I opened the mail today and suddenly it was 1996 all over again.
Yet another fine example of right-wingers being pro-terrorism.
Jesus H. Christ, people.
Their description reads, “We hope that everyone is okay and accounted for. It is our belief that his intention was not to hurt anyone, but to prove a point.”
I would have figured he could just stop paying taxes or maybe start a protest if his true intent was to “prove a point”. If flying a stolen plane into a building is the only way to prove a point I’ve been doing things wrong my whole life.
These people are subhuman.
Lyons Has Seen the Google Buzz. Lyons is Not Amused.
Why, Google? Why take a perfectly wonderful email system and pollute it by adding a zillion new things to it? I’m not looking for more clutter in my life. I’m looking for less. At the launch event some Google exec claimed Buzz is a way to “find the signal in the social neworking noise,” but to me it just looks like Google is adding to the noise.
Why does Buzz even exist? Is it because Google wants to make my life better in some way? No. Buzz exists because Google feels threatened by Twitter and Facebook, and wants to kill them. Google has become what Microsoft used to be – the Borg, the company that gobbles up ideas from smaller rivals and cranks out lame imitations in an attempt to put the little guys out of business.
That is the biggest problem with Buzz — it was invented not for us, but for Google. So now, because Google feels threatened, we have yet another thing to learn, which won’t be easy because Google is basically a world where nerd engineers get turned loose in a Montessori preschool and they have no idea about user interface design and frankly, they don’t care.
Who says we have to learn to use it?
You’ve probably glossed over the boring headline and aren’t even reading this, but it’s a lot more important than it sounds for the computer industry and computer users.
This is the tipping point for SSDs to become mainstream.
Currently, good SSDs (the bad, cheaper ones generally aren’t worth buying) are small and expensive. Intel’s excellent X25-M series, the gold standard, is about $450 for 160 GB.
SSDs based on this 25nm flash are likely to offer 160 GB in the $200 range and 320 GB in the $500 range.
It’s hard to overstate the performance gains that SSDs offer. It’s not the sort of incremental, you’ll-notice-it-5%-of-the-time gains that new CPUs usually offer.
If your computer feels slow, it’s almost definitely the hard drive’s fault.
If you’re waiting a little longer than usual for a popular website to render its Dashboard or show you an encyclopedia page or tell you which of your old high-school friends have gotten fat, you’re probably waiting for some hard drives in a server somewhere.
Nearly every slowdown of modern computer usage is caused by a very fast computer that’s sitting around doing nothing while it waits for its hard drive to move its heads.
Seek time is the delay required for the drive’s heads to move to the requested location on the disk, stabilize, and start reading or writing the data. Most hard-drive delays are seeks, not big sequential transfers1.
Ten years ago, the best consumer-class hard drives had seek times in the 12ms range. Today, most good drives are in the 8ms range. Got that? In a decade, we’ve made huge gains in nearly every other aspect of computer performance, and hard drives are much faster than they used to be. But seek time is still very high, and is still the bottleneck for everyday computer performance.2
SSDs — these tiny, laptop-hard-drive-sized boxes that have no moving parts and emit no noise and cost only $450 for 160 GB today — have an effective seek time of 0ms.
Zero.
Seeks become effectively free. (Technically, they do take some time. But it’s well under 1ms and close enough to zero, relative to hard drives, for the sake of argument.)
Imagine if nearly every computer slowdown vanished. That’s what it’s like using a good SSD.
And it’s very likely that, in 2010, SSDs will finally reach mainstream-friendly prices and capacities.
I’m incredibly excited about this. Say what you will about my geekiness or overenthusiasm if you’ve actually made it all the way through this post, but the first time you use a computer with an X25-M, you’ll be this excited, too.
Average people don’t realize how little of a hard drive’s performance is bottlenecked by the maximum transfer rate, which is why new interfaces always advertise their sequential-transfer rates. USB with 60 MB/s vs. Firewire 800 at 100 MB/s vs. SATA at 150+ MB/s. It doesn’t really matter — when you’re waiting for seeks, which is most of the time, you’re lucky if the drive transfers more than 10 MB/s. There’s a great car analogy here with the everyday relevance of top speeds if you want to make it. ↩
What makes ridiculously expensive, 15,000 RPM server-class hard drives worth their cost to server admins is the reduction in seek times down to the 5ms range. They’re worth a huge price premium just for that. ↩
While your enthusiasm is uh…enthusiastic, you fail to mention some important points related to the current state of SSDs and some of your information is just misleading. Your claim that “Nearly every slowdown of modern computer usage is caused by a very fast computer that’s sitting around doing nothing while it waits for its hard drive to move its heads.” is untrue for most tasks performed by today’s users.
When my Gmail takes forever to load or I can’t watch a video on YouTube, the culprit is more likely one of many issues with the network (whether on my end or Google’s). When I’m playing a game on my PC and the framerate squeaks by in the single digits, I probably need to upgrade my video card. Many issues won’t be fixed by simply upgrading to a SSD as you claim.
As a developer working with web-based applications, I find some of the biggest performance gains can be had by optimizing long-running SQL queries. From my experience, these queries are more CPU intensive than I/O intensive.
And to continue with your car analogy, recommending that everyone switch to a SSD in 2010 would be like recommending everyone go out and buy a new Prius today because hybrids are “the future”. Even the “good” brands you mention have been plagued by firmware and compatibility issues. Here, here, and here. When a X25-M firmware update from Intel bricks your drive and it takes over a month for a fix to be released, I’d say that’s a product that’s not quite ready for prime-time.
While you may have great experiences with your SSD and want to share them with the world, I find it troublesome that so many popular tech bloggers are recommending SSDs to everyone without even mentioning the potential headaches related to them.
In time, I agree that SSDs will be a fine replacement for disc-based drives. But for everyday consumers, I disagree that the time is now.
And yes, this reblog was typed on a PC running a new Intel X25-M.
If you really want to support this guy, I propose that we all Google Image Search Miranda Kerr from work today. I know I already did.
iPad, Maxi Pad, whatever it’s called
Do you know how dirty this thing could get? It’s hard enough to put that screen protector on the iPhone…let alone this thing? It’d take 3 of my friends just to put that damn thing on.
Now that NOLA is in the superbowl for the first time in, like, ever…it’s time to go have some fun. If you find your self in a local pub watching the big game, everytime NOLA scores a touchdown, people from the “who dat” nation will yell out, “who dat!” This is where you come in. Make sure to correct everyone and say, “no, no…it’s who is that, who is that!” You are sure to make friends in no time.
