Move to some form of *IX. Gosh - the scripts and junk don't run at all. Look - my ports stay closed by default. No backdoor 0-day exploits, either - or nothing that isn't easily and truly fixed in short order.
The headaches that I suffer trying to keep my one windows box(gaming mostly) stable and free of malware is astounding. I have no less than four anti spam/spyware apps running at the same time and it still doesn't catch it all. The net is being strangled by hackers, mal-ware, and the like. I have zero faith in any government's ability to deal with it, so opting out to some obscure or small system that flies under their radar is the only real option. Or will be the only real option in the next 5-10 years.
Life is so much easier without Microsoft. This is probably the most direct and truthful statement that one can make about Windows. It's exactly like living in a crowded city with smog and then moving to the country where the air is clean. You wonder how you ever put up with it in the first place.
P.S. You can get a copy of a couple of unix-type email programs for Windows. It's text-only, but nothing and I mean NOTHING runs on it because it's ASCII(or Unicode) only. Quick as lightning, too, and secure.
I bring this up because it's a biggie - quite possibly the very first 2.5D CRPG. Alternate Reality. Back a decade before his article starts out, this game had most of the same thngs that the modern games in the early 90s had.
It's well worth checking out if you have an emulator installed. The Atari ST version is probably the best. Be warned, though - it's tough. Don't stay out after dark.
Most BitTorrent programs won't allow you to kill the outbound connection entirely, but there are a couple of easy solutions:
1: Azureus is a nice client that has a 0k/sec option for uplink speed. 2: Get a copy of ZoneAlarm. When it asks you to allow the program to act as a server, click on the remember this box and then deny. This is a better option as it also keeps your machine from being hijacked. Your downloads will be painfully slow(modem speed), but secure. I do this because the speed at which you get hacked with one of the identity-theft bots/trojans these days can be measured in under an hour. Locking down your machine is good practice as well.
Me? I listen to indy bands mostly - no fees, no BS. Many groups give their music away online for free to generate interest/get people to attend their concerts. I highly recommend this as while the S/N ratio is awfully low(loads of junk), it's all cutting-edge at the same time. Or I listen to internet radio, which is also free and legal(well, for now - until the FCC drives them offshore that is).
No RIAA to bother with as a result. But I do keep BitTorrent locked down to keep my machine from being hijacked.
Which is why nerfing their ability to sue you for infringement is such a horrendous prospect to a business that nobody smart goes after someone unless they think they have a pretty good case.
As I understand it, the RIAA was set up as the legal arm of the recording industry for this reason - to provide a buffer between them and the copyrights(just in the incredibly unlikely chance that something like this might happen).
So nothing really changes. Except that the companies have to come after you themselves. And this of course effectively means they would only have the resources to go after the servers and major distributors. And, honestly, that should be their job - to go after the big fish and leave the consumer alone. Going after P2P sites and imposing DRM and so on, that's all legal(if annoying). Using Mafia-esque tactics to pressure college students into coughing up money that they need for tuition? Not good at all.
And last I checked, nobody, not even Congress has any love for the RIAA. They get complaints by the hundreds or thousands I bet - each and every single Congress Member - about the RIAA.
But the RIAA *can* lose its ability to enforce the copyrights at all. The original copyrights are intact - just the industry wold have to find other means/another method to do it. And of course, it would invalidate all of the RIAA notices in the music you bought to date. Now, the music still is copyrighted, so copying it illegally is still as wrong as it ever was - but the companies would have to come after you individually - at least until they get a new method in place.
Of course, the question gets murkier since they in theory could lose their patent/copyright if they abuse it too much - or at least the ability to enforce it at all, which would spell the end of the RIAA if I read it right. And get more than a few companies and artists mad at them in the process.
I read somewhere that they are closing on 200 found so far, which is pretty remarkable. I suspect they'll send a probe to one within our lifetimes(though getting data back... yeah, slightly longer - maybe our great grandchildren)
The proper way to modify a Prius is to get rid of the redundancy and margins that Toyota built in(ie - it can function entirely on gas or electric for silly ranges). In a nutshell, they hacked the software to allow the car to run on batteries up to 45mph or so and put in a bigger battery pack. So the average commute went from 40mpg to about 75-80mpg. No change in driving style, and when the battery pack runs down a bit(long trips), it reverts to a normal Prius at about 35-40mpg average.
These guys probably have the X-prize thing wrapped up, but then again, there is a LOT of pressure forming right now on the X-prize community to either severely limit electric use or to get rid of most hybrids entirely.
A 100mpg fuel-only powered car would be very very tough to make - as tough as the original X-Prize was. A 100mpg Hybrid, shoot, I could build one in my garage in under six months, as could most of us here.
The thing most people forget is that the landlord was a relative. Kicked them out, then sold their stuff to pay for the back rent.(which say, if it was your parents - would probably feel morally okay with - even though it's illegal to do so).
Of course, my guess is that there wasn't a formal rental agreement, either.
So, the scenario: Parent or relative rents to their semi-deadbeat child or relative. Said renter, sans a rental contract, doesn't pay rent. Relative/parent kicks them out and sells their stuff to cover the back rent.(which is an incredibly mean and asshat thing to do to begin with)
(I've had the same exact scenario happen with me two decades ago when I was in college with my parents - though they didn't sell my stuff, they threatened to do so)
Now, what would you do as the person who's stuff got sold? Right - want your stuff back, and want to get even with them, of course.
I tihn the police are right to call it a family feud and leave it alone, because both parties broke the law and are at fault.
But it's funny to read about:)
My second favorite, though, was the stench of doom. Someone was mad at their ex and so he got some shrimp from the market and tossed a handful in the curtain rod(inch or so round type), then screwed the cap back on. Stage two was later on - he took a tiny hand drill(sell these at Radio Shack/hobby stores) and made two microscopic holes in it to let air in.
Took her over a year to figure out where the stink was coming from.
I've also heard of people getting dead feeder mice from the pet store - the tiny thumb sized ones and tossing it in an ac vent or behind an outlet or simmilar.
My favorite, though, was the $100 Porsche. Married couple. He was beyond obsessed and she wasn't taking it anymore, so she sold it for $100. (evidently she'd bought it for him or something, so he name was on the title). Moral: be nice to those close to you.
4) Games work fine. I have an ATI x1300 and it plays the games fine **** This is like saying the following:
"My 911 Turbo handles city traffic just fine."
You shouldn't need an X1300 to play basic games that XP ran as fast with a last generation card. Something is seriously broken. Do yourself a favor and move to unix. Since all of the games now come out on Windows and a console at the same time - you're playing a console game on your fancy PC.
So ditch the PC for games, get a console, and have a tenth the headache.
I suggest that anyone looking for a new OS to try out that's as simple as Windows XP - they should try Xandros.
Yes, it's not free. But it's exactly the Linux flavor/distro to give to your average home user/client. $40 of the price is for a copy of CodeWeavers(commercial version of WINE made to run mostly Windows Office and other business apps), so it's worth the price. Plus free tech support by humans and so on, which is critical for an installer/consultant, since you can pass warranty/support/liability issues up the chain. $50 and does all of the stuff the average home user wants other than hardcore games. given that 90% of my clients don't do anything more advanced than solitaire on their windows box, it's a no-brainer instead of Vista.
Imagine being able to have an implant where you could understand 20,30, or even a hundred different languages.
The advantage of computer storage is that it's miserable for thoughts but fantastic for all of those tedious tables and charts and such that are in language, math, and so on.
Why bother? Because another theory that they have about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other degenerative diseases is that if you could remap the brain like this repeatedly, you could clear out a lot of the cruft that gets in the way.(kind of like running an anti-virus program on your OS).
Possibly with enough remapping, you could learn to utilize a vastly greater amount of your brain at once. Ie - you would train your brain to work faster and better.
And then there's the obvious part - with a properly made prosthetic - possibly in a decade - that looks like a retainer, you could see if your were blind. Or you could do things in the military like having 360 degree vision, see in the dark, or even do things like see electrical fields(imagine working in an electric plant or as an electrician and always knowing which wires were live)
Coolest scientific development of the decade, without a doubt.
Still, the simple fact is that crops are renewable while oil isn't. Oil based fuels are the #1 reason for global warming. The advantages gained by switching far outweigh the long-term problems of oil.
In 500 years, the planet will be run on bio-fuels anyways. Once the oil is gone, there's nothing to use BUT bio-fuels.(sci-fi pipedream stuff like antimatter and such aside) We just need to learn to make it cleaner. Of course, if we shifted our feedcorn production(70% or so of U.S. corn goes to fatten up meat!), we'd be almost halfway there. Without fighting wars or having the damage from oil.
X-Com. This is without a doubt a DS game if there ever was one. Angband. Forget Zork - this requires a second area to display all of the info - and it's amazingly hard as well.
The problem here is that he's just making it easier to install. Not to actually set up.
Xandros beat him to it a long time ago and is well worth the $30-$40 for a first time UNIX user. Nice hand-holding, nice drivers, easy as pie to install, and real live customer support to walk you through it.
As a computer person myself, I'd not pay for it, but as an average person who would rather get back to answering emails and watching TIVO episodes of 24, $30-$40 is cheap for the time and asprin it saves.
Yet another company dooms itself to failure by kicking out management.
When times are tough, the smartest and most experienced people are exactly the ones you need to grow your business out of its problem. Now they have a balanced budget but no way to fix the original problem. Smart move. I give them a year before they implode.
"...their four seasons are Wildfire, Mudslide, Earthquake, and Smog"
I live in California and the correct seasons are "Fire, Flood, Earthquake, and Riot" But this is good news. If we can't verify that our elections are fair and proper, then our entire system falls apart. The last election is proof of that. While Ohio got most of the news coverage, there were incidents like on New Mexico where they recorded zero votes in an entire precinct, despite a turnout of thousands. Nevada also had serious glitches, including more people voting in some precincts than were registered. We just had a local election a while back here in California where the margin was less than ten votes, so this is a great thing. And it's nice to finally see someone doing their job.
Note - here in Los Angeles, though, we still use mostly the paper and ink system. The margin of error is virtually none and it's inexpensive as well. http://www.inkavote.com/ Gotta love low-tech sometimes.
It would be interesting to know if the neuron's firing frequency can be controlled with more resolution than the simple on/off implied in TFA. **** If they could do this, it would be the first step in building a device that would allow them to put information into your brain. ie - learning devices and so on. Maybe learning programs like we see in many science fiction movies someday will actually happen.
It would be kind of nice to, say, learn a language without having to sit in a boring class for months and months. But it's of course going to be massively abused by governments around the world. Gives a new meaning to he idea of "sleeper agent".
It seems like it would be infinitely simpler to have a small remote control dongle that you could put in your pocket or on your keychain.
Someone mentioned the idea of using these while riding his motorcycle. With such a remote, you could switch the color without having to actually touch them. This would also work well for soldiers, doctors, machinists(assuming they make safety glasses like this(welding?)) and anyone else who normally has their hands occupied. A small remote on the side of your belt or gun is a lot easier than reaching up to your helmet for a miniture knob(or when you have gloves on).
The antenna easily could be built into the earpiece and keyed to a specific remote(of course the manual knob would still work as a backup)
What's the biggest problem with hard drives? Right - heat. You need fans and all sorts of wizardry for a typical rack/array. Imagine these dropping to zero noise, zero heat, and 1/3 the power used.(minimal at best).
Suddenly you don't need that $100K forced cooling system to keep the room cool enough so that they drives aren't sucking in 100+ degree air and melting themselves in the span of a month or two. If the fans or cooling dies... yep, the system goes into shutdown mode in minutes. Seen it happen many times. It's not the energy useage for the drives that's the big deal, or the fans, but the fact that there's so much waste heat in a typical array that you need external cooling of the room.
Now imagine no 10 ton or larger A/C system. No holes in the building, no engineering. Just roll the flash-array (smaller, too) in the corner and plug it in. 200 flash drives in a brick the size of a small rack.(virtually no heat means you can stack them like legos) At most, a big heatsink on the rear would suffice.
And it halves the typical heat load for a blade or even a desktop. There's no 150+ degree drive in the case needing loads of airflow(most are almost painful to the touch they run so hot). Longer system life as well.
This will obviously be the future. All we need is a bit more reliability/lifespan and a lower cost. I'd say no more than 2-3 years before we all are seeing flash drives in desktop computers. Maybe 1-2 years for laptops.
Q: how reliable are those boxes? 4gig is low, but 16gig would work for a Ubuntuu install and leave plenty of room for apps. Have you tried this with a raid aray? "Oh gosh - my 4 gig CF stick blew up after 3-4 months"(plugs another in for $20).:) (I'd suspect that the drives would be hot-swappable as well?)
P.S. the spellchecker here doesn't recognize "Ubuntuu" - lol.
***quote pinkstuff*** The masses of people moving away from windows games to console games ***
Same price, same code, same play... But it fine on a XBox360 or PS3 and doesn't require DX10 or a new video card or anything... It just works. Boots faster, too, and there's no need for a zillion levels of firewalls and such when I get online.(at worst I reboot and everything's fine again) And a used 360, especially with the new Elite version coming out... Going to be probably less than a new copy of Vista alone.(upgrades aside - which I don't pay by going to unix)
Switching to a console for the games removes the last incentive to keep in this relationship. Time to get a divorce from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
The easy solution, of course, is to just...
Move to some form of *IX. Gosh - the scripts and junk don't run at all. Look - my ports stay closed by default. No backdoor 0-day exploits, either - or nothing that isn't easily and truly fixed in short order.
The headaches that I suffer trying to keep my one windows box(gaming mostly) stable and free of malware is astounding. I have no less than four anti spam/spyware apps running at the same time and it still doesn't catch it all. The net is being strangled by hackers, mal-ware, and the like. I have zero faith in any government's ability to deal with it, so opting out to some obscure or small system that flies under their radar is the only real option. Or will be the only real option in the next 5-10 years.
Life is so much easier without Microsoft. This is probably the most direct and truthful statement that one can make about Windows. It's exactly like living in a crowded city with smog and then moving to the country where the air is clean. You wonder how you ever put up with it in the first place.
P.S. You can get a copy of a couple of unix-type email programs for Windows. It's text-only, but nothing and I mean NOTHING runs on it because it's ASCII(or Unicode) only. Quick as lightning, too, and secure.
I bring this up because it's a biggie - quite possibly the very first 2.5D CRPG. Alternate Reality. Back a decade before his article starts out, this game had most of the same thngs that the modern games in the early 90s had.
It's well worth checking out if you have an emulator installed. The Atari ST version is probably the best. Be warned, though - it's tough. Don't stay out after dark.
Most BitTorrent programs won't allow you to kill the outbound connection entirely, but there are a couple of easy solutions:
1: Azureus is a nice client that has a 0k/sec option for uplink speed.
2: Get a copy of ZoneAlarm. When it asks you to allow the program to act as a server, click on the remember this box and then deny. This is a better option as it also keeps your machine from being hijacked. Your downloads will be painfully slow(modem speed), but secure. I do this because the speed at which you get hacked with one of the identity-theft bots/trojans these days can be measured in under an hour. Locking down your machine is good practice as well.
Me? I listen to indy bands mostly - no fees, no BS. Many groups give their music away online for free to generate interest/get people to attend their concerts. I highly recommend this as while the S/N ratio is awfully low(loads of junk), it's all cutting-edge at the same time. Or I listen to internet radio, which is also free and legal(well, for now - until the FCC drives them offshore that is).
No RIAA to bother with as a result. But I do keep BitTorrent locked down to keep my machine from being hijacked.
Which is why nerfing their ability to sue you for infringement is such a horrendous prospect to a business that nobody smart goes after someone unless they think they have a pretty good case.
:)
Good post, btw.
As I understand it, the RIAA was set up as the legal arm of the recording industry for this reason - to provide a buffer between them and the copyrights(just in the incredibly unlikely chance that something like this might happen).
So nothing really changes. Except that the companies have to come after you themselves. And this of course effectively means they would only have the resources to go after the servers and major distributors. And, honestly, that should be their job - to go after the big fish and leave the consumer alone. Going after P2P sites and imposing DRM and so on, that's all legal(if annoying). Using Mafia-esque tactics to pressure college students into coughing up money that they need for tuition? Not good at all.
And last I checked, nobody, not even Congress has any love for the RIAA. They get complaints by the hundreds or thousands I bet - each and every single Congress Member - about the RIAA.
But the RIAA *can* lose its ability to enforce the copyrights at all. The original copyrights are intact - just the industry wold have to find other means/another method to do it. And of course, it would invalidate all of the RIAA notices in the music you bought to date. Now, the music still is copyrighted, so copying it illegally is still as wrong as it ever was - but the companies would have to come after you individually - at least until they get a new method in place.
I can definitely see a judge thinking this way.
Of course, the question gets murkier since they in theory could lose their patent/copyright if they abuse it too much - or at least the ability to enforce it at all, which would spell the end of the RIAA if I read it right. And get more than a few companies and artists mad at them in the process.
I read somewhere that they are closing on 200 found so far, which is pretty remarkable. I suspect they'll send a probe to one within our lifetimes(though getting data back... yeah, slightly longer - maybe our great grandchildren)
http://www.calcars.org/priusplus.html
The proper way to modify a Prius is to get rid of the redundancy and margins that Toyota built in(ie - it can function entirely on gas or electric for silly ranges). In a nutshell, they hacked the software to allow the car to run on batteries up to 45mph or so and put in a bigger battery pack. So the average commute went from 40mpg to about 75-80mpg. No change in driving style, and when the battery pack runs down a bit(long trips), it reverts to a normal Prius at about 35-40mpg average.
These guys probably have the X-prize thing wrapped up, but then again, there is a LOT of pressure forming right now on the X-prize community to either severely limit electric use or to get rid of most hybrids entirely.
A 100mpg fuel-only powered car would be very very tough to make - as tough as the original X-Prize was. A 100mpg Hybrid, shoot, I could build one in my garage in under six months, as could most of us here.
I say Google stops being apologetic and says "so what". Afterall, China has no respect for U.S. copyrights and patents and steals from us every day.
The thing most people forget is that the landlord was a relative. Kicked them out, then sold their stuff to pay for the back rent.(which say, if it was your parents - would probably feel morally okay with - even though it's illegal to do so).
:)
Of course, my guess is that there wasn't a formal rental agreement, either.
So, the scenario:
Parent or relative rents to their semi-deadbeat child or relative.
Said renter, sans a rental contract, doesn't pay rent.
Relative/parent kicks them out and sells their stuff to cover the back rent.(which is an incredibly mean and asshat thing to do to begin with)
(I've had the same exact scenario happen with me two decades ago when I was in college with my parents - though they didn't sell my stuff, they threatened to do so)
Now, what would you do as the person who's stuff got sold? Right - want your stuff back, and want to get even with them, of course.
I tihn the police are right to call it a family feud and leave it alone, because both parties broke the law and are at fault.
But it's funny to read about
My second favorite, though, was the stench of doom.
Someone was mad at their ex and so he got some shrimp from the market and tossed a handful in the curtain rod(inch or so round type), then screwed the cap back on. Stage two was later on - he took a tiny hand drill(sell these at Radio Shack/hobby stores) and made two microscopic holes in it to let air in.
Took her over a year to figure out where the stink was coming from.
I've also heard of people getting dead feeder mice from the pet store - the tiny thumb sized ones and tossing it in an ac vent or behind an outlet or simmilar.
My favorite, though, was the $100 Porsche. Married couple. He was beyond obsessed and she wasn't taking it anymore, so she sold it for $100. (evidently she'd bought it for him or something, so he name was on the title). Moral: be nice to those close to you.
4) Games work fine. I have an ATI x1300 and it plays the games fine
****
This is like saying the following:
"My 911 Turbo handles city traffic just fine."
You shouldn't need an X1300 to play basic games that XP ran as fast with a last generation card. Something is seriously broken. Do yourself a favor and move to unix. Since all of the games now come out on Windows and a console at the same time - you're playing a console game on your fancy PC.
So ditch the PC for games, get a console, and have a tenth the headache.
I suggest that anyone looking for a new OS to try out that's as simple as Windows XP - they should try Xandros.
Yes, it's not free. But it's exactly the Linux flavor/distro to give to your average home user/client. $40 of the price is for a copy of CodeWeavers(commercial version of WINE made to run mostly Windows Office and other business apps), so it's worth the price. Plus free tech support by humans and so on, which is critical for an installer/consultant, since you can pass warranty/support/liability issues up the chain. $50 and does all of the stuff the average home user wants other than hardcore games. given that 90% of my clients don't do anything more advanced than solitaire on their windows box, it's a no-brainer instead of Vista.
And no need to upgrade any of their hardware.
Imagine being able to have an implant where you could understand 20,30, or even a hundred different languages.
The advantage of computer storage is that it's miserable for thoughts but fantastic for all of those tedious tables and charts and such that are in language, math, and so on.
Why bother? Because another theory that they have about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other degenerative diseases is that if you could remap the brain like this repeatedly, you could clear out a lot of the cruft that gets in the way.(kind of like running an anti-virus program on your OS).
Possibly with enough remapping, you could learn to utilize a vastly greater amount of your brain at once. Ie - you would train your brain to work faster and better.
And then there's the obvious part - with a properly made prosthetic - possibly in a decade - that looks like a retainer, you could see if your were blind. Or you could do things in the military like having 360 degree vision, see in the dark, or even do things like see electrical fields(imagine working in an electric plant or as an electrician and always knowing which wires were live)
Coolest scientific development of the decade, without a doubt.
Still, the simple fact is that crops are renewable while oil isn't. Oil based fuels are the #1 reason for global warming. The advantages gained by switching far outweigh the long-term problems of oil.
In 500 years, the planet will be run on bio-fuels anyways. Once the oil is gone, there's nothing to use BUT bio-fuels.(sci-fi pipedream stuff like antimatter and such aside) We just need to learn to make it cleaner. Of course, if we shifted our feedcorn production(70% or so of U.S. corn goes to fatten up meat!), we'd be almost halfway there. Without fighting wars or having the damage from oil.
I'd like to add two games to the list:
X-Com. This is without a doubt a DS game if there ever was one.
Angband. Forget Zork - this requires a second area to display all of the info - and it's amazingly hard as well.
The problem here is that he's just making it easier to install. Not to actually set up.
Xandros beat him to it a long time ago and is well worth the $30-$40 for a first time UNIX user. Nice hand-holding, nice drivers, easy as pie to install, and real live customer support to walk you through it.
As a computer person myself, I'd not pay for it, but as an average person who would rather get back to answering emails and watching TIVO episodes of 24, $30-$40 is cheap for the time and asprin it saves.
Yet another company dooms itself to failure by kicking out management.
When times are tough, the smartest and most experienced people are exactly the ones you need to grow your business out of its problem. Now they have a balanced budget but no way to fix the original problem. Smart move. I give them a year before they implode.
"...their four seasons are Wildfire, Mudslide, Earthquake, and Smog"
I live in California and the correct seasons are "Fire, Flood, Earthquake, and Riot"
But this is good news. If we can't verify that our elections are fair and proper, then our entire system falls apart. The last election is proof of that. While Ohio got most of the news coverage, there were incidents like on New Mexico where they recorded zero votes in an entire precinct, despite a turnout of thousands. Nevada also had serious glitches, including more people voting in some precincts than were registered. We just had a local election a while back here in California where the margin was less than ten votes, so this is a great thing. And it's nice to finally see someone doing their job.
Note - here in Los Angeles, though, we still use mostly the paper and ink system. The margin of error is virtually none and it's inexpensive as well. http://www.inkavote.com/ Gotta love low-tech sometimes.
It would be interesting to know if the neuron's firing frequency can be controlled with more resolution than the simple on/off implied in TFA.
****
If they could do this, it would be the first step in building a device that would allow them to put information into your brain. ie - learning devices and so on. Maybe learning programs like we see in many science fiction movies someday will actually happen.
It would be kind of nice to, say, learn a language without having to sit in a boring class for months and months. But it's of course going to be massively abused by governments around the world. Gives a new meaning to he idea of "sleeper agent".
It seems like it would be infinitely simpler to have a small remote control dongle that you could put in your pocket or on your keychain.
Someone mentioned the idea of using these while riding his motorcycle. With such a remote, you could switch the color without having to actually touch them. This would also work well for soldiers, doctors, machinists(assuming they make safety glasses like this(welding?)) and anyone else who normally has their hands occupied. A small remote on the side of your belt or gun is a lot easier than reaching up to your helmet for a miniture knob(or when you have gloves on).
The antenna easily could be built into the earpiece and keyed to a specific remote(of course the manual knob would still work as a backup)
The smart thing to do is just get a used 360, add the HDMI cables and swap out the puny HD with a normal 300 gigger for $100.
Should be very easy with all of these early adopters tossing their original units.
Nice summary.
:)
What's the biggest problem with hard drives? Right - heat. You need fans and all sorts of wizardry for a typical rack/array. Imagine these dropping to zero noise, zero heat, and 1/3 the power used.(minimal at best).
Suddenly you don't need that $100K forced cooling system to keep the room cool enough so that they drives aren't sucking in 100+ degree air and melting themselves in the span of a month or two. If the fans or cooling dies... yep, the system goes into shutdown mode in minutes. Seen it happen many times. It's not the energy useage for the drives that's the big deal, or the fans, but the fact that there's so much waste heat in a typical array that you need external cooling of the room.
Now imagine no 10 ton or larger A/C system. No holes in the building, no engineering. Just roll the flash-array (smaller, too) in the corner and plug it in. 200 flash drives in a brick the size of a small rack.(virtually no heat means you can stack them like legos) At most, a big heatsink on the rear would suffice.
And it halves the typical heat load for a blade or even a desktop. There's no 150+ degree drive in the case needing loads of airflow(most are almost painful to the touch they run so hot). Longer system life as well.
This will obviously be the future. All we need is a bit more reliability/lifespan and a lower cost. I'd say no more than 2-3 years before we all are seeing flash drives in desktop computers. Maybe 1-2 years for laptops.
Q: how reliable are those boxes? 4gig is low, but 16gig would work for a Ubuntuu install and leave plenty of room for apps. Have you tried this with a raid aray? "Oh gosh - my 4 gig CF stick blew up after 3-4 months"(plugs another in for $20).
(I'd suspect that the drives would be hot-swappable as well?)
P.S. the spellchecker here doesn't recognize "Ubuntuu" - lol.
***quote pinkstuff***
The masses of people moving away from windows games to console games
***
Same price, same code, same play... But it fine on a XBox360 or PS3 and doesn't require DX10 or a new video card or anything... It just works. Boots faster, too, and there's no need for a zillion levels of firewalls and such when I get online.(at worst I reboot and everything's fine again) And a used 360, especially with the new Elite version coming out... Going to be probably less than a new copy of Vista alone.(upgrades aside - which I don't pay by going to unix)
Switching to a console for the games removes the last incentive to keep in this relationship. Time to get a divorce from Microsoft.