May 14, 2023
January 29, 2014
A Razor to Apple's Throat
I love Razer's Project Christine - a completely modular PC.
There is a stand and you simply attach the components you want: Central Processing Units (CPU), Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), Power Supply Unit (PSU), Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage, and so on.
By making the architecture open and plug and play--just jack in a new module-- and change out whatever you want, whenever you want. Obsolescence be gone.
This is a challenge to pure standardization, and a way to make customization cost-effective.
The cooling is done with mineral oil that is pumped throughout from the bottom reservoir.
At the top, you see a module for a command center for adding operating systems, adjusting configurations and settings, or monitoring performance.
A subscription model is planned where for a annual fee, you can get the latest and greatest upgrades.
Project Christine PC is the epitome of simple, useful, scalable and beautiful.
Watch out Apple, you have a Razor at your throat--it's time to seriously up the innovation game. ;-)
A Razor to Apple's Throat
August 18, 2012
How Good Is Our DNA
These days it's typically in 0 and 1s--binary code--on computer chips.
But according to the Wall Street Journal (18 August 2012), in the future, it could be encoded in the genetic molecules of DNA.
DNA has "vastly more capacity for their size then today's computer chips and drives"--where a thumb size amount could store the entire Internet--or "1.5 milligrams, about half the weight of a house ant could hold 1 petabyte of data, which equals to 1,000 1-terabyte hard drives."
As opposed to binary code, DNA will store information as strands made up of four base chemicals: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).
Just like letters in the alphabet make up words, sequencing of these 4 base chemicals can store biological instructions (e.g. 3 billion for a person) or any other information.
Using DNA for storage involves 4 key steps:
1) Encoding information into binary code
2) Synthesizing the chemical molecules
3) Sequencing them in a string to hold the information
4) Decoding the molecules back into information
Overall, DNA is seen as a "stable, long-term archive for ordinary information"--such as books, files, records, photos, and more.
Researchers have actually been able to store an entire book of genetic engineering--with 53,426 words--into actual DNA, and "if you wanted to have your library encoded in DNA, you could probably do that now."
With the cost declining for synthesizing and sequencing DNA, this type of data storage may become commercially practical in the future.
And with the amount of information roughly doubling every 2 years, large amounts of reliable and cost-effective memory remains an important foundation for the future of computing.
Frankly, when we talk about storing so much information in these minute areas, it is completely mind-boggling--really no different than the corollary of imaging all the stars in vastness of sky.
It is almost incredible to me that we have people that can not only understand these things, but make them work for us.
With NASA's Curiosity Rover exploring Mars over 34 million miles away, and geneticists storing libraries of information in test tubes of DNA coding, we are truly expanding our knowledge at the edges of the great and small in our Universe.
How far can we continue to go before we discover the limitations to our quest or the underlying mysteries of life itself?
What is also curious to me is how on one hand, we are advancing our scientific and technological knowledge as a society, yet on the other, as individuals, we seem to be losing our knowledge for even basic human survival.
How many people these days, are proficient on the computer in an office setting, but couldn't survive in the wilderness for even a few days.
Our skills sets are changing drastically--this is the age of the microwave, but knowing how to cook is a lost art to many.
So are we really getting smarter or just engaging our minds in a new direction--I hope we have the DNA to do more than just one! ;-)
(Source Photo: adapted from here with attribution to Allen Gathmen)
How Good Is Our DNA
January 20, 2012
Clean Water From A Bicycle
Love this product called The Aquaduct for helping people in developing countries get clean water.
Using the power of pedaling, water that is loaded into the back of the bike is "cycled" through a filter and run into the clean container in the front.
This can be done by actually riding the bike home with the water or refilling the clean container in stationary mode.
The Aquaduct reminds me of some similar products that I saw and blogged about in July at a Peace Corps exhibit that used bicycles for shelling corn and charging cell phones.
What's great about The Aquaduct is that is a simple, all-in-one solution that transports, filters, and stores water--it was the winning entry (out of 102) in the Google Innovate or Die competition.
For 1.1 billion people without clean water in the world, The Aquaduct solves the problem for transporting and sanitizing water.
In Judaism, we say "Mayim Chaim"--that water is life, and this innovative pedal-powered transit and filtration machine can help bring life-saving water to the masses.
Clean Water From A Bicycle
February 14, 2008
Small Is In and Enterprise Architecture
Remember the saying, “good things come in small packages?” In enterprise architecture big is out and small is in. This applies not only to the obvious consumer electronics market, where PDAs, phones, chips, and everything electronic seems to be getting smaller and sleeker, but also to the broader computing market (such as the transition from mainframe to distributed computing) and even to the storage device market.
The Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2008, reports that Mr. Moshe Yanai “was responsible for one of
How did Mr. Yanai do this?
He did this by going small. “One point of the architecture is simplicity of management of data…with his architecture, you just add more pieces.”
In creating Symmetrix disk drives, Mr. Yanai developed storage drives that were “cheaper, faster, and more reliable than
The small disk drives of
Mr. Yanai, a one time Israeli tank commander, is a User-centric enterprise architect. He recognized the needs of his users for smaller, cheaper, and faster devices and he delivered on this. Moreover, Mr. Yanai put the customer first not only in terms of product design and development, but also in terms of customer service. “Mr. Yanai was known as an expert engineer who also could talk to customers and solve their problems. Mr. Yanai put telephones in each storage device and programmed them to ‘phone home’ when it sensed a part was in danger of failing.”
While Mr. Yanai was removed from his top engineering role at
From a User-centric EA perspective, the small and agile often wins out over the large and stodgy. It is a lesson thousands of years old, like the biblical tale of David vs. Goliath, when little David defeats the monstrous Goliath. Small is nimble and big is cumbersome. This is the same thing the
Small Is In and Enterprise Architecture