The real platform for cutting edge games is Facebook - it's ubiquitous, the games are designed to be viral and addictive (and in some cases, actually fun, though that doesn't seem to be a requirement), they mostly run on PCs but increasingly also work on mobile phones, and either they're freemium or cheap.
Your friend Bob's Zombie has just become Godfather!
Roger has just sent you a Shrubbery!
No, I'm not the target market, but it seems to be pervasive and growing, assuming that either Google+ doesn't kill Facebook and/or the games migrate to Google+.
One of the magic phrases in your note was "and that all precincts had enough resources". The new electronic voting machines were complex and had lots of parts that you needed, and some precincts didn't get all the parts, or enough of them to run all their machines, and ended up opening late with two-hour lines out the door on a rainy election day. (I think this was Columbus, but might have been Cincinnati; it's been a while since I saw the movie that documented it.) Surprisingly, this did not happen in the mostly-white suburban precincts that were likely to vote Republican, it happened in the black urban precincts which were likely to vote Democrat, and where people were more likely to have jobs where they had to go to work instead of professional flex-time jobs, so a 2-hour wait meant they couldn't vote. The movie that documented it showed one precinct where they were only able to open because there was a local city council woman who came to the precinct and started making lots of phone calls to get the election people to show up.
MITMing the reporting and generating fake votes were theoretically possible, but this was an Offense In Depth strategy.
Yes, there's lots of politics going on, and there's lots of money with BSkyB, but there's also a Dead Kid, and a sleazy newspaper doing sleazy things to sell papers with a Dead Kid story, and other newspapers selling stories about Murdoch's papers interfering with the murder investigation over a dead kid by hacking her voicemail. It's really beyond the pale, even for Murdoch.
No, being a stable storage of value is one of them. If supply and demand don't change, the price won't be changing. Changing the amount of money in the system is like redefining the inch. If the money supply remains constant, instead of expanding, a contract to pay $100 will be a contract to pay $100 from your pocket, doesn't matter what year you got them.
Also, the Debt Ceiling compromise is going to be a mess, and one obvious thing Obama can do besides raising taxes and cutting spending is to sell assets - he's been drawing down on the Strategic Oil Reserve already, mostly to manipulate gasoline prices, but he could always go sell all the gold in Ft. Knox just to annoy Ron Paul:-)
On the other hand, just because I don't think expanding the money supply is a good idea, that doesn't mean it hasn't already happened to such an extent that we can actually get the US back onto the gold standard, given the amount of economic activity, the amount of gold in the world, the amount of real money, and the amount of fictitious funny money floating around in the financial markets, much less the huge interconnectedness of the world economy that's evolved since we went off the gold standard (which didn't happen because we went off the gold standard, but because protectionist regulation was reduced or eliminated, transportation costs dropped significantly, and lots of economic activity happened.)
Gold is a commodity, and it has functional as well as speculative value, gold ownership is spread very unevenly around the economy between commodity users, speculators, and jewelry, and I'd be extremely surprised if the government could pick a gold price and suddenly declare "We're backing US dollars with gold at $X/oz and we'll buy whatever we need with the existing dollars to make that work" without radically twisting the market in ways that don't make economic sense.
Ron Paul, with all due respect, hasn't really been paying much attention to the changes in the world economy over the last couple of decades. Yes, we could possibly have gone back to the gold standard in the early 1980s (after the Hunt Bros attempt to corner the markets during the ~1980 gold price bubble was over with.) But that was three decades ago, and you can't get back there again.
Expanding the money supply isn't necessary for economic growth - what happens instead is that as the economy grows, prices of everything fall, which is a reasonable response to having more stuff around for people to buy. This is mostly good. It means that you can save money and it'll be worth more to you in the future. On the other hand, it means that if you borrow money, it's effectively going to cost you more to pay it back, which is a problem if you want to take financial risks (like starting/expanding a business), and you might be more inclined to rent a house from a landlord than to borrow money to buy one yourself.
Also, "expanding the money supply" means that the government effectively prints paper money and says "you have to accept this as payment on stuff", without them having done actual work to create more stuff in the economy. Why should they be allowed to do that? How do you keep them from doing it to excess, e.g. Weimar Germany where you needed wheelbarrows full of currency to buy bread, or Zimbabwe which has dropped at least 30 zeroes off their currency, leaving what a friend of mine called "homeopathic quantities of money"?
You're mixing up Ron Paul supporters with Rush Limbaugh / Fox Noise supporters. Please don't. Free Markets and Republican political capitalism are much different things, and free marketers don't think ignorant insulting sloganeering is a good way to convince people to agree with you.
Yes, we know Bernie, and people who like Ron Paul have generally paid enough attention to like Bernie Sanders even though we disagree with him on a lot of issues. He's a Socialist who's actually in favor of Socialism, using government resources to do good things for people, as opposed to somebody who likes big powerful intrusive government because they like power and can use their power to support their friends (we call most of those people "Republicans" and some of them "Democrats".) Sure, it's not economically sustainable, but the system we've got now tries to emulate many of the bad aspects of socialism and not the good ones.
If you've noticed, and you apparently haven't, Ron Paul disagrees with most of Congress a lot, but when there are a couple of other people agreeing with him on something, it's usually Bernie or Dennis Kucinich. Occasionally it'll be a Tea Party Republican, but only if it's a fairly specific economic issue, and usually those guys would rather vote with the Party Machine or bully the Party Machine into doing what they want.
There's certainly room in the Marketplace of Ideas for namespaces that work in ways other than hierarchies controlled by the Trademark Gods. Also, DNS is both a namespace and a delivery system for that namespace runnning on a distributed set of name servers - it's possible to run the delivery system of DNS in many different ways, and in fact we've seen a transition of most of the upper levels from conventionally-routed IP to anycast, and a wide range of different kinds of servers people use for their subdomains.
But DNS can still assimilate those namespaces into subdomains, so you end up with example.com.torrentfreak.com and 432423542345652423423deadbeef32142.namecoin.com and so on.
Yes, it did have to be said. That's what top-down hierarchical naming systems are for, and why they work, in spite of early arguments like Pike&Weinberger's The Hideous Name article on Plan9's locally-based namespace, and Peter Honeyman's pathalias work that made uucp bang-paths much more scalable back when we used those, and my general anarchist ranting about not wanting to let some bunch of bureaucrats decide what I'm going to call my computers. ISPs do mostly know that multiple namespaces break things - that's why NXDOMAIN pages only get used when there's No Such Domain, and the ISPs who do that usually implement it in a way that breaks applications other than http-port-80 and maybe smtp-port-25 and they don't care.
Another reason that you can't have multiple DNS trees is that DNS contains a mechanism for fixing that - if you've got your DNS tree with aaa.example.com and Eugene has his aaa.example.com, you can both be replaced by a very small shell script that turns yours into aaa.example.com.smallpond.altroots.net and his into aaa.example.com.kashpureff.altroots.net, and suddenly you've been assimilated and there's just one namespace again.
Users want namespaces that point them to the correct place, so that somebody can say "I'm at thisdomain.com" and anybody in the world can use it, and "users" includes both the owners of the name and people using that name to retrieve content. Otherwise we need to use namespace assimilation (if we want to keep DNS syntax) or start bang-pathing everything (if we'd rather use mixed syntaxes.)
None of that means that the DNS Root should be owned by ICANN, who are a conspiracy of lizard-like aliens here to steal our water and almost totally under the control of the Trademark Gods, but breaking that requires you to defeat them all in single combat. Good luck with that (and I say that in all sincerity, but you aren't going to succeed, because they've got way more money and clout than you're going to have.)
I'll be amused to see your business model and your adoption rate, and your plan for making it useful for some people before convincing everybody in the world to adopt it, and your plan for dealing with privacy and spam and identity theft and spam and with people who have multiple email addresses and multiple phones and one-use email addresses to avoid spammers, and....
And if you do manage to sell any significant number of users on wanting it, somebody's quickly going to decide to create the domain iids.com, so you'd get the domain name hantart.iids.com and user abc1234 will get the domain name abc1234.iids.com, and now you're back inside DNS.
Meanwhile, if you're giving out names, I'm Number6.
The RTO furniture market has a reputation for being a ripoff, preying on poor people. That's a lot different from the musical instrument market that's supporting school band instruments.
While it's certainly not universal yet, more and more hotel rooms have flat-screen digital TVs in them. Get a laptop that can talk to HDMI and VGA, and you should be able to hijack the TV as a second monitor.
Meanwhile, if he's there for six months, yeah, get a second monitor when you arrive. They're down to $100 or so these days - get one for the hotel and one for work.
The meme says "The Goggles, they do nothing!", but there are goggles out there that do something. They're mainly for gamers and for watching TV, and don't have enough resolution for coding (typically TV resolution or 2xTV for 3D.)
The Republicans don't want to raise the debt ceiling. The Democrats do. Since the House of Representatives is controlled by the Republicans, the Democrats need to either offer the Republicans a deal that the party as a whole will accept, or at least offer terms that are good enough that a few dozen Republicans are willing to go against party discipline and vote with them. So far, the Republican Party's suggestions about what they'll accept are roughly along the lines of "We want you to roll back Obamacare, The Great Society, and half the New Deal, plus we want a Balanced Budget Amendment. And a pony."
One of the big problems is that the Tea Party is ideologically committed to balancing the budget - the issue that created them as a movement was the sudden discovery in 2008 that Federal Budget Deficits are Bad, which had not been a problem when George W. Bush was in office and the Republican-controlled Congress had doubled the Federal Debt, but now it was obviously a serious problem. On the other hand, the Party Machine candidates are ideologically committed to not raising taxes, and maintaining the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, and that's mandatory for any deal approved by the party leaders and their corporate sponsors. And the Party Machine doesn't want to risk alienating the Tea Party wing too much, especially when it's easier to play chicken with the Democrats.
One of the two major US political parties hasn't had a balanced budget since the Eisenhower Administration. Neither has the other one, but the Democrats like deficit spending for Keynesian ideological reasons, and the Republicans (except Nixon) pretend they don't.
Ok, your projects are about 50GB each, so you can fit about 20 of them per Terabyte. How many of them do you want to keep? If they're something that you generate 100 of them per day, all year, you're looking at a much different solution than if a project takes you a month to tweak all the pixels lovingly by hand.
For a few Terabytes, just use 3.5" hard disk, make backups, keep one copy offsite. If you want to keep 10 or so TB handy and online, maybe you'll want to do a RAID thing, or maybe you just want JBOD, and 128-256GB of SSD for the project you're working on right now (but you're still copying it to hard disk once it's baked.)
If you want to keep much more than that online, you'll need to think about fancier storage architectures, and more money. You can go with NAS (Network Attached Storage, a bit pricier, not much faster, high-density disks), or you can go with SAN (Storage Area Networks, much more expensive, blazingly fast, very large.) If you're the bureaucrats who run our IT department, you understand how to support SAN at $8000/TB, and don't have a clue how to support NAS at more like $100/TB, which is ok if you want a big blazingly fast database system, and way out of line if you want to keep a lot of log files that will be Write Once, Read Never (well, Hardly Ever.)
I suspect that what they're talking about is the effect of caching data from your disk drives in Flash instead of DRAM, and also letting you swap data out of DRAM into Flash instead of disk. Flash is cheap enough that for typical applications, you can cache most of your active data there, not having to wait for rotating machinery.
Windows 7 is supposed to have some feature that manages this in an intelligent way - so you can speed up your machine for a year or so by adding a $10-20 memory stick. (I'm not running Win7, so I haven't tried it - but my laptop has an SD card slot, which would let me leave a card in there full time, without it sticking out like a USB stick.)
This isn't a boom economy, and while there might be a bubble going on, it's a pretty small one. This is a "gradually crawling out of a hole" kind of recovery, not a "VCs throwing us billions of dollars again" recovery.
It's partly because there are _some_ jobs around, but partly because recruiting companies get paid for finding workers, so they'll call anybody plausible. Being a recruiter is a better job in a good economy than a bad one.
Of course, 9600 baud was really fast back then, and some of them today use 115200 instead. You could crank a Unibus up to 9600 or maybe even 19200 if you had the I/O processor card (KMC?).
The fan in your desktop PC hasn't changed much since then. (It's a lot different from your laptop fan, or the fans in a VAX 11/780.) And the VAX didn't "come with 2MB" of RAM or have a speed of about 1 MIPS. The canonical definition of 1 MIPS was "as fast as a VAX 11/780", and you could get different amounts of RAM; mine had 4MB in two cabinets. Princeton University's Massive Memory Machine Project later had a VAX 11/785 with 128 MB of RAM, so they could experiment with what you could do if you had "enough" memory (128MB wasn't really quite enough, but it was all you could fit in a VAX expanded to 10 cabinets.:-)
> There aren't any easy answers left no matter what billstewart et al. wish to believe.
There are two radically different problems here - what to do to avoid disaster when the US hits the entirely artificial Federal Debt Limit in a month or so, and how to deal with the actual problem of Federal debt, budgets, unfunded pensions and other obligations, and general financial and demographic mess the country is in. Yes, the latter is really really hard, and we not only have to balance the budget, we either have to run it into a major surplus to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund, which was invested in "perfectly safe" T-bills instead of in the market, or shaft the Baby Boomers much earlier than 2036 or whenever it is they're currently (pretending we're ok until) planning to shaft us. But I'm not talking about that problem.
I'm talking about the artificial Debt Limit that we're about to hit, which the President, Congressional Democrats and Republicans are playing partisan chicken games with, threatening that the country will fall into Disaster! Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and Cats Living Together! if the other side doesn't immediately give in, with the primary stakes being political support for the 2012 election. One side has already thrown the spare steering wheel out the window, while the other side's driver is sticking his head out the window making moose-antler faces. At some point in the next month, either they're far stupider than I give them credit for and they'll crash, or they're both going to swerve a bit, just miss each other, and give each other high-fives where they hope most of the audience can't see, and the real question is how far on which side of the road they'll be when they do it. If Obama's extra-clever he can jump out of the car, change his clothes, and he and Geithner can show up as the Keystone Kops and make the Congressional Democrats and Republicans stop the game before they crash.
I think Obama has the advantage here, and if he's good at it he can pin most of the blame for the problem on the Republicans, and if not, he's going to fall really hard, because "It's still the economy, stupid!" and he's let the Republicans frame the debt as his problem, not Bush's. I did miss one other option he can use, which is "Sell the gold in Fort Knox, mostly to annoy Ron Paul, but also to make the Tea Baggers and Republicans take responsibility for their spending." (And you may have noticed that Obama's been quietly selling off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which not only makes gas prices a bit lower but also gets the Treasury some cash, even though, as when GHWBush did it during the First Gulf War, he hasn't timed it for the best profit or market benefit.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ought to be around here somewhere?
The real platform for cutting edge games is Facebook - it's ubiquitous, the games are designed to be viral and addictive (and in some cases, actually fun, though that doesn't seem to be a requirement), they mostly run on PCs but increasingly also work on mobile phones, and either they're freemium or cheap.
Your friend Bob's Zombie has just become Godfather!
Roger has just sent you a Shrubbery!
No, I'm not the target market, but it seems to be pervasive and growing, assuming that either Google+ doesn't kill Facebook and/or the games migrate to Google+.
One of the magic phrases in your note was "and that all precincts had enough resources". The new electronic voting machines were complex and had lots of parts that you needed, and some precincts didn't get all the parts, or enough of them to run all their machines, and ended up opening late with two-hour lines out the door on a rainy election day. (I think this was Columbus, but might have been Cincinnati; it's been a while since I saw the movie that documented it.) Surprisingly, this did not happen in the mostly-white suburban precincts that were likely to vote Republican, it happened in the black urban precincts which were likely to vote Democrat, and where people were more likely to have jobs where they had to go to work instead of professional flex-time jobs, so a 2-hour wait meant they couldn't vote. The movie that documented it showed one precinct where they were only able to open because there was a local city council woman who came to the precinct and started making lots of phone calls to get the election people to show up.
MITMing the reporting and generating fake votes were theoretically possible, but this was an Offense In Depth strategy.
Yes, there's lots of politics going on, and there's lots of money with BSkyB, but there's also a Dead Kid, and a sleazy newspaper doing sleazy things to sell papers with a Dead Kid story, and other newspapers selling stories about Murdoch's papers interfering with the murder investigation over a dead kid by hacking her voicemail. It's really beyond the pale, even for Murdoch.
> Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Absolutely.
No, being a stable storage of value is one of them. If supply and demand don't change, the price won't be changing. Changing the amount of money in the system is like redefining the inch. If the money supply remains constant, instead of expanding, a contract to pay $100 will be a contract to pay $100 from your pocket, doesn't matter what year you got them.
Also, the Debt Ceiling compromise is going to be a mess, and one obvious thing Obama can do besides raising taxes and cutting spending is to sell assets - he's been drawing down on the Strategic Oil Reserve already, mostly to manipulate gasoline prices, but he could always go sell all the gold in Ft. Knox just to annoy Ron Paul :-)
On the other hand, just because I don't think expanding the money supply is a good idea, that doesn't mean it hasn't already happened to such an extent that we can actually get the US back onto the gold standard, given the amount of economic activity, the amount of gold in the world, the amount of real money, and the amount of fictitious funny money floating around in the financial markets, much less the huge interconnectedness of the world economy that's evolved since we went off the gold standard (which didn't happen because we went off the gold standard, but because protectionist regulation was reduced or eliminated, transportation costs dropped significantly, and lots of economic activity happened.)
Gold is a commodity, and it has functional as well as speculative value, gold ownership is spread very unevenly around the economy between commodity users, speculators, and jewelry, and I'd be extremely surprised if the government could pick a gold price and suddenly declare "We're backing US dollars with gold at $X/oz and we'll buy whatever we need with the existing dollars to make that work" without radically twisting the market in ways that don't make economic sense.
Ron Paul, with all due respect, hasn't really been paying much attention to the changes in the world economy over the last couple of decades. Yes, we could possibly have gone back to the gold standard in the early 1980s (after the Hunt Bros attempt to corner the markets during the ~1980 gold price bubble was over with.) But that was three decades ago, and you can't get back there again.
Expanding the money supply isn't necessary for economic growth - what happens instead is that as the economy grows, prices of everything fall, which is a reasonable response to having more stuff around for people to buy. This is mostly good. It means that you can save money and it'll be worth more to you in the future. On the other hand, it means that if you borrow money, it's effectively going to cost you more to pay it back, which is a problem if you want to take financial risks (like starting/expanding a business), and you might be more inclined to rent a house from a landlord than to borrow money to buy one yourself.
Also, "expanding the money supply" means that the government effectively prints paper money and says "you have to accept this as payment on stuff", without them having done actual work to create more stuff in the economy. Why should they be allowed to do that? How do you keep them from doing it to excess, e.g. Weimar Germany where you needed wheelbarrows full of currency to buy bread, or Zimbabwe which has dropped at least 30 zeroes off their currency, leaving what a friend of mine called "homeopathic quantities of money"?
You're mixing up Ron Paul supporters with Rush Limbaugh / Fox Noise supporters. Please don't. Free Markets and Republican political capitalism are much different things, and free marketers don't think ignorant insulting sloganeering is a good way to convince people to agree with you.
Yes, we know Bernie, and people who like Ron Paul have generally paid enough attention to like Bernie Sanders even though we disagree with him on a lot of issues. He's a Socialist who's actually in favor of Socialism, using government resources to do good things for people, as opposed to somebody who likes big powerful intrusive government because they like power and can use their power to support their friends (we call most of those people "Republicans" and some of them "Democrats".) Sure, it's not economically sustainable, but the system we've got now tries to emulate many of the bad aspects of socialism and not the good ones.
If you've noticed, and you apparently haven't, Ron Paul disagrees with most of Congress a lot, but when there are a couple of other people agreeing with him on something, it's usually Bernie or Dennis Kucinich. Occasionally it'll be a Tea Party Republican, but only if it's a fairly specific economic issue, and usually those guys would rather vote with the Party Machine or bully the Party Machine into doing what they want.
There's certainly room in the Marketplace of Ideas for namespaces that work in ways other than hierarchies controlled by the Trademark Gods. Also, DNS is both a namespace and a delivery system for that namespace runnning on a distributed set of name servers - it's possible to run the delivery system of DNS in many different ways, and in fact we've seen a transition of most of the upper levels from conventionally-routed IP to anycast, and a wide range of different kinds of servers people use for their subdomains.
But DNS can still assimilate those namespaces into subdomains, so you end up with example.com.torrentfreak.com and 432423542345652423423deadbeef32142.namecoin.com and so on.
Yes, it did have to be said. That's what top-down hierarchical naming systems are for, and why they work, in spite of early arguments like Pike&Weinberger's The Hideous Name article on Plan9's locally-based namespace, and Peter Honeyman's pathalias work that made uucp bang-paths much more scalable back when we used those, and my general anarchist ranting about not wanting to let some bunch of bureaucrats decide what I'm going to call my computers. ISPs do mostly know that multiple namespaces break things - that's why NXDOMAIN pages only get used when there's No Such Domain, and the ISPs who do that usually implement it in a way that breaks applications other than http-port-80 and maybe smtp-port-25 and they don't care.
Another reason that you can't have multiple DNS trees is that DNS contains a mechanism for fixing that - if you've got your DNS tree with aaa.example.com and Eugene has his aaa.example.com, you can both be replaced by a very small shell script that turns yours into aaa.example.com.smallpond.altroots.net and his into aaa.example.com.kashpureff.altroots.net, and suddenly you've been assimilated and there's just one namespace again.
Users want namespaces that point them to the correct place, so that somebody can say "I'm at thisdomain.com" and anybody in the world can use it, and "users" includes both the owners of the name and people using that name to retrieve content. Otherwise we need to use namespace assimilation (if we want to keep DNS syntax) or start bang-pathing everything (if we'd rather use mixed syntaxes.)
None of that means that the DNS Root should be owned by ICANN, who are a conspiracy of lizard-like aliens here to steal our water and almost totally under the control of the Trademark Gods, but breaking that requires you to defeat them all in single combat. Good luck with that (and I say that in all sincerity, but you aren't going to succeed, because they've got way more money and clout than you're going to have.)
I'll be amused to see your business model and your adoption rate, and your plan for making it useful for some people before convincing everybody in the world to adopt it, and your plan for dealing with privacy and spam and identity theft and spam and with people who have multiple email addresses and multiple phones and one-use email addresses to avoid spammers, and ....
And if you do manage to sell any significant number of users on wanting it, somebody's quickly going to decide to create the domain iids.com, so you'd get the domain name hantart.iids.com and user abc1234 will get the domain name abc1234.iids.com, and now you're back inside DNS.
Meanwhile, if you're giving out names, I'm Number6.
That's not going to help you with the microphone, or when you're actually using the webcam, but it's a start.
The RTO furniture market has a reputation for being a ripoff, preying on poor people. That's a lot different from the musical instrument market that's supporting school band instruments.
While it's certainly not universal yet, more and more hotel rooms have flat-screen digital TVs in them. Get a laptop that can talk to HDMI and VGA, and you should be able to hijack the TV as a second monitor.
Meanwhile, if he's there for six months, yeah, get a second monitor when you arrive. They're down to $100 or so these days - get one for the hotel and one for work.
The meme says "The Goggles, they do nothing!", but there are goggles out there that do something. They're mainly for gamers and for watching TV, and don't have enough resolution for coding (typically TV resolution or 2xTV for 3D.)
The Republicans don't want to raise the debt ceiling. The Democrats do. Since the House of Representatives is controlled by the Republicans, the Democrats need to either offer the Republicans a deal that the party as a whole will accept, or at least offer terms that are good enough that a few dozen Republicans are willing to go against party discipline and vote with them. So far, the Republican Party's suggestions about what they'll accept are roughly along the lines of "We want you to roll back Obamacare, The Great Society, and half the New Deal, plus we want a Balanced Budget Amendment. And a pony."
One of the big problems is that the Tea Party is ideologically committed to balancing the budget - the issue that created them as a movement was the sudden discovery in 2008 that Federal Budget Deficits are Bad, which had not been a problem when George W. Bush was in office and the Republican-controlled Congress had doubled the Federal Debt, but now it was obviously a serious problem. On the other hand, the Party Machine candidates are ideologically committed to not raising taxes, and maintaining the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, and that's mandatory for any deal approved by the party leaders and their corporate sponsors. And the Party Machine doesn't want to risk alienating the Tea Party wing too much, especially when it's easier to play chicken with the Democrats.
One of the two major US political parties hasn't had a balanced budget since the Eisenhower Administration. Neither has the other one, but the Democrats like deficit spending for Keynesian ideological reasons, and the Republicans (except Nixon) pretend they don't.
Ok, your projects are about 50GB each, so you can fit about 20 of them per Terabyte. How many of them do you want to keep? If they're something that you generate 100 of them per day, all year, you're looking at a much different solution than if a project takes you a month to tweak all the pixels lovingly by hand.
For a few Terabytes, just use 3.5" hard disk, make backups, keep one copy offsite. If you want to keep 10 or so TB handy and online, maybe you'll want to do a RAID thing, or maybe you just want JBOD, and 128-256GB of SSD for the project you're working on right now (but you're still copying it to hard disk once it's baked.)
If you want to keep much more than that online, you'll need to think about fancier storage architectures, and more money. You can go with NAS (Network Attached Storage, a bit pricier, not much faster, high-density disks), or you can go with SAN (Storage Area Networks, much more expensive, blazingly fast, very large.) If you're the bureaucrats who run our IT department, you understand how to support SAN at $8000/TB, and don't have a clue how to support NAS at more like $100/TB, which is ok if you want a big blazingly fast database system, and way out of line if you want to keep a lot of log files that will be Write Once, Read Never (well, Hardly Ever.)
I suspect that what they're talking about is the effect of caching data from your disk drives in Flash instead of DRAM, and also letting you swap data out of DRAM into Flash instead of disk. Flash is cheap enough that for typical applications, you can cache most of your active data there, not having to wait for rotating machinery.
Windows 7 is supposed to have some feature that manages this in an intelligent way - so you can speed up your machine for a year or so by adding a $10-20 memory stick. (I'm not running Win7, so I haven't tried it - but my laptop has an SD card slot, which would let me leave a card in there full time, without it sticking out like a USB stick.)
This isn't a boom economy, and while there might be a bubble going on, it's a pretty small one. This is a "gradually crawling out of a hole" kind of recovery, not a "VCs throwing us billions of dollars again" recovery.
It's partly because there are _some_ jobs around, but partly because recruiting companies get paid for finding workers, so they'll call anybody plausible. Being a recruiter is a better job in a good economy than a bad one.
Of course, 9600 baud was really fast back then, and some of them today use 115200 instead. You could crank a Unibus up to 9600 or maybe even 19200 if you had the I/O processor card (KMC?).
The fan in your desktop PC hasn't changed much since then. (It's a lot different from your laptop fan, or the fans in a VAX 11/780.) And the VAX didn't "come with 2MB" of RAM or have a speed of about 1 MIPS. The canonical definition of 1 MIPS was "as fast as a VAX 11/780", and you could get different amounts of RAM; mine had 4MB in two cabinets. Princeton University's Massive Memory Machine Project later had a VAX 11/785 with 128 MB of RAM, so they could experiment with what you could do if you had "enough" memory (128MB wasn't really quite enough, but it was all you could fit in a VAX expanded to 10 cabinets. :-)
The real question becomes when will the duct tape have more power than your existing cell phone....
> There aren't any easy answers left no matter what billstewart et al. wish to believe.
There are two radically different problems here - what to do to avoid disaster when the US hits the entirely artificial Federal Debt Limit in a month or so, and how to deal with the actual problem of Federal debt, budgets, unfunded pensions and other obligations, and general financial and demographic mess the country is in. Yes, the latter is really really hard, and we not only have to balance the budget, we either have to run it into a major surplus to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund, which was invested in "perfectly safe" T-bills instead of in the market, or shaft the Baby Boomers much earlier than 2036 or whenever it is they're currently (pretending we're ok until) planning to shaft us. But I'm not talking about that problem.
I'm talking about the artificial Debt Limit that we're about to hit, which the President, Congressional Democrats and Republicans are playing partisan chicken games with, threatening that the country will fall into Disaster! Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and Cats Living Together! if the other side doesn't immediately give in, with the primary stakes being political support for the 2012 election. One side has already thrown the spare steering wheel out the window, while the other side's driver is sticking his head out the window making moose-antler faces. At some point in the next month, either they're far stupider than I give them credit for and they'll crash, or they're both going to swerve a bit, just miss each other, and give each other high-fives where they hope most of the audience can't see, and the real question is how far on which side of the road they'll be when they do it. If Obama's extra-clever he can jump out of the car, change his clothes, and he and Geithner can show up as the Keystone Kops and make the Congressional Democrats and Republicans stop the game before they crash.
I think Obama has the advantage here, and if he's good at it he can pin most of the blame for the problem on the Republicans, and if not, he's going to fall really hard, because "It's still the economy, stupid!" and he's let the Republicans frame the debt as his problem, not Bush's. I did miss one other option he can use, which is "Sell the gold in Fort Knox, mostly to annoy Ron Paul, but also to make the Tea Baggers and Republicans take responsibility for their spending." (And you may have noticed that Obama's been quietly selling off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which not only makes gas prices a bit lower but also gets the Treasury some cash, even though, as when GHWBush did it during the First Gulf War, he hasn't timed it for the best profit or market benefit.)