Gadgetopia

The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem : Spolsky complains about a pet-peeve of mine – the state of wireless at conferences.  It almost universally sucks, and you can just assume you’ll never get connected.

It’s almost getting boring to read the conference reports complaining about this. Almost every conference, even the ones put on by fancy tech companies, has trouble. I never assume WiFi is going to work whenever I’m in a room with that many techies.

The Web Content people solved it from 2008 to 2009 by moving the conference to the University of Chicago.  Connectivity at the 2009 shindig was stone-cold perfect.  (And, given that it was a college, all the desks in the lecture halls had power ports, which was uber-awesome…)

New battery could change world, one house at a time: If this is legitimate, it would be revolutionary.  Battery technology is the only thing holding renewable power back from its full potential.  The inability to buffer solar or wind is a huge limitation, and this battery would give us that ability.

The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

[…] Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours — how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That’s a pretty exciting place to live.

To give you an idea of the capacity, my house is above average in size and we’re not that energy conscious.  We used 1,600 kWh during the hottest month of this year so far.  That’s 51 kWh per day, which is a bit above this capacity.

However, I’ve been running an informal survey of other people’s electrical usage, and there are a lot of people well down in the triple-digits for monthly usage, which is 20 – 30 kWh per day, which this battery could fully power.

Foxconn: Just because their name is on it, doesn’t mean they actually make it.  In fact, it’s likely they don’t make it – Foxconn does.

Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer retailers Dell, Inc. and Hewlett Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, and the Amazon Kindle.

Coding Horror: Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs: Great post from Jeff Atwood comparing how much it costs to run your site on one massive server (scaling UP), against multiple smaller servers (scaling OUT).

At any rate, let’s assume $100,000 is a reasonable ballpark for the monster server Markus purchased. It is the very definition of scaling up — a seriously big iron single server.

But what if you scaled out, instead — Hadoop or MapReduce style, across lots and lots of inexpensive servers?

His numbers are interesting.  I tended to think that scaling out would be cheaper, but it’s not when you throw in software licensing and power consumption.  In those two areas, the single, monster server wins by a mile.

The other thing that I don’t see Atwood discuss is getting a bunch of low-level servers to all play together nicely.  He gives the example that he could buy 83 smaller servers for the cost of one monster.  But now you have 83 servers to manage, instead of just one.  Of course, you have a crapload of fault tolerance now, so is this better?

The Architecture Issue - Data Center Overload: Article about the massive data centers that we all use and know exist, but never see.  They’re around, and they’re flippin’ huge it turns out.

The Tukwila data center happens to be one of the global homes of Microsoft’s Xbox Live: within those humming machines exists my imagined city of ether. Like most data centers, Tukwila comprises a sprawling array of servers, load balancers, routers, fire walls, tape-backup libraries and database machines, all resting on a raised floor of removable white tiles, beneath which run neatly arrayed bundles of power cabling. To help keep servers cool, Tukwila, like most data centers, has a system of what are known as hot and cold aisles: cold air that seeps from perforated tiles in front is sucked through the servers by fans, expelled into the space between the backs of the racks and then ventilated from above. The collective din suggests what it must be like to stick your head in a Dyson Airblade hand dryer.

One really interesting note: machines today are so power-hungry, that in 3-5 years, you’ll spend as much on electricity to power the server as you did to buy it.  That’s why data centers are moving to places where electricity costs are as low as possible.

Solid State Disks: Spolsky explains why solid-state drives (SSDs) are the new hotness. Looks like this is the next major revolution in personal computer hardware.

I did a little bit of benchmarking… don’t take these numbers too seriously since I didn’t run many tests and it’s hard to get everything right. Boot time dropped from 2:11 to 0:34. That’s from a cold boot to launching Firefox and navigating to google.com. Launching 6 major applications went from about 20 seconds to about 10 seconds. In general, the fact that app launching is so much faster makes a huge difference and it was totally worth it. This little laptop is now the fastest computer I’ve ever used.

The drawback? His 160GB SSD was $760.

Unpaid bills? Good luck starting future laptops: Wireless carriers are subsidizing the cost of little netbooks. So, if a customer stops paying his wireless bill, they are introducing technology to remotely kill the machine.

LM Ericsson AB, the Swedish company that makes many of the modems that go into laptops, announced Tuesday that its new modem will deal with this issue by including a feature that’s virtually a wireless repo man. If the carrier has the stomach to do so, it can send a signal that completely disables the computer, making it impossible to turn on.

“We call it a ‘kill pill,’” said Mats Norin, Ericsson’s vice president of mobile broadband modules.

Dear Apple’s flock…: I hate to toss out a Mac-hating post, but everything this guy has written is the absolute truth. Utter gospel.

Don’t get me wrong, I love new technology - I think it’s great. But I’m not going to consign to this crazed kind of addiction that so many people have. No, I don’t need that new MacBook, I’m perfectly happy with my three year old PC running XP! And speaking of Operating Systems, no! I don’t need Vista, OSX or Windows 7 - I can manage quite happily without all that!

[…] Grow up! This industry isn’t about my hammer being better than yours; it’s about what I create with my hammer, and what you create with yours! Like the old saying goes “A bad workman blames his tools” - actually, I’d take it further: “A bad workman feels so passionately about his tools that he values them more than his actual work!”

An OS is just that — an operating system. It manages files and provides a container in which to run apps. Get over yourself already.

New, faster Copilot: Pretty good reference story about Akamai.

Well, the new Akamaized Copilot seems to get about 100% more throughput going from Boston to Los Angeles. More importantly, our exhaustive scientific experiments using beakers and chemicals and graph paper and slide rules proved that the usability of Copilot jumped from “tolerable” to “pretty snappy.”

This is cool too:

I tried the new Akamaized Copilot back to my desk in New York [from Munich] and was blown away… Copilot’s speed and reliability doing remote desktop was actually better than the native internet access in the hotel.

Viewsonic’s square-shaped PC to mount your monitor: This is severely awesome. $400.

The LinkPC or ViePC (Viewsonic’s press material claims two different names) is Viewsonic’s most unique offering at CES. The LinkPC is a small, square-shaped PC that attaches to the back of any VESA-compatible monitor. The device is powered by an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU and 1GB RAM. It also features a 160GB hard drive, gigabit Ethernet LAN, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, VGA output, sa erial port, and four USB 2.0 ports.

Considering Heresy: Buying a PC: John Battelle is considering dumping Apple for reasons he hasn’t completely elaborated on. He asked for opinions, and the resulting comments are a good read. Some excerpts:

I do love my PC for it simplicity and my understanding of it. I do hate it because of Microsoft errors and blue screen I will probably have a PC until I get enough money to buy a Mac […]

PCs have so much more software available, more information online on how to fix them, and many more people have them than Macs. […]

Ha! I used to be a smug Mac person before I learned anything about computers. […]

While I prefer the Mac, my PC experience is fine. While Vista is not nearly as good as MacOSX do not believe the extreme negativity about it. At this point, Vista OS is stable. […]

What does it mean to say that a machine is great but the OS isn’t? OS stands for Operating System, s’far as I recall. I always considered myself computer operator, so am I missing something when I say that the OS counts?

I even have a comment in there somewhere.

Cool Tools: 30" Cinema Display: A pretty good explanation of why you need a 30” monitor.

Within a few days of using a large screen I began to experience a much more significant effect, though: when more of the things I needed to look at were already in view, the amount of time spent on visual context switches went down. Having more documents in view not only reduces the time consumed by the switch, but also the “recovery time” needed to remember what I was doing.

I have a 24” Dell monitor, and I don’t think I could go back. I also don’t think I would go back to two smaller screens either. I used to think managing two screens independently would be better because you could maximize one app to each, but having a 24” screen has really eliminated my need to desire to maximize anyway.

Google search finds seafaring solution: Fascinating.

The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.

The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres, which are sited across the world, including in Britain.

This reminds me of SeaCode from a few years back:

These guys plan to station a cruise ship just outside U.S. waters and stock it with foreign programmers. So, they pay dirt for wages, but they can claim close proximity to the U.S.

SeaCode’s page is still running, but the Last-Modified header on the home page is from March 2006, and there doesn’t seem to be any pages past the home page.

Netbook - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: I remember when this was called the “Internet Appliance.” I had an i-Opener at one time, complete with “Pizza” button.

The term netbook was re-introduced by Intel in February 2008[1] to describe a category of small-sized, low-cost, light weight, lean function subnotebooks optimized for Internet access and core computing functions (e.g., word processing) — either directly from applications installed on the netbook itself or indirectly, via cloud computing.[

Microsoft and Harrah’s unveil high-tech interactive bar table : The Microsoft Surface video that came out last year was the butt of many jokes (“the future of computing will be a big-ass table…”), but lookie here…

Microsoft and Harrah’s Entertainment introduced a high-tech interactive bar table Wednesday that lets patrons order drinks, watch YouTube videos, play touch-screen games and even flirt with each other.

Not a bad price either, though I doubt it’s a money maker for Microsoft:

The six rectangular tables with built-in 30-inch flat screens using Microsoft Surface technology were installed in a lounge at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, with custom applications built for Harrah’s.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the units sold for a base price of $10,000.