Book Reviews
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Friday, January 31, 2003
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Text messages prove a life-saver: "A scheme using text messages to remind patients to take their medicine is proving a hit in South Africa." [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
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Endless requirements for disk space -- Comment()
Ars Technica writes about the new hard drives: "250 GB ought to be enough for anybody." There is always a need for more disk space. Consider, for example, recording all the sounds you hear in your life in digital format. A minute of mp3 audio requires about 1 MB of disk space. One day requires about 1.5 GB, and one year takes 550 GB. Finally, 70 years of audio requires 38 500 GB, or 38.5 TB of disk space. Thus there is a factor of 150 still missing in hard disk capacity. And if you want to record high-quality video, the factor is about 1000. If you estimate that the disk capacity will double each year (I doubt this), increasing the disk space by a factor of 1000 will take 10 years. And then you might find you have new needs -- browsing through the recordings of your parents, friends, ...
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Pleasing Words: "Have you ever found yourself, rather than trying to write well, trying to please Microsoft Word's spell checker and grammar checker." [DonnaM]
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Robert L. Read has published a guide titled How to be a Programmer: "This long essay attempts to summarize the non-technical things that I wish someone had explained to me at the beginning of my career as a professional programmer. It is primarily concerned with social situations and team relationships that occur in typical software development. I try to cover what I consider the essential, often non-techncial, skills of the beginning, intermediate and advanced programmer." (via visakopu.net)
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