Just in case anybody really needs a lot of sound channels on one PC, I bet the USB ones (like the Griffin iMic) would work really well - just plug in several of them. As a bonus, you can run USB cable from the computer rather near your amplifier, and cut down on the length of the analog cable, for example in home theater situations etc. And it's not likely to be obsolete anytime soon.
An Audrey would be marginally acceptable, but the sound quality isn't that great. (has some white noise in it, in my experience) However they are perhaps the ideal home automation controller - color, touchscreen, hackable, built-in browser, and so cheap. I just use them for that, and intend to use them to control my whole-house audio system when I get around to it, but do the decoding on some other device to get better quality.
There's no reason this ought to be centralized. You will save on cable by just running ethernet to each room and distributing the audio digitally, and it's a more flexible solution, and you'll get better quality audio by not running analog signals over long distances, and the load of decoding multiple MP3/Ogg/whatever streams gets distributed to multiple CPUs too. You need a small quiet computer or dedicated decoder device in each room.
But, I haven't found the right combination of software to do this yet. What I want is something like IceCast but have it actually work, and have it be multi-channel too, so you can listen to different music in each room, or listen to perfectly synchronized music in all the rooms, your choice, and at the same time have it mix in an "auxiliary" stream for voice announcements, simulated telephone ringing, stuff like that. Each stream should be done via broadcast or multicast to conserve bandwidth in the case where you're receiving it in multiple rooms at once. The client software ought to be able to identify and decode various kinds of streams (Ogg, MP3, that new lossless standard, or just plain uncompressed PCM) and mix them together transparently. Maybe it ought to be able to play locally-stored files too, like rplay, for things like telephone ringing etc.
The old-fashioned way to distribute audio is to use the 70V audio standard where the audio is sent at a high voltage and each speaker has a transformer to convert high-voltage high-impedance audio to high-current low-impedance for the speaker. You can add speakers to such a system without changing the load that the amplifier sees quite as drastically. Most commercial installations that have speakers in the ceiling, for Muzak or something, are done that way. But then every speaker is playing the same tune.
Yep, you really don't need much for a home server. Back in 94 or so my home gateway (PPP, web server, email, some packet radio stuff, etc.) was a 386/33 with 5 megs of RAM and 70 megs or so of disk. Of course Linux distros were much smaller back then. (I used Slackware) I could even compile a kernel on that machine (in several hours). But no trouble at all keeping up with any load I needed it for. I've always stored all my email on my home gateway and read it there (I went from elm to cyrus to pine to mutt over the years, but always kept the mail on the server). Nowadays it's a dual-Pentium Classic, each processor overclocked to 100 MHz. Still underpowered by today's standards, but I'm running a fairly current Debian and still doing more or less the same stuff, and not noticing a need for any more power. I want to switch to a Via Eden server some day just to get rid of the fan noise, and it will be quite a step up in power too.
I couldn't believe they wanted you to install it into your home directory rather than as a multi-user app, on a Unix-like system! Hell mine is NFS mounted (isn't everybody's?) so that would be slower. Well, you can put it in/usr/local/OpenOffice if you like, but only if you MAKE THE WHOLE THING WORLD WRITEABLE for chrissakes, so that it at runtime can write user-specific config stuff THERE, rather than in the user's home directory where it belongs. Then it ate up a lot of RAM, just to start up, and ran like molasses in January. One headhunter I worked with insisted on having my resume in Word format, so I converted it from HTML to DOC using OpenOffice, and he said it was terrible. I checked later on a Windows system, and sure enough, text running vertically up the side of the page, misaligned stuff all over, and all kinds of crap that didn't show up when I was editing it. What an embarrassment. I had better results with Ted, despite its somewhat limited feature set. But Ted's table editing is quite good.
People were raving about how wonderful OpenOffice was back then, too.
Now of course, coming up with a universal XML schema or DTD for WP documents is a really good idea. Maybe after everybody adopts it, the interoperability problems will be solved. But going from shitty bloatware to a lean, mean editing machine is probably more trouble than just starting over. I really do hope they prove me wrong.
The trouble is that spam filtering is hard to do, because anybody can send email to whatever address your service provider creates. Anybody know of a way to force email going to that address to first pass through another server, where it can be filtered? Any MX record tricks? I can't see any way to do that. Ideally the service providers would also offer web-mail service for your phone emails, where every email that gets sent to your phone is also stored on that server, and you can read them later and tag your spams, and then they do Bayesian filtering on those. But telecoms always have such hysteresis about adopting new ideas, I doubt we'll see that anytime soon.
Of course as phones begin to run real operating systems rather than some proprietary Nokia OS, and it gets to be easier to write applications for them, you could just do filtering right on the phone. My 3360 doesn't seem to have any options like that, and I can't find much info on how to write applications for these phones either. But, I've only gotten 3 or 4 SMS spams in over a year, so far so good...
Well it doesn't exist anymore, sorry. Anyway to this day Russian is still frequently written in cursive, even on official documents and stuff like that. And Cyrillic cursive looks drastically different than the printed variety. Some letters look like other letters, for example t looks like m, d looks like g, etc. As well as being generally loopy if written quickly. In English at least the resemblance between cursive and printed letters is much closer. So, you know, just be glad it's dying here, and that it was never that bad to begin with.
I'm sure those who like cursive writing will still do it, just like people who do calligrapy for the art of it. But it's certainly not a survival skill anymore.
I'm waiting with bated breath for the day when I'll be able to ask the computer where is my (wrench, screwdriver, cellphone, drawer of RJ-45's, whatever) and it will actually know. (Just mount scanners in each room.) I'm always losing stuff and for any given project, spend maybe 10% of my time just finding things. If WalMart starts using RFID tags, and if these tags work at a longer range than the ones now available (meters instead of a few inches), there ought to be some stuff showing up on ebay pretty soon - surplus scanners, unused tags, etc. Or maybe the tags would be reusable as-is. I hope they _don't_ zap them when I exit the store - that way I will be able to find the stuff later.
I was already looking into it but the current scanners really are short-range. I can't see them being of much use to prevent shoplifting in their current form, unless they're going to have you walk through a narrow frame like a metal detector. Even then, the distance from the outside of a shopping cart to its middle is too far to read some of these tags. So probably there is something better available than what I've seen on ebay so far.
As for privacy invasion, all this initial overreaction is, well, overreaction, but it will shape the future by letting them know we're concerned about it; and in the final version we will have somewhat less privacy, but not enough to really change our lives much, and the criminals will still be able to find workarounds too. Business as usual. I think the upside is much more than the downside; society just needs time to adjust to it, and new taboos and laws to be established to prevent excessive invasion of privacy. It's a representative government here in the US, we tend to get what we want eventually. In general, for any potentially threatening new technology, I don't believe banning it is ever the answer - you just have to adapt. The EFF will probably make it their business too if it becomes a problem, so send them a donation.
But, the dehumidifier works on the same principle doesn't it? AFAIK it's basically an air conditioner, except the air also goes over the condenser on the way out (rather than having the condenser mounted outside as with a window AC), so that it doesn't end up any cooler, just drier. I submit that having two compressors doing one job is less efficient than just letting the window AC work harder. (Unless you were exceeding its capacity, and this extra "help" from the dehumidifier got you better performance)
The thing is, if this plant extracts all salts from the soil, then there's no particular reason that the salt from the plant will be particularly healthy; there will be sodium chloride, some other stuff that might be healthy, and perhaps also some salts which aren't. Which salts accumulate from chemical fertilizer use? Probably something other than sodium chloride, right?
Maybe the thing to do when reclaiming tracts of farmland is to gather up all the salicornia and throw it in the ocean; this is nature's place for excess salt anyway, and such dumping would be nowhere near as bad as the other kinds of stuff we dump there (garbage, nuclear waste, oil, etc.) It's following an example set by nature, rather than going against the grain - purify the land, and dump the salt there. Dumping it in the food supply could have other bad consequences; for one thing, after being digested it would then end up in the sewer, and then it should be extracted again, to avoid polluting the land or water again; and secondly, people probably eat more salt than they should as it is; encouraging them to eat salt from this new source, even if it is mostly sodium chloride, as if it were some new health supplement, is a really bad idea.
I seriously doubt Minsky wants PROLOG hackers to unite; MIT is pretty much a Scheme sort of place... (and it's the one true language anyway, so good for them:-)
Get one of these and then try not to spill stuff on it. At least you can do quite a bit without a keyboard or mouse, 'cause it's touchscreen. I use mine with a web server containing recipes, home automation scripts, personal contacts, etc. Just making a bookmark to my.yahoo.com is pretty indispensible too, for checking TV and movie showtimes, weather etc. But, I mounted it on a pull-down shelf that was intended for knife storage; it's perfect - hangs down below the cabinets when I want it, folds back up when I don't, and I was able to attach the ethernet adapter to the underside - and the Audrey stays booted all the time while not consuming much power with the screen off, so no wait time. Even for quick web lookups I don't really need access to in the kitchen, it's quicker than going to my main workstation, waiting for the dual monitors to power up, waiting for that slow monstrosity Mozilla to finally load, and mousing around. So I find myself using it now and then, and my wife does too. I also wrote a caller ID application for it, but it still has a bug I haven't fixed yet.
So replace it with one. I changed out the backlighting bulbs on the A/C controls and clock in my old car to green LEDs. They'll probably be the last things still working in that car.:-) Only caveat is that LEDs are more directional; the centers of those LCDs ended up being illuminated much more than the edges.
In my CS faculty they had a saying - that they could count the number of women in CS on one hand... with three fingers cut off:)
Sounds like something a CS scholar would say... 'cuz with two remaining fingers you can count in binary... you just need to sign the number serially. Use one finger as the clock and the other as the data indicator, or use one for "zero" and the other for "one", and consider any movement to be a clock tick.
Extracting energy from unavoidable vibrations is cool. You're harnessing an energy source external to the process, which would otherwise be wasted. But trying to harness power from vibrating cellphones is just another variation on all the other perpetual motion schemes... the phone's battery runs a motor to make it vibrate, and then you try to absorb some of that energy and use it to charge the battery? So, for each quantity of energy that you absorb, the phone is vibrating that much less strongly, which defeats the purpose of turning on the vibrator in the first place. And you will lose energy in the various conversion processes, so you will have a net loss. If you don't want to waste the energy to vibrate the phone, then just don't do it. Or, run the motor with less power; this will accomplish the same thing as re-absorbing some of the power of the vibration, but more efficiently.
I have a couple of these, and have given them to all my friends and some of the family. (Disclaimer: the owner is an old friend and gave me a nice discount) They're wonderful! So tiny, so bright, so rugged, and run for hours and hours on one AAA battery. The secret is the tiny built-in DC-DC converter which extracts every last electron out of the battery while stepping it up to a constant current for the LED. The electronics are encapsulated, and the battery chamber is sealed, so it's even waterproof. Really, I think this is the most elegant design possible. Most others require special batteries, or have worse performance, or are excessively complex or fragile. One of mine has been on my keyring in my pocket for a couple of years. It's really scuffed up, but works like new and is only on its second battery, despite the fact that I find a use for it every few days, and can't imagine what I ever did without always having a flashlight at the ready.
Only cons are that they're overpriced, and well, the case could've been titanium rather than aluminum. But still there is no competition, yet.
See also the high-brightness Luxeon Star model; but those are beyond what most can afford, and then you have to pay extra to get the AA battery chamber.
The next thing I want to see is a retrofit for my 3-D-cell Maglights, which I still use when a penlight isn't enough.
Yeah, there's the rub... hydrogen is not a fuel, but a storage medium. Hydrogen plus a fuel cell is equivalent to a storage battery. (Or it could be burned in some sort of engine if you prefer.) Any way you slice it, I think future society will be increasingly dependent on electricity; and "hydrogen technology" is something of a distraction from the bigger picture - how to generate electricity in the most efficient way.
Of course there are reformers, but the whole point is to eliminate dependency on fossil fuels. And there is biomass. We'll see if that ends up being the best way to generate hydrogen. In that case, instead of the source being electricity, the source is the sun; arguably a bit more direct, since ultimately that's where all energy sources we know of come from.
Just think someday all farmers may have stills... what's not good for drinking they can use as an energy source.
This sounds more interesting as a distributed computing project, rather than for mere video editing. My personal experience is the typical 100 gig IDE drives they're selling now are plenty fast enough for DV editing; the bottleneck is in processor speed, for effects, MPEG encoding, etc.
OTOH I've sometimes thought, in OO information systems, if you never had to persist data to disk, it would sure save a lot of trouble. Multiply-redundant storage of data in memory on lots of machines on a network, with separate UPSs, might alleviate the need to save it to disk. Only in certain applications, of course.
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What open source projects need is originality, not just cloning everybody else's ideas. Course, that's easier said than done.
Well to maximize your personal methane output I'd recommend beans or egg salad rather than pizza.
But a fuel-powered laptop would be handy for keeping your pizza warm.
Just in case anybody really needs a lot of sound channels on one PC, I bet the USB ones (like the Griffin iMic) would work really well - just plug in several of them. As a bonus, you can run USB cable from the computer rather near your amplifier, and cut down on the length of the analog cable, for example in home theater situations etc. And it's not likely to be obsolete anytime soon.
An Audrey would be marginally acceptable, but the sound quality isn't that great. (has some white noise in it, in my experience) However they are perhaps the ideal home automation controller - color, touchscreen, hackable, built-in browser, and so cheap. I just use them for that, and intend to use them to control my whole-house audio system when I get around to it, but do the decoding on some other device to get better quality.
There's no reason this ought to be centralized. You will save on cable by just running ethernet to each room and distributing the audio digitally, and it's a more flexible solution, and you'll get better quality audio by not running analog signals over long distances, and the load of decoding multiple MP3/Ogg/whatever streams gets distributed to multiple CPUs too. You need a small quiet computer or dedicated decoder device in each room.
But, I haven't found the right combination of software to do this yet. What I want is something like IceCast but have it actually work, and have it be multi-channel too, so you can listen to different music in each room, or listen to perfectly synchronized music in all the rooms, your choice, and at the same time have it mix in an "auxiliary" stream for voice announcements, simulated telephone ringing, stuff like that. Each stream should be done via broadcast or multicast to conserve bandwidth in the case where you're receiving it in multiple rooms at once. The client software ought to be able to identify and decode various kinds of streams (Ogg, MP3, that new lossless standard, or just plain uncompressed PCM) and mix them together transparently. Maybe it ought to be able to play locally-stored files too, like rplay, for things like telephone ringing etc.
The old-fashioned way to distribute audio is to use the 70V audio standard where the audio is sent at a high voltage and each speaker has a transformer to convert high-voltage high-impedance audio to high-current low-impedance for the speaker. You can add speakers to such a system without changing the load that the amplifier sees quite as drastically. Most commercial installations that have speakers in the ceiling, for Muzak or something, are done that way. But then every speaker is playing the same tune.
Shouldn't that be "draweth nigh"?
Yep, you really don't need much for a home server. Back in 94 or so my home gateway (PPP, web server, email, some packet radio stuff, etc.) was a 386/33 with 5 megs of RAM and 70 megs or so of disk. Of course Linux distros were much smaller back then. (I used Slackware) I could even compile a kernel on that machine (in several hours). But no trouble at all keeping up with any load I needed it for. I've always stored all my email on my home gateway and read it there (I went from elm to cyrus to pine to mutt over the years, but always kept the mail on the server). Nowadays it's a dual-Pentium Classic, each processor overclocked to 100 MHz. Still underpowered by today's standards, but I'm running a fairly current Debian and still doing more or less the same stuff, and not noticing a need for any more power. I want to switch to a Via Eden server some day just to get rid of the fan noise, and it will be quite a step up in power too.
I couldn't believe they wanted you to install it into your home directory rather than as a multi-user app, on a Unix-like system! Hell mine is NFS mounted (isn't everybody's?) so that would be slower. Well, you can put it in /usr/local/OpenOffice if you like, but only if you MAKE THE WHOLE THING WORLD WRITEABLE for chrissakes, so that it at runtime can write user-specific config stuff THERE, rather than in the user's home directory where it belongs. Then it ate up a lot of RAM, just to start up, and ran like molasses in January. One headhunter I worked with insisted on having my resume in Word format, so I converted it from HTML to DOC using OpenOffice, and he said it was terrible. I checked later on a Windows system, and sure enough, text running vertically up the side of the page, misaligned stuff all over, and all kinds of crap that didn't show up when I was editing it. What an embarrassment. I had better results with Ted, despite its somewhat limited feature set. But Ted's table editing is quite good.
People were raving about how wonderful OpenOffice was back then, too.
Now of course, coming up with a universal XML schema or DTD for WP documents is a really good idea. Maybe after everybody adopts it, the interoperability problems will be solved. But going from shitty bloatware to a lean, mean editing machine is probably more trouble than just starting over. I really do hope they prove me wrong.
The trouble is that spam filtering is hard to do, because anybody can send email to whatever address your service provider creates. Anybody know of a way to force email going to that address to first pass through another server, where it can be filtered? Any MX record tricks? I can't see any way to do that. Ideally the service providers would also offer web-mail service for your phone emails, where every email that gets sent to your phone is also stored on that server, and you can read them later and tag your spams, and then they do Bayesian filtering on those. But telecoms always have such hysteresis about adopting new ideas, I doubt we'll see that anytime soon.
Of course as phones begin to run real operating systems rather than some proprietary Nokia OS, and it gets to be easier to write applications for them, you could just do filtering right on the phone. My 3360 doesn't seem to have any options like that, and I can't find much info on how to write applications for these phones either. But, I've only gotten 3 or 4 SMS spams in over a year, so far so good...
Well it doesn't exist anymore, sorry. Anyway to this day Russian is still frequently written in cursive, even on official documents and stuff like that. And Cyrillic cursive looks drastically different than the printed variety. Some letters look like other letters, for example t looks like m, d looks like g, etc. As well as being generally loopy if written quickly. In English at least the resemblance between cursive and printed letters is much closer. So, you know, just be glad it's dying here, and that it was never that bad to begin with.
I'm sure those who like cursive writing will still do it, just like people who do calligrapy for the art of it. But it's certainly not a survival skill anymore.
I'm waiting with bated breath for the day when I'll be able to ask the computer where is my (wrench, screwdriver, cellphone, drawer of RJ-45's, whatever) and it will actually know. (Just mount scanners in each room.) I'm always losing stuff and for any given project, spend maybe 10% of my time just finding things. If WalMart starts using RFID tags, and if these tags work at a longer range than the ones now available (meters instead of a few inches), there ought to be some stuff showing up on ebay pretty soon - surplus scanners, unused tags, etc. Or maybe the tags would be reusable as-is. I hope they _don't_ zap them when I exit the store - that way I will be able to find the stuff later.
I was already looking into it but the current scanners really are short-range. I can't see them being of much use to prevent shoplifting in their current form, unless they're going to have you walk through a narrow frame like a metal detector. Even then, the distance from the outside of a shopping cart to its middle is too far to read some of these tags. So probably there is something better available than what I've seen on ebay so far.
As for privacy invasion, all this initial overreaction is, well, overreaction, but it will shape the future by letting them know we're concerned about it; and in the final version we will have somewhat less privacy, but not enough to really change our lives much, and the criminals will still be able to find workarounds too. Business as usual. I think the upside is much more than the downside; society just needs time to adjust to it, and new taboos and laws to be established to prevent excessive invasion of privacy. It's a representative government here in the US, we tend to get what we want eventually. In general, for any potentially threatening new technology, I don't believe banning it is ever the answer - you just have to adapt. The EFF will probably make it their business too if it becomes a problem, so send them a donation.
Or, harness the sparks from crunching wintergreen, and use the electricity to run your AC...
But, the dehumidifier works on the same principle doesn't it? AFAIK it's basically an air conditioner, except the air also goes over the condenser on the way out (rather than having the condenser mounted outside as with a window AC), so that it doesn't end up any cooler, just drier. I submit that having two compressors doing one job is less efficient than just letting the window AC work harder. (Unless you were exceeding its capacity, and this extra "help" from the dehumidifier got you better performance)
The thing is, if this plant extracts all salts from the soil, then there's no particular reason that the salt from the plant will be particularly healthy; there will be sodium chloride, some other stuff that might be healthy, and perhaps also some salts which aren't. Which salts accumulate from chemical fertilizer use? Probably something other than sodium chloride, right?
Maybe the thing to do when reclaiming tracts of farmland is to gather up all the salicornia and throw it in the ocean; this is nature's place for excess salt anyway, and such dumping would be nowhere near as bad as the other kinds of stuff we dump there (garbage, nuclear waste, oil, etc.) It's following an example set by nature, rather than going against the grain - purify the land, and dump the salt there. Dumping it in the food supply could have other bad consequences; for one thing, after being digested it would then end up in the sewer, and then it should be extracted again, to avoid polluting the land or water again; and secondly, people probably eat more salt than they should as it is; encouraging them to eat salt from this new source, even if it is mostly sodium chloride, as if it were some new health supplement, is a really bad idea.
You can buy fresh salicornia at Gentle Strength, a bit west of ASU. It is really quite salty. They suggest adding it to salads, etc.
(Disclaimer: I don't work there)
I seriously doubt Minsky wants PROLOG hackers to unite; MIT is pretty much a Scheme sort of place... (and it's the one true language anyway, so good for them :-)
Get one of these and then try not to spill stuff on it. At least you can do quite a bit without a keyboard or mouse, 'cause it's touchscreen. I use mine with a web server containing recipes, home automation scripts, personal contacts, etc. Just making a bookmark to my.yahoo.com is pretty indispensible too, for checking TV and movie showtimes, weather etc. But, I mounted it on a pull-down shelf that was intended for knife storage; it's perfect - hangs down below the cabinets when I want it, folds back up when I don't, and I was able to attach the ethernet adapter to the underside - and the Audrey stays booted all the time while not consuming much power with the screen off, so no wait time. Even for quick web lookups I don't really need access to in the kitchen, it's quicker than going to my main workstation, waiting for the dual monitors to power up, waiting for that slow monstrosity Mozilla to finally load, and mousing around. So I find myself using it now and then, and my wife does too. I also wrote a caller ID application for it, but it still has a bug I haven't fixed yet.
Yeah, come on, spill it... I live in Phoenix too.
The ones I know of: Electronics Surplus Exchange, on 7th Ave. and Magnolia (if memory serves)
ASU surplus on 8th and Price in Tempe
Apache Reclamation on 2d Ave., but they suck mostly
Gold Circuit, but haven't been there yet
So replace it with one. I changed out the backlighting bulbs on the A/C controls and clock in my old car to green LEDs. They'll probably be the last things still working in that car. :-) Only caveat is that LEDs are more directional; the centers of those LCDs ended up being illuminated much more than the edges.
Sounds like something a CS scholar would say... 'cuz with two remaining fingers you can count in binary... you just need to sign the number serially. Use one finger as the clock and the other as the data indicator, or use one for "zero" and the other for "one", and consider any movement to be a clock tick.
Extracting energy from unavoidable vibrations is cool. You're harnessing an energy source external to the process, which would otherwise be wasted. But trying to harness power from vibrating cellphones is just another variation on all the other perpetual motion schemes... the phone's battery runs a motor to make it vibrate, and then you try to absorb some of that energy and use it to charge the battery? So, for each quantity of energy that you absorb, the phone is vibrating that much less strongly, which defeats the purpose of turning on the vibrator in the first place. And you will lose energy in the various conversion processes, so you will have a net loss. If you don't want to waste the energy to vibrate the phone, then just don't do it. Or, run the motor with less power; this will accomplish the same thing as re-absorbing some of the power of the vibration, but more efficiently.
Only cons are that they're overpriced, and well, the case could've been titanium rather than aluminum. But still there is no competition, yet.
See also the high-brightness Luxeon Star model; but those are beyond what most can afford, and then you have to pay extra to get the AA battery chamber.
The next thing I want to see is a retrofit for my 3-D-cell Maglights, which I still use when a penlight isn't enough.
Yeah, there's the rub... hydrogen is not a fuel, but a storage medium. Hydrogen plus a fuel cell is equivalent to a storage battery. (Or it could be burned in some sort of engine if you prefer.) Any way you slice it, I think future society will be increasingly dependent on electricity; and "hydrogen technology" is something of a distraction from the bigger picture - how to generate electricity in the most efficient way.
Of course there are reformers, but the whole point is to eliminate dependency on fossil fuels. And there is biomass. We'll see if that ends up being the best way to generate hydrogen. In that case, instead of the source being electricity, the source is the sun; arguably a bit more direct, since ultimately that's where all energy sources we know of come from.
Just think someday all farmers may have stills... what's not good for drinking they can use as an energy source.
Bubble sort!?! Of all the things to have trouble remembering...
Quicksort, maybe.
This sounds more interesting as a distributed computing project, rather than for mere video editing. My personal experience is the typical 100 gig IDE drives they're selling now are plenty fast enough for DV editing; the bottleneck is in processor speed, for effects, MPEG encoding, etc.
OTOH I've sometimes thought, in OO information systems, if you never had to persist data to disk, it would sure save a lot of trouble. Multiply-redundant storage of data in memory on lots of machines on a network, with separate UPSs, might alleviate the need to save it to disk. Only in certain applications, of course.