Comment: Re:Holy idiocy batman (Score 1) 267
That was exactly the intention. And I've written down that idea for a more focused article on desktop/workstation usage with consumer grade SSDs, just in case nobody else will beat me to it ;).
Comment: Re:Holy idiocy batman (Score 5, Informative) 267
I specifically had SLCs in mind when I ran the numbers. As for the 100k writes I used my original calculations, I took those from this PDF here: http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheets2/16/1697648_1.pdf - see section 1.5, it lists "Endurance : 100K Program/Erase Cycles"
As for the 1M write cycles: http://investors.micron.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=440650 - that one came out in 2008, so using it as a baseline for "newer" SLCs didn't seem that far off. I'll have to revise the article to include those links methinks...
+ - SSD Write Endurance Considered... Sufficient->
Submitted
by
jyujin
jyujin writes "Ever wonder how long your SSD will last? It's funny how bad people are at estimating just how long "100,000 writes" are going to take when spread over a device that spans several thousand of those blocks over several gigabytes of memory. It obviously gets far worse with newer flash memory that is able to withstand a whopping million writes per cell. So yeah, let's crunch some numbers and fix that misconception. Spoiler: even at the maximum SATA 3.0 link speeds, you'd still find yourself waiting several months or even years for that SSD to start dying on you."
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Link to Original Source
+ - Naked scammers blackmail men on web->
Submitted
by
innocent_white_lamb
innocent_white_lamb writes "Police in Singapore have received many reports of a blackmail ring that uses attractive women to seduce men via webcam/chat. "They would commence a webcam conversation with the victims and initiate cybersex by undressing themselves first before persuading the male victims to appear nude or perform sexual acts in front of the webcams", according to the Singapore Police Force. The victim then received an email and/or phone call demanding $50,000."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - Determinism and Its Enemies Are Still Waging War over the Soul of Science->
Submitted
by
derekmead
derekmead writes "Wherever determinism appears, controversy attends, raising specters of days when colonialists, eugenicists, public health officials, and political idealists believed they could cure the human condition through manipulation and force. Understanding those fears helps shed light on the controversy surrounding a recent paper (PDF) published in the American Economic Review, entitled, “The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development.” In it, economists Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor argue that the economic development of broad human populations correlate with their levels of genetic diversity—which is, in turn, pinned to the distance its inhabitants migrated from Africa thousands of years ago. Reaction has been swift and vehement.
An article signed by 18 academics in Current Anthropology accuses the researchers of “bad science”—“something false and undesirable” based on “weak data and methods” that “can become a justification for reactionary policy.” The paper attacks everything from its sources of population data to its methods for measuring genetic diversity, but the economists are standing by their methods. The quality of Ashraf and Galor's research notwithstanding, the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable."
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An article signed by 18 academics in Current Anthropology accuses the researchers of “bad science”—“something false and undesirable” based on “weak data and methods” that “can become a justification for reactionary policy.” The paper attacks everything from its sources of population data to its methods for measuring genetic diversity, but the economists are standing by their methods. The quality of Ashraf and Galor's research notwithstanding, the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable."
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Comment: Re:The P.O. Box reinvented? (Score 3, Interesting) 92
I'm still stumped at how people manage to actually receive anything sent to their homes to boot. Maybe it's just me, but at my place nobody's at home in that rather... flexible... time span that delivery companies might decide to drop by... ... but then again I find it easier to just have the things I want delivered to either the company where I work rather than to some PO Box workalike where I actually drive by and pick it up.
Comment: Re:Corporate benefits (Score 1) 165
Indeed, wouldn't expect an AAA to let down their corporate property, errrr citizens, errrr wait that hasn't happened yet.
Comment: Biased media? By golly, however did that happen! (Score 1) 165
Not exactly a surprise, but I'd sure like to get my hands at the statistics afterwards...
+ - Amazon Kindle Book Sales Surpass Print In UK->
Submitted
by
twoheadedboy
twoheadedboy writes "Book lovers are increasingly turning to e-books, and in the UK Amazon has announced it now sells more e-books than physical copies on Amazon.co.uk. Kindle books surpassed sales of hardbacks in the UK back in May 2011 at a rate of two to one and now they have leapfrogged the combined totals of both hardbacks and paperbacks. The same happened in the US not so long ago, largely thanks to the popularity of novels like EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey, which started out as an e-book before being released in paperback."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - 4D is so yesterday, what about 5D and up?->
Submitted
by
jyujin
jyujin writes "Ever notice in certain university maths lectures that certain things just ought to be great do visualise, but nobody ever bothered to do it? One of those was higher dimensional geometry. For some reason there's a lot of talk about n-cubes and the like, but you'll be lucky to find Youtube videos about it. So here's a nice little programme for you to get dirty with on your Mac that let's you view a lot of the common primitives in higher dimensional geometry and just play with them. Sure helped me get the gist of 4D rotations and beyond."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - Curiosity Rover landed on Mars Successfully and started sending Images of Mars.->
Submitted
by
Qualitypointtech
Qualitypointtech writes "Nasa's has announced that Curiosity Rover has landed on Mars Safely. U.S President Barack Obama on Curiosity: "Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history."
You can see below the Reaction of MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) Team after learning that Mars Curiosity rover has landed safely on Mars."
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You can see below the Reaction of MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) Team after learning that Mars Curiosity rover has landed safely on Mars."
Link to Original Source
+ - "Unbreakable Message Exchange" using single photon->
Submitted
by
Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes "Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a process that enables two parties, 'Alice' and 'Bob', to share a secret key that can then be used to protect data they want to send to each other. The secret key is made up of a stream of photons that 'spin' in different directions — vertically, horizontally or diagonally — according to the sender's preferences.
The laws of physics state that it is not possible to measure the state, or 'spin', of a particle like a photon without altering it, so if 'Eve' attempted to intercept the key that was sent between 'Alice' and 'Bob', it would become instantly noticeable.
The use of QKD for message encryption is not new, as it has been used to encode the national election ballot results in Switzerland in 2007.
The techniques currently being used on a commercial scale rely on lasers to create the source of photons, however, may come with a potential defect — The emission events in lasers occur completely random in time, sometimes results in the emission of two photons very close to each other.
Single photon sources are predestined for use in the secure communication systems using quantum communication protocols of the future, with the benefit of having a single photon source emits exactly one photon upon a trigger event, giving further enhancement on the security.
In the new experiment, the single photons were produced with high efficiency, then made into a key and successfully transmitted from the sender to the receiver across 40 cm of free space in the laboratory."
Link to Original Source
The laws of physics state that it is not possible to measure the state, or 'spin', of a particle like a photon without altering it, so if 'Eve' attempted to intercept the key that was sent between 'Alice' and 'Bob', it would become instantly noticeable.
The use of QKD for message encryption is not new, as it has been used to encode the national election ballot results in Switzerland in 2007.
The techniques currently being used on a commercial scale rely on lasers to create the source of photons, however, may come with a potential defect — The emission events in lasers occur completely random in time, sometimes results in the emission of two photons very close to each other.
Single photon sources are predestined for use in the secure communication systems using quantum communication protocols of the future, with the benefit of having a single photon source emits exactly one photon upon a trigger event, giving further enhancement on the security.
In the new experiment, the single photons were produced with high efficiency, then made into a key and successfully transmitted from the sender to the receiver across 40 cm of free space in the laboratory."
Link to Original Source
+ - Sci-Fi writers of the past predict life in 2012->
Submitted
by
cylonlover
cylonlover writes "As part of the L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text “time capsule” of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source