And this is the difference between science and religion. Since its science, we say, "we were wrong - but its cool, now we can move on to find out the truth..

If this were religion, we'd be fighting tooth and nail, and there would be smear jobs about the scientists liberal tendencies, and stories going around on "How the lord said life was 3.46 billion years old, so it damn well WAS 3.46 million year old fossils.

Teach the controversy brothers!

I'm just hoping we can find the melange!

Because of what?

If all you've got is bad programmers, and their bad code is nevertheless good enough to accomplish the tasks you need to get done, then a tool that allows bad programmers to produce more bad code may be just the thing you need. (of course some would argue that that niche is already filled by Java, but time will tell)

And so does Florida. They just have water to go with it.

Without th ewater that California steals from other states, it's just scrubland.

Slashdot has covered a bunch of new PCI Express SSDs over the past month, and for good reason. The latest crop offers much higher sequential and random I/O rates than predecessors based on old-school Serial ATA interfaces.

That's just it. Their speeds are not "much higher." They're only slightly faster. The speed increase is mostly an illusion created by measuring these things in MB/s. Our perception of disk speed is not MB/s, which is what you'd want to use if you only had x seconds of computing time and wanted to know how many MB of data you could read.

Our perception of disk speed is wait time, or sec/MB. If I have y MB of data I need read, how many seconds will it take? This is the inverse of MB/s. Consequently, the bigger MB/s figures actually represent progressively smaller reductions in wait times. I posted the explanation a few months ago, the same one I post to multiple tech sites. And oddly enough Slashdot was the only site where it was ridiculed.

If you measure these disks in terms of wait time to read 1 GB, and define the change in wait time from a 100 MB/s HDD to a 2 GB/s NVMe SSD as 100%, then:

A 100 MB/s HDD has a 10 sec wait time.
A 250 MB/s SATA2 SSD gives you 63% of the reduction in wait time (6 sec).
A 500 MB/s SATA3 SSD gives you 84% of the reduction in wait time (8 sec).
A 1 GB/s PCIe SSD gives you 95% of the reduction in wait time (9 sec).
The 2 GB/s NVMe SSD gives you 100% of the reduction in wait time (9.5 sec).

Or put another way:

The first 150 MB/s speedup results in a 6 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 250 MB/s speedup results in an extra 2 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 500 MB/s speedup results in an extra 1 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 1000 MB/s speedup results in an extra 0.5 sec reduction in wait time.

Each doubling of MB/s results in half the reduction in wait time of the previous step. Manufacturers love waving around huge MB/s figures, but the bigger those numbers get the less difference it makes in terms of wait times.

(The same problem crops up with car gas mileage. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption. So those high MPG vehicles like the Prius actually make very little difference despite the impressively large MPG figures. Most of the rest of the world measures fuel economy in liters/100 km for this reason. If we weren't so misguidedly obsessed with achieving high MPG, we'd be correctly attempting to reduce fuel consumption by making changes where it matters the most - by first improving the efficiency of low-MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs even though this results in tiny improvements in MPG.)

It would be more accurate to say it revealed a bug. The bug was almost certainly a race condition that had always been present, but it took particular entry conditions (such as an unusually fast I/O device that the transcoder developers never tested against) to provoke the bug into causing a user-detectable failure.

That was my actual point. Sarcasm or hidden irony doesn't translate well to the web.

As soon as someone who didn't know that California already sucked that river dry, and checked my statement out, they might start to understand just why other states might not care to give all of their own water to California.

On a PC environment when you've got multiple browser windows open, IRC, email client, etc. getting constrained for IOPS is easier than expected.

Generally, I would say that machine would only be IO bound if it had so little memory it was constantly paging.

Those things once loaded are NOT doing heavy disk IO. Heavy disk IO would be thrashing in all likelihood.

So you add more RAM. You'd be amazed how many "IO" problems can be fixed with eliminating the IO in the first place by adding RAM.

Getting taxpayers a profit proportional to the lending risk they assumed is not "fucking [Tesla] in the ass".

The loan program also lends money to epic failures like Solyndra - if they don't maximize their profits on the better investments, they won't cover the costs on the bad ones.

Federal tax money is not a personal piggy bank for your favorite CEO/corporation. "Socialized risk and privatized profit" ring a bell?

Ok, automakers want to force me to obey their license terms? WHERE ARE THEY?

I've never had a dealer make me sign a EULA or license terms to use the car they just sold me... Go ahead guys, TRY IT!.

Once you do this, I'm going to review all the software I can find in my car and start looking for Open Source libraries in all that fancy user interface stuff you are providing now and make you comply to the license terms for it all. I have a feeling that we will find that you have some legal problems..

Next they are going to try this on hand tools....

We've reached the limits of the flash technology which drives both the SATA and PCIe versions of the storage device, at least in terms of how fast the data can be received from the media (the nand flash). This is not surprising. Flash is not all that fast and it quickly becomes the limiting factor on how fast you can read data out of it.

Just moving from SATA to PCIe wasn't going to change the underlying speed of the media. The slowest device in the chain is what rules the overall speed. We've just moved past where the drive interface is the limiting factor.

So the story here really is, that we have reached the limits on the Nand Flash, at least on read performance.

OpenWRT is pretty much brain dead simple with the default load if you have reasonable hardware and use LuCi. Usually the load of the firmware is exactly like what the factory firmware does. Yea, LuCi is a bit more compex than your average home router product, but it's still easy enough that I was able to figure it out with very little help. Armed with the FAQ and or WiKi it's really easy and takes you about 3 steps.. 1. set the root password, 2. configure your internet connection and 3. turn on the wireless connections. Everything else is optional for most.

One issue they could fix is the default configuration. Something a bit more functional out of the first flash might be nice... Just enough to get everything running out of the box, but the failsafe mode is only a few mouse clicks away from an internet connection.

That's all part of the allure. my classics don't get driven as daily drivers because if they did all the head turners in traffic would crash.