I thought the same thing. Flash memory or whatever replaces it will be much farther along in ten years. Dell is already offering a flash memory hard drive for laptops. Low power consumption, no latency, and less heat. Unless this vaporware is faster, better and cheaper it will die in the laboratory.
In 2002 I bought a high end digital camera. 128MB flash memory cards were about half the price of 256MB and I think the 512MB had just come out and were very expensive. Five years later 2GB flash memory cards are often on clearance sales for less than half of what I originally paid for my pair of 128's.
Non mechanical storage has the potential to change the shape of laptops as well. A flash based system does not have to conform to the form factor of a conventional hard drive. I'm sure they will at least for now for compatibility but someday that form factor constraint will follow ISA into oblivion.
There are several companies that make solid state flash based hard drives in both 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors. I wonder if a server would benefit from a pair of these used for system and paging files.
Fundamental discoveries are made by accident.
One of the best examples of this was Michaelson and Morley's interferometer that they used to measure the speed of light in different directions. A well designed experiment that very accurately measured the speed of light. The experiment objective was to determine the direction through which earth was passing though the "ether", at the time a theoretical media that supported the wave propagation of light. As such the experiment failed because the speed of light was the same regardless of the orientation of the interferometer.
A few years later Einstein re-interpreted the results and declared that there was no ether and that the speed of light was a constant. There was nothing wrong with the original experiment, just the interpretation of the result. It was a discovery that changed our understanding of the universe.
Years ago I opened a fortune cookie that said "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." The universe was telling me to look for a learning opportunities whenever I didn't get an expected result.
I signed up for Vonage in January 2005. The Vonage enabled Linksys router/firewall worked fine when I plugged it in and everything worked fine except for the occasional dropped call. The frequency of dropped calls was less than cell phone service and the audio quality was much better than typical cell phone service. Service remained good until late 2005 and became increasingly worse in the first months of 2006. More frequent dropped calls, chronic audio cutout and distortion made the service nearly unusable. I once had to listen to the outgoing message on a colleagues voice mail four times just to get the number where I could reach him. I spent about two hours on the phone with Vonage a month ago regarding these problems. They claimed to have changed some settings. I did not see any immediate change after this call but my impression is that the service has improved from nearly unusable to barely usable. I found it curious that Vonage thinks so poorly of their own customer service that they registered http://www.vonagesucks.com/ but didn't rub enough braincells together to register http://www.vonageblows.com./
Wallwart DC transformers waste more power than appliances on standby. Wallwarts are manufactured as cheaply as possible. The cheap solution is a magnetic core saturation circuit which leaves the transformer drawing max current regardless of output. There's a dozen or so wallwarts in my place drawing about 20 watts each.
California *already* taxes drivers by the mile. Every time we fill up our tank we pay a state and federal tax per gallon plus California sales tax on top of all of it. Gas guzzlers already pay more because they have to fill up frequently, people who drive more already pay more. This GPS proposal is just another way for the state to get into our wallets. The state could raise all the road maintenance cash they needed by increasing the per gallon tax on gas.
The presence of a simple solution that is already implemented compared to a complicated solution requiring deployment of new gadgets just screams hidden agendas. The proposal would require a new gadget for each car. Who makes these? Are they related to some politician in Sacramento? An infrastructure to interface with the gadgets would be needed. Is this provided by the same vendor or will the bread be buttered evenly? A new bureaucracy to administrate all of the gadgets and interfaces would have to be created. This would no doubt be run by a political appointee. It all reeks of cronyism and the good ole boys network.
The privacy implications cannot be overstated. A GPS device could track every movement you make, how fast you drive (Imagine getting speeding tickets based on data downloaded from a GPS unit in your car.) Where you've been, and who else was in the same location while you were there. The potential for abuse is massive.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
Many of us have already switched over to compact florescent lights and flt panel displays are on the way in. I don't see CRT's as the primary cause of energy waste. The problem I see is the plethora of wall wart transformers plugged into the powerstrips. Each one uses magnetic core saturation to limit the output and draws its max current regardless of the output. This is why they're always warm to the touch even when they power is turned off. I counted mine awhile back and came up with a dozen all pulling 15 to 25 watts. I would like to see the electronics industry would adopt a uniform DC voltage standard that could be built into powerstrips using a more efficient DC power supply. I have seen some do it yourself projects that eliminated several wall warts and reduced power consumption by an estimated 200 watts. Do something comparable in in a few million homes and the savings would be substantial.
After reading about the helium cooled pebble bed reactor I cannot get too excited about a reactor design with a steam generator.
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I thought the same thing. Flash memory or whatever replaces it will be much farther along in ten years. Dell is already offering a flash memory hard drive for laptops. Low power consumption, no latency, and less heat. Unless this vaporware is faster, better and cheaper it will die in the laboratory. In 2002 I bought a high end digital camera. 128MB flash memory cards were about half the price of 256MB and I think the 512MB had just come out and were very expensive. Five years later 2GB flash memory cards are often on clearance sales for less than half of what I originally paid for my pair of 128's. Non mechanical storage has the potential to change the shape of laptops as well. A flash based system does not have to conform to the form factor of a conventional hard drive. I'm sure they will at least for now for compatibility but someday that form factor constraint will follow ISA into oblivion. There are several companies that make solid state flash based hard drives in both 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors. I wonder if a server would benefit from a pair of these used for system and paging files.
Fundamental discoveries are made by accident. One of the best examples of this was Michaelson and Morley's interferometer that they used to measure the speed of light in different directions. A well designed experiment that very accurately measured the speed of light. The experiment objective was to determine the direction through which earth was passing though the "ether", at the time a theoretical media that supported the wave propagation of light. As such the experiment failed because the speed of light was the same regardless of the orientation of the interferometer. A few years later Einstein re-interpreted the results and declared that there was no ether and that the speed of light was a constant. There was nothing wrong with the original experiment, just the interpretation of the result. It was a discovery that changed our understanding of the universe. Years ago I opened a fortune cookie that said "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." The universe was telling me to look for a learning opportunities whenever I didn't get an expected result.
I signed up for Vonage in January 2005. The Vonage enabled Linksys router/firewall worked fine when I plugged it in and everything worked fine except for the occasional dropped call. The frequency of dropped calls was less than cell phone service and the audio quality was much better than typical cell phone service. Service remained good until late 2005 and became increasingly worse in the first months of 2006. More frequent dropped calls, chronic audio cutout and distortion made the service nearly unusable. I once had to listen to the outgoing message on a colleagues voice mail four times just to get the number where I could reach him. I spent about two hours on the phone with Vonage a month ago regarding these problems. They claimed to have changed some settings. I did not see any immediate change after this call but my impression is that the service has improved from nearly unusable to barely usable. I found it curious that Vonage thinks so poorly of their own customer service that they registered http://www.vonagesucks.com/ but didn't rub enough braincells together to register http://www.vonageblows.com./
Wallwart DC transformers waste more power than appliances on standby. Wallwarts are manufactured as cheaply as possible. The cheap solution is a magnetic core saturation circuit which leaves the transformer drawing max current regardless of output. There's a dozen or so wallwarts in my place drawing about 20 watts each.
California *already* taxes drivers by the mile. Every time we fill up our tank we pay a state and federal tax per gallon plus California sales tax on top of all of it. Gas guzzlers already pay more because they have to fill up frequently, people who drive more already pay more. This GPS proposal is just another way for the state to get into our wallets. The state could raise all the road maintenance cash they needed by increasing the per gallon tax on gas. The presence of a simple solution that is already implemented compared to a complicated solution requiring deployment of new gadgets just screams hidden agendas. The proposal would require a new gadget for each car. Who makes these? Are they related to some politician in Sacramento? An infrastructure to interface with the gadgets would be needed. Is this provided by the same vendor or will the bread be buttered evenly? A new bureaucracy to administrate all of the gadgets and interfaces would have to be created. This would no doubt be run by a political appointee. It all reeks of cronyism and the good ole boys network. The privacy implications cannot be overstated. A GPS device could track every movement you make, how fast you drive (Imagine getting speeding tickets based on data downloaded from a GPS unit in your car.) Where you've been, and who else was in the same location while you were there. The potential for abuse is massive.
Many of us have already switched over to compact florescent lights and flt panel displays are on the way in. I don't see CRT's as the primary cause of energy waste. The problem I see is the plethora of wall wart transformers plugged into the powerstrips. Each one uses magnetic core saturation to limit the output and draws its max current regardless of the output. This is why they're always warm to the touch even when they power is turned off. I counted mine awhile back and came up with a dozen all pulling 15 to 25 watts. I would like to see the electronics industry would adopt a uniform DC voltage standard that could be built into powerstrips using a more efficient DC power supply. I have seen some do it yourself projects that eliminated several wall warts and reduced power consumption by an estimated 200 watts. Do something comparable in in a few million homes and the savings would be substantial. After reading about the helium cooled pebble bed reactor I cannot get too excited about a reactor design with a steam generator.