Archive for the ‘Materialism’ Category
Kingston (who I never knew made CF cards) has a 4GB CompactFlash card for $24 at NewEgg. At 8MB writes and 10MB reads, it’s hardly blazing, but if you don’t do any high-volume activity, it’s not a bad deal.
Actually, if you’re not looking for speed or name brands…
They seem better-suited for a ultra-low-power PC than a camera, of course: no one needs a 32GB CF card, and the type of people that would ‘need’ one are the type of people that couldn’t put up with anything but the highest throughput available.
A really random thought just popped into my head…
UNIX systems have their “swap” partition, a disk partition where unused stuff in RAM is “swapped out” to disk to make room for newer stuff in RAM. Of course, no hard drive is as fast as RAM, so you obviously want lots of RAM so you never touch swap. Windows has the same concept but calls it a paging file.
But what if your disk was as fast as RAM? I remain fascinated by OCZ’s new 64GB SSD, which has an almost-zero seek time, and throughput rivaling the best of hard drives. (Though I’m yet to read any actual reviews, as it seems to have still not quite shipped.) I suspect that, given factors like the direct bus between your CPU and RAM, and all the work on boosting RAM “speeds,” a solid-state disk wouldn’t literally be as fast as RAM. But I also think that the difference between having more RAM and “swapping out” to SSD would be somewhat negligible.
I think it’d be interesting to test the extent of this… Plunk an SSD (one with high throughput!) into a system, and run it on as little memory as you can. (Though I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anything less than 256MB DIMMs these days, and even those might be hard to find? I wonder if Linux has a facility for deliberately overlooking a quantity of its RAM?) And with that set up, go crazy with stuff to ensure that you’re using several gigs of “memory.”
We can sit around all day and measure bus speeds and Mbps throughput and latency and seek time, but I think the only meaningful measure would be to try this and see how it feels. I have a hunch that it wouldn’t be that big of a slowdown (compared to RAM), but that the biggest problem would be ensuring your SSD was on a separate controller/ bus/ channel, so you didn’t obliterate your hard drive performance. While it’s easy to get an affordable system with a couple gigs of RAM now, RAM remains expensive if you need a decent amount of it. Buying a system with 64GB of RAM would still be extraordinarily expensive, but with a 64GB SSD for under $300, you could imitate it fairly well.
I’d posted before about my interest in picking up a low-capacity SSD card for my laptop, to drastically speed up disk access. (This actually has nothing to do with my recent posts about slow hard drives…)
Newegg seems to have a 64 GB SSD, 2.5″ SATA disk for $240 after rebate. Interestingly, from the specs, it seems as if not only are the seek times nill (on account of being solid-state), but the throughput exceeds that of your average hard disk. It won’t be released for four days, however. (Found via FatWallet, which also links to a review here.)
For those who aren’t major geeks, SSD is short for “solid-state disk.” Your ordinary hard drive is a bunch of spinning platters, whereas solid-state is the technology you see in a USB thumb drive or the like: no moving parts. The major benefit of SSDs thus far has been seek time: with a normal hard disk, the disk has to find the right spot on the disk and read it. Seek times average 8-10ms on most normal drives, but that adds up quickly with fragmentation or concurrent I/O. With an SSD, there are no moving parts, so “seek time” is pretty much non-existent: files are ready instantly. Early SSDs seemed to not be capable of moving as much data (in terms of MB/sec), though, meaing that SSDs were great for lots of small “random” access, but not so hot for handling big, contiguous files. Now, it’s looking as if OCZ has made SSDs kick butt over normal hard drives, and somehow offered the product at a fraction of what it normally costs. (This 64GB SSD is more normally-priced, to give you an idea of why they haven’t caught on so quickly.)
Incidentally, today I came across deals on two different notebooks for about $700, both of which have 4GB RAM, but 1280×800-pixel screens. The RAM is incredible, as are most of the other specs (though it’s 5400RPM drives), but I think you can do much better on the resolution.
I keep coming across things like this eBay listing. Sun Enterprise 4500, 12 SPARC processors (400 MHz, 4MB cache) and 12 GB of RAM. This one looks to have a couple Gigabit fiber NICs, too. (Although it’s fiber, so you’d need a pricier switch to use it on a “normal” copper home LAN.)
Even if you foolishly assume that a 400 MHz SPARC is no better than a 400 MHz Celeron, with 12 processors, this is still a net of 4.8 GHz. With a dozen processors, this is clearly best for something that’s very multi-threaded.
Of course, there’s one problem: these machines use SCSI disks. SCSI’s great and all, but it’s expensive, and you can be sure that, if this machine even comes with hard drives (none are listed?), they’re 9GB. So pick up one of these. What’s that you say? Oh, it’s ATA and won’t work with SCSI? No problem!
Nowhere that I see does Sun mention whether Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris will run on older hardware, but I assume it will. Some Linux distros also excel at running on platforms like SPARC.
Now the real question: how much electricity does this thing use?
I came across Ken Rockwell’s site the other day, and, as I perused a lot, I came across his interesting mention of the Casio EX-F1. I’ve “graduated” from integrated point-and-shoots to digital SLRs, although this camera costs more than my digital SLR and three lenses put together.
Photographically, it’s mediocre. 6 megapixels. Except you don’t buy this thing for its resolution. You crave it because:
- 60 frames per second at 6 megapixels. (Note that most movies are shot at 24 fps.)
- “[S]tereo HDTV movies,” although I confess that I’m not quite sure what that means.
- Continuous shooting mode, where it’s just constantly shooting at 60fps, and, when you hit the shutter, saves the ones around that time. Thus, you can actually get shots from before you click the shutter.
- A maximum shutter speed of 1/40,000 second. That is not a typo.
- 60 frames per second is ridiculous. But if you can take a cut in resolution, you can go further, all the way to 1,200 frames per second at a pitiful 336×96.
Actually, 336×96 isn’t just tiny, it’s a really weird size. I’ve resized (and cropped) a random photo of mine down to 336×96:
In conclusion… 6 megapixel camera, with a long zoom lens equivalent to 36-432mm. And it’s an HDTV video camera. And it’s got the crazy bonus of letting you use shutter speeds of 1/40,000 of a second, and capture low-res video at 1,200 frames/second. I wouldn’t carry it as my main camera (though it would probably be entirely usable for that), but I’d love one of these in my bag for video and such.
I also wonder about the “trickle-down” effect. Although really, more like the “trickle-out effect.” Nikon’s D3 will give pretty clean shots at ISO 6400, something no other camera even tries to offer. It goes up to ISO 25,600. Canon and Nikon are very close when it comes to the frames-per-second rate of their high-end digital SLRs; 7-9 frames/second. (Hint: get rid of the shutter, which is useless on a digital camera where you can just “read” the sensor for a given period of time.) Companies keep focusing on packing more and more megapixels into smaller and smaller sensors. As I’ve said before, I have a 20×30″ print from my 6-megapixel camera. (Cropped a bit, too, actually.) I only “upgraded” to my 10-megapixel XTi because the old one broke and you can’t buy a 6-megapixel SLR anymore. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve seen an end to the megapixel arms race. We exceeded the resolution you could squeeze out of film a long time ago, and now we’re giving medium format a run for its money. When I go to buy a new SLR in maybe five years, I don’t want it to be more than 10 megapixels. But I hope that it goes a lot further than 6 megapixels. And if a “prosumer” point-and-shoot camera does 60 frames per second at full resolution, all of a sudden 3 frames per second on an SLR looks pathetic. Similarly, I’m unaware of any still camera (aside from maybe weird scientific-engineered stuff) that will take a 1/40,000-second exposure, or any flash that’s capable of running at 7 frames per second.
(That said, I’m having a hard time figuring out when you’d need a 1/40,000-second exposure. I only hit my camera’s 1/2,000-second limit when I’m too lazy to stop the lens down…)
Periodically I come across deals for computers that are very tempting. I’m not necessarily in the market right away: I’m going to keep my laptop until I’ve been working long enough that I can afford something stellar. It’s silly to “upgrade” a little bit. But every time I see these deals, I think of the various ways I could set things up… My “ideal (but realistic) computer” would actually be a network:
- Network infrastructure: Gigabit Ethernet, switched, over Cat6. 10GigE and fiber are cool, but really not worth the cost for a home network.
- A server machine. It needn’t be anything too powerful, and could (should) be something that doesn’t use a ton of electricity. The machine would run Linux and serve multiple rolls:
- Fileserver. It’d have a handful (4-6?) of 500GB disks, running RAID. While performance is important, it’s important to me that this thing be very ’safe’ and not lose data. (Actually, in a very ideal setup, there’d be two fileservers for maximum redundancy, but my goal with this setup is to be reasonable. What interests me, though, is that I think it’d be possible to use an uncommon but awesome network file system like Coda or AFS, but also have some network shares on top of that service that ‘look normal,’ so Windows could just merrily connect to an M: drive or whatnot, merrily oblivious to the fact that the fileserver is actually a network of two machines.) It’s important that the machine have gobs of free space, so that I can merrily rip every CD and DVD I own, save every photo I take, and back up my computers, without every worrying about being almost out of disk space. It’s also important to be hyper-organized here, and have one “share” for music, one “share” for photos I’ve taken, etc.
- Internet gateway. It’d act as my router/firewall to the Internet, and also do stuff like DNS caching. It may or may not serve as a caching proxy; I tend to only notice caches when they act up, but then again, it might be quite helpful.
- Timeserver. For about $100 you can get a good GPS with PPS (pulse-per-second) output and keep time down to a microsecond. Hook it up to the serial port of this machine, and have your local machine sync to that for unnecessarily accurate time. (Actually, it looks like you can do PTP in software with reasonable accuracy?)
- Asterisk machine, potentially taking in an analog phone line and also VoIP services, and giving me a nice IP-based system to use, blending them all so it’s transparent how they’re coming in. It would also do stuff like voicemail, call routing/forwarding, etc. For added fun, it could be made to do faxes: receive them and save them as a PDF, and act as a “printer” for outgoing faxes. The code’s there to do this already.
- Printserver. If you have multiple machines, it’s best to hang your printer(s) off of an always-on server. It could speak CUPS or the like to Linux, and simultaneously share the printer for Windows hosts.
- MythTV backend? But most likely not; I’d prefer to offload that to a more powerful machine, rather than bogging down a server.
- Primary desktop. Surprisingly, a quad-core system, 4 GB of RAM, and a 24″ LCD can be had for around $1,000 these days. That’s all I need in a system. I have my Logitech G15, which is all the keyboard I need. My concern is with what to run… These days I make use of Windows and Linux pretty heavily. I think virtualization will be mature enough by the time I’m actually going for a setup like this to allow me to get a Linux-based Xen host and run Windows inside of a virtual machine with no performance degradation. (This is actually mostly possible already, but as Andrew will attest, Xen can still have some kinks….) The system should have a big monitor. It’d be interesting to put something like an 8GB solid-state drive in it and use that for a super-fast boot, but the jury’s still out on whether it’s worthwhile. (I guess that some places are pushing SSD under some special name to make Windows boot instantly, but the reviews I’ve heard suggest that it gives a nominal improvement at best.)
- Secondary desktop. Pay attention for a while to the short bursts of time when you can’t use your computer. The system locks up for a bit, or it’s just unbearably slow while the disks spin up and get a massive file, or you have to reboot, or you’re playing a full-screen game and die and wait 15 seconds to respawn, or….. In this “ideal setup,” I’d have a second machine. It needn’t be anything special; in fact, it could be the cheapest machine possible. It’d basically run Firefox, AIM/IRC, Picasa (off of the network fileserver), iTunes, and the like. For the sake of completeness, it should probably run whatever the other system doesn’t, out of Linux, XP, and Vista.
A cool map of lightning frequency over time across the globe. And a live version for the U.S. Heck, a zoomed-in version on the Northeast for the past 60 minutes. It turns out that you can even buy a small Lightning Detector to map local lightning strikes on your PC. It listens for the signature static crashes from lightning, sometimes called sferics (short for atmospheric noise), much like you can hear on an AM radio during a storm. You can even listen to streaming audio from NASA’s (Alabama) VLF receiver.
I started a blog post about this, but it talked about terabytes NASs, HDTV DVRs, VoIP / SIP, LDAP, DNS caches, NTP strata, and a bunch of acronyms.
So instead I’ll be incredibly precise. This PC, seemingly sold only at Walmart, is really cool. It’s not that fast. Its specs are bad any way you look at them. Unless you look at power consumption. 20 Watts peak power, 2 Watts average. By comparison, my desktop machine has a 300 Watt power supply. For someone who wants to set up an always-on Linux server, this thing is screaming your name. I’m strongly attracted to the idea of setting this thing up with handful of 500 GB drives, to build a network fileserver with a terabyte or two of capacity. And doing software RAID across them. (I’m fairly certain that the hard drives would draw more power than the whole system… Although you could set up power-saving features, since a home fileserver could surely power down the drives periodically.)
There’s also a cheaper one that seems to be the same, except it comes with 512 MB RAM instead of a gig, and comes with gOS instead of Vista. I’m dying to play with OpenFiler, a Linux-based “appliance” software package for some superb fileserver tools.
As I’ve mentioned in a few past posts, those of us in business school really don’t think normally. Having found that there are a lot of good jobs in Nashua (versus my previously-narrow search in Boston), I started looking, out of curiosity, at real estate in Nashua. And I stumbled across this place, a home with an attached storefront.
It’s located in a very dense rural area, and seems like it may have a high percentage of renters in the neighborhood. So I thought a laundromat may do well. Of course, you also stock a lot of vending machines. Although labor really isn’t necessary, I’d probably want to employ one person to watch over things, and maybe to do laundry for people who want to drop stuff off, and to help customers who need it. I’ve read that it’s hard to keep good staff, but really, the job requirements are minimal–you have to be able to work a washing machine, be friendly to people, and watch over the store. You’d probably have a lot of free time, too, which could be spent watching TV, surfing the web, or whatever. And I don’t think I could bring myself to pay less than $8/hour or so.
It’s hard to find much information on commercially-available solutions, but a “water recycling” system could help cut costs, too–filtering the “waste water” and reusing it. Additionally, I’d sell plastic “gift cards,” at a small discount. ($50 for $45 or so.) The cards would also help everyone by not being coins, meaning that they wouldn’t have to lug around a pocket full of quarters, and I wouldn’t have to empty huge hoppers of quarters. (Although a lot of coin-based places seem to end up being “closed loops” of quarters–you put your bills into the change machine, get quarters, and put them into the washers or vending machines. So at the end of the week, I go in and move the quarters back into the change machine, and take the bills to the bank.) Selling the pre-paid cards, though, would generate a lot of cash up front, which could be put into a high-yield savings account. If you get a gift certificate for your birthday, how long until you spend it? Especially when it’s a “bulk” item (something you can spent on multiple visits), it may well be six months or longer before you’ve depleted it. Further, gift certificates also get forgotten and lost. Thus, if I sell $5,000 in gift certificates, I might only ever have an expense of, say, $4,500. And that $5,000 is in the bank earning me a decent chunk of interest.
They now make cheap security cameras that do resolutions like 1280×1024, versus the standard 640×480. And with things like ZoneMinder on Linux, it’s easy to set up an excellent camera system on the cheap.
I’d also pull in a cheap cable/DSL line and offer free WiFi for people doing laundry. Hopefully, while waiting for their laundry, they’d also buy some food from the vending machines. (As long as I have someone working there, actually, we could maybe serve fresh, hot food, like hot dogs or pizza!)
And of course, there are benefits to me besides the income. I wouldn’t need a washer and dryer in my home, since I’d have a dozen attached to my home. And I wouldn’t need to buy Internet access, since I’ve already got it at the laundromat. Plus, it’s occasionally a problem to have packages delivered to my house, as no one’s home and they might need a signature. Now I’ve got an employee who could collect them.
Of course, only after developing a killer business plan in my head did it occur to me that maybe I don’t want a home in a not-so-hot neighborood, especially one where I don’t have a driveway.
So the Project 25 protocol, with its IMBE CAI digital voice, is being rolled out in huge numbers. Motorola’s ASTRO is the most commonly-used, although several other providers make radios that do the P25 standard, too.
They’re calling it interoperability. When you and the next town over both buy $3,000 radios doing a crappy 9600bps digital audio protocol, your radios can talk to each other! I’m really not sure who fell for this, since the existing strategy, analog voice, worked 100% of the time. They’re switching people over to a new, proprietary (kind of: the voice codec is proprietary, but it’s part of an open standard) digital system so that everyone’s radios can talk to each other. This has never made sense to me.
The other big problem is that there are multiple bands out there. In New Hampshire, VHF is most common. You’ll find police, fire, and ambulances between 152 and 161 MHz. (More or less: they expand a bit on both sides.) Massachusetts is big on UHF, with the police usually being between 460 and 490 MHz. But it’s not quite that standard–some municipalities do their own thing. The 800 MHz band is becoming big, too, especially with trunked radio systems. You find that a lot in big cities. (Indeed, I think Manchester and Nashua are on 800, though I don’t monitor either so I wouldn’t swear to it.) And now there’s a 700 MHz band coming out that’s slowly being introduced.
As a ham, we have allocations on VHF and UHF that are both very common: 144-148 MHz and 420 or 430 through 450 MHz. Since both are commonly used, a lot of ham radios will do both bands. So my ham radios merrily transmit on both VHF and UHF. But, for whatever reason, this never caught on with “commercial” radios, like the ones public safety agencies use. If you want your police cars to monitor VHF and UHF, you put two radios in them. God forbid you work for something like a huge city, or a regional task force, where you may need to communicate on VHF, UHF, and 800 MHz. That’s three radios everyone will need to carry.
Vertex (the “commercial” branch of Yaesu, a ham company) made a dual-band radio. Once. The FTH-2070 came out in the 80s (?) and did VHF and UHF in one radio. It was huge, but for people who needed both bands (lots), it was a huge boost. For some reason, no one ever made a radio to follow in its footsteps, and the radio hasn’t been made for several years.
So it’s actually a grand mess. You have four different bands that a public safety agency may be on. They might be using analog voice, or they might using digital. (And this isn’t even counting wacked-out proprietary standards like OpenSky / EDACS / SmartNet, which are all additional technologies that need their own radios.)
Finally, someone saw the light. Thales has announced The Liberty, a handheld that supports P25 digital (and, of course, analog voice), and covers all four major bands. Pricing is rumored to be around $5,000, but you have to keep in mind that it’s doing the job of four radios that would probably cost $2,500 each. It’s SDR-based, front-panel programmable, and supports several different encryption protocols as well.
Thales previous filled a bit of a niche market. It looks like they do a lot of government stuff, and I seem to recall them being bigger overseas (but maybe I’m confusing them with another company). But this radio has a lot of high-end radio afficionados over here drooling. They not only did a dual-band radio, but they did a multi-band radio. It’s got a big color screen. (What the functionality is remains to be seen.) I think a lot of people, not just me, are hoping that this will lead to more competition, which will lead to more innovation.
