Well said. We're going to transition from performance to reliability and power consumption.
Solid state flash drives are a big part of that and Intel's forthcoming systems on a chip will also help.
I'm surprised more business PCs don't have ECC memory yet.
Why not rip out the guts of some p2p file sharing system and instead of files transfer links around. Search would find relevant articles instead of files. NYTimes is doing some pretty cool stuff with semantic journalism but nobody is taking advantage of it yet. If you took ID3 and applied it to articles it would be a good start.
I founded a startup and we're trying to do something better than Google news for specific locations. Think Digg+Local+Slashdot comments. Nobody is really thinking about geography very hard but it's a fundamental core thing you need to get right before you can build a good local search engine. Pitching the idea to some VCs Wednesday, can't sleep for some reason:)
They're getting better plus they use wear leveling, which is like forced fragmentation but there are no moving parts so it doesn't incur a performance penalty. The mean time before failure is a lot longer than your typical spinning platter drive in the newer drives.
Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.
Assuming we all had Neos with mobile broadband access and TrixBoxes(Asterisk) running at home what would the future look like? Open Source VOIP? Would we have something like email addresses instead of phone numbers?
FYI, my biggest IT coup was installing asterisk at work and having it email everybody voice messages as email attachments. Best bang for your buck if you're about to ask for a raise.
You know, there were people on CNBC saying that it was a great time to buy after the NASDAQ had "corrected" 10%. You can argue that homes aren't stocks but I'd argue that when a home triples in value in 5 years for no reason (as it has in much of California) then it faces the same risks as stocks.
If you buy a home before 2010 you're in for a world of hurt, regardless of what your realtor tells you.
In five years when the hardware costs 38cents for these there is no doubt that vendors will avoid paying a hefty fee for the software or they won't be able to compete. I just hope Google gets around to building free wireless internet.
Kids will not know what a phone is in 10 years.
You know how Richard Dawkins is all over the news talking about Atheism? My theory is that it's because he's secretly preparing we humans for a time when they land and we're all forced to question our religion.
Microsoft sells boxed copies of Windows, which is totally pointless, because all PCs come with an OS according to HP, otherwise PC vendors would be selling a broken product.
The news article doesn't link to the site but has a link to the Amazon boxed set. Why aren't they using bit torrent? The site is a UI disaster. It's unclear how to find actual music.
Because the last moving part inside our computers is the hard drive. For the last week I've been seriously looking into the I-Ram. Basically you plug a few RAM chips into a SATA converter and you max out the SATA bus. Granted you can only do 8GB in RAID 0 but the next gen is around the corner and it'll have SATA2 speeds and a 16GB limit. Not cheap but then nobody said performance was.
Check out this Google Video to see what it's capable of.
Good points but they do have laws, they're just not written in a top down manner. As for life expectancy, 48 does sound low but here are the numbers for other African countries WITH governments:
Zimbabwe: 39 years - The Mugabe medical plan isn't working all that well apparently.
Ethiopia: 41 That's right, their next door neighbor has a life expentancy seven years lower, even with a government!
Bostwana: 40
Burkina Faso: 46
Burundi: 46
Cameroon: 51
Central African Republic: 49
Republic of Congo: 47
Congo: 49
Ivory Coast: 46
Kenya: 48
Lesotho: 54
Malawi: 37
Namibia: 42
Nigeria: 54
Rwanda: 42
South Africa: 56
Swaziland: 39
Tanzania: 46
Uganda: 43
Zambia: 37
In anarchy deepened by local warlords, private interests swooped in to provide essentials like water, telephones and electricity, though not in the most efficient ways.
The three telephone companies, for instance, operate entirely independently of one another. Having access to all people with phones means having three telephone lines -- one from each company.
"Despite the seeming anarchy, Somalia's service sector has managed to survive and grow. Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent. In the absence of a formal banking sector, money exchange services have sprouted throughout the country, handling between $500 million and $1 billion in remittances annually. Mogadishu's main market offers a variety of goods from food to the newest electronic gadgets."
A lot can change in six years. They still don't have a government by the way.
Amen. This does sound horrible right? But what if they do jack up prices? Google will have even more incentive to roll out free broadband wireless. Competition and free markets take time to sort things out but regulation... well, we've all heard about weird old laws still on the books that ban corduroy pants on Tuesdays. And of course the mayor is getting campain contributions from the shorts lobby. Be careful what you wish for.
Idiots. The management probably doesn't have the technical know-how to see where their visitors are coming from. I can see it now. A month after they send Google a cease and desist wondering, "Geeze, I wonder why our web traffic just fell off a cliff. Must be that damn Craigslist again."
As a poor person in America you can eat for free, go to public libraries for free and use thier computers to get online, get a free education. Heck even our panhandlers make over $100 a day on average. Nobody starves to death in America, that's why people from Cuba risk their lives to get here and why academics and entreprenuers leave for America as their countries cry "Brain Drain". If you have an ounce of motivation you can become successful in America.
You can believe everybody is fat and happy in France, Cuba, China, etc. but tens of thousands of burning cars and fleeing citizens tell a different story.
You can start a business now for next to nothing, venture capitalists can't figure out who to give their money to. That means technology has brought costs down to the point where you don't have to be a Rockerfeller to compete anymore. Have a good idea and a year old PC? You can invent the next Google, Flickr, Digg, etc. Open source has the same effect, Microsoft can't buy Linux and bury it. So you're right, free markets weren't perfect in the industrial revolution and they'll never be perfect but they are, by far, the best solution to poverty and things are only getting better.
India and China recently adopted more free market policies. Why on earth would a government give up control of industry if they didn't think there was a better way?
Read Hayek's A Road to Serfdom and Austrian economic theory for an explanation of why socialism leads to poverty (or just look at unemployment rates in France and Germany). I think Wikipedia and the Internet will lead to more geniuses than bureaucracy. Since China switched from pure communism to a more free economic system in the '70s 300Million people have risen out of poverty. I personally don't think that's a coincidence.
I used to be a die-hard socialist myself in college but I started studying economics and though I'm not now a Republican I know government intervention is a net loss for society. Money donated to a good open source project will do the world infinitely more good than well funded politicians.
One thing I do when forced to use dialup is load one page then open a bunch of my other sites in tabs and let them load while I'm reading the first article. Most of us can't keep up with a steady stream of 56,000 bits of information per second, audio and video not withstanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said. We're going to transition from performance to reliability and power consumption. Solid state flash drives are a big part of that and Intel's forthcoming systems on a chip will also help. I'm surprised more business PCs don't have ECC memory yet.
If your apps only read data then yeah, but if you have a bulletin board or log a bunch of data the RAM doesn't really help for write caching.
Why not rip out the guts of some p2p file sharing system and instead of files transfer links around. Search would find relevant articles instead of files. NYTimes is doing some pretty cool stuff with semantic journalism but nobody is taking advantage of it yet. If you took ID3 and applied it to articles it would be a good start. I founded a startup and we're trying to do something better than Google news for specific locations. Think Digg+Local+Slashdot comments. Nobody is really thinking about geography very hard but it's a fundamental core thing you need to get right before you can build a good local search engine. Pitching the idea to some VCs Wednesday, can't sleep for some reason :)
We're a .com startup on a budget, though I'm asking some investors for a bunch of money Wednesday :)
They're getting better plus they use wear leveling, which is like forced fragmentation but there are no moving parts so it doesn't incur a performance penalty. The mean time before failure is a lot longer than your typical spinning platter drive in the newer drives.
Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.
Assuming we all had Neos with mobile broadband access and TrixBoxes(Asterisk) running at home what would the future look like? Open Source VOIP? Would we have something like email addresses instead of phone numbers? FYI, my biggest IT coup was installing asterisk at work and having it email everybody voice messages as email attachments. Best bang for your buck if you're about to ask for a raise.
You know, there were people on CNBC saying that it was a great time to buy after the NASDAQ had "corrected" 10%. You can argue that homes aren't stocks but I'd argue that when a home triples in value in 5 years for no reason (as it has in much of California) then it faces the same risks as stocks.
If you buy a home before 2010 you're in for a world of hurt, regardless of what your realtor tells you.
In five years when the hardware costs 38cents for these there is no doubt that vendors will avoid paying a hefty fee for the software or they won't be able to compete. I just hope Google gets around to building free wireless internet. Kids will not know what a phone is in 10 years.
You know how Richard Dawkins is all over the news talking about Atheism? My theory is that it's because he's secretly preparing we humans for a time when they land and we're all forced to question our religion.
Microsoft sells boxed copies of Windows, which is totally pointless, because all PCs come with an OS according to HP, otherwise PC vendors would be selling a broken product.
The news article doesn't link to the site but has a link to the Amazon boxed set. Why aren't they using bit torrent? The site is a UI disaster. It's unclear how to find actual music.
Because the last moving part inside our computers is the hard drive. For the last week I've been seriously looking into the I-Ram. Basically you plug a few RAM chips into a SATA converter and you max out the SATA bus. Granted you can only do 8GB in RAID 0 but the next gen is around the corner and it'll have SATA2 speeds and a 16GB limit. Not cheap but then nobody said performance was. Check out this Google Video to see what it's capable of.
Yeah, just like they're working in Iraq. If we ever need to change governments I doubt a militia would look anything like our army.
Microsoft: Open source 'not reliable or dependable'
Good points but they do have laws, they're just not written in a top down manner. As for life expectancy, 48 does sound low but here are the numbers for other African countries WITH governments:
Zimbabwe: 39 years - The Mugabe medical plan isn't working all that well apparently.
Ethiopia: 41 That's right, their next door neighbor has a life expentancy seven years lower, even with a government!
Bostwana: 40
Burkina Faso: 46
Burundi: 46
Cameroon: 51
Central African Republic: 49 Republic of Congo: 47 Congo: 49 Ivory Coast: 46 Kenya: 48 Lesotho: 54 Malawi: 37 Namibia: 42 Nigeria: 54 Rwanda: 42 South Africa: 56 Swaziland: 39 Tanzania: 46 Uganda: 43 Zambia: 37
Here's an excerpt from another article. A lot can change in six years. They still don't have a government by the way.
Amen. This does sound horrible right? But what if they do jack up prices? Google will have even more incentive to roll out free broadband wireless. Competition and free markets take time to sort things out but regulation... well, we've all heard about weird old laws still on the books that ban corduroy pants on Tuesdays. And of course the mayor is getting campain contributions from the shorts lobby. Be careful what you wish for.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ceragenins&start=0& start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org .mozilla:en-US:official
Idiots. The management probably doesn't have the technical know-how to see where their visitors are coming from. I can see it now. A month after they send Google a cease and desist wondering, "Geeze, I wonder why our web traffic just fell off a cliff. Must be that damn Craigslist again."
As a poor person in America you can eat for free, go to public libraries for free and use thier computers to get online, get a free education. Heck even our panhandlers make over $100 a day on average. Nobody starves to death in America, that's why people from Cuba risk their lives to get here and why academics and entreprenuers leave for America as their countries cry "Brain Drain". If you have an ounce of motivation you can become successful in America.
You can believe everybody is fat and happy in France, Cuba, China, etc. but tens of thousands of burning cars and fleeing citizens tell a different story.
You can start a business now for next to nothing, venture capitalists can't figure out who to give their money to. That means technology has brought costs down to the point where you don't have to be a Rockerfeller to compete anymore. Have a good idea and a year old PC? You can invent the next Google, Flickr, Digg, etc. Open source has the same effect, Microsoft can't buy Linux and bury it. So you're right, free markets weren't perfect in the industrial revolution and they'll never be perfect but they are, by far, the best solution to poverty and things are only getting better.
India and China recently adopted more free market policies. Why on earth would a government give up control of industry if they didn't think there was a better way?
Read Hayek's A Road to Serfdom and Austrian economic theory for an explanation of why socialism leads to poverty (or just look at unemployment rates in France and Germany). I think Wikipedia and the Internet will lead to more geniuses than bureaucracy. Since China switched from pure communism to a more free economic system in the '70s 300Million people have risen out of poverty. I personally don't think that's a coincidence.
I used to be a die-hard socialist myself in college but I started studying economics and though I'm not now a Republican I know government intervention is a net loss for society. Money donated to a good open source project will do the world infinitely more good than well funded politicians.
I have a 24" Dell, they're 1920X1200 which would give you 3840x1200 in a dual setup.
One thing I do when forced to use dialup is load one page then open a bunch of my other sites in tabs and let them load while I'm reading the first article. Most of us can't keep up with a steady stream of 56,000 bits of information per second, audio and video not withstanding.