There are two things impressive about this. One is the fact that you mention, that the kid did not give up until he had the solution and was smart enough to solve a problem that stumped every mathemetician for 350 years.
The second is that people still try to solve difficult analytic problems at all instead of just turning it into a computing problem.
I don't know which surprises me more.
^^^^ This.
I think the most impressive part is that even though we hear all the time about "X-teen year old invents BLAH" we're like "Great!" but secretly think "BIG Deal! Who can't invent something? How is that challenging, really? Oh look their dad's an electrical engineer that works at XYZ... hmmmm....." but this 16-year-old actually solved something that the best mathematicians on Earth haven't been able to solve for 350 years.
Major kudos kid! Only way that can be topped is if a teen cures cancer, aids or doubles productive lifespan.
Did anyone even bother to check the date of this so called news? The photo thread shows May 2010 as the posting date.
Some of the photos in that thread are even 7-8 years old. The one about Pilot Helmet (post #21) show the defense minister of Iran in 10 years ago!!!
Considering this news is 2-10 yrs old, and instead of actually creating a superior product they ripped off a very old but already well-known product, probably means these helicopters aren't that great.
Do not buy a consumer laptop, make sure you shop around in the Business/Small Business areas of leading manufacturers (HP, Lenovo, Dell).
that's 90% good advice, but that's not a guarantee.
Having recently bought a laptop sight-unseen, using internet only, I know how the poster feels.
Basically, I relied on reviews, usually consumer reviews like on Amazon, and ignore the +5 or +1 because +5 means nothing since it means they loved everything and +1 means they absolutely hated everything about it so neither of those two reviews will tell you anything useful. Read the +2 thru +4 reviews, those tell the most, those people put more thought into the review because they liked some things and hated others.
Then google the cpu to find whatever the PassMark rating is. With so many ghz and cores and optimizations you can't just say "1.4ghz slower than 1.6ghz" anymore, and PassMark has been, IMHO, about the only benchmark program that does a decent job distinguishing which CPU is faster. Don't get hung up on a number though, a 2,000 PassMark score won't be much faster than a 1,900 score, but 3,000 will feel faster than that 1,900.
But in all honesty nothing replaces just going to the store and buying one. Really nothing is horrible now in terms of speed, but there's a huge difference in keyboards, screen flex, durability, "cheapness", touchpad, etc. My sister bought a ~$350 Walmart laptop without me and the case is so cheap you can press on the palm rest and it will sink in like it's made of pre-formed packaging plastic (google led me to blister pack plastic). I'm shocked, really, at how poor a $350 laptop was built. It works fine, but it just feels like it'd break at any moment.
My ultimate advice: go to the store and play with the laptops and find one that seems solid and go online and see if you can find that model for less. That's the only way you'll be sure you get one made well, because all the reviews and cpu benchmarks in the world won't tell you how cheap or solid it feels.
Also, I'd like to point out that if a startup needs 500k to keep the idea going then it's probably not a good startup idea. He got 20k and.... what? How well did he do with that 20k? Seems like it went no where, article said nothing about how much $$$ he made with that 20k. Yes, silicon valley = expensive, so move back to Iowa or Nebraska or where ever to make that 20k last. 20k is more than most startups get to start with, most start in a parents basement or garage or dorm room and either make millions or vanish, he got 20k and it's gone, then he got 50k and now wants 500k? Take what you have and make something with it, don't keep begging other people to throw money at your pit hoping someone else will fill that pit for you.
Startups these days.... shesh, think people should just toss money at them because they have an idea. You got the money, now show us the profit. Sink or swim.
i'm sorry, maybe i'm just being negative, but by the end it sounded like an advertisement:
Ad one: "Simons said he was able to score $50,000 in seed funding from Ulu Ventures and Silicon Valley VC Paul Sherer."
Now Ulu Ventures and Paul Sherer is someone thanks to this CNET article.
Ad two: "Now, Simons said, he's looking to raise an additional $500,000."
Yep there it is. "I slept on a couch in AOL, can i get $500,000?"
And just in case you missed it, his startup name, ClassConnect, is mentioned 6 times in the article. 6. When really, it didn't need to be mentioned at all, the story is about the kid hiding in AOL, not about his startup. It's even in the topic tags at the bottom.
Someone's profiting from this, besides the kid. Writer obviously, probably several others.
He filed a notice using the tools given to him, GoDaddy are the ones that overreact to DMCA notices.
Would you rather he went straight to a copyright infringement lawsuit? He could have done that. Then the first notice she would have gotten was, 'hi, I'm suing you for using my pictures commercially, see you in court'.
tools given to me is a shotgun, should i shoot my neighbors for the loud music? No? Call the police you say? Ask them to turn it down? Naw, nuke from orbit, i wont say anything just rip them apart.
Suing is waaaay better. Site stays up, court decides, pay a judgement and you're done. As a website owner I would MUCH rather fight in court than watch the site go down for even a day.
ripping a business website off the internet is probably the worse thing you can do to a online business, hence nuke from orbit.
I'm incredibly shocked the entire internet hasn't turned on this asshole and post every photo he's ever taken all over every website on earth. Screw this prick.
People were using his photo on commercial websites. What is the problem?
so email them. Ask them to pay or remove or else. The guy jumped (to conclusions) all the way to or else. Maybe some designer used the photo. Maybe they didn't know. Maybe they got it from another site and didn't know who owned it. Image doesn't say copyright on it. Maybe they're evil and stole the photo. Still email them first, maybe they're nice.
And when did/. start supporting abuse of DMCA take-down notices? Thought we hate DMCA notices, and really hated people that abused the system.
Its a story about some nobody who got upset because he published his photograph on the internet and someone else used it. boo fucking hoo.
This is right!
Clearly whoever posted this/. story did not read the article. I was thinking oh, he was probably selling some photos online and someone stole them, and he tried to email them and ask them to remove the photo but websites were being douches.
Nothing could be further from the truth: "setup my camera gear and took this photo. And as I tend to do, I posted it to my blog to show it off. No big deal. I liked the photo I took of the city I love and I wanted to share it."
This is NOT a photo he was selling and making money off of or paid models/actors to be in, he just took photo of the city and put it on his blog. That's great... took a photo, put on blog... that's nice....
"I tried searching to see if this photo might be being used without my permission and was pretty stunned to learn the results.... this did not sit with me too well so I contemplated my options. I decided to file a formal Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down notice with the providers of any site I found using my image without permission..... in less than a day, the site was down."
W......T..............F.............. "I found a mouse in my house so i contemplated my options. I decided to nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure."
How crazy do you have to be to file DMCA take-down notices with the website providers over your blog photo as your FIRST option? No attempt to email, no attempt to resolve situation or extort money, just pull down their website! This photographer is clearly a nut case!
I hope he doesn't issue a DMCA to/. because I quoted his blog.
You may want to check your math... at $0.01/GB, a 1TB drive would be $10... and I'm still not seeing them cheaper than $70 on sale.
You're right, meant less than 10 cent/GB.
I really don't see the cost of SSD's dropping to 1/10th of their current price (the price point at which they're comparable to hard disks) in 7 months. 7 years is much more likely when you consider hard drives are also getting larger and cheaper at the same time.
Oh, there's also the fact that cheaper SSDs still seem to have a relatively poor MTBF and don't deliver the performance gains that most people associate with SSDs... have to pay a bit more for a *good* SSD
That's not really a fact though, that "cheap PC hardware price = poor performance and poor MTBF", that's your opinion.
Haven't they been saying that for a few decades now? Rotational media will be around for a long time to come, barring any real shattering breakthroughs in solid state media. Some markets, such as laptops and workstations which value speed over capacity, will likely transition to SSDs being the norm within the next 5 years or so, but when you need a lot of storage you'll still turn to hard drives for at least another decade or two. Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
SSDs have the huge advantage that everyone wants them. Every device needs fast access and transfer rates with low power usage in as small a space as possible. More devices means more sales means lower prices as they ramp up production. I have a feeling that by the end of 2012 people won't even be considering a hard drive in a PC anymore, everyone will just buy SSDs.
Most articles I've seen indicate that rotational storage (and existing flash-based SSDs) will be replaced within 2 years by memristor-based storage or similar non-rotational, non-flash storage. It makes no sense for hard drive manufacturers to "race to the bottom" when they've already consolidated into 2 major manufacturers and sales have such a short term outlook.
This. Hard drives are dead. SSDs are less than $1 a gigabyte.Down from $4 a gigabyte just 2 years ago. At the rate SSDs are dropping in price why even consider a hard drive when you can buy now for $1/gb or wait a few months until it's 50 cents/gb or another year until it's 10 cents/gb? Few hundred gigabytes is more than enough for the average user.
Good-bye rotational media, I will not miss your slow access times.
Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. [techdigest.tv] 4tb came out Oct 2011. [storagereview.com] Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale.
You're making the flawed assumption that current PRM technology can continue at that pace and that HAMR will not be a disruptive technology resulting in a "bump" in the density.
HAMR will be a bump in density just like PRM was only a bump in density over the older recording methods.
I would predict 10-20tb, but I'm not sure anyone will care since we'll all be using multiple terabyte SSDs by 2016 anyway, they're increasing at a much faster growth rate than hard drives and who wants to wait milliseconds to transfer date at mBps when you can wait nanoseconds to transfer at gBps? Hard drives will be almost as useful in 2016 as tape drives are in 2012.
For example take microSD cards, they're at 64gb now. 100 of those would be 55mm by 15mm by 20mm = 16,500 mm3, much smaller than a 3.5" hard drive at 101.6 mm × 25.4 mm × 146 mm = 368,650 mm3, yet a hundred 64gb microSD cards would provide 6.4tb of storage, far more than any hard drive and it could fit in a cellphone and weigh only 50grams (0.1 lbs) compared to the 1.5 lbs a hard drive weighs. Of course at $87 each that would be almost $9,000, but flash memory prices are dropping faster than any other technology related item so I have no doubt that $9k will be ~$200 within a few years.
I actually know one person that is pretty much like you though, he lives in a very rural area just on the border of ADSL services. Over his copper line it's probably not ever going to go faster, and the chances of an upgrade is slim. But he's the one exception to everyone else...
I'm sorry I should have said I'm in the US, in a city of 5+ million. It's very common in the US to have "slow" internet speeds (10-15mbps), probably because the country is so large and urban sprawl. They do offer 3x faster speeds but the cost is also 3x more than what I'm currently paying, and like I said I'm paying the same amount now as I was 10 yrs ago and my speeds have not increased at all in 10 years despite the significant drop in bandwidth costs during that period.
And once we have hundreds of terabytes how do we fill the drive? Most of the content on my PC is downloaded, but internet speeds have not increased drastically over the years, I'm still at the same speed now as I was in 2000 and paying about the same amount.
They're putting the cart before the horse, they're offering us storage for something we don't have to store and that we can't even obtain through current technology.
They're also not laptops, they're desktops with screens attached. They're not portable, their battery doesn't last. I'm guessing that if the guy can't manage to carry a USB keyboard around, he also can't have a 3 ton brick as a "laptop".
But then, I found it interesting growing up with Maynard G. Krebs and with the Dharma Bums and Lenny Bruce somewhere on the horizon to years later sitting a table sharing pitchers of beer with G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary.
I don't recognize any of those names (damn hipster)
Reliability is the reason I havent gone SSD yet. Every time I'm about to upgrade I read the reviews on newegg of some guy losing all his data. Guess if it's only for the OS and you clone it nightly that's not a big deal.... actually, that's not a bad idea, a small cheap ssd for the OS so it boots fast, then keep files on reliable hd and make clone of ssd to backup drive so u can still boot if the ssd dies....
Now, I loved my netbook for years, but most educational software is still disc based, and a lot of educational software is a bit bloated and requires a bit of horsepower. When you look at math and graphing tools, the need for power is even more important.
that's around $234 a piece, for that amount you can get a netbook with better specs compared to olpc
I thought the same thing, but they have a program where the children learn how to replace motherboards and LCDs in the olpc.. Can't do that with a dell netbook, and I'm sure the kids appreciate them more when they realize they'll have to replace the screen themselves if they slam it against a wall. Besides an olpc is a bit more robust than a walmart netbook, I'd compare it more to a toughbook then a normal netbook and you can't buy a new toughbook for anywhere near $200
If the kickstarter bubble bursts (through a sullied reputation or scamming or whatever), another one will come along to replace it that learns from the mistakes of the past.
It has already happened. Kickstarter isn't the first incarnation of the concept. Its ideological predecessor, fundable.org, went defunct due to credit card scammers using it to launder money / little success in wrapping people's heads around the concept (even though it was essentially the same as Kickstarter).
Kickstarter already burst, but the failed projects get no press. Great example: Disapora.
Why? Because they have so many other candidates lining up for the job? as someone who uses yahoo Services frankly I don't care if he said his mama was a snowblower on his resume as long as he does his job and keeps Yahoo afloat. After the privacy change I don't trust Google for anything more than a spamdump (and for public forums such as this) and Hotmail I just can't stand, so as long as he keeps Yahoo strong enough I can keep my Yahoo mail frankly i don't give a shit if his resume says he can fart diamonds. Hell he can't be any worse than some of their previous CEOs.
It depends on WHEN he lied. If he lied 30 yrs ago to get him on the path to becoming CEO then hang him. However, he made it to CEO of Paypal and Yahoo and decided "Ya know, I'm going to say I have a few degrees I don't really have" then WHO CARES? He's already CEO, once you're CEO it doesn't matter.
But then these guys can mostly just dig up the land between their buildings and lay cables, which will give higher capacity and more reliability (one of the universities has an issue because one of their buildings is separated from the rest by a public road... they might benefit from this).
You could spend $50 a lot of times vs digging up land between buildings and laying cables, so if capacity and reliability is a problem, just buy 10x for greater capacity and reliability, or even 100x would probably still be cheaper than digging and laying cables.
First, there's Mondo Spider. The same guys are also working on Titanoboa, which is a ridable robot snake.
And both of those are electric. No propane forklift engines, which makes them much quieter.
or, more importantly, Mondo Spider exists. So far "Stompy" is just a computer rendering. Article is kind of pointless, what is the point of telling everyone every little project you plan on working on? They're not even half way done, nothing exists at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Also he solved it without mooching off a company for 2 months (and still having nothing to show for it) or asking for $500,000! No $$$$ up front and he still brought results! This 16 yr old will go far, I would happily donate to this kid's next .... whatever he wants to do, since he's already earned it in my opinion.
There are two things impressive about this. One is the fact that you mention, that the kid did not give up until he had the solution and was smart enough to solve a problem that stumped every mathemetician for 350 years. The second is that people still try to solve difficult analytic problems at all instead of just turning it into a computing problem.
I don't know which surprises me more.
^^^^ This.
I think the most impressive part is that even though we hear all the time about "X-teen year old invents BLAH" we're like "Great!" but secretly think "BIG Deal! Who can't invent something? How is that challenging, really? Oh look their dad's an electrical engineer that works at XYZ... hmmmm....." but this 16-year-old actually solved something that the best mathematicians on Earth haven't been able to solve for 350 years.
Major kudos kid! Only way that can be topped is if a teen cures cancer, aids or doubles productive lifespan.
Did anyone even bother to check the date of this so called news? The photo thread shows May 2010 as the posting date.
Some of the photos in that thread are even 7-8 years old. The one about Pilot Helmet (post #21) show the defense minister of Iran in 10 years ago!!!
Considering this news is 2-10 yrs old, and instead of actually creating a superior product they ripped off a very old but already well-known product, probably means these helicopters aren't that great.
I mean while the US was making the Cobra Russia was making the Mil Mi-24 (aka Hind... or "the helicopter from Rambo") and later the Mil Mi-28. Very different designs from the US Cobra, with their own strengths and weaknesses.
These Iran Cobras are like having a Lamborghini replica: looks good in photos, but in action it's obviously not the real thing.
Do not buy a consumer laptop, make sure you shop around in the Business/Small Business areas of leading manufacturers (HP, Lenovo, Dell).
that's 90% good advice, but that's not a guarantee.
Having recently bought a laptop sight-unseen, using internet only, I know how the poster feels.
Basically, I relied on reviews, usually consumer reviews like on Amazon, and ignore the +5 or +1 because +5 means nothing since it means they loved everything and +1 means they absolutely hated everything about it so neither of those two reviews will tell you anything useful. Read the +2 thru +4 reviews, those tell the most, those people put more thought into the review because they liked some things and hated others.
Then google the cpu to find whatever the PassMark rating is. With so many ghz and cores and optimizations you can't just say "1.4ghz slower than 1.6ghz" anymore, and PassMark has been, IMHO, about the only benchmark program that does a decent job distinguishing which CPU is faster. Don't get hung up on a number though, a 2,000 PassMark score won't be much faster than a 1,900 score, but 3,000 will feel faster than that 1,900.
But in all honesty nothing replaces just going to the store and buying one. Really nothing is horrible now in terms of speed, but there's a huge difference in keyboards, screen flex, durability, "cheapness", touchpad, etc. My sister bought a ~$350 Walmart laptop without me and the case is so cheap you can press on the palm rest and it will sink in like it's made of pre-formed packaging plastic (google led me to blister pack plastic). I'm shocked, really, at how poor a $350 laptop was built. It works fine, but it just feels like it'd break at any moment.
My ultimate advice: go to the store and play with the laptops and find one that seems solid and go online and see if you can find that model for less. That's the only way you'll be sure you get one made well, because all the reviews and cpu benchmarks in the world won't tell you how cheap or solid it feels.
Also, I'd like to point out that if a startup needs 500k to keep the idea going then it's probably not a good startup idea. He got 20k and.... what? How well did he do with that 20k? Seems like it went no where, article said nothing about how much $$$ he made with that 20k. Yes, silicon valley = expensive, so move back to Iowa or Nebraska or where ever to make that 20k last. 20k is more than most startups get to start with, most start in a parents basement or garage or dorm room and either make millions or vanish, he got 20k and it's gone, then he got 50k and now wants 500k? Take what you have and make something with it, don't keep begging other people to throw money at your pit hoping someone else will fill that pit for you.
Startups these days.... shesh, think people should just toss money at them because they have an idea. You got the money, now show us the profit. Sink or swim.
i'm sorry, maybe i'm just being negative, but by the end it sounded like an advertisement:
Ad one:
"Simons said he was able to score $50,000 in seed funding from Ulu Ventures and Silicon Valley VC Paul Sherer."
Now Ulu Ventures and Paul Sherer is someone thanks to this CNET article.
Ad two:
"Now, Simons said, he's looking to raise an additional $500,000."
Yep there it is. "I slept on a couch in AOL, can i get $500,000?"
And just in case you missed it, his startup name, ClassConnect, is mentioned 6 times in the article. 6. When really, it didn't need to be mentioned at all, the story is about the kid hiding in AOL, not about his startup. It's even in the topic tags at the bottom.
Someone's profiting from this, besides the kid. Writer obviously, probably several others.
He filed a notice using the tools given to him, GoDaddy are the ones that overreact to DMCA notices.
Would you rather he went straight to a copyright infringement lawsuit? He could have done that. Then the first notice she would have gotten was, 'hi, I'm suing you for using my pictures commercially, see you in court'.
tools given to me is a shotgun, should i shoot my neighbors for the loud music? No? Call the police you say? Ask them to turn it down? Naw, nuke from orbit, i wont say anything just rip them apart.
Suing is waaaay better. Site stays up, court decides, pay a judgement and you're done. As a website owner I would MUCH rather fight in court than watch the site go down for even a day.
ripping a business website off the internet is probably the worse thing you can do to a online business, hence nuke from orbit.
I'm incredibly shocked the entire internet hasn't turned on this asshole and post every photo he's ever taken all over every website on earth. Screw this prick.
People were using his photo on commercial websites. What is the problem?
so email them. Ask them to pay or remove or else. The guy jumped (to conclusions) all the way to or else. Maybe some designer used the photo. Maybe they didn't know. Maybe they got it from another site and didn't know who owned it. Image doesn't say copyright on it. Maybe they're evil and stole the photo. Still email them first, maybe they're nice.
/. start supporting abuse of DMCA take-down notices? Thought we hate DMCA notices, and really hated people that abused the system.
And when did
Its a story about some nobody who got upset because he published his photograph on the internet and someone else used it. boo fucking hoo.
This is right!
/. story did not read the article. I was thinking oh, he was probably selling some photos online and someone stole them, and he tried to email them and ask them to remove the photo but websites were being douches.
/. because I quoted his blog.
Clearly whoever posted this
Nothing could be further from the truth:
"setup my camera gear and took this photo. And as I tend to do, I posted it to my blog to show it off. No big deal. I liked the photo I took of the city I love and I wanted to share it."
This is NOT a photo he was selling and making money off of or paid models/actors to be in, he just took photo of the city and put it on his blog. That's great... took a photo, put on blog... that's nice....
"I tried searching to see if this photo might be being used without my permission and was pretty stunned to learn the results.... this did not sit with me too well so I contemplated my options. I decided to file a formal Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down notice with the providers of any site I found using my image without permission..... in less than a day, the site was down."
W......T..............F.............. "I found a mouse in my house so i contemplated my options. I decided to nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure."
How crazy do you have to be to file DMCA take-down notices with the website providers over your blog photo as your FIRST option? No attempt to email, no attempt to resolve situation or extort money, just pull down their website! This photographer is clearly a nut case!
I hope he doesn't issue a DMCA to
You may want to check your math... at $0.01/GB, a 1TB drive would be $10... and I'm still not seeing them cheaper than $70 on sale.
You're right, meant less than 10 cent/GB.
I really don't see the cost of SSD's dropping to 1/10th of their current price (the price point at which they're comparable to hard disks) in 7 months. 7 years is much more likely when you consider hard drives are also getting larger and cheaper at the same time.
Very few people need 4TB, the current largest hard drive. I'd argue most people are happy with 500gb. With SSDs less than $1/gb now, down from $4/gb just 2 years ago, 500gb SSDs will be somewhere south of $200 by the end of 2012 or early 2013. You can already buy a 240gb SSD for $190.
Oh, there's also the fact that cheaper SSDs still seem to have a relatively poor MTBF and don't deliver the performance gains that most people associate with SSDs... have to pay a bit more for a *good* SSD
That's not really a fact though, that "cheap PC hardware price = poor performance and poor MTBF", that's your opinion.
Haven't they been saying that for a few decades now? Rotational media will be around for a long time to come, barring any real shattering breakthroughs in solid state media. Some markets, such as laptops and workstations which value speed over capacity, will likely transition to SSDs being the norm within the next 5 years or so, but when you need a lot of storage you'll still turn to hard drives for at least another decade or two. Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
SSDs have already surpassed hard drives in capacity, with 16TB being offered on a single SSD. SSDs are less than $1 a gigabyte. True, much more than hard drives, but 11 years ago when hard drives were $3 a gigabyte and 7 years ago hard drives were 50 cents/gb. Now hard drives are less than 1 cent a gigabyte, so how long do you think it will take SSDs to get there?
SSDs have the huge advantage that everyone wants them. Every device needs fast access and transfer rates with low power usage in as small a space as possible. More devices means more sales means lower prices as they ramp up production. I have a feeling that by the end of 2012 people won't even be considering a hard drive in a PC anymore, everyone will just buy SSDs.
Hard drives will never win the capacity war, not when they can currently put 64 gigabytes on a space smaller than your fingernail and that includes the memory controller and case.
Most articles I've seen indicate that rotational storage (and existing flash-based SSDs) will be replaced within 2 years by memristor-based storage or similar non-rotational, non-flash storage. It makes no sense for hard drive manufacturers to "race to the bottom" when they've already consolidated into 2 major manufacturers and sales have such a short term outlook.
This. Hard drives are dead. SSDs are less than $1 a gigabyte. Down from $4 a gigabyte just 2 years ago. At the rate SSDs are dropping in price why even consider a hard drive when you can buy now for $1/gb or wait a few months until it's 50 cents/gb or another year until it's 10 cents/gb? Few hundred gigabytes is more than enough for the average user.
Good-bye rotational media, I will not miss your slow access times.
Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. [techdigest.tv] 4tb came out Oct 2011. [storagereview.com] Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale. You're making the flawed assumption that current PRM technology can continue at that pace and that HAMR will not be a disruptive technology resulting in a "bump" in the density. HAMR will be a bump in density just like PRM was only a bump in density over the older recording methods.
You're exactly right: perpendicular recording (PRM) was a bump in recording methods. Before perpendicular recording the largest hard drive was 400gb and perpendicular recording did exactly what slashdot predicted, offer 10x the storage, with 4tb hard drives now available only 7 years after PRM came out in 2005.
But it took 10 full years to reach that 10x prediction, and hard drive capacity has been increasing at the same exponential growth for 30 years. What they're calling for is a huge leap, 15x the storage in 4 years, from 4tb to 60tb, and that's just not going to happen.
I would predict 10-20tb, but I'm not sure anyone will care since we'll all be using multiple terabyte SSDs by 2016 anyway, they're increasing at a much faster growth rate than hard drives and who wants to wait milliseconds to transfer date at mBps when you can wait nanoseconds to transfer at gBps? Hard drives will be almost as useful in 2016 as tape drives are in 2012.
For example take microSD cards, they're at 64gb now. 100 of those would be 55mm by 15mm by 20mm = 16,500 mm3, much smaller than a 3.5" hard drive at 101.6 mm × 25.4 mm × 146 mm = 368,650 mm3, yet a hundred 64gb microSD cards would provide 6.4tb of storage, far more than any hard drive and it could fit in a cellphone and weigh only 50grams (0.1 lbs) compared to the 1.5 lbs a hard drive weighs. Of course at $87 each that would be almost $9,000, but flash memory prices are dropping faster than any other technology related item so I have no doubt that $9k will be ~$200 within a few years.
I actually know one person that is pretty much like you though, he lives in a very rural area just on the border of ADSL services. Over his copper line it's probably not ever going to go faster, and the chances of an upgrade is slim. But he's the one exception to everyone else...
I'm sorry I should have said I'm in the US, in a city of 5+ million. It's very common in the US to have "slow" internet speeds (10-15mbps), probably because the country is so large and urban sprawl. They do offer 3x faster speeds but the cost is also 3x more than what I'm currently paying, and like I said I'm paying the same amount now as I was 10 yrs ago and my speeds have not increased at all in 10 years despite the significant drop in bandwidth costs during that period.
If 4TB is the biggest drive you can get today, wouldn't densities have to increase by 15x to get to 60TB drives by 2016, not just "more than double"
Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. 4tb came out Oct 2011. Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale. And for anyone wondering the answer is yes, the 4tb drives already use five platters, 800gb each, so they can't shove more platters in there to double capacity currently, they have to significantly increase areal density.
But while storage continues to increase, the types of media we store is not increasing in size. HD Video is probably the most common space hog on any personal computer at 25 to 40 mbit per second of video, about 11 to 18gb per hour, but once we have hundreds of terabytes what do we need more space for? For higher high definition video? At some point even video quality will surpass what the human eye can distinguish, especially from across the room.
And once we have hundreds of terabytes how do we fill the drive? Most of the content on my PC is downloaded, but internet speeds have not increased drastically over the years, I'm still at the same speed now as I was in 2000 and paying about the same amount.
They're putting the cart before the horse, they're offering us storage for something we don't have to store and that we can't even obtain through current technology.
"I don't recognize any of those names (damn hipster)"
Well, first, I ain't no hipster.
*swoosh*
They're also not laptops, they're desktops with screens attached. They're not portable, their battery doesn't last. I'm guessing that if the guy can't manage to carry a USB keyboard around, he also can't have a 3 ton brick as a "laptop".
Um... yeah....I'm going to have to disagree with you there.... just because it's heavy (this model is 12 lbs with a 18" 1080p screen), doesn't mean it's not a laptop, and there's a big difference between carrying around a heavy laptop and carrying around a laptop + extra full-size keyboard.
But then, I found it interesting growing up with Maynard G. Krebs and with the Dharma Bums and Lenny Bruce somewhere on the horizon to years later sitting a table sharing pitchers of beer with G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary.
I don't recognize any of those names (damn hipster)
Reliability is the reason I havent gone SSD yet. Every time I'm about to upgrade I read the reviews on newegg of some guy losing all his data. Guess if it's only for the OS and you clone it nightly that's not a big deal.... actually, that's not a bad idea, a small cheap ssd for the OS so it boots fast, then keep files on reliable hd and make clone of ssd to backup drive so u can still boot if the ssd dies....
Now, I loved my netbook for years, but most educational software is still disc based, and a lot of educational software is a bit bloated and requires a bit of horsepower. When you look at math and graphing tools, the need for power is even more important.
Math and graphing? You do realize that a TI-89 has 16mhz and 256 kbyte RAM, right?. I think any modern CPU can handle math and graphing.
Honestly the laptops they sell now are far more powerful than what we need 99% of the time since all most people want is a browser.
that's around $234 a piece, for that amount you can get a netbook with better specs compared to olpc
I thought the same thing, but they have a program where the children learn how to replace motherboards and LCDs in the olpc.. Can't do that with a dell netbook, and I'm sure the kids appreciate them more when they realize they'll have to replace the screen themselves if they slam it against a wall. Besides an olpc is a bit more robust than a walmart netbook, I'd compare it more to a toughbook then a normal netbook and you can't buy a new toughbook for anywhere near $200
It has already happened. Kickstarter isn't the first incarnation of the concept. Its ideological predecessor, fundable.org, went defunct due to credit card scammers using it to launder money / little success in wrapping people's heads around the concept (even though it was essentially the same as Kickstarter).
Kickstarter already burst, but the failed projects get no press. Great example: Disapora.
Someone actually called Diaspora a Facebook competitor way back in 2010. And..... nothing. 180,000 users as of November 2011, not exactly a facebook competitor. And Dispora received $200,000 in June 2010, over 20 times their $10,000 goal. That's a lot of money that could have gone to real startups with a real future, not some pie-in-the-sky facebook killer. If they couldn't get it done with $200,000, what would they have done with $10,000? Nothing at all? "Our Promise. We promise to you that Diaspora will be aGPL software which will released at the end of the summer."
And according to Kickstarter's TOS they're responsible for nothing. If the company you invested in uses the money for blow and hookers, you're out of luck.
Why? Because they have so many other candidates lining up for the job? as someone who uses yahoo Services frankly I don't care if he said his mama was a snowblower on his resume as long as he does his job and keeps Yahoo afloat. After the privacy change I don't trust Google for anything more than a spamdump (and for public forums such as this) and Hotmail I just can't stand, so as long as he keeps Yahoo strong enough I can keep my Yahoo mail frankly i don't give a shit if his resume says he can fart diamonds. Hell he can't be any worse than some of their previous CEOs.
It depends on WHEN he lied. If he lied 30 yrs ago to get him on the path to becoming CEO then hang him. However, he made it to CEO of Paypal and Yahoo and decided "Ya know, I'm going to say I have a few degrees I don't really have" then WHO CARES? He's already CEO, once you're CEO it doesn't matter.
But then these guys can mostly just dig up the land between their buildings and lay cables, which will give higher capacity and more reliability (one of the universities has an issue because one of their buildings is separated from the rest by a public road... they might benefit from this).
You could spend $50 a lot of times vs digging up land between buildings and laying cables, so if capacity and reliability is a problem, just buy 10x for greater capacity and reliability, or even 100x would probably still be cheaper than digging and laying cables.
First, there's Mondo Spider. The same guys are also working on Titanoboa, which is a ridable robot snake.
And both of those are electric. No propane forklift engines, which makes them much quieter.
or, more importantly, Mondo Spider exists. So far "Stompy" is just a computer rendering. Article is kind of pointless, what is the point of telling everyone every little project you plan on working on? They're not even half way done, nothing exists at all.
In the spirit of the nonexistent Stompy here's the rocket ship I'm building to travel to Mars