Define "unnecessarily". Given current SSD costs and depletion rates, it's probably completely acceptable to replace an SSD used as an intermediary cache in front of a large spindle-based array every couple of years.
Just because it's not useful to you, doesn't mean it's not useful.
Err, no you don't. That's not caching at all, and doesn't help with datasets that don't fit on the SSD.
This is a shortsighted kludge with limited uses, and not at all the elegant solution the poster was asking for.
They are huge for larger applications. Database servers, for instance, can see performance increases in the magnitude of 10-20x the number of transactions per second when using a scheme like this for datasets that are too large to fit in RAM.
No. Swap is not a cache. Swap holds things that don't fit in RAM. I/O cache will never hit swap, it limits itself to physical RAM.
Am I the only one who thinks this is probably a really good thing for society in the long run?
"Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?"
We can only hope so. Let's face the facts, this is one of many industries that is a leech on a helpless, target audience. They deserve the painful death that is coming to them.
No. The framework would only run on their GPUs. However, you could have one of their cards in the system to do purely physics calculations, and then use a competitor's card to do the actual display and 3d rendering. They've now disabled this, so if your monitors are connected to, say, and ATI card, you can no longer use the Nvidia card in your system for physics processing.
Before you discount this as an unlikely scenario, consider motherboards with onboard NVidia chipsets. These are usually underpowered for full time duty, but are perfectly suited to being used for physics calculations while a more powerful ATI card in the PCI-E slot does the graphics rendering. This is actually a fairly likely setup these days, and NVidia has just said they're going to block it.
Personally, I agree with others who have pointed out this must be an anti-trust issue. Intel and Microsoft have both been fined heavily recently for doing exactly this kind of anti-competitive behaviour.
AGREED.
Seriously. Fortran? FFS.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.
