SanDisk Releases 512GB SD Card 210
Lucas123 writes: SanDisk has announced the world's highest capacity SD card, a 512GB model that represents a 1,000-fold increase over the company's first 512MB card that it shipped a decade ago. The SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I memory card has a max read/write rate of 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. The card is rated to function in temperatures from -13 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. The 512GB model retails for $800. The card also comes in 128GB and 256GB capacities.
Go video go... (Score:2)
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Exactly how long do you want You Tube videos to be anyway?
I need this in comparable terms. (Score:2)
Just how many Libraries of Congress are we talking about, here?
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Dunno about LoC's but this is equal to about a single Archos 5.
When these prices come down, I will finally have a reason to retire the old thing (my Archos 5).
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1/1075th of one LoC [google.com], given the numbers in this [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia article and extrapolating from its information:
525 tb + 5 months of 5 tb / month = 550 tb.
(Not counting September as completed, so only April through August.)
Or, you'd need a stack of 1,075 of these SD cards to hold one LoC. (The actual calculation is
So... (Score:2)
...in a decade or so 1 LoC will fit on a 1 portable memory device the size of a postage stamp?
I mean... only a decade or so ago 1 portable memory device the size of a postage stamp had about 1000 times smaller capacity.
Which means that we'll finally be able to use LoCs as a practical measure of size, distance, speed, weight...
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I still think in terms of double-sided Commodore 64 5-1/4" floppies. At about 320KB per disk, that'd be 1,388,888 disks.
Overkill much... (Score:2, Informative)
So the highest MP camera I could find in a normal store is 40 Mpix (Pentax 645D) * 14 bit RAW = 70MB/picture. So good for 70,000+ photos. Or the Panasonic HC-X1000 4K/24 & UHD/60p camera just released, 150 Mbps = 7-8 hours continuous recording. But I suppose it's good for when you want to carry 10 BluRays in your phone. Whoops, wrong format not microSDXC. I guess there's a niche for this since they made it, but I kinda fail to see the target market, unless it's the "give me the biggest and best you got"
Re:Overkill much... (Score:5, Insightful)
How is 640kb of ram working out for you?
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Well I seem to be both right and wrong, it's 42 bits from the camera but it's losslessly compressed so an actual RAW file is still around 70 MB/photo (listed under cons) [imaging-resource.com] so the card does hold 70,000+ photos.
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Sorry, Dad, you don't know how digital cameras work. Pixels ARE 14 bits each in 14 bit RAW.
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I guess there's a niche for this since they made it, but I kinda fail to see the target market, unless it's the "give me the biggest and best you got" crowd.
I can imagine plenty of uses for this in automated systems such as video system or other data gatherer. And even if it's to be used to record manually-triggered output, there's much to be said for the concept of "so much freaking storage that I can pay for this once and never have to think about it again over the lifetime of the equipment I'm using it with".
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Generous Maths (Score:2)
The largest files you can get from a camera are TIFF not RAW, and thus you'd be looking at 40Mpix * 16bit per pixel per channel (remember a final image is per channel, the RAW has a beyer matrix) * 3 channels = 240MB/picture. That's only 2200 photos on your super memory card now.
Why would you shoot in TIFF? Production ready from the camera. If you shoot at an event you can use the camera to process the image and then save an uncompressed file ready for print / transmission. Kind of important if you want to
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On the other hand, it would make a cool mod for a Raspberry Pi
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"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone,
Not really... (Score:2)
There is a target market for everything.
For example, a high end graphics card can be called overkill, until you bring in gaming.
So who shoots 70000 pics? Well for one, us timelapse folks. often to get a 30fps, a 10 minute time lapse means 600 seconds = 18000 frames.
This is just a 10 minute sequence.
Then there are the sports guys. Often each shot is a 80 frame sequence, then pick out the best. Again, one day means 15-20000 pics. Many shoot RAW+JPEG, so that is going to increase the space.
Last but not the lea
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Confirmed [blackmagicdesign.com].
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Nope-- they would drop frames. The write speed is not sufficient for raw 4k video. It's good for about 1.5 hours of video, perhaps even more since 95MB/sec is the read speed, and not the (almost certainly) slightly slower write speed, and of course, it's unlikely that the camera will produce data at this exact speed.
The blackmagic cameras are typically used with SSDs. even though some SanDisk extreme Pro SDCards support 280 MB/s reads [sandisk.com]. This 512 GB card is hogtied by its slow speed, even though 95 MB/s would
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Bandwidth Calculation Upgrade (Score:2)
Time to upgrade the bandwidth calculations for a station wagon full of SD cards.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ [xkcd.com]
Temperature Range (Score:2, Informative)
For everybody living out the the Bahamas, Palau, the USA, Belize and the Cayman Islands who struggle with the odd Imperial system, the temperature range of this SD card is between -25C and 85C.
Micro SD (Score:3)
SanDisk if you are reading this please make a 512GB Micro SD... thanks!!
Just imagine (Score:2)
a 512GB model that represents a 1,000-fold increase over the company's first 512MB card...The card is rated to function in temperatures from -13 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. The 512GB model retails for $800.
All that in a standard 1 1/4 x 1 inch package. Amazing.
Too Bad... (Score:2)
Too bad Google crippled SD cards in Android so they can sell cloud services.
Too bad tablets and phones don't use SD cards.
To bad too many companies make SD cards that stick out.
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This answers a question... (Score:3)
The new GoPro camera...which hasn't come out yet...is said to effectively capture video at double the rate that it currently does. So it can do 1080p at 120 frames/second.
But there's a problem with that...the existing GoPro, at half that speed, requires the very fastest of SD cards (UHS Speed Class 3) to be able to write the data fast enough. So I was wondering how the hell the camera would even be able to work at 120 fps 1080p resolution in the first place. This card, with its throughput, answers that, since it's triple the UHS Speed Class 3 specification.
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No, that would be MibiBytes and GibiBytes. A GB is 1000 times larger than a MB.
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Only if you use the newfangled redefinitions. A traditional GB is identical to a GiB.
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No, a "traditional" GB is the one that was defined way before computer scientists got their hands on it –1000. The 1024 "definition" is actually simply a bug. Engineers working on early machines had a choice – take a bug that pretty much no one would notice on an early machine (because files over 1kB were very rare, much less ones over 1MB), or take a massive perf hit. It takes a long time to compute the size of 20 files when a division by 1000 takes 300 odd cycles on a 10kHz machine. It doe
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It takes a long time to compute the size of 20 files when a division by 1000 takes 300 odd cycles on a 10kHz machine.
Sorry, man. Division by 1000 isn't even remotely a 300-cycle operation. If you're dividing by 1000 a lot, you're going to multiply by the reciprocal of 1000 instead of doing division. For 16-bit arithmetic, we're talking 6 single-bits shifts and 1 addition, worst case.
Re:1024-fold (Score:5, Informative)
It takes a long time to compute the size of 20 files when a division by 1000 takes 300 odd cycles on a 10kHz machine. It doesn't take such a long time when a right shift 10 takes 1 cycle.
This must be the most clueless post about the 1000/1024 divide so far. It never had anything to do with the computer's performance, it's that when you build a digital computer a lot of things will be sizes of two because what you can address with n bytes will be 2^n. Physical memory, memory pages, caches, buffers, floppy and hard drive sectors all the "microunits" in the computer are powers of two. Hint: No actual hard drive gives you 1MB = 1000000 bytes because it's not divisible with 512, in reality they give you 1954*512 = 1000448 so they don't underdeliver. Actually make that divisible by 4096 for modern HDD drives with 4K (no, not 1000) sectors.
There is a single reason why computer scientists usurped the prefix kilo and that is because they needed to describe "one thousand and twenty four bytes" - or multiples of that - very, very often. They needed a shorter name, they never needed the unit "1000 bytes" and so "one kilobyte" became their shorthand for 1024 bytes. And unless you're really good at doing math in your head, tell me how much is seven kilobytes exactly? (And if you answer 7000 I'll slap you). We still say 512GB of RAM. Nobody wants to say 549.755813888 GB of RAM, because multiply that with a billion and you have how many bytes that is. It's not some nice, round number.
Either way you're going to run into some f*cked up conversions if you mix GiB and GB, which I'll use now for clarity. If you have 512GiB of RAM (hey, servers do) and load 512GB from disk, how much of your RAM have you used up? Now while you're calculating that, this other person who uses a GiB system says so that was like ~477 GiB so like ~35 GiB free? Or you have to say you have 549.8 (rounded) GB RAM and use exactly 512 GB. Of course in reality file sizes are probably a rather random size so you'll have two long floating point numbers. At least with base 2 you just have one, because you have exactly 512 GiB RAM.
And when you do have base 2 numbers then multiplication/division gives other nice base 2 numbers like 10 MiB / 2 KiB = 5 KiB. 10.485760 MB / 2.048 KB = how much? It's a lot uglier if you numbers are 2^n values, which again they will be a lot of the time. At least far more often than base 10 as long as you're working with the computer itself and not business data or whatever. If you for example want to make something fit in L3 cache to optimize and algorithm, the numbers will be in base 2. You can't "bugfix" your way out of that.
Re:1024-fold (Score:5, Interesting)
The units cancel, so you get 5K er... 5*1024 = 5120.
My favorite solution to the issue is to treat GB, MB, and KB as special units whose meanings are 1024MB, 1024KB, and 1024B, respectively. That's what they've meant for decades, and I'm not going fiddle with giving them two incompatible meanings now. IMO if powers of two don't matter in a particular context, it's cleanest to use Gb, Mb, and kb, SI units referring to 1000Mb, 1000kb, and 1000b (bits), respectively. Bits are a fairly fundamental unit.
Re:1024-fold (Score:4, Informative)
Kilobyte = 1024 is a standard too, by the way. It's the JEDEC standard for memory sizes.
Re:1024-fold (Score:5, Insightful)
I have an irrational desire to slap the people who thought inventing GiB was a good idea. I hope it's forgotten eventually. All the justifications for it were (and still are) bullshit -everyone knew what HD vendors were doing and no one who mattered was confused. That's still true , but now I have to explain to people that no, it's not a speech impediment...
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Computer scientists? Did they just choose it at random? I thought it was because 2^10 = 1024, therefore 2^30 = 1073741824.
That would suggest, to me, that it was a mathematical definition and not chosen by computer scientists.
More than that, it would suggest to me that 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 was a redefinition of a known quantity by a third party.
Ah, let's get one thing straight here. The notion of a byte did not appear before computer science. Anything that measures bytes is ultimately CS-derived, even if marketing folks like to confuse people.
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That was pretty silly of you, given that data isn't stored in powers of two. When was the last time you saw a hard disk with an exact power of two capacity?
Re:1024-fold (Score:5, Informative)
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>newfangled
correct
There, fixed that for you.
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And the marketing idiots that came up with that crap are firmly in the "don't" group!
Biggest SD Card? It is Like Nothing! (Score:3)
In Ukraine we have achieving technological dominance again for one time more!
Announcing for world first time, biggest ever microchip. Ability to the processing power of more data is an explosive growth phenomenon.
Now it is Ukraine again the leader!
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Announcing for world first time, biggest ever microchip, invented by Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader.
FTFY. Don't mess up the facts, buddy.
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You are wrong. Memory is not always expressed in GiB, and there are certainly architectures with base 10 memory (you only show you are young making a silly assertion such as that)
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You only show you are old that anyone would be talking about systems using base 10 memory.
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You only show you are old that anyone would be talking about systems using base 10 memory.
Like disk storage today
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It seems like
Re:1024-fold (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, because your OS incorrectly computes the number of GB. It computes the number of GiB, and then displays GB.
Notably, if you stick that same terabyte drive in a mac, or many linux boxes, it'll register as 1TB.
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Well "incorrectly" is a loaded term. Si prefixes are base-10 but the byte is not an SI unit. The IEC issued a standard saying that binary versions of the prefixes should be indicated with an extra i but only long after the use of those binary prefixes without the i was well established in the computer software industry.
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No, the OS is correct, it just uses the JEDEC standard instead of the IEC one. JEDEC is preferred by many electronic/firmware engineers because all the manufacturers of memory (RAM, flash, EEPROM etc.) use it and almost all addressing schemes use powers of two.
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Spare sectors (Score:2)
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Why are you talking about memory at all in an article about permanent storage?
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Well, using common core math, maybe.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte [wikipedia.org] says:
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Why is this flamebait? I refuse to speak these words as well. A GB is 1024MB. The other thing is some asshat 20 years late to the party solving a problem that almost no one thought was a real problem. Fuck'em.
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Why the hell are we talking about the Fahrenheit scale.
Because the marketing droids who came up with the press release are based in the U.S., the only country next to Birma to use this arbitrary roller-coaster as an official standard.
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One arbitrary roller-coaster is as good as another.
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Choosing water's freezing and boiling points is ALSO fairly arbitrary.
Re:Fahrenheit? WTHolyF? (Score:5, Informative)
Arbitrary means to pick something at random or at whim. In this case the choice of freezing / boiling points of water were NOT arbitrary, but rather consistent with the rest of the units of the SI system which are based around some interlinking thing.
1L = 1000g of water.
0degC is the freezing point of water.
100degC is the boiling point of water.
1 calorie is the energy needed to heat 1g of water by 1degC (though superseded by an SI unit this was the original metric measurement for energy)
Even if you dismiss this, it's still less arbitrary than a measurement system that bases the arbitrary number of 96degC on the temperature of blood in the human body, and has a zero point where the history is not actually known; is it brine mixed with ammonium chloride with a bit of error added in, was it the coldest day of Fahrenheit's home town? The only thing not arbitrary about the Fahrenheit scale is that it was later redefined ... based around the freezing point of water.
A bit more Wikipedia trivia Celsius was originally called centigrade a completely not arbitrary name meaning 100 steps.
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Yes, things like altitude change the scale a bit. Can you can come up with a better solution (very accessible, reasonably accurate, reasonably reproducible) for transfer of a standard temperature scale worldwide with mid-1700's technology? Choosing the freezing and boiling points of water on that basis for something of scientific, industrial and commercial use seems anything but "ar
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Celsius is arbitrary too. There is nothing inherently connecting temperature and water.
Kelvin is the only scale based on something fundamental.
Fahrenheit is based on the coldest you can get brine before it freezes and the approximate human body temperature. Both of these make great sense for telling the weather as 0 is dangerously cold and 100 is dangerously hot.
One might argue that a lot of people don't live in the temperate zone where 0 and 100 occur regularly but C's water boiling and freezing points are only good for people at sea level and no one's weather on Earth ever involves boiling water.
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All Imperial units are great for real world human-scale measurements. That's what they were designed for. Metric units are obviously much better for scientific use, but the units are mostly too big for day to day stuff.
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All Imperial units are great for real world human-scale measurements. That's what they were designed for. Metric units are obviously much better for scientific use, but the units are mostly too big for day to day stuff.
The metric units were originally based on preexisting units units. If they hadn't been similar to the imperial units they would probably never have caught on.
One meter ~= one yard. One liter ~= 2 pints. One kilogram ~= 2 pounds. A decimeter happens by chance to be about the width of a hand and a centimeter about the width of a finger.
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The Kilo and the Liter are great measurements. But the Meter is way to fucking big, it's almost like it was based on the French meter that was create by a guy who was an excellent military tactician and leader but suffered from small height and always felt the need to compensate. I don't know, almost like a Napoleon complex.
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Both scales have their advantages and disadvantages. Thing is, most of the world has standardised on Celsius and is easy to convert to scientific units (kelvin).
0C means ice, 100C means boiling. Two common and dangerous points. Most everyday activity falls within that range, and it's easy to tell what something that is 80C is going to be like because it is 80% of boiling water temperature. There really is no reason to stick with Fahrenheit other than tradition.
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For most of the world it's easier to use Celsius, like they have for their entire lives. 10 is cold, 20 is nice, 30 is damn hot.
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-20 what?
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Fahrenheit is based on the coldest you can get brine before it freezes and the approximate human body temperature.
Well, the average temperature of inmates living in inhygenic conditions.
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Celsius is arbitrary too.
In metric, one millileter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree celcius - which is exactly one percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point.
In the American system, the answer to "How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?" is "Go fuck yourself", because the American arbitrary roller-coaster makes it impossible directly relate any of those quantities.
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A calorie is not SI. That would be the Joule.
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Were you dropped on your head as a child? Quoth the wiki [wikipedia.org]:
Celsius degrees came before Kelvin units.
Choice of DHMO (Score:2)
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Really not that much more absurd than setting the coldest temperature based on what a ??? physicist could cool water at a particular height in the atmosphere that changes all the time.
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I think you are mistaken. The equation converting F to C is linear. F = C * 1.8 + 32.0. Both units are completely arbitrary. F used the freezing point of brine while C used the freezing point of pure water as a zero reference. F used the human body temperature and C used the boiling point of pure water as the 100 reference. Arbitrary.
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It's not arbitrary to use the freezing and boiling points of water. Water is used for other SI units (1L = 1000g of water) and both are not too difficult to create as a rough calibration point.
Fahrenheit zero point being the freezing point of brine is a myth. No-one knows exactly where it comes from, but it certainly isn't that unless the original measurement error was huge.
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Where "huge" is 3 degrees... :)
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As for the temperature, the Fahrenheit scale is used on SanDisk's product page for the new card. Presumably, that's because Sandisk is an American company, and that page is marketing to a non-scientific audience. In the U.S., that means Fahrenheit would be used.
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And, while we're at it, memory of all kinds is always expressed in GiB,
I think you'll find that this is not actually the case.
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I use Rankine, you insensitive clod.
And, you're wrong. The Sandisk 512 GB card being discussed has a capacity of 512,000,000,000 bytes ("1GB=1,000,000,000 bytes" - Sandisk). Just like disk drives and SSDs are measured.
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Yes, apparently it is too much to ask that people be correct these days.
The summary clearly states that 512GB of memory is 1000 times more than 512MB of memory, which is patently false. If you're making comparisons, you don't make absolute statements like this. You use qualifying words like "about 1000 times" or "approximately 1000 times" to let the reader know you do not mean to be precise.
Re:Fahrenheit? WTHolyF? (Score:5, Informative)
Correctness not an issue; you merely have difficulty with common usage, common sense and ability to relate to normal humans, is all.
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Confused yet?
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Re:Fahrenheit? WTHolyF? (Score:5, Informative)
"0 is very cold,"
If we are talking Fahrenheit , 0 is nighttime in winter.
"100 is you"
You must be coming down with the flu or something. 98.4 is normal
"200 is boiling water"
On a mountain I spose. its 212 at sea level.
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Sea water is more abundant than fresh water. There is nothing exact about the point at which "fresh" water freezes. And pure water won't freeze until you give it a nucleation site. Try it in the freezer with deionized or distilled water sometime, it's actually really "cool". :p
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Now STFU
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This logic, reduced ad absurdium, basically says we've had the technology since the dawn of man.
The first IBM PC should have run at 4,77 Gigahertz, not megahertz, and should have been released in 1774 after the continental congress convened at the cost of 1 ha'penny.
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Hmm. So you get easy access to amazing hardware that previous generations could only fantasize about, at bargain-basement prices, and still you manage to find a way to get upset about it, because somewhere out there, somebody might be making a profit by supplying you with products you want at a price you're willing to pay.
I'm finding it a bit difficult to feel much sympathy for your plight.
Which generation iPad? (Score:2)
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So store a movie on the first 2 GB and watch it while the rest of the data copies off.
OP does point to a real issue though -- drive capacity is increasing faster than drive bandwidth. That means that as time goes on, it takes longer and longer for full-disk operations (e.g. drive backups) to complete.
Since NAND access is (at least in principle) parallelizable, perhaps there is some new SD interface that can increase the transfer rate so that we can keep up for a while longer? I certainly don't much look forward to waiting 15 hours to make a copy of my 5TB SD card...
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