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  • Email is crap: The past is yours, the future’s mine!

    File this!
    File this!

    Considering the evolution of email and the Internet it’s a wonder we cling to it so tenaciously. The original Internet was slow, unreliable, and had a small number of actual users. Email was a messaging mechanism allowed communication to occur asynchronously over a slow unreliable network. And the mechanims used to transport it prior to the ever popular SMTP server was something called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol. Your messages to people would get copied over the network as files to another Unix computer. Eventually they would get routed to the mail spool on a machine your recipient had an account on. He could then read the message and reply to it. Kind of like telegrams back and forth. So what if you got a telegram with no subject line? Or a telegram with all kinds of tasks for different projects all wrapped up into a single message?

    Dan Dube @ dandube.com complains that Filing Cabinets which approximates the desktop computing metaphor are not good. The extra work required to make the Filing Cabinet work outweighs the benefit of the activity the email is helping take place.

    Each email is a file, so each email needs an informative, relevant title.  Look in your inbox — I would guess there are almost no emails that fit that bill.

    Nobody uses subject lines. I get blank subject lines from people. Or they put the vaguest subjects in the subject line.

    Emails don’t happen in a vacuum, people reply to them, are added and subtracted from the distribution list, change the content, etc.  Yet we still treat each email as a singular file.

    That’s the truth, especially for group projects, or worse committee projects where people come and go. You don’t know sometimes where a requirement or task ever came from because you don’t have the original text in an email from the person that proposed it. There’s no trail or flight data recorder for what transpired in that email message.

    Emails don’t always categorize nicely.  If they fit in more than one “folder”, the filing cabinet metaphor will fail.

    I couldn’t agree more. If you have a boss who starts using ‘bullet points’ in the email you know you will need to file that thing in more than one spot. I have a boss that does this often and it takes a few minutes to parse out the tasks that are expected to be accomplished. Once that’s done, which “project” do you file that email message into?

    Emails are extraordinarily redundant, with the original message copied hundreds of times in long conversations.

    Oh the insanity of quote all. And worse yet I think Outlook turns it on by default. Occasionally I will go back through that really long message and delete everything except my own contributions so the email is physically shorter in length and easier to read.

    Files can be emailed, which immediately forks the original file and makes any further edits a synching problem.

    This happens all the time rather than copy and paste the text of another file into the medium of the email message, the immediacy of ‘attaching’ just makes it too appealing. Someone is ‘dumping’ the task off on you with the minimum effort necessary, and that means they attach the file that has the exact same text they could have included in the email. Worse yet, sometimes those attachments are PDFs! Useless,useless,useless. Try keeping track of that mix of files.

    All of these gripes apply to the file system of the computer, too.  Regular files (mp3, doc, html, etc) all have the same shortcomings.

    Again it’s hard to associate files in a wide range of ways that make sense for a variety of projects. None of us are limited to one file type in all the projects we do. We might have pictures, audio, video, text, etc.

    Now Dan mentions Google Waves. And I wrote a quick blurb about Google Waves about week after the Google demo in San Francisco. Waves is by design, very different from email. It’s not copying files from one server to another over an unreliable slow network. It is meant to give you realtime text based communication in whatever collaborative style you prefer. And it keeps a record of everything, so you can step back through a document at each version or stage of editing.

    It’s kind of like chat too. You just start a connection with one other person, start inviting in participants as you go. And as part of the record of the ‘Wave’ or wavelength, you have buddy icons of all the participants. And everything is a reference to that original wave. So file it wherever you want, open it from wherever you want, it all points back to the original and will edit that original file for you AND all the participants. Because like I said, there is but one original, one index everyone’s client points to that same EXACT REFERENCE. That’s the genius of the wave format of communication and collaboration. Waves is a giant shared workspace, nobody really keeps private copies and edits them. They always edit the shared copy no matter what. And so the mailbox/cabinet metaphor is broken at last.

    So if it’s not a filing cabinet we’re looking for, but Google Waves, what’s the metaphor? Instead of a filing cabinet in my office, I now use a big giant bulletin board that sits in the hallway in my building. And everyone posts there and edits there and nobody keeps copies of anything anywhere on the bulletin board. The original bulletin is there with all it’s edits recorded, all the participants in the document are recorded for all to see. Scary isn’t it?

  • Move Over GPS, Here Comes the Smartphone – NYTimes.com

    Smartphone & GPS
    Maybe these devices will converge into one

    I personally enjoyed very much the iPhone 3GS presentation when TomTom Inc. presented their software/hardware add-ons that will allow you to use the iPhone as fully functional Navigation System. The question is how long companies like Garmin can sit monopolizing the market and provide little more than radical incrementalism in it’s new product offerings. About a year ago there were four competitors in the personal navigation market: Garmin, TomTom and Navigon with Magellan kind of in the background. Navigon has ended it’s production of devices but will sell it’s software to anyone willing to license it. Magellan is still creeping around, but has been superceeded by Garmin long ago. So TomTom and Garmin beat each others heads in on a quarterly basis. TomTom really did innovate in the software end of things providing all kinds of aids like telling you which road lane to take on the highway, or help at difficult intersections. As they rolled these out, Garmin would just sit back and eventually respond with a similar feature. Slowly by attrition trying to bleed away the advantage of TomTom. Worse yet, Garmin entered into a project to design a brand new cell phone with all the software and gps components integrated into it. THAT folks is the Garmin strategy. They will own the production of the device and the software or nothing at all. TomTom has taken a rather different approach and is kind of taking a cue from Navigon. They took the Apple iPhone Application development environment and ported the software into it. Now the GPS chip of the iPhone can be fully accessed and used to turn the iPhone into a TomTom Go!

    Oh how I wish Garmin had seen this coming. Worse yet, they will not adapt their strategy. It’s full steam ahead on the cell phone and they are sticking to it. Ericsson is helping them design it, and it won’t be out for another year. Which shows the perilous position they are in. With the blistering pace of product introductions in the Navigation market, wouldn’t Garmin have learned that a 2 year design cycle on a cell phone is going to KILL the product once it’s released? And worse yet, as the tastes change, who is going to give up their iPhone just to have the privilege of owning the Garmin branded cell phone. I swear that product is dead on arrival and Garmin needs to pay off it’s contract with Ericsson and bury all the prototypes built so far. End it, end it now.

    “It’s more like a desperate move. Now that you have the iPhone and the Pre, it’s just too late,” Mr. Blin said. Smartphones equipped with GPS “are the model moving forward that is going to be successful.”

    via Move Over GPS, Here Comes the Smartphone – NYTimes.com.

  • Toshiba 3D flash chip

    Toshiba currently bonds several traditional flash chips into a multi-chip stacked package. The Apple iPhone 3GS is an example of one manufacturer using this seemingly cutting edge technology. In one chip Toshiba has achieved 32GBytes of storage. But size is always a consideration for portable devices like cell phones. So how do you continue increasing the storage without making the chip too thick?

    Enter the nirvana of 3D CMOS manufacturing. SanDisk and Toshiba both have aquired companies who dabbled in the 3D chip area. And I’m not talking multi-chip modules, stacked on on top of  another in a really thin profile. These would be laid down one metallic layer at a time in the manufacture process, achieving the thinnest profile theoretically possible. So if you are like me and amazed that 32GBytes of Flash can fit in one chip, just wait. The densities are going to improve even more. But it’s going to be a few years into the future. Three years of development and research is going to be needed to make the 3D Flash chip a manufacturable product.

    The basic idea is to stack layers of flash memory atop one another to build a higher capacity chip more cheaply than by integrating the same number of cells into a single layer chip. The stacked chip would also occupy a smaller area than a single layer chip with the same capacity.

    via Toshiba hopes for 3D flash chip within three years • The Register.

  • Apple web tablet on the way???

    Mac Tablet PC
    Mac Tablet PC

    The answer to the question in this picture to the left is a resounding NO! All bets are being placed on Apple using a custom processor for it’s version of a Tablet PC. This is interesting in that everyone in the Technology Computer Gizmo/Gadget news circles has pursued this as a story starting last week.

    China Times Daily apparently is hinting a new Mac Tablet is being manufactured for release in October of this year. I’m surprised they decided to go with a custom processor for the tablet. But given the ultra-competitiveness of the Wintel netbook market, CPUs are the next big thing in product differentiation. There are manufacturers now using Google’s Android cell phone OS paired with cell phone processors from ARM and Motorola for a new generation of battery conserving netbooks. Most of those products are targeted at the Pacific Rim market and will never see the American market at all. Which made me sad because I would love to have a netbook with extra long battery run times.

    I have adapted much of my computer needs to what can be delivered through a network, web-browser and web apps. So the netbook to me is a nice analog to a cell phone and I’ve been waiting to jump into the market until some bigger innovations occured. Maybe this product will help shift the market the way the iPhone has done for cell phones. And with their new found CPU designs maybe product differentiation will even be easier.

    However, hairy eyeball of experience rears it’s ugly head and takes the shine of this buzzing hive of technology press bees. Enter Mark Sigal @ O’Reilly.com. Mark doesn’t think the tablet is the real story, but that the iPod Touch IS the Mac Tablet right here, right now. Given Mark Sigal’s earlier survey of the mobile computing landscape he proposes a unified matrix of Apple computing products rather than phone vs. computer. So the longer one waits, the less we have to worry about whether we should be buying a Tablet or an iPhone. Personally I think the bigger screen and the new CPU from PA-Semi does warrant some extra attention. I think we’re going to see either longer battery run times, or maybe mix of iApps and iLife and iWork on the same happy device. But, who knows? We all have to wait until October.

    From the Register

    The VentureBeat note says that Apple divided the PA-Semi designers between two projects: ARM-based mobile phone processors on the one hand and a tablet processor, possibly ARM-based as well, on the other.

    So we are looking at an Apple CPU-powered Mac tablet with touchscreen functionality and an October launch. The timing is said to be suitable for sales in the lead up to Christmas. Neither the manufacturers nor Apple are saying anything.

    via Pssst… Apple tablet on way, whisper Chinese moles • The Register.

  • Super capacitors in the news

    I first read about supercapacitors (Ars Technica-2007) some time back when gas prices were starting to reach an all time high. The Summer of 2008 everyone wanted to own a battery powered car, or hybrid drive car. Many writers were speculating then about the car of the future. All the hype surround hydrogen fuel cells was proven to be premature. But Tesla Motors was showing off what you could do with off the shelf Lithium ion batteries. And there were some announcements of new materials being used to create a possible adjunct to the Lithium ion cells. It was called a Super capactior.

    In the time since Ars Technica wrote the article about supercapcitors, Zenn has created a car using the EEStor supercapacitor technology

    EEstor Cell
    EEstor Cell

    In the rest of the high tech manufacturing world the electronics industry has recently adopted the supercapacitor as well. Why? Well, as this article from the Register states, more restrictions are being placed on Lithium ion batteries after some unfortunate accidents were splashed in picture form all over the Internet. But more than that, replacing failed lithium ion batteries on disk controllers is very inconvenient when you are a customer at a Lights Out style data center. In expensive flash memory has been around for a while now. And I have wondered when disk controller manufacturers might start using it for the high end disk controllers. Enter the Adaptec RAID controller with super capacitor backed Flash memory. This device should handle any amount of power outages and still keep all your disk writes from being corrupted. And the recharge cycle rate with a supercapacitors is much faster than any battery technology currently manufactured. So after full power is recovered, the recharge cycle is short enough to get full safety almost immediately.

    Adaptec has done away with the need for battery back-up of its RAID controller cards by changing to a NAND flash cache and capacitor set up.

    via Adaptec adds NAND cache to RAID cards • The Register.

  • links for 2009-07-11

  • The Google Chrome OS or As Public Enemy sez’: Don’t Believe the Hype

    Google Chrome OS
    Will Chrome end Windows headaches?

    Everyone has been weighing in on the Google announcement of Chrome. Why last night even the News Hour on PBS did a short sales job on Google. They called it “Cloud Computing could Transform Data storage, Internet use”. The idea was selling software as an online service with all your data housed on the servers of a remote data center might change the software publishing business. The timing of this story on the heels of Chrome OS was a little too convenient. I wouldn’t have minded so much by Google CEO Eric Schmidt makes two appearances in the piece to argue on behalf of Google’s view of the Future of Computing. In some ways the whole piece comes of as a sales promotion for Cloud Computing.

    Meanwhile on the Interwebs, I have entered into at least one discussion with an avid Google user who is swallowing the Google propaganda. I pointed out how poorly the first generation netbooks sold once unsuspecting or naively hopeful buyers tried to use them with the default Linux derived OSes installed on them. I’m not saying the majority of the early adopters were unprepared to adapt to a new operating system. But in fact after trying to adapt, they gave up and returned the computers. A mad scrambe occured to get a version of Windows on the next revs of the netbooks and voila! Microsoft entered a new market for the so-called ‘netbooks’ completely without trying. That is the end user/market inertia equivalent of falling into riches. Microsoft never saw this market, instead concentrated on the desktops and smart phones. Out of nowhere Asus and Acer along with all the other Taiwan manufacturers created a new product, trying to make it cheap they chose a Linux derived operating system. But the customer is always right. The customer learned how to use a computer on a Windows OS of some sort, old habits die hard.

    So will Chrome OS beat the odds and succeed where Acer and Asus failed? Will they drive the next wave of innovation and make an OS that a Windows user won’t find unusable? I doubt it for a number of reasons. First off let’s address what you get with Windows in the ‘multimedia’ category. You buy a Windows OS, you get a whole layer of stuff in there called DirectX. It helps you play games, play audio, watch video all that stuff. You move from Windows to a Linux derived OS you get a loose aggregation of individual progams some of which play certain file types. Some require special program language libraries to be installed to work properly. There’s many dependencies, vast differences in the User Interfaces, and darned little of it is integrated into a seamless whole. If Google can bridge that gap, maybe the transition won’t be so onerous for the new Google Chrome OS users.

    “Chrome is basically a modern operating system,” Mr. Andreessen said.

    The first wave of netbooks relied on various versions of the open-source Linux operating system, and major PC makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell have backed the Linux software. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has worked on developing a Linux-based operating system called Moblin as well. The company has aimed the software at netbooks and smartphones in a bid to spur demand for its Atom mobile device chip.

    via Google Plans a PC Operating System – NYTimes.com.

  • Yahoo Pipes via Dan Dube dot Com

    Yahoo Pipes plus Twitter = Good
    Yahoo Pipes plus Twitter = Good

    There is nothing cooler than discovering you can take a feed from one bit of RSS and plug it into another service and slowly create your own custom feeds based on simple keyword filters. But that service is here today using the mechanism of ‘pipes’ ala Unix style input/output of character streams from one application into another. Take for instance in Unix the ability list the contents of a folder in a long detailed format:

    ls -al

    Now what good is that if there’s a thousand files that get spit back in your face? Now add the power of Unix pipes, and the search command known as ‘grep’

    ls -al | grep interestingThings*.txt

    So now I can take the output of the first command and rather than send that output directly to my computer screen, I ‘pipe’ i t over to the grep command and let it do a search in real time on all that text output. I get a list of things as a result:

    interestingThings1.txt
    interestingThingsFoo.txt
    etc.

    So Yahoo Pipes extends this metaphor into the real of http and rss/xml feeds of data from Twitter, Blogs, Web based RSS news readers and allows you to find stuff as soon as it is sent out for mass consumption on the Interwebs. And like all things, it also allows you to add your own personal spin by blogging about that which you have discovered through the Yahoo Pipes. Flame On!

    For example, suppose I wanted to search for news on Google, specifically about Chrome. There could be useful things popping up at any minute, and I could easily miss them (like leaked screenshots!) This is what you could consider doing:

    * Create a twitter search for #google

    * Subscribe to the RSS feed of that search

    * Send the RSS feed to the pipes, where it is filtered for the word “chrome”

    * Subscribe to the RSS feed that comes out of the pipes

    Now you can monitor any breaking developments about chrome as they happen (more or less)!

    This is the real power of the web 2.0 stuff, the ability to make your own stuff. No longer will we have to rely on any one place to get info. I am using twitter, google, and yahoo to get my information here!

    via Yahoo Pipes.

  • Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries

    You may remember High School chemistry class when the topic of reactive metals came up. My teacher had a big slab of pure sodium he kept in a jar under kerosene. The reason for that was to prevent any water, even humidity in the air from reacting with that pure metallic sodium. He would slice pieces off of the sodium to make the surfaces completely free of tarnish. Then pull out the pieces with forceps. And in a display of pyrotechnics and sound and fury, he would place the metal in a flask of water. And it would fizz violently racing around on the surface of the water. It was reacting with the water creating Lye (NaOH-Sodium Hydroxide) and Hydrogen Gas(H2). He would then light the gas to show it was really combustible Hydorgen gas.

    Well, Lithium is also a very reactive metal too. Which means it has lots of energy stored up in it that can be tapped to do useful things, like being a battery electrode. Lithium Ion batteries exploit this physical trait to give us the highest energy density batteries on the market save for some exotic specialty chemistries, like Zinc Air. Lithium Ion uses all kinds of tricks to keep the water and moisture out of the mix inside the battery. However these tricks take away from the total energy density of the battery. So now the race is on to use pure metallic lithium in a battery without having to use any tricks to protect it from water.

    A company based in Berkeley, CA, is developing lightweight, high-energy batteries that can use the surrounding air as a cathode. PolyPlus is partnering with a manufacturing firm to develop single-use lithium metal-air batteries for the government, and it expects these batteries to be on the market within a few years. The company also has rechargeable lithium metal-air batteries in the early stages of development that could eventually power electric vehicles that can go for longer in between charges.

    via Technology Review: Waterproof Lithium-Air Batteries.

  • Intel to double SSD capacity • The Register

    Things are really beginning to heat up now that Toshiba and Samsung are making moves to market new SSD products. Intel is also revising it’s product line by trying to move it’s SSDs to the high end process technology at the 32nm design rule. Moving from 50nm to 32nm is going to increase densities, but most likely costs will stay high as usual for all Intel based product offerings. Nobody wants SSDs to suddenly become a commodity product. Not yet.

    Intel is expected to bring forward the projected doubling of its SSD capacities to as early as next month.

    The current X18-M and X25-M solid state drives (SSDs) use a 50nm process and have 80GB and 160GB capacities with 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) technology. A single level cell (SLC) X25-E has faster I/O rates and comes in 32GB and 64GB capacities.

    via Intel to double SSD capacity • The Register.