History likes to repeat itself.

This week we are going to talk technology.

Overview

Very recently(today) I read an article about the shift in the sector size on the hard drives from 512 bytes to 4kb. 

As it is nicely explained here, the sector is a fixed size storage unit on the hard drive (or optical media) that can store data. The sector size has an effect on the HDD transfer speed and latency (speed) at which the disc can access data. It also affects how much data we can store on the hard drive.

Little bit of history

What happens is that when we write files to the disc, they occupy at least one sector (given that the files are smaller than the sector size). The more small files we have (lets say 2-3kb in size) the more we save by converting from 4kb to 512bytes.  This was the case when the HDD industry was converting from FAT16 to FAT32 (circa 1998). And I remember how everybody was talking about saving space (about 10% more free space after conversion), how much bigger drives we will be able to have now (due to FAT16 not being able to address more clusters, etc.
So today we have another push, to move back to 4kb sectors... As explained here and actually compared here those drives are being slightly faster. Also now they can address more clusters, perform more writes/reads per second, etc. The explanation is that 4kb sector size today is more appropriate as almost no file is less than 4kb and each one of the 512b sectors had ECC (Error Correction Code) which obviously also took up space.

Conclusion

The interesting thing is that the whole recent switch went almost unnoticed, where move from Fat16 to Fat32 was all over the professional magazines.
How come 10-12 years ago we didn't know how to make 4kb sectors work to our advantage and we got bombarded with marketing campaigns about how good  the 512bytes sectors are, and now it just goes under the radar that we are going back to what it was 12 years ago?

Where is technology going

 

New Release

Recently Apple released its newest MacBook Air, saying it is the smallest and lightest laptop in the market.The very nice and easy to read article with basic information about this machine can be found here. I totally think it is a truly amazing achievement to get the laptop to be only twice the height of the USB port. The laptop uses Solid State memory, fairly slow CPU, and a good video card. While the price was lowered to actually appeal to everyone, I still dont see any use for this laptop. All you can do on it, is actually browse the web, a thing that iPad can do no problem for less money. You cant do any graphic design on it, as its only 10 or 13 inches...

My question is, why would you buy it then??

Cutting Edge

 Another thought that I have about this machine is how close it got to the iPad, iPhone, and iPod. My former boss predicted that in 10 years all we are going to have are going to be smartphones. I agree with him, the technology is so advanced that we see the barriers between product categories starting to blend. Now a days you can do almost everything on a smartphone as you could do only on a proper PC a few years ago.
All we really need is a projector in a phone being able to project a full size keyboard, and you've got a PC in front of you. That is a really cool idea, and I cant wait till this day comes.Until then if you want to have the most cutting edge piece of technology MacBook Air might be a good choice.

Top freebies while on the job

Three extra perks to be aware of when traveling

When working as consultant you realize that the job comes with a few more perks than just the advertised benefits. That is especially true if you travel a lot. In all cases you will be getting miles, car rentals, and hotel points. If you are lucky you will be also getting points on your credit card that you use to pay for the travel. There are a few rules to stick with in order to maximize profits.

BRAND LOYALTY - points and status

Always stick with the same brand and book it under all circumstances. If you start with Hilton, stay with Hilton, even if it means driving a bit more. Once you reach your Diamond Status, you get extra 50% of points for each stay. Same happens for airlines and car rentals.

PROMOTIONS - double points, free nights

It is a great idea to look around what promotions are currently available, as well as some insider tips on what upcoming promotions are on the radar. Sometimes there are targeted promotions, but if you do find out about it through lets say message board, you can call the customer service and many people reported luck in getting those promotions applied to their accounts.

PER DIEMS - food reimbursement

Nobody ever talks about it during interview, and its an important aspect of travel. In some places you get $50+/ day for food only... I don't think there is a real need to spent 50 bucks a day on food. At the end of the month it adds up to a nice chunk of change, and its all cash after all.

There are other ways to get more perks such as signing up for the credit cards that offer points and miles. In the end it is possible to save up enough points through out the year to go for a very nice vacation for free anywhere in the world, and still have extra cash left from per diems for the expenses during the vacation. Think about extra $3-4k a year, and that is all after taxes.

EMR (electronic medical record)

In 2004 president (at that time) Bush said that in 10 years we will have a universal EMR for each American. We are almost 60% done in terms of time, but only 10%-15% done in terms of implementation, and that is only large hospitals, the results are even lower for small doctors offices.

There are many problems associated with EMR and one of them is storage of the EMR record. Plain record of a healthy individual is only 2mb, barely anything when we can buy 2tb drives for $100, but if the person only becomes sick (complex sickness) the record grows to 40mb, add some pictures and the record becomes 300mb, decode the genome of the person and it is a whooping 3gb on a short side. So where I can see that a large organization can afford a data center with thousands of hard drives running, storing this data, I cant really imagine a doctors office running a server rack full of storage just for the health records.
I can imagine cloud storage, but then the bandwidth becomes the issue and the cost associated with the storage in the cloud, again a no win situation.

As with every governmental idea, there is an issue with standards. Today there are at least a few, including HL7, that allow systems to communicate with each other. Each organization uses the one that they like.

If we want to see a universal health record, it should be implemented by the govt, in a central location, with some backup locations, where doctors could log in and search for the particular patient and then download the necessary data. It would make security maintenance a lot easier as well.

Instead of spending millions of dollars on individual ideas, the govt should implement it themselves. I'm sick of waiting an hour before the doctor finds out what sickness I have and what is the history of my disease.... and it happens every time I go to the doctor.

Tablet Wars: A New Hope

Starring Apple Ipad and the rest of the world....

So its on... We got a very nice war between producers, trying to compete who will get a nicer, yet not as usefull tablet.

The idea isn't new. Its been tried before, it just didnt take off as expected. Tablets have a very limited usage, especially tablets like Apple, which are limited by their own operating system that is not compatible with anything else in the world.

It didnt take long before other producers jumped on a band wagon and shown their own tablets, including Dell. Where I dont like tablets at all, Dells idea got me thinking... I believe it is extremely cool solution to have either a netbook or a tablet. Tablet for fun, netbook for real work.

Out of all the choices that are coming to the market, this is the one I think that has a chance of actually taking off. Apple did take off, but thats due to the army of followers that would say Jesus lives if Steve Jobs would ask them to...

The only question is, how long will this hype about tablets stick around? Overall they are not as usefull as they are shown and they cost awful lot for a medium sized screen to play games on the go...

In my opinion, in 2 years the market will actually shrink from what it is now. What do you think?

MKT 595 Week 1 YouTube almost profitable.... Almost.....

A couple of days ago I saw info surface about YouTube, mainly that it is "close to becoming profitable". I think everybody knows now that YouTube was bought by Google a few years ago for over $1.5 billion. The problem with it is, that until now, Google has not found a recipe of how to make money off of it. Every year it costs close to 1 billion dollars just to operate the site, considering the resources that it must use in order to work properly (there are 2 billion hits a day).

Not long ago Google started putting ads on the bottom of the videos, but I am yet to find someone who clicked on any of them.

Where its all great that YouTube is "close to become profitable", this is exactly the same thing that Google said last year.... So how many more years is it going to be close and how many more years after that will if finally pay for itself ?

This blog entry is based on many google search results, including YouTube is now “Almost” Profitable

Test Post

Testing if HTML tags work

This is my test post that I am supposed to make for my class

Greg

PS. Seems as HTML tags are working correctly