Dru’s Blog » 2004

Giant Mess-O-Potamia

May 12, 2004 at 12:15 am · Filed under General

…thought I was done for the night.. and then I saw this Jon Stewart Show clip.

Interesting new battery technology…

May 11, 2004 at 11:20 pm · Filed under General

This is from the Register, so it could be sketchy, but it does seem interesting. Here is the article. The website for the company is here. Neat stuff.

Like any real technology company that deals with real-worls atoms, the development cycle is a lot longer. Expect this…’Real Soon Now’.

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Senator Feinstein

May 11, 2004 at 11:07 pm · Filed under General

A few weeks back, I wrote senator Feinstein with concern about the possibility the leaders in California may drop the requirement for clean burning gasoline in California in order to generate more gasoline supplies. I opposed this action.

Today I got a thoughtful letter back from Senator Feinstein. Barbara Boxer didn’t respond.

Overall, she agreed with my concerns. California has some fairly bad air. Here team was looking into ethanol alternatives, but felt that that solution still produced too much polution.

I was really impressed, this wasn’t a canned response.

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TRAM coming…

May 11, 2004 at 10:44 pm · Filed under General

Recently, there have been some examples of non-volatile memories actually making it commercially in the next couple of years. Then I read this article at the register, which points to this article by ExtremeTech(Ziff-Davis). Microsoft, the only company next to Apple that we can rely on for innovation these days, is asking hard drive vendors to add a tier to the storage with some flash memory. Why? Somebody over their is slowly getting it.

I wrote an article myself almost 5 years trying to make the case for this. My idea wasn’t new, the intent of the article was to push the idea back into the arena again. At the time, the economies of DRAM were at a good point, and it had applications in the server farms as well as low-power laptops.

According to the ExtremeTech article, Microsoft is asking for the vendors to add Flash to the drives. I think this is a mistake. The write speeds for flash are still slow, and you may hit the write-cycle-limit.

Anyways, all of this is two years away, and non-standard. I expect some other technologies to pop-up and perform the same role. Consumers will continue to get better and better technology.

Comments

TRAM coming…

May 11, 2004 at 10:44 pm · Filed under General

Recently, there have been some examples of non-volatile memories actually making it commercially in the next couple of years. Then I read this article at the register, which points to this article by ExtremeTech(Ziff-Davis). Microsoft, the only company next to Apple that we can rely on for innovation these days, is asking hard drive vendors to add a tier to the storage with some flash memory. Why? Somebody over their is slowly getting it.

I wrote an article myself almost 5 years trying to make the case for this. My idea wasn’t new, the intent of the article was to push the idea back into the arena again. At the time, the economies of DRAM were at a good point, and it had applications in the server farms as well as low-power laptops.

According to the ExtremeTech article, Microsoft is asking for the vendors to add Flash to the drives. I think this is a mistake. The write speeds for flash are still slow, and you may hit the write-cycle-limit.

Anyways, all of this is two years away, and non-standard. I expect some other technologies to pop-up and perform the same role. Consumers will continue to get better and better technology.

Comments