Carpet Bomberz Inc.

by Stephen Mullen Things to Come, released in 1936, a collaboration between H. G. Wells, Alexander Korda, William Cameron Menzies, and a host of illustrious others, is a bit of an odd duck. Gorgeous looking, with stunning imagery (pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and utopian), even more stunning montage sequences, fantastic music, and – well, a star-studded […]

via 62. Things to Come (1936) — Wonders in the Dark
I’m a big fan of Metropolis (1927) and any film made prior to 2001: A Space Odyssey that portends to portray the future is worthy of my notice. I still haven’t seen this film, but the name hovers in the back of my mind all the time. Someday I will see this film. But for now thanks to the wonder of personal blogs and devoted amateurs Wonders In The Dark does a great job of revisiting these films hanging in the back of my mind. I’m reminded I still haven’t seen them and become even slightly more motivated to seek them out and watch them.

We managed to grab a few pictures of Micron’s new 3D XPoint-powered QuantX SSD, and the company also provided performance results and endurance information.

via 3D XPoint SSD Pictured, Performance And Endurance Revealed At FMS — News Tom’s Hardware

3D XPoint is an invention of Intel to re-architect NAND based flash memory and make it much higher performance. The goal is to achieve an Non-volatile DIMM memory that could possibly be mixed with RAM modules and be a 2nd tier of memory between RAM and even now current SSDs. The speed increase touted is 1000X faster tha NAND. But from this article you can quickly glean that turning a memory technology into a marketable product comes with many, many compromises. And not least of which is turning 3D Xpoint into an SSD. Apparently this forces many interrupts on the buses read/write as an I/O occurs. Then all that gets stuck behind a SATA-NAND memory controller. Eventually all this needs to be hung off a SATA cable or bridge chip that talks to a CPU or PCIe bus. But hopes are still high for the NVDIMM version which hopefully can get closer to achieving the 1000X faster promises. So little in new announcements have come out regarding NVDIMMs in part due to lawsuits between intellectual property holders and licensees of that property. Some of those cases are ongoing and this announcement points to a possible less litigation filled future for NVDIMMs, I hope.

Facebook — one of the world’s largest advertising companies — magnanimously acknowledges that in your life on the internet, you’ve probably encountered some bad ads. And you almost certainly have, because online advertising can be obtrusive, creepy, and irritating to say the least. But Facebook thinks that they are so far ahead of the pack…

via Facebook Thinks You Love Ads So Much, It’ll Helpfully Block Your Ad-Blocker For You — Consumerist

Every time I see a news story anywhere on the web re:Facebook, I’m reminded of this movie I watched prior to de-activating my own account.

The details of this include a lawsuit filed in Europe to get Facebook to provide documentation re:How they use/sell the data of the people enrolled. That to me was such a telling behavior to skirt the issue and fight it in court. They do not want anyone to know anything about what their business is. But this story today from Consumerist is the great big reminder that you, YOU dear reader are the product that is behind the shiny thumbs up symbol.

As for me, I’m still deactivated, and contemplating a full shutdown of my account. I know from watching the YouTube video: Facebookistan they keep ALL my old data no matter what. So a fat lot of good that will do me. But for now at least, I scrubbed out all my old data. That account is now a mere dried up husk of it’s former self. Best part yet is there’s more than one person on FB with my first/last name so good luck trying to find out which person is which. I know FB doesn’t care in the long run, but anyone that stops participating on FB is tops in my book. Not just from the paranoia aspect, which is not what I’m really touting, but from the less than stellar, less than open Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle like behavior of what is promoted as Web 2.0, the replacement for the Internet. It’s no replacement, believe me. I’ll take the good ol’ Internet any day over the entry way into Prison Camp that is the Facebook login screen.

Seagate is looking to break records with two enterprise SSDs they’re showing off at Flash Memory Summit this week. The first drive is one that’s been seen before: the 10GB/s PCIe x16 SSD that Seagate demonstrated in March. It has now been named the Nytro XP7200 and is scheduled for mass production in Q4. Based…

via Seagate Introduces 10GB/s PCIe SSD And 60TB SAS SSD — AnandTech

*Nota Bene: The IOPs for read transactions for the card pictured in this article the Nytro XP7200 is 940,000 for read transactions. That’s dangerously close to what I consider the golden target of 1M IOPs achievable 10 years ago but only on hardware costing millions and millions of dollars. And then it was only achievable using benchmarking software on an experimental test rig setup by the vendor as a means of generating marketing materials. By that I mean they wanted to claim being able to hit 1M IOPs with their custom config of racks and racks of SAN disks connected via FibreChannel switches and custom accelerator boxes. All of it done in the name of marketing to Wall Street trading floors that need millisecond latencies and return times for transactions so they could do “high frequency” trading.

We’ve come a long way since then, mashing all that stuff down in to a 16-Lane PCIe 3.0 card. Truly we’re going to achieve 1M IOPs in a single PC chassis before you know it. And this is a step certainly in that direction, if only the write IOPs spec was symetrically as big. But that’s not the case here. Write IOPs is a good deal less than the 10GB/sec for the read operations. But who knows? A few more runs of new boards, redesigns, errata and bug fixes and there could be a small ramp for the write performance. I’m amazed Seagate’s got the nerve to engineer this, let’s hope they got the nerve to produce it in quantity.

Toshiba announced that it will have its new BG series of products at the Flash Memory Summit 2016 next week. These new NVMe SSDs come in the smallest of form factors, such as small M.2 2230 (22x30mm) and BGA (Ball Grid Array) form factors.

via UFS And NVMe Go Toe-To-Toe In Mobile, Toshiba Launches 3D BiCS NVMe SSDs — News Tom’s Hardware

UFS is the new, new thing for removable media. Samsung pre-announced a whole line of UFS memory cards to compete against the top of the line mini-SDXC memory cards. The speeds of UFS are so much faster than existing SDXC it’s very nearly as fast as a hard drive. If we can get fast removable memory like UFS with native SSD hard drive speeds, I would say even Hard drives are on their way out. The interfaces are just too slow.

I’m enjoying the use of the digital video projectors. It makes for a much grander scale and pallette for the choreography. I’m reminded a bit of the whole English creation myth we got to see in the London Ceremony. Everyone gets to act out the history of the world as een through their eyes. (20:26 EDT)

Portuguese colonization is next up. This is sadly when the 4million indigenous people start to lose their lands.Slave trade enters the country and does not leave until 1888, a number of years after the U.S. Civil War. So sad. One day I would love to see Egypt host an Olympics and get to tell their story in the opening ceremonies. And India too! And why not Vietnam? (20:31 EDT)

The city diorama of Sao Paulo in the stadium.

After a photographer who’s donated thousands of images to the public domain filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Getty Images for allegedly threatening her for using her own photos, the photo agency says it will investigate the complaint, and “vigorously defend” if need be. Last week, U.S. photographer Carol Highsmith filed a copyright complaint [PDF]…

via Getty Will Fight Photographer’s $1B Lawsuit For Selling Her Public Domain Images — Consumerist

How did Getty Inc. and Alany ever get ANY rights to the images in question?