Thursday, September 9, 2004

Samsung Cell Phones to Get Tiny Hard Drive. Samsung's new SPH-V5400 mobile phone sports a built-in 1-inch, 1.5-gigabyte hard disk that can store about 15 times more data than conventional handsets, Samsung said. By By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. [The New York Times > Technology] The main point of the article is to celebrate the recent announcement that phones are now becoming little microcomputers with all the same vestments and peripherals as their laptop brethren. What I found more interesting is Toshiba is making a form factor that's smaller than 1" (the IBM microdrive size). They are going after a .85" form factor that will no doubt be "more palatable" to the designers of the mobile phones coming out in the next few years. Space on the PCB's or flexible PCBs in a phone is STILL at a premium. And Toshiba knows this well enough to make the investment today. The iPod 1.8" drives are not even in the running, and it sounds like 1" drives will still be a rarity in the handset market. So by all means Toshiba show everyone how it should be done. 9:05:54 PM    comment []

Kanguru ships 1GB FireWire portable flash drive. Kanguru today released "the first" FireWire-based flash drive, a high speed 3-inch portable FireWire... [MacNN | The Macintosh News Network] These same guys manufacture my DiskOnKey drive that I bought at the Apple Store in Houston, TX. To me they were ALWAYS the premium provider of the small footprint removable media. And this proves they are striving to stay ahead of the pack by providing superior performance at a nearly, closely, almost competitive price. They will no doubt steal some of the thunder of those early manufacturers and adopters who foolishly felt USB 2.0 was "good" enough for their purposes. What will they think when people are transferring files at hard drive speeds on their Flash media? Obviously they're not quite there yet, but it's going to happen. We just need to keep looking at the speeds of the read and write on those very same Flash modules. I think Flash memory is still a good deal faster than even the fastest hard drives. 9:02:07 PM    comment []

Virtual Server becomes reality. After two years of fits and starts, Microsoft will finally deliver its Virtual Server 2005 product, which company officials contend will be an important contributor to its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), the company's plan for managing distributed systems. [InfoWorld: Top News] Microsoft is finally shipping their head to head challenge with VMware. But by VMware's own estimates they are 6 months to 3 years ahead of Micro$oft. I would like to see our University's own NT folks consolidate their wastefuly sprawling NT farm. There's no reason they couldn't buy a box analogous to our Sun F15K that would run all the clusters on one machine with all it's failover and redundancy capabilities. I would love to throw a scare into those NT support people and see how they scramble to defend that haphazardly architected so called NT farm. What would they do with all the time the saved patching a virtual cluster on their 32cpu monster NT mainframe eh? 8:57:42 PM    comment []

Indiana University suffers during PeopleSoft rollout. Problems during the rollout of a PeopleSoft financial aid software module in the Indiana University system caused problems for about 3,000 students just as classes were set to start. [Computerworld News] My boss's boss just started working at IU at Bloomington. I'm curious is there's been any blowback from this in the School of Music where he works. He was so smug when he left and so self-satisfied that he was moving on up. Looks like every institution has some big warts it doesn't tell it's prospective job candidates about. I remember a few years ago a similar catastrophe at a College in Cleveland that had a bad PeopleSoft Financial Aid module roll out. Everything in PeopleSoft depends on YOU mapping your business processes to the applications perceived "ideal" business processes. If you don't account for things they way they do, you will always have problems meeting your rollout date in a PeopleSoft deployment. 8:54:09 PM    comment []

Future portables go much faster all day, says Intel. Beefier batteries and multicore chips aim to make Intel's future mobiles more like desktops. [CNET News.com] The future is dual core on the laptop or so Intel says. We'll see if it's all that feasible. I would love to know how Transmeta feels about dual core in terms of power usage. If I see Transmeta follow up with a dual core architecture I will truly believe it is everything that Intel claims. Similarly I want to see what AMD does for the laptop. Maybe in a couple of years they will be dead even with Intel on the low power end as well as the top end. I think Intel should consider going for dual core at lower clock speeds on their 65nm architecture. What would be so wrong with de-clocking down to 1Ghz on a dual core with all the Speed Step features turned on? I bet you could get 8 hours out of your batteries today if they implemented it correctly. 8:51:04 PM    comment []

Space Probe Fails to Deploy Its Parachute and Crashes. NASA's $264 million Genesis mission came to a sudden and violent end on Wednesday morning, when a capsule returning with samples of the Sun slammed into the desert. By By KENNETH CHANG. [The New York Times > Technology] It's unfortunate indeed that this happened so close to when the Shuttle missions were to reconvene. The hurricanes in Florida are also negatively impacting the schedule for reconvening regular Shuttle flight schedule. Let's hope they can overcome this latest failure quickly and fully and get on with business. 7:40:33 AM    comment []