Sunday, July 13, 2003

An interesting interview with Jim Gray on disks. Disk capacity is doubling every year whereas CPU density is limited (to doubling approx. every two years) by Moore's Law. In a few years we will have terabyte disks under our desks. He notes too what I had said earlier about moving data on the network getting slower w.r.t. computation. He prophesies that disks, memory and transducers will have CPU's in them and thus get more intelligent. Many years ago when I worked for an industrial welding machine manufacturer where I was involved in the design and implementation of the display system. It was plasma screen with some intelligence in the form of a vector graphics processor that was connected to a 19.2Kb/s serial line. The graphics processor was not that intelligent and the serial speed was relatively slow compared to the data that we wanted to transport. As a result it was no object of wonder. I had remarked then that either the speed has to be better in order to compensate for the dumbness of the processor or it has to intelligent, in other words, capable of processing fast to make up for the slow communication speed. If it had neither speed nor intelligence we were in trouble. And so it was. 9:34:12 PM

Switzerlands ranks just behind the US in per capita health cost. When I look at my monthly medical insurance bill I feel the hole in my pocket. Even more painful is the rate at which it increases every year (around 8-10%). In the article Mut zur Lücke of Weltwoche (issue 24, 03) I learned where a big chunk of those expenses are. You may be as shocked as I was to hear this: 50 to 60% of the health expenses of an average swiss person are incurred in the last 3 months of his/her life. Of course, endless amounts of money can be poured into extending peoples lives and, it being a sensitive subject, no one would want to complain too loudly. Nevertheless, this will have to change. 11:13:06 AM

© Copyright 2003 Raju Varghese. Last update: 2003-08-13; 8:57:41 PM.