Techno Musings

There seems to be a general move afoot for the entire IT sector to standardize on the x86-64 processor architecture.  Examples include Cray and SGI who use x86-64 from AMD and Intel respectively.  In essence these two companies that used to make their own processors have stopped.  (Further HP no longer makes the PA-RISC processor, [...]

McBlu-ray

I have a soft spot for disruptive innovation or game-changing technology. I like to see the establishment tossed around and turned upside-down a bit. Not from an anarchist point-of-view, but from a change-is-good perspective. Of the disruptive attributes that we typically focus on in technology, cost reduction, performance, reliability and ease-of-use, aka, user friendly, cost [...]

Yes you did read the title correctly.  There an interview with several Hitachi researchers discussing this very point.  Specifically since it is mandatory for mobile phones to have GPS on them in Japan this led the researchers to look no further and push for indoor GPS.  The work focuses on building an indoor transmitter and [...]

Today the Gazopa team announced the availability of a new service on top of the visual searching platform. This system is another demonstration of the core image search technology, but adds crowd sourcing to the visual searching. The site is Gazopa Bloom and is available for private beta, so head on over and [...]

There is a very interesting article here talking about how a professor has used online gaming to craft a new approach to grading students within a college course.  Here is a snippet of the article which talks about the grading system.

So I’m just in the middle of reading a presentation by one of the larger IT vendors and I’m finally sick of this term so I’m going to rant for a minute. The “this term” is “transparent to…” You hear it all the time, transparent to the application or transparent to the storage, [...]

Power to the SSD
So I’ve been looking into the benefits of Solid State Storage Devices over Hard Disk Storage Drives. Personally, I’m more infatuated by the performance advantage than the power advantage, but both play in this discussion. In fact, one solves the problem of the other as I’ll try to show. If you do [...]

And you make a mistake that is rather like watching a train wreck — this is a highly relevant analogy for this post.  Well last week I was headed from Shin-Yokohama to Odawara and accidentally got on the wrong train. Four hours and a 5 minute stop in Nagoya later I was right back where [...]

Last year I blogged on Hitachi’s overall innovativeness and referenced that in 2010 we would be celebrating our 100th anniversary. Well this is the year, so Hitachi congratulations on turning 100.  As one of the few companies that has been around through the large scale electrification of the world to today where we have multi-terabyte hard [...]

If you have the chance head on over to popsci.com/archives and take a gander at their archive that has been put online.  Since both Pete and I have been talking about how to keep information stored for a really long time and specifically the 100 or 1000 year archive has come up, here is a [...]