Does anybody have statistics that show this, or similar technology, is making the roads safer? How many fewer accidents? How many fewer deaths? I want proof that this is a good thing.

Just by touching different points on your arm, hand, or fingers you can tell your portable device to change volume, answer a call, or turn itself off.

Teenagers texting will look like a first base coach on crack.

people, being so used to FREE content, will feel outraged by the concept of being charged to distributed their mundane crap videos online.

Charging a small fee to upload videos is the key to improving YouTube. The reason people upload so many "mundane crap videos" is because there is not a fee. People who are proud of good work would be willing to pay a buck or two to upload their video. The people that upload their friend burping would hesitate to waste money their money. I'm sure you would still have some bad videos uploaded. Maybe google could use the money from bad videos to give small rebates to people with good videos.

Sorry, "two IO benchmarks" was ambiguous - I meant the difference between IOMeter (350MB/sec) and CrystalMark (1504MB/sec). There is an order of magnitude difference between these benchmarks. I suggested that one was affectively measuring cache performance, but I suppose it is possible that one was measuring reads and the other measuring writes. It could also be the number of IO streams hitting the disks. The point is that the numbers posted need to be reexamined.

If the two IO benchmarks are *that* far apart, there is something seriously wrong with the test. Mostly likely, one of the tests is reading the same data blocks over and over, and the blocks are being stored in cache (either on the disk, in the array, or on the OS). What type of interface attaches the drives? If it's a 4x SAS connection, then the max theoretical bandwidth is 1200MB/sec.

Beyond that, using the word "sequential" with SSDs makes no sense because the internal bits aren't stored sequentially as they are on a hard disk. Perhaps you meant "read performance".

We saw it in HP where leadership was so arrogant that it thought it should be able to do the things it did overstepping boundaries.

Way to be specific.

If you're gonna spread FUD, you should at least give some valid, specific references. If you said this about Enron your point would be obvious, but HP?

It will depend on a lot of different variables:
- disk manufacturer
- what O/S
- what application is accessing the disk
- what interface connects the disk
- how is the disk physically connected (what controller is the disk behind)


If you're using a SCSI/SAS device you might see any of these errors. The O/S might see an "adapter failure" or a "time out failure". In turn, the O/S would probably just tell your application that a read/write failed and hopefully log the failure somewhere.

I've had flash drives die all at once. It's not the norm, but there are things that can happen that will take them from "fine" to "dead" with no steps in between

This can also happen with mechanical disk drives after a head crash. This happens when the disk head (think: needle on a record player) that reads the media breaks down.

Interesting - so are manufacturers putting capacitors inside of high-end SSDs to ensure that writes are written successfully? I would imagine so. Mechanical drives use capacitors to move the disk head to a landing pad to prevent head crashes after a power failure.

I think it's more like
1. Yahoo makes some cool cloud offerings
2. Sun builds the cloud
3. Cloud produces rain & thunderstorms
4. Customers hop on the Noah's arc of Google, HP, IBM, etc.

The parent ironically is quite insightful. The record industry's actually targets marketing to males between the age of 18 and 25. As I've edged towards 25, my CD purchasing has fallen off a cliff. I believe the reason is that I'm not actively searching for new music anymore. Graduating college had a lot to do with it.

The people that are still in the 18-25 group are the kids that grew up with MP3's. It's not in the culture to buy CD's anymore.

I'll buy that people have started preferring the distorted sound of 128bit MP3s over higher quality mediums. My question is, how long will this last?

Maybe some of you remember that the MP3 format was created in order to make downloading music faster. Back in 1998 it used to take 1-2 hours to download an album, now it takes 15 minutes. As bandwidth and disk space grow, the demand for compressed audio will decrease, and people will start downloading higher quality recordings.

I can see the shift being driven by iTunes marketing: "Get 3x the quality (384bit) for only $.05 more". People will eventually start thinking 384 bit is better.

Let me fix that:
No it is assuming that shoe sellers should cater to people without feet

You missed the connection...

olddotter said:
government keeps favoring establish Fortune 500 companies over small nimble truly innovative start ups

BlendieOfIndie said:
Most small startup companies are not profitable in their nascent years. This means that they DO NOT PAY INCOME TAXES

egcagrac0 said:
What's next, people without feet not buying shoes?

No it is assuming that shoe sellers cater to people without feet.

the government keeps favoring establish Fortune 500 companies over small nimble truly innovative start ups

How do you figure? Most small startup companies are not profitable in their nascent years. This means that they DO NOT PAY INCOME TAXES! The big Fortune 500 companies pay billions in taxes.

Even if I'm wrong, do you really think that what you said IS the problem? Has the US gradually become less innovative due to favoritism of big companies? Was there ever favoritism for small "innovative companies?" I think this article is saying that China is becoming a power house, rather than the US's innovation is weakening.