that lots of consumer electronics which expect 3V would not get along well on 8V. Not for long, in any case.

Exactly

"""Science uses a process called "The Scientific Method" in which theories which match the data become accepted until data arises that disproves them. That has been how science has worked for as long as it has existed."""

Which is my problem with the whole thing - the data, frequently, is massaged into fitting the theory, which is the wrong way round. Another important bit of "The Scientific Method" is peer review (On every step from data collection to conclusions,) which has been a bit unimpressive thus far.

Something that I know for sure is that science isn't done by politicians, governments, or whoever else is writing the checks - there are far too many conflicts of interest in this field for me to take much of anything seriously.

So I guess I'll keep on with my "Anti-science" position until I see some actual "Science" done. Anyone who believes absolutely in either side of this current debacle is clearly a bit short in the "Critical Thinking and Analysis" department.

Not really...

"""Ultra-stiff = brittle."""

If you're thinking in terms of metal, then that's true, to an extent. But it's absolutely wrong when you're talking about composites, which I imagine is what they used for these blades. I imagine that small arms fire would cause some combination of a hole and some delamination, but the nature of the material tends to prevent the propagation of fractures, when designed properly.

Re: So, you've never logged in to an Apple machine then

Nice list of a lot of things you can do on an Apple workstation (I wonder why, if that's what you want to use your machine for, you pay the Apple tax for what amounts to a pretty Dell,) but all of those things are perfect examples of what you can't do on a mobile Apple device.

You can't install GNU anything, because the GPL conflicts with the Apple rules, you can't compile anything, or set up a web server, or program in shell. I'm not sure, but I bet you can't mount network volumes, or run X either.

I think what the OP wanted, as a power user, from a tablet, was the same sort of thing you enjoy doing on your workstation. That's not unreasonable. That's the reason I use an N900 (Until ATT/TMobile merge and turn off my 3G.) It's not the most amazing device, but I can and regularly do all of those things (Except run Java, natch,) and it's got a keyboard.

And just in case you're wondering: I don't use Windows or a graphical file manager, so I'd say I'm not in the click and drag camp. I still don't want much to do with any Apple kit, however, because I don't spend that much on my workstations, or servers, they can't put a real keyboard on a laptop, and they won't put any keyboards at all on their mobile devices.

Wrong?

"""you can't security wipe them (well, not easily)."""

I do many times a day, for various reasons, using the secure erase command from some ATA protocol version or another. It's actually easier to securely erase an SSD than a magnetic drive, because the bits don't have any memory like magnetic bits do, which eliminates the need to overwrite many times. And since NAND flash is actually pretty quick at erasing itself, it only takes 2 minutes, as opposed to many hours for your average spinning disk.

"""Until they lose all their data that is."""

Well, since you never trust any important data to one device, this isn't a problem. I mean you use some sort of mirrored raid and backups, right? I'm sure you've got a huge amount of experience with a large number of SSDs, and you've determined in a statistically significant manner that they're less reliable than spinning disks. Because I've done those things, and I must say that, including firmware issues, SSDs aren't significantly worse than enterprise spinning disks (Which actually aren't that much cheaper per GB than comprable SSDs.)

Sure SSDs are different, and they've got some problems, but there are certain places where they certainly make a whole lot of economic sense, and they have done for years, even before prices dropped as much as they have.

Really?

10 kilotonnes seems a bit low to destroy an entire city - that's just a tactical nuke, and presumably the asteroid wouldn't really be too radioactive. Also, some (if you'd read the article, you might suspect that 'all' or 'most' are more accurate) of the energy would be expended in the atmosphere before impact.

So no, I doubt hundreds of thousands of people will be at stake.

Sandforce is alright...

I've had the opportunity to play with plenty of SSDs over the last couple years, and I can tell you that Sandforce controllers (while not my favorite) aren't always bad. There's quite a lot to be said for the firmware, which is totally up to the drive manufacturer. It seems to me that the consumer drives, tuned to score highest in benchmarks and boot Windows fastest, are always somewhat less reliable than the enterprise ones (shocking, I know.)

In any case, the Sandforce enterprise controllers (1500, 2500 series) aren't half bad, especially when capacitor-backed.

That said, I do prefer the Intel G3 over anything - even without considering that it's by far the cheapest capacitor protected SSD available, the price to performance / capacity is pretty sweet. And I know that the G3 is somewhat higher quality than your average consumer Sandforce or Indilinx drive.

To be fair...

I haven't got any matching pair(s) of weapons... Still a few mated socks hanging around though... for now.

Not that important, really

Wear leveling has been made a big issue of, because people are worried about early drive death, but it's just not a complex or expensive process. SSDs remap every page (4 or 8k) from the OS LBA to flash blocks, so they're free to save your data wherever they'd like, and ensuring that blocks are written evenly is simple (compared to other background processes likely to run on an SSD.)

I've used and benchmarked plenty of SSDs, and blocks have failed plenty of times (According to SMART stats) and I've never noticed. That's because blocks have a limited write lifetime, and when a write fails, the drive can just silently re-write the data to another block, and your OS never knows the difference, except for maybe a slightly higher latency. Drives come with varying amounts of spare blocks for re-allocation and to retain a pool of clean blocks for writing, so this block death doesn't become a problem for a while.

The main issues to worry about on an SSD is what the firmware does to maintain a pool of erased blocks, and how they protect themselves against a power failure. If you've got no erased blocks available, then each write has to wait for a block to be recycled, which takes ~50x longer than a simple write to a fresh block. As the drive fills, this is what causes the performance drop that most people worry about. TRIM can help, but the drive still has to be intelligent about how it organizes the data on flash.

Since the SSD blocks are re-mapped, the drive has to store that table somewhere. Since it's expensive to write blocks to flash (Especially blocks that don't get re-mapped, IE necessarily the ones that store the mapping table) they generally store this table in DRAM and only commit it to flash periodically. That means when you lose power (A proper full shutdown is safe,) your drive has a fair chance of losing a few of your last writes, depending on the firmware. I'd personally not consider using a drive without power fail protection (Intel SSD 320, anything with a SandForce 15xx or 25xx controller - Look for pictures of a drive taken apart, banks of SMD capacitors are easy to spot.)

Not really...

"""There are only a few hundred mines and refineries that would need to be regulated and you are already measuring their output."""

You might not know this (Well, you've clearly no idea) that a large portion of fossil fuels are never burned, and therefore do not contribute CO2 to the atmosphere. Do you propose to tax the evil, evil carbon that ends up stuck in PVC pipes, road tar, or tight vinyl pants (coincidentally I'm in favor of taxing the latter, if worn by blokes)? Seems like that's a bit far-reaching for an environmental tax.

Yeeeeah...

Back before I semi-closed or deactivated or whatever they'll allow you to do instead of deleting a facebook account, I had my birthday set something like 5 months off, just out of habit for not posting some information online. I forgot all about doing so, until a whole lot of my 'friends' that I hadn't talked to in weeks started emailing and calling to wish me a 5 month late happy birthday...

Anyway, facebook jumped the shark when they started allowing more than one picture. Yes, I'm alright with being alone in that opinion.

Works for compiling

I tend to compile a (small) Linux distro many times a day, and doing it on an SSD makes a huge difference. Part of the procedure is removing the entire old build tree, which took 10+ minutes on a standard magnetic disk, and is now down to around 30 seconds on a (now outdated) Intel X25-M G2 SSD. The sheer number of files used during a distro compile makes the SSD totally worth it.

And I've been using SSDs for quite some time now, under all sorts of load - I can safely say that your SSD will be outdated and replaced long before it starts to fail from too many write/erase cycles from compiling. And since they're mostly immune to heat and vibration, they have certain longevity benefits over spinning disks as well.

Bleh

Unfortunately, stuff which seems like a good idea, is probably legally sketchy, and thus require some degree of grey hat involvement. That sort of thing tends to be a non-starter for financial institutions.

One other possibility

I'd go with 'both.'

Nah, it wouldn't go that far

As soon as Apple is looking at the wrong end of an import ban, they'll settle w/ Nokia on licensing or some such. Chances are the only thing any of their customers will hear is "Apple gives Nokia $x (m|b)illion dollars for blah blah blah" and their share prices will adjust accordingly.

But yeah the real point of the lawsuits isn't to fight existing competitors, it's to keep smaller players from skipping licensing patents from the big guys, thus preventing the small competitors from actually posing a threat. "Well it seems that it's time to renew that license, and you're now taking our market share... so we're going to be creatively adjusting the terms a bit, alright?"

Doesn't really work

"""rather than downward motors, how about fitting these machines with a spare couple of gas bottles and a compressor."""

Thermodynamics is unfortunately quite opposed to this idea. I did some quick calculations when ElReg ran that article on the quad rotor blimp chopper contraption, and given probably fuel efficiencies (20% for a turbine, 40% for a diesel, turbine has much better power / weight ratio, though) and energy lost to compression (The gas heats up quite a lot,) plus the increase of potential energy in the form of gas pressure, it won't even sort of work out. Burning liquid fuel makes your airship lighter, and no fuel has an energy density high enough to compress gas efficiently enough to offset it's own mass. So you compress gas and make the situation worse.

Conservative estimates showed that the quad chopper blimp wouldn't be able to lift the fuel and combined cooling system required for the engine, compressor, and storage bottles, since something like 97% of the fuel energy would exit via exhaust pipe or radiator(s,) requiring lots of fuel and lots of radiators (More radiators for faster compression, assuming you don't want to spend multiple days slowly pulling off cargo as the compressors make progress.) And that doesn't even count the weight of the engine, compressor, storage bottles, or plumbing.

It's just not possible for too many reasons.

See, here's where you're wrong

"""1. at some point in time health experts determined that infants should not be served water of greater than 100 Bq/L of iodine-131"""

You forgot to mention the 'for a year' part of the 100 Bq/L limit. Which is the important bit. Since there's probably not a continuous supply of Iodine-131, the water will be under the limit (long) before anyone can get 100Bq*Year/L of exposure.

Seems to me that leaving the time dimension out of an inherently time-related issue is rather careless.

Meh

I figure if you're into cyber crime this hard, you just pay for everything with stolen credit cards. And if you really want to pay for it yourself, the friendly banking laws of Switzerland and other countries can supposedly stop paper trails before they get back to you.

Yup

T-Mobile 3G doesn't share spectrum with AT&T 3G, so it'll be interesting to see how AT&T plans to use any networks that they acquire. I suspect they'll start switching off the T-Mobile frequencies to A) benefit iPhone users and B) 'motivate' T-Mobile users to buy new devices and give up their nice, old T-Mobile plans.

Welp, functional 3G in San Fransisco was nice while it lasted.

ToS

"""Why would TweetDeck need to change it's name?"""

I'm sure Twitter can enforce just about anything they want, given that it's their service, and they dictate the terms of use of that service. I think it'd be most efficient (read: most entertaining to someone who doesn't use Twitter) if they restricted 3rd party client names to use only the last half of the alphabet, or require them to contain at least one number, one capital letter, and to not be based on a dictionary word.