Seen at the WWI Memorial in downtown Washington, DC.
Yearly Archives: 2007
Words of wisdom from Steve Jobs
Found this video on YouTube, and just had to share it with you. It’s the 2005 Stanford Commencement speech, and it’s amazingly inspirational. In it, Steve Jobs tells three stories from his life, and each one has an amazing lesson for us to learn. Whatever you may think of the man, you can’t argue with this speech. Watch it, you won’t regret it!
A bit of site maintenance
I made time tonight to do a few things that I’ve wanted to get done for some time:
- Introduce a new section called Faves, which displays my shared items from Google Reader. This is where I’ll showcase the posts I find really interesting and worthwhile to read from the various blogs and feeds that I’m subscribed to. I’ve been sharing blog items in Google Reader for months, and until now, they only showed up in a little box in my sidebar, but I wanted to present them a little better by dedicating an entire site section to them. They will all have links right back to the original items, and I’ve also included Feed Flares (through FeedBurner) that will allow you to subscribe to their particular feeds, Digg them and save them to del.icio.us right from the site. Yes, you’ll be digg-ing and bookmarking the original items, not my site/feed, not to worry about that. The intent is to promote these stories and their authors.
- I did away with the Mobile and News sections. Judging by the stats, very few people were using them.
While I’m on the subject of site updates, I also wanted to let you know that I put together a unified/single feed for all of my content. I used the My Networks feature of my FeedBurner account (gotta love them!) and put together a single feed that gathers my ComeAcross, Zooomr, YouTube, del.icio.us, and Twitter content and packages it in nice little, eatable nibblets — well, they’re XML nibblets anyway. Rick, thank you so much for telling me how to do this! And, just in case you were wondering, I didn’t include my three Dignoscentia feeds. Since this will be a commercialized feed, it just didn’t feel right to include content I didn’t want to commercialize at all.
And yes, you can still subscribe to individual feeds for all of this stuff. Just navigate to the various site sections using the menu at the top of this page, and choose whatever feed you want. Not sure yet if I’ll feature this single feed anywhere on the site (other than this post), because I don’t want to confuse people. Many still don’t know what feeds are (sad, but true), so I’ll just wait a little longer and give it some more thought. Want to know the fun part? The URL for this unified feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Raoul. Beautiful, isn’t it? 🙂
Solid State Disks aimed at wrong market segment
People are making a big to-do about Solid State Disks (SSDs) like this one. While I agree a 128GB size is impressive for SATA-connected flash memory, they shouldn’t be marketed as replacements for regular laptop hard drives. Yes, I think HD damage due to drops is a valid reason to try and use SSDs, but they’re still flash memory: they have an inherently limited number of uses before they die. Hard drives last longer, especially ones made nowadays. They can handle more read/write cycles. And, the biggest thing of all, they more capacity, especially with perpendicular bit storage.
You know where I think SSDs would work great? As secondary storage in addition to a regular hard drive. They could figure as a secondary drive on laptops or desktops, and be used for storage of all sorts of things that don’t need to be stored on the drive itself or that get fragmented quickly, like the page file, or the scratch disk in Photoshop. They could also be used to hold all of the temp files that the operating system generates. While you’re working on a file, say a Word document, the OS should store it automatically on the SSD, then transfer the saved document to the hard drive when you hit Save. Things like this could really help cut down on the HD fragmentation.
The SSDs could also be used to store vital OS files that are needed for boot-up (as was suggested a couple of years back, when flash storage was still too expensive and small). That way, computers could potentially start up instantly. The regular files would be stored on the HD, of course. But to say SSDs are hard drive replacements is a stretch. Their application as such, while suited for certain environments and laptops like the Panasonic Toughbooks, military equipment, or media players like the iPod, is ill-suited for regular laptops and computers, where storage needs are growing exponentially.
We should really focus our efforts on developing bigger, quieter hard drives for laptops and desktops, not on replacing them with expensive flash memory of unproven long-term reliability.
The HumanCar
I love the idea of the HumanCar, a street-legal vehicle powered by the passengers and a hybrid-electric drive. It’s wonderful!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=369463415941480101
[via Autopia]
Raoul Pop 