Peter's Box o' Soap

The iPhone 4 DOES have a reception issue. ))

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple

The SPAM situation: An ENISA report says that now, 95% of email transmitted is junk; the 90% threshold was crossed at least 2 years ago. Wikipedia has good information about this afflication and it’s history.

Side note: The US anti-spam law, the CAN-SPAM act, was enacted in 2003 (after years of agonized waiting in the Internet community as the spam problem was growing ever worse), and has been ineffectual, of no surprise to anarchists. Top 1 spamming nation is still the USA.

NYTimes is becoming a pay site, as regular newspaper sales are declining (not just NYT, though, it’s general), and revenue from ads on online news don’t make up for it, (especially since ‘the crisis’ started two years ago, with a major drop in advertiser willingness to shell out for ads, to the tune of a halving of ad revenue).

My opinions on this tendency:

a) Big Business (in this case, Big Media) and their traditional way of running things is scarcely compatible with a  network-centric, de-centralized 21st Century style of living.

b) more importantly, the quality of commercial written material, newspapers as well as magazines, have declined severely over the past 15 years, and I have limited interest in daily papers for the same reason that I don’t buy printed magazines anymore: I find their content predictable, superficial and saturated with advertisements and product placement to the point where it is an insulting affair to read their tripe.

Facebook doesn’t want you to leave – it seems the AOL of the 2000′s, where leaving the ‘social network’-cum-data-mining-operation is made as difficult as possible. Various people have made FB apps and web pages that help you commit “facebook suicide” (wiping your account), but FB has been quick to purge itself of any mention of these.

Answers.com says FB has 321M members. With that many on board, the priorities tend to shift from getting more, to keeping who you have.

Stuff on the web today is easy to sign up for (to satisfy short attention spans), but difficult to get out of again (either in a clean way or with less effort than threatening legal action). Since employers and ‘authorities’ increasingly use web searches and data from social sites to dig up dirt on you, combined with that stuff you put on the web these days just doesn’t go away (google.com knows everything and archive.org remembers everything), it goes without saying that you should think before speaking on controversial matters in public in your own name, or and thinking at least twice before signing up for ‘social’ foolishness. A good way of gauging a social site or service is doing your homework on whether they give you an easy option of leaving and having your contributions deleted if you decide to. If they don’t, it’s clear that they do not intend you to leave if and when you wish.

In 2009, Intel introed their sucessor to the Core2 line of CPUs, the Core i<something> series, the big news being that the memory controller is contained in the same package as the CPU itself, resulting is a major boost in system memory bandwidth. AMD did this in 2003 in the same swing as unveiling their 64-bit processors (which, to digress, opened the door to 64-bit computing at consumer prices, ultimately derailing Intel’s Itanium train); at the CES in the first week of January this year, AMD once again distance themselves technologically from Intel, by presenting their plans: Merging the GPU (graphics chip) onto the CPU die, the first practical results of which we will probably see in 2011.

2010 will for Intel be the year where new Core iX (‘X’ denoting 3, 5 or 7) products are launched, marking the departure of old socket775 processor series like the Core2Duo and Core2Quad. I’m sure the motherboard manufacturers will be happy at the refreshed opportunities for making high-margin products. Intel promises introduce a 6-core Core_i7@3,33 GHz, taking the effective processing capability for their flagship product to almost twice what it was early 2009. Moore’s Law is alive and well, and in more than one interpretation.

USB 3.0 has seen the light of day; the first motherboard from Asus with USB 3.0 connectors was unveiled November 2009; the first brand-name PC containing the tech is a Hewlett-Packard (specifically their ‘Envy’ series of pricey laptops), also unveiled at the CES this month. USB 3.0 is the youngest member of the Universal Serial Bus family; providing a theoretical 5 Gbps bandwidth on 9-pin cable, it is quite a step up from it’s predecessor, USB 2.0 which has had a theoretical max. of 480 Mbps since its inception in early 2000. Usb 3.0 has been in the pipeline since late 2007, thus a good two years underway. In practical terms, it is ten times faster than 2.0, and for mass storage, it means that in single- and dual-drive external RAID enclosures , the drive speed will be limited not by the cable,but by the drive mechanisms. From where I’m sitting, USB 3.0 is heartily welcomed!

(FireWire seems to be hiding away in its niche; it held great promise 10 years ago, but the FireWire 800 sucessor to FireWire 400 never caught on too well, as USB 2.0 had made its appearance by then, and besides it was not much of an improvement over what it replaced. The “good enough” mentality had a major part in this, I suspect, and in this case with good reason. There has been talk about FireWire 1600 and FireWire 3200 for the last two years, but now that USB 3.0 has made its entry, the niche for FireWire is shrinking. Those professional who aren’t satisfied with USB 3.0, will go with Fibre Channel.)

The first USB 3.0 expansion cards for PCIe are commecially available for 60$ and up. Western Digital has likewise introduced a USB 3.0 version of its 1 TB external MyBook hard drive, with a 2 TB version coming soon.

SATA (Serial ATA) 3.0 has likewise said hello in 2009, but is still far from the mainstream; also dubbed SATA 6G, it now allows 6 Gigabits of data to be piped through per second; for professionals, it is not as much the increased tempo that matters (though SSD storage can now saturate a SATA 2.0 bus!), but the addition of NCQ (Native Command Queuing), enabling Isochronous transfers that allow reliable throughput for audiovisual applications.

Speaking of storage and memory, I believe that 2010 will be the year where SSD enters the mainstream to replace them ol’ spinnign disks, and 16 GB RAM will become the new standard of installed memory in personal computers (as 4 GB was in most PC’s you could buy in 2009). We shall see, I’m not giving any of you beer if I turn out to be wrong.