Disks for Data Centers

Google released a whitepaper on their wishlist for HDDs.  It's somewhat amusing that they appear to think that ECC is still used.

"An obvious question is why are we talking about spinning disks at all, rather than SSDs, which have higher IOPS and are the 'future' of storage. The root reason is that the cost per GB remains too high, and more importantly that the growth rates in capacity/$ between disks and SSDs are relatively close (at least for SSDs that have sufficient numbers of program-erase cycles to use in data centers), so that cost will not change enough in the coming decade."

Google Voice on RPi with Incredible PBX

While poking around for Skype on RPi info, I also checked Google Talk.  It seems that video encoding is beyond the modest capabilities of the RPi, but there's already a voice application ported to the RPi called Incredible PBX.  There are a couple versions of this software for the RPi: Incredible Pi and RasPBX.  The original version of Incredible PBX used Google Voice to provide the phone number; I haven't checked into it enough to know if that's still the case.

Incidentally, Google has a page for developers on Talk, which includes information about how it uses XMPP and their extensions for voice.

As an aside, the Google Talk dev page links to the XMPP extensions page, which has proposals for IoT applications including sensors and such.

Blogger Problems Again

"Your browser is no longer supported by Blogger. Some parts of Blogger will not work and you may experience problems.   If you are having problems, try Google Chrome."

Eat me.

TED

I saw reference to this device called TED on c|net, and it looks pretty interesting. The Google PowerMeter software may or may not be good: if they're logging my consumption patterns, that could be unpleasant. ("At 2 AM power demand at his house spikes 150W, so he must be in the bathroom taking a whiz before he goes to sleep.") I'd rather keep some information off the Net, thank you very much. Still, it's an intriguing product.

News Dump

• Google hacked, may leave China [Google, CNN, c|net]
• Wi-Fi powered gadget charger @CES [c|net] - I had an idea a few years back on how to monetize wireless power...this is getting too close for comfort
• LPD displays [xconomy linked from /.] - seems like the phosphor-zapping technology found in CRTs just won't die?
• Genetically modified corn is bad for you [International Journal of Biological Sciences] - the paleos say plain corn ain't good for you, but then again the good stuff made from corn, bourbon whiskey, ain't good for you either

Not So Good

/. had a post on how Sprint released GPS data to law enforcement via automated system 8 million times in a year. The linked blog post has a quote from Eric Schmidt that is quite disturbing.

"The reason we keep [search engine data] for any length of time is one, we actually need it to make our algorithms better, but more importantly, there is a legitimate case of the government, or particularly the police function or so forth, wanting, with a Federal subpoena and so forth being able to get access to that information."
-- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, All Things Considered, NPR interview between 5:40 and 6:40, October 2, 2009.

So much for "don't be evil"—that sounds pretty fucking evil to me. Government tends toward evil, and pandering to them is also evil. That explains why they kissed the Chinese government's ass with regard to censoring political dissidents.

Apple may not be very different, but at least they make no pretense of being "good". There's nothing like someone raping you and telling you that it's for your own good.

My comments posted to the blog anonymously:

I have a problem with financial disincentives: where the money comes from. Law enforcement is paid for via taxes, so not only are we paying a higher bill to the phone company (TPC) on the front-end for the infrastructure, we're also funding federal, state, and local governments to pay for wiretaps, etc., on the back-end. Business is business for TPC, but the "law" is being used to strong-arm the consumer into paying for the privilege of being spied upon.