Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Category: vague interests

  • 2010 in review

    The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

    Healthy blog!

    The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

    Crunchy numbers

    Featured image

    A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

    A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,300 times in 2010. That’s about 15 full 747s.

     

    In 2010, there were 56 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 229 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 154kb.

    The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 155 views. The most popular post that day was Apple web tablet on the way???.

    Where did they come from?

    The top referring sites in 2010 were planet3dnow.de, google.com, en.wordpress.com, facebook.com, and search.aol.com.

    Some visitors came searching, mostly for virtual reality, america’s test kitchen chili, america’s test kitchen chili recipe, mower blade sharpening equipment, and robert venturi.

    Attractions in 2010

    These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

    1

    Apple web tablet on the way??? July 2009

    2

    America’s Test Kitchen Chili Recipe January 2007

    3

    GPU accelerated H.264 encoding June 2008

    4

    Which way the wind blows: Flash Memory in the Data Center March 2010
    2 comments

    5

    Learning from Las Vegas, Learning from Levittown October 2008
    2 comments

  • 64 GB Coming to SD Cards, USB Drives

     

    Image representing iPad as depicted in CrunchBase
    Image via CrunchBase

     

    Tuesday Samsung announced that it had begun mass-producing the industry’s first 3-bit-per-cell, 64 Gb (8 GB) MLC NAND flash chip using 20-nm-class processing. The news follows Samsung’s introduction of 32 Gb (4 GB) 3-bit NAND flash using 30-nm-class processing last November, and the company’s 32 Gb MLC NAND using 20-nm-class processing unleashed in April.

    via 64 GB Coming to SD Cards, USB Drives.

    Samsung’s product development keeps arriving faster and harder each revision of the product cycle. And competition is not slowing down. There are at least two other big flash memory manufacturers who are moving into the ~20nm-class of flash memory too. So three big manufacturers all manufacturing roughly the same ‘feature size’ and Apple sucking up all the supply. If it’s possible for an oversupply to occur it won’t be until next year I am sure and then hopefully prices will start to fall somewhat for the SSD market. Also add to this the Apple style packaging of multiple 64Gbit chips sandwiched one on top of the other to keep everything tidying in one small footprint and you have got ultra dense chips going into products now. In the iPhone and iPad they can layer up to 8 or 16 of those chips into one physical package to save room. This means we could see iPhones hitting 64Gbytes of storage and the iPad could reach 128Gbytes. It will truly be a new day once both of these devices hit these levels of storage. Consider my Mac mini from 2008. It has a spinning hard drive that is only 80Gbytes total. That my friends is a revolution in the making.

  • Microsoft GPU video encoding patent could hurt creatives | Electronista

    Microsoft hasnt been granted the patent despite it having been first filed in September 2004, but it may face challenges to the claims from companies that began using GPU video encoding independently after the patent application was filed but before it was published.

    via Microsoft GPU video encoding patent could hurt creatives | Electronista.

    Given that it took nVidia quite a while before they got any developers to work on shipping products that took advantage of their programmable GPUs (the CUDA architecture), it’s a surprise to me that Microsoft even filed a patent on this. Previously I have re-posted some press releases surrounding the products known as Avivo (from ATI/AMD) and Badaboom, which was designed to speed up this very thing. You rip a DVD and you want to save it to a smaller file size or one that’s compatible with a portable video player.  But it takes forever on your computer, so what’s a person to do? Well thanks to nVidia and product X you just add a little software and speed up that transcoding to .mp4 format. It’s like discovering your car can do something you didn’t know was even possible, like turning into a Corvette on straight flat roadways. Now be advised not all roads are straight or flat, but when they are Boom! You can go as fast as you want. That’s what having an accelerated video encoding is like. It’s specialized but when you use it, it really works and it really speeds things up. I think part of why Microsoft wants to enforce this is in the hope of possibly getting licensing fees but part of it is also maintaining it’s bullying prowess on the desktop computer. They own the OS right? So why not remind everyone that were it not for their generosity and research labs we would all be using pocket calculators to do our taxes. This is one case, a premiere example of how patents are stifling innovation. And I would love to see this patent never be enforced or struck down.

  • Flickr

    This is a test post from flickr, a fancy photo sharing thing.

  • links for 2010-04-09

  • links for 2010-03-17

  • links for 2010-02-04

  • links for 2010-01-28

    • Video on the Web – Dive Into HTML5
      This is a great description of containers versus codecs when it comes to video files on the web. There are many types of containers and many types of codecs. You can have an AVI file that is encoded in Xvid/DivX. Or you can have a Quicktime file that is encoded in H.264. So which ones do you want to use to ensure the maximum number of people can view your video?
      (tags: video, web, html5, codec, tutorial)

  • links for 2009-12-04

  • links for 2009-12-01