Ahh, Laser Solidifier. Can I have one? Beats a Deckel FP1, or maybe not?
Category: technology
Democracy is based on people casting a vote. Making the act to vote more complicated than it needs to be is a simply a criminal act against the spirit of Democracy. In developed Democracies you vote by taking a thick pencil and making a cross inside of a circle. That’s it. Since decades. Works always and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s the best way of doing this. In 2000 there was a bit of a stir up in the USA around punch cards, butterfly ballots and hanging chads. The remedy was not to abandon complicated things. It was to add more layers of technology. Which defies logic and furhter dilutes the act of voting. This kind of story is to be expected. Actually the whole vote fraud idea deters people from voting, instead of motivating them. Which means that democracy looses it’s foundation.
If you have any doubts about mal intend around the voting process just look up “Gerrymandering”. But sure the US has all the rights to wage war on the other side of the planet to find WMD, retaliate 911 spread Democracy. I wonder if those painted index fingers were collored diebold. Probably not, since the color would dissapear within seconds in that case.
According to wikipedia it was the first World War that brought the wrist watch into wide use. Only sixty years later people tought that it would be a brilliant idea to have a calculator in your wrist watch. As brilliant as having a PDA or a camera in your cell phone I suppose.
Before the were pocket calculators there were slide rules. I did like them. Thinking about it, I should get one. Or even better: create one with megabytes, megabit etc scales. Having the common technologies like USB2 etc marked. OK, neat, but obsolete in about a year. Still, it would be fun to wip out a slide scale in a meeting when asked how long xyz would take. Actually I am pretty convinced now that I want a slide scale. Good thing my dad tought me how to use one.
In 1962 the DoD came up with a slide scale to compute the impact of nuclear bombs. Somehow I could see Kennedy operating one of these after a brief introduction. Now imagine your job would be to teach George W. Bush to operate and use this device.
The scary part about this is, that both people have the power to push the same button. People then were fast to say that Mr B. had so many great advisors. Those that gave him that darn good intelligence.
The nice people at fxguide were brave enough to record my incoherent ramblings and put them up as a podcast. Luckily Angus Wall and Jeff Heuser were in the same podcast. They added sense and reason and made it so worth listening to.
Surprisingly little attention goes into the fact that most computer installation run 24/7 and use power that needs to be bought. Electricity bills are often perceived like taxes or any other act of god: An expense needed in order to do business. As long the competition get’s hit as well, what’s there to think about?
Well.
The ‘digital negative’ of the movie we just finished was 140 Terrabytes. That got me thinking: what if we would have tried to keep it all online. The installation of those disks would have used 8,750 Watts. Double that for cooling and you would have spent 16,863 US dollar to keep all those spindles spinning for a year. (at 11 cents a KW/h).
That does matter in my book. Since I can never remember anything I thought I would try to come up with a approximation of cost per 1000 Watts. It looks as if realities don’t get bent too much when assuming 80 US$ per 1KW per month, or 1000 US$ per year. Double that if you have to cool the room the machines live in. Which is always the case. The variables here are the efficiency on the cooling and the actual price not being 11cents. Actuall and nominal Wattage might also differ. But close numbers are better than no numbers, or numbers that are so complex to calculate that they never be taken into account.
a quick demo of a multi finger touch interface
Make sure to have alook at the image organisation application he shows around 3:40 before you click away.
There are lots of other TED demo’s online. This is -I believe- the first year that they publish these presentations. Worth the browse.
Many Cellphones have cameras. Wether you want it or not. While I had no problem taking 70,000 images with cheap Canon pocket cameras that then became twexus, I never really used the camera in the Motorola flip phone I am using right now.
I find it amazing how there are no phones that make use of the camera for themselves. Phone and camera share the power source, that’s about it. When I want to call somebody that is not in the address book I have to read the number and then type it. Not a big deal. True. But the camera in the phone could do that for me, right? Either trying to OCR a humanly readable number, or -slightly more involved- read a special barcode that could mean all sorts of other things as well.
Filesystems store what we use on our computers. They are not an act of god, they are man made. They seem to have an impressive resilience if it comes to innovation though. The folder / directory structure was more or less the last break through. Since the the storage capacity did grow: You mom might manage hundred times the storage now than a mid sized team of lab coat wearing engineers did when she was young.
This general rant got inspired by an rather unpleasant observation: Many filesystem become unstable or only slow in the better cases when they become full. Xsan and xfs
have technically not that much in common, but you better keep 10% space available.
Which is tragically exactly the opposite from any real life use I have seen. Now I am talking about professional storage for media. It always is full. Brimful.
I will miss Youtube. It’s as close I want to get to TV these days. BlogsNow is crawling back into existence. Slowly. It would only find two links worth mentioning right now. Bothsurrounding the Page meme. I wonder what the Republicans will come with. Maybee bomb North Korea?
Meandering through youTube’s suggestions I watched a bit of Daily Show (there is lots) and finally ended up with a video almost dedicated to Maf54.
Needed to build a new NAS server with safe raid storage. It’s more or less a near line storage solution, so I tried to go for best price per Terrabyte. Just before it dissapears into what will be hopefully years of uninterupted service I snatched it’s keys and took it for a spin on the weekend. So to say. I am still tweaking things, but right now I get just a hunch more than 600 MBytes a second sustained writes xfs.
Which is actually quiet awesome, considering that there is not a single SCSI disk to be found in the case. We paid a very reasonable price for the net 6Terrabytes we got. In theory this machine could record 3 streams of 1920x1080x23.98 10bit dpx frames. For 3 hours.