Does anyone ever actually EAT this stuff? It must be like owning NKOB cd's or something. You know people buy this stuff, but no one ever owns up to it, and obviously, Hormel makes a tidy profit from it. Hmm? Come on everyone, you know who you are.
Just reminded me of the time I was tasked with finding out why my boss's keyboard didn't work any more.
There was literally a hardened crust of fried chicken skin, hair, grease, coffee grinds (and probably coffee), cola, nail clippings, and various other unidentified biological stuff. Sounds like the perfect breeding ground for anything that likes to grow in warm, dark, sticky places.
Of course, this was the guy everyone feared because of his projectile spittle, so it was probably not unreasonable to be able to find remnants of his meals inside everything at his desk, including his computer. Glad I don't work there anymore.
I just got to thinking about the feasibility of using solid state memory instead of hard disk drives.
Seams to me that Kingston (and probably others) sell flash memory modules up to 512MB. With a little bit of hardware know-how, I think it would be possible to finagle an array of a few of these (let's say, oh, I dunno, 8 should do it) for a grand total of 4.096 GB. Expensive? Yes. At current prices, (mpsuperstore.com says $600 per 256 MB) this is... um... $4800. Yikes!
Anyhow, that's about $1.17 per megabyte. Cnet says I can get a 4.3 gig HD for $91. This is about $.02 per megabyte.
Just from a quick google search, I found out that generically, 512 Mb flash mem supports a r/w speed of 3.0/1.5 Mb/s. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that "seek time" would be something like 200 nanosecs. Our 4.3 gigger, on the other hand, maxes out at around 12/6 Mb/s, but only an "average" seek time of 9.5 milisecs. Comparatively speaking, the flash memory wins the seek time test (almost 50 times as fast) while the hard drive is four times as fast reading and writing. Tortoise and the hare, anyone?
The only other thing I can think of is to some how support an array of standard, EDO or SDRAM memory with a keep-alive voltage with a hard disk only for backup. I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to store any important data on volatile memory, but for Quake and the like, you probably couldn't beat it.
Just another random thought: I wonder how fast a computer would be able to boot up using pure solid state? I don't have one of those palm-thingies yet...
Please feel free to correct my math or my (ahem) facts, this was just a quick search during one of my numerous "email catch-up breaks". Thanks.
Could be the reason why spin-off tech exsist in the first place is because gov't feels the need to save face: "Ok, we spent all your money sending people to space but you don't really care because we're going to saturate the media with a neon-orange beverage that just so happens you can clean your plumbing with! Look, it's pretty!"
Justification rears is ugly head yet again.
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Does anyone ever actually EAT this stuff? It must be like owning NKOB cd's or something. You know people buy this stuff, but no one ever owns up to it, and obviously, Hormel makes a tidy profit from it. Hmm? Come on everyone, you know who you are.
Just reminded me of the time I was tasked with finding out why my boss's keyboard didn't work any more.
There was literally a hardened crust of fried chicken skin, hair, grease, coffee grinds (and probably coffee), cola, nail clippings, and various other unidentified biological stuff. Sounds like the perfect breeding ground for anything that likes to grow in warm, dark, sticky places.
Of course, this was the guy everyone feared because of his projectile spittle, so it was probably not unreasonable to be able to find remnants of his meals inside everything at his desk, including his computer. Glad I don't work there anymore.
oopth...the thpelling gremlinth thtrike...pow.
I think you missed my point entirely. Try saving data to a ram disk and then powing down your computer. :)
Seams to me that Kingston (and probably others) sell flash memory modules up to 512MB. With a little bit of hardware know-how, I think it would be possible to finagle an array of a few of these (let's say, oh, I dunno, 8 should do it) for a grand total of 4.096 GB. Expensive? Yes. At current prices, (mpsuperstore.com says $600 per 256 MB) this is... um... $4800. Yikes!
Anyhow, that's about $1.17 per megabyte. Cnet says I can get a 4.3 gig HD for $91. This is about $.02 per megabyte.
Just from a quick google search, I found out that generically, 512 Mb flash mem supports a r/w speed of 3.0/1.5 Mb/s. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that "seek time" would be something like 200 nanosecs. Our 4.3 gigger, on the other hand, maxes out at around 12/6 Mb/s, but only an "average" seek time of 9.5 milisecs. Comparatively speaking, the flash memory wins the seek time test (almost 50 times as fast) while the hard drive is four times as fast reading and writing. Tortoise and the hare, anyone?
The only other thing I can think of is to some how support an array of standard, EDO or SDRAM memory with a keep-alive voltage with a hard disk only for backup. I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to store any important data on volatile memory, but for Quake and the like, you probably couldn't beat it.
Just another random thought: I wonder how fast a computer would be able to boot up using pure solid state? I don't have one of those palm-thingies yet...
Please feel free to correct my math or my (ahem) facts, this was just a quick search during one of my numerous "email catch-up breaks". Thanks.
Could be the reason why spin-off tech exsist in the first place is because gov't feels the need to save face: "Ok, we spent all your money sending people to space but you don't really care because we're going to saturate the media with a neon-orange beverage that just so happens you can clean your plumbing with! Look, it's pretty!" Justification rears is ugly head yet again.