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Comment Re:Where are the 3.5" SSDs? (Score 4, Informative) 264

there are a few reasons they don't make 3.5's

1: physical size isn't an issue, for the sizes they release that people are willing to pay for it all fits nicely in 2.5
2: 2.5's work in more devices, including in desktops where 3.5's live. if noting is forcing the 3.5 usage then it would be bad for them to artificially handicap them selves.

now for your commend on larger physical drives being cheaper. Flash does not work the way that normal dries to.

Normal platter drives the areal density directly impacts pricing as it drives the platter surface to be smoother, the film to be more evenly distributed, the head to be more sensitive, the accurater to be more precise, all things that cause higher precision that drive up costs as it increases failure rates and manufacturing defects causing product failure.

Now in the flash world. they use the same silicon lithography that they use for making all other chips. there are two costs involved here.

1: the one time sunk cost of the lithography tech (22nm, 19nm, 14nm...) This cost is spread across everything that goes though it. And in reality evens out to no cost increase for the final product because the more you spend the smaller the feature the more end product you can get out per raw product put in.
2: the cost of the raw material in. It does not matter what level of lithography you are using the raw material is nearly exactly the same (some require doping but costs are on par with each other). So in fact your larger lithographic methods become more expensive to produce product once there is newer tech on the market.

No please note that in the CPU world where you have complex logic sets and designs there is an added cost for the newer lithography as it adds to the design costs. but for flash sets there is nearly zero impact form this as it is such a simple circuit design.

Comment Re:Don't Misunderstand Me... (Score 3, Insightful) 548

The question is "high risk of what?"

The answer is credit card fraud.

they might not have the tightest security when it comes to detecting fraudulent transactions

If this was true, then it should be the industry that goes after the company not the DOJ.. PCI-DSS is extremely clear on what the company needs to do to be able to process credit cards. If they are getting ripped off or that company is by action enabling fraud to happen then that company is liable for the charges and fees.

Trust me i've gone through PCI-DSS certification, and it isn't easy.. but it is extremely clear what the ramifications are for failure.

Comment Re:video of the road (Score 2) 187

For the temperature, it depends on where you live. If they are covered with snow & Ice then it is obvious, and if the temp is below 0C then it's obvious. but where i live we have a lot of humid wind and bridges. This means you can have black ice when it is 40F or below. funny thing about black ice is it doesn't cover up the road, unless you can catch a glare off of it you can't tell it's there till you hit it.

I think it would be nice to have a color change at least on bridges to show that the surface is below freezing, to warn drivers that there is a strong possibility of black ice.

wouldn't work for most places, but would be really useful for where i live.

Comment Re:video of the road (Score 2) 187

Wish i had mod points, first useful example of the actual thing.

They do look quite nice, and i'd love to have them where i live, and if they can get rid of the light pollution by reducing the number of street lights i'd be all for them (and willing to pay extra for it too).

Personally i see more value in the temperature sensitive idea, i'd love to see coloration showing up on roads and bridges when the surface temps get down to freezing. Where i live we don't get a lot of snow and ice, but when we do it shuts the place down because people don't know how to spot, avoid, and/or handle it. Giving a visual indication that conditions are right for ice/black ice would be wonderful.

Comment Re:A simple solution (Score 2) 97

I remember a few years ago when they did the black out of the world cup in the US. we had a computer setup back in my area streaming the World Cup in ASCII. It was actually quite good and you could follow the game fairly easily.. At one point we had 3-4 of us standing around watching it..

http://ascii-wm.net/

Comment Re:Does everything need to be smart? (Score 1) 128

I will say i bought and installed their thermostats, and i do like them. especially the remote control, with my travel schedule..

But i fully agree that things that are safety devices (like fire/smoke detectors) should be as simple as possible.

I highly doubt that they have applied/executed a RAM analysis on their smoke detectors (either do to ignorance or complexity), but my bet is their reliability would be much lower than they believe them to be if they did. and then you have to ask your self. do you want 10-20% risk of failure in a lifesaving device? not a chance.

Personally i think their protect product is pointless, and more of a liability for them and the user than anyone needs.

Displays

Rise of the Super-High-Res Notebook Display 333

MojoKid writes "Mobile device displays continue to evolve and along with the advancements in technology, resolution continues to scale higher, from Apple's Retina Display line to high resolution IPS and OLED display in various Android and Windows phone products. Notebooks are now also starting to follow the trend, driving very high resolution panels approaching 4K UltraHD even in 13-inch ultrabook form factors. Lenovo's Yoga 2 Pro, for example, is a three pound, .61-inch thick 13.3-inch ultrabook that sports a full QHD+ IPS display with a 3200X1800 native resolution. Samsung's ATIV 9 Plus also boast the same 3200X1800 13-inch panel, while other recent releases from ASUS and Toshiba are packing 2560X1440 displays as well. There's no question, machines like Lenovo's Yoga 2 Pro are really nice and offer a ton of screen real estate for the money but just how useful is a 3 or 4K display in a 13 to 15-inch design? Things can get pretty tight at these high resolutions and you'll end up turning screen magnification up in many cases so fonts are clear and things are legible. Granted, you can fit a lot more on your desktop but it raises the question, isn't 1080p enough?"

Comment Re:You're buying an extended warranty (Score 1) 270

The other main point i see between consumer drives and enterprise is the behavior. Especially when the drive encounters a bad sector.

Consumer drive encounters a bad sector, it retries for a long time and then eventual remaps it. In the mean time it has stopped talking to the raid controler and gets dropped from the array as a failed drive.

Enterprise drive encounters a bad sector, it relays the write fail and bad sector to the raid controller who then remaps and reissues a write command. Drive never becomes unresponsive and never gets dropped from the array.

In one case you have a degraded raid array and the overhead of a rebuild putting data at risk, on the other you have a log entry/notification of a drive starting to degrade and very limited risk.

Enterprise drives allow you to manage your storage arrays and handle small failures on your time, consumer drives force you to do it when ever even the smallest errors occur.

This matters a lot when you get to larger arrays where rebuild times can be in the days and not hours..

Sure it's just a firmware/behavior difference, but until they allow you to control that on consumer drives, or allow you to flash consumer drives with raid friendly firmwares, it would be unwise to use consumer drives in hardware driven arrays.

This firm can get away with it because they don't use normal raid striping, they use a mixture of software raid distribution logic (reminding me of something akin to ZFS) where you have better separation and control over how things react to minor failures and behavioral differences.

But for most people, we use hardware driven arrays, and in that world enterprise drives win over consumer drives.

Comment Re:Common knowledge (Score 1) 270

Source on the tanker claim?

Also FYI the octane requirement can be related to timing advance, where a lower-compression turbocharged engine with more advanced timing would need higher octane gas to make longer burns from each spark (higher octane gas burns longer than lower octane gas). The earlier spark sets off a longer-burn time of gas timed to the timing, needing the longer-burn ability of the 92+ octane. An old simple truck with 0 BDC timing would be happy with 87 octane, where a newer engine with 15 BDC timing advance would be better with 92+ octane.

While you are correct your numbers are off.. i haven't seen a car thats less than 10 years old with timing at 0 BDC or retard.. a naturally aspirated 90's miata runs 36 advance, and you can safely take that to 39 advance on 93oct and into the low 40's with 100oct

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