All posts by admin

A little bit of math

Uncategorized

This is a problem I found in one of Google’s entrance tests. You don’t need to be the natural descendant of Euler to answer it, and please, I beg you not to Google and post the answers.


1
1 1
2 1
1 2 1 1
1 1 1 2 2 1

What is the next line?

The answer shalt be revealed in a week.

Laptop storage gets flashy

Uncategorized

SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive.

Such a swap will make thin laptops faster and more reliable.


Source: Seagate

Why go flash?

Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts. As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down–flash cards can survive drops from great heights–and consume less energy.

Flash also can retrieve data faster. In its own tests, Sandisk says its flash drive can boot-up Windows Vista–the next version of the Windows operating system–in 35 seconds, a half-minute faster than the 55-second boot-up time required with a conventional drive.

Military and aerospace customers have been buying so-called solid-state flash drives for about a decade. Some of the drives have capacities of 256GB and are quite sophisticated.

What’s the catch?

The flash drive isn’t for everyone. At 32GB, it is far smaller than the conventional drives found in current notebooks, desktops or even MP3 players. Many business users, however, never max out the capacity on their drives.

The drive will also add about $600 to the cost of a notebook. Those prices will hinder sales.

Meanwhile, drive makers point out that hard drives also continue to increase in data density and are far less expensive. Hitachi executives have said drives that can hold a terabyte of data are on the horizon.

Internet video will choke flash. An hour of standard video gobbles up about 1GB, while an hour of high-definition video will take up 4GB, according to various estimates.

Still…

The capacity and price gaps will begin to erode over time. NAND flash memory makers (NAND is the kind SanDisk makes) have managed to double the storage capacity of its chips nearly every year for the past few years.

With growth actually exceeding Moore’s Law, who knows, in another two or three year’s time, our laptops may just get a little flashier!

Sources: CNET.com, Wikipedia