These are complex biological systems that were not designed by mathematical principles [that are] very difficult to formalize completely, he told us.This reminds me a bit of the beginning of the computer era, he said. If you go back to the 1930s and early 1940s, when people first started thinking about computers they were really interested in whether an algorithm would complete, and they were looking for mathematical completeness, a mathematical proof. If you today build a computer, no one sits around saying 'let's look at the mathematical formalism of this computer.' It reminds me a little about that. We still have people saying 'You don't have enough math here!' There's some people that just don't like that.Hawkins' confidence stems from the way Numenta has built its technology, which far from merely taking inspiration from the brain – as many other startups claim to do – is actively built as a digital implementation of everything Hawkins has learned about how the dense, napkin-sized sheet of cells that is our neocortex works.
I know of no other cortical theories or models that incorporate any of the following: active dendrites, differences between proximal and distal dendrites, synapse growth and decay, potential synapses, dendrite growth, depolarization as a mode of prediction, mini-columns, multiple types of inhibition and their corresponding inhibitory neurons, etcetera. The new temporal pooling mechanism we are working on requires metabotropic receptors in the locations they are, and are not, found. Again, I don't know of any theories that have been reduced to practice that incorporate any, let alone all of these concepts, he wrote in a post to the discussion mailing list for NuPic, an open source implementation of Numenta's CLA, in February.In the 1TB and 512GB models, the NAND has 128Gbit density dies, the same as used throughout the M500 series. For the 128GB and 256GB versions of the M550, Crucial has switched to using 64Gbit density NAND, which offers a better performance potential in a highly competitive section of the market.
In short, the 120GB M500 is rated 500MB/s and 130MB/s for sequential read and writes whereas the 128GB M550 sports figures of 550MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes.As with the M500, the M550 supports Crucial’s RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND) technology for increased reliability. The M500 was the company’s first non-Enterprise drive to use RAIN and the parity settings were set pretty tight, mainly to give the 20nm NAND a helping hand to keep it as reliable as possible.As 20nm NAND is now a more mature product, the parity settings in the M550 have been relaxed to allow more capacity to be freed up as useable storage space.Also still present in the M550 is 256-bit AES encryption, TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 support. The meaning of the latter two is, in effect, a nod that the drive supports Microsoft’s eDrive.Crucial quotes sequential read/write performance for the 1TB M550 of 550MB/s for reads and 500MB/s for writes, which is an improvement over the M500 960GB’s quoted performance figures (500MB/s reads, 470MB/s writes).So how do these figures hold under testing? Using the ATTO benchmark it managed a sequential read figure of 557MB/s and 514MB/s for writes, pretty much bang on the official figures, and putting it neck and neck with Samsung’s 840 EVO 1TB (555MB/s reads, 519MB/s writes).
When it comes to dealing with the small bitty file size that most of us use on a day to day basis the M550 does pretty well too. It produced a read score of 27.08MB/s in CrystalDiskMark’s 4K test, which is only slightly better than the 960MB M500’s 25.21. Yet the extra bandwidth the controller brings shows in the write performance, with the M550 producing a score of 91.73MB/s - as opposed to the older drive’s 75.63MB/s.It’s slighter slower in read performance than the 840 EVO (30.79MB/s) but faster when it comes to writes, as the Samsung drive gave a score of 75.56MB/s in the same test.The Marvell controller also doesn’t have a preference when it comes to whether the data is compressed or not, as I found out. When tested using CDM’s compressed data test it produced read/write scores of 27.22MB/s and 89.45MB/s respectively.I then tested the drive using some real life scenarios. Copying a 50GB folder of small files (28,523 items) took just under ten minutes at an average speed of 73MB/s, while copying a 4GB image took just 30 seconds – 128MB/s average. Similarly, a 17GB BluRay image took a mere 2 minutes 18 seconds to copy at a 127MB/s average speed.
As with the M500, the pricing of the M550 series is highly competitive. All those extra enterprise features that impressed in the M500 – thermal and power loss protection, RAIN and advanced encryption – are all still in place in the M550.Thanks to the tweaked controller, they are joined by some noticeable improvements in performance: in particular. the write speed.Also, the power savings from its enhanced DEVSLP support will give laptop users yet another drive to ponder on for that essential upgrade.Every IT manager worth his or her salt would really like to get hold of users’ physical devices to lock down security and manage privileges, protocols and permissions in the perpetual quest for control. This is not always possible.The situation has given rise to industry terminology such as mobile device management (MDM) and bring your own device (BYOD).But where do we start? What do you get in an MDM box when you unwrap it and what kind of roadmap should firms be following to implement effective MDM in the face of rising BYOD?Simply put, MDM is that area of administrative IT department control where devices are deployed, secured, integrated (and architected) into the network and subsequently monitored and managed (and possibly deleted).
By “devices” we mean laptops, tablets and smartphones, of course. But our use of the term also now includes the Internet of Things, including basic “wearables”, from the consumer-level Fitbit, and perhaps heart-rate monitors, to more industrial sensor-based pieces of equipment.At the peak of MDM Nirvana (a place oft dreamed of but rarely reached) an administrator is capable of intercommunicating with all devices on all platforms in the network.The machine-to-machine communication channels are open through all local country service providers so all devices are accessible. Updates and other management can be performed over the air without requiring physical contact with the devices.These can be managed to a degree compliant with the IT department’s vision for an optimised network based on particular application use cases and connections to specific online services. This is MDM perfection – but perfect MDM is tough to calculate and rarely possible.What happens back on planet Earth is slightly different. Device usage is subject to an overabundance of determining factors; while some are logical and predictable, others are intangible and unexpected.According to surveys, the younger workers classed as Generation Y have exhibited some strange behaviour. Generation Y executives would apparently be happy to take a lower salary if allowed to work using a device of their own choosing.
It is at this point that the prudent business should surely start to question whether these are really the kinds of employees they want to attract in the first place.The challenge here comes down to usability and productivity. It is straightforward enough to think about an MDM policy that stops users starting up specified applications in defined locations, or one that prohibits them from downloading games on their devices, but at what cost to employees’ freedom, work satisfaction and ultimately loyalty?There is little point in managing any data or device if we don’t know what is inside it, so inventory controls are a first element of any decent MDM package.From there we can look at hardware and software component management and also include network access control and help-desk features into the MDM mix.As we build up this idea of the total MDM architecture, we need to ask just how far and wide should an MDM solution go? The answer is quite far, because MDM can include software application provisioning and management to make apps behave with custom-designed characteristics.
Applications may be installed under terms of limited access so that they stop functioning based on GPS location information, time of day or some other pre-selected factor.Developers will not necessarily have engineered controls and gateways to enable this kind of broader control, so MDM has a direct role to play here.Part of the challenge is that MDM has to be comprehensive and capacious: you either have it or you don’t.MDM control software can be delivered in a virtualised form as a cloud-based service as opposed to an on-premise solution. But every MDM solution that a firm settles on must have a comprehensive range of features.It is difficult (and expensive) to deploy multiple systems, each of which solves just a piece or two or three of the total mobility management puzzle.“Businesses need to implement a structure that can identify classes of users and device types
“BYOD has significantly changed approaches to managing and securing end-user computing devices in enterprises,” says Graham Long, vice president of the enterprise business team at Samsung UK.