Working on my novel as usual today. About to finish another chapter. There was a lot of domestic quarreling involved (between the characters I mean, not in RL because I was working on the book). So it was … a struggle to get it into a semi-believable state. Close enough. :)
candle in the dark woods
burning brightly
threatening to set the woods on fire
copyright (c) oct 1 2011
Dedicated pagefile.sys paging and/or ReadyBoost SSD drives.
Think about it. If someone built a modern SSD with say 4 – 12GB specifically designed for very high random 4K read/writes on a SATA III(II) interface they would make excellent little add-ons for most any desktop out there.
Older drives that could serve that purpose do exist, but 1) they generally are of an older, slower generation and 2) they do not market them for that purpose.
Buying a new desktop computer is something expensive that people put off for many years at a time. Buying an “add-on” for US$30-40 that speeds up their computer is something most any layman can get behind and be persuaded to do.
Note: A dedicated paging drive could in fact consist of a block of a few GB of DDR5 memory and a tiny SSD or CMOS to hold basic file structure so as to be multi-os compatible. Generally you want paging data to be wiped on shutdown/reboot anyway as well as being fast as possible. This gives us both those criteria. It does however completely confound and confuse all those layman out there that couldn’t figure out the difference between RAM memory and a hard drive up till now. (Laughs at the embarrassed tech geeks the first time a layman corrects them that their paging hard drive actually is “memory”.)
Sometimes I think I keep killing off everyone in the world in my head so that when the day finally comes that I finally can, that I’ll be merciful — and indifferent enough by then — and I won’t kill off everyone in a wave of bloody retribution.
Just a few hundred million or so of them.
[Did I mention I'm slightly misanthropic? Oh. Well, now you know. *wink*]
Do you find yourself thinking that in the back of your mind most everytime you start to buy something?
I do.
I wonder if that’s a cause for concern. Hmm.
Ah. My computer left me a copy of Windows 8 Preview in the downloads folder this morning. How thoughtful of it. Installing a copy in VirtualBox….
I am wondering how long it will be till Google makes it’s Picasa facial recognition data sharable and builds an API for it.
Imagine: You have an app on your android device that shows you the video from it’s back camera as you hold it up — but overlayed with the names of everyone in the room you’re in as you scan it around. Including all collected information, c.f. age, place of residence, marital status, what movies or music they like. The names of all the books they’ve read recently … what they’ve been twittering about lately. Their criminal history.
All in real time.
With otherwise complete strangers.
Imagine doing that as you walk along in an amusement park amidst a throng of people, or in a sports stadium seating 100,000+ fans.
I’m not sure if I’m excited by the possibility or would have an urge to start smashing all the smartphones I saw.
Either way, it’s buildable right now.
Not that I’m trying to make you paranoid of strangers pointing their cell phone cameras at you. *smirk*
Sometimes I read what is going on in the news (c.f., states banning gay marriage) or just watch “modern” cars going by on the highway and feel such a sense of temporal discorporation. As if my mind is watching events that transpired centuries ago, in a daydream, and any moment the fugue will fall away and I’ll be in the place I always was — which is not here.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been waiting so very long for an age, for a state of mind that may never come.
And I feel exhausted.
[And elated.]
Something that’s been annoying me the last week or so is all the complete misinformation on ReadyBoost+SuperFetch there is on the web. Some of it coming from Microsoft’s own website — they try to explain what it does in dumbed down layman’s terms that just adds to the confusion.
READYBOOST HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW MUCH MEMORY YOU HAVE IN YOUR COMPUTER. There. I said it. Well, it uses RAM, just as any piece of software uses RAM, but it, and it’s big brother SuperFetch, will not “add RAM” in any sense to your computer.
What do they do? They make your old mechanical hard drives seem faster, less laggy, by using solid-state USB memory as a cache of the often used files on your mechanical hard drive. This is precisely what so called “hybrid” drives such as the Seagate Momentus do, except it’s using an internal 4GB solid-state drive instead of a USB memory stick. Note: A modern SSD is typically faster than any memory used in solid-state USB devices, but it is the same over-all idea.
So, if you have a slow mechanical hard drive and buy a fast USB memory stick for use as a ReadyBoost device, you may notice (after you have used your computer a while and Windows has had time to figure out what files you use most and copy them to the ReadyBoost drive) that your computer boots faster, apps start faster, and there is less lag while playing games (especially big games like MMOs).
If on the other hand you have a fairly fast modern mechanical hard drive or your USB memory is just average speed, the boost, if any at all, will most likely be below human perception.
If you have an SSD (solid-state drive) as your boot drive, then ReadyBoost is of no use to you at all, as the SSD will be far faster than your USB Memory stick or most any mechanical hard drive you probably own.
Got it? Good.
And as for superfetch? It also attempts to make accessing files on your mechanical hard drive seem faster by preemptively loading ones you often use into any free RAM you might have. It also tries to keep any files or applications you have used in this free RAM cache. That is, if there are a couple applications you use a lot on your machine, superfetch will try to load them into a special cache in your free memory ASAP and keep them there as long as your machine is on. You can exit and restart these applications often and not worry too much about how slow they will be to start up when you click on them again, because they will be copied directly from your fast memory cache, not from the slow hard drive.
Thus if you have a slow hard drive and a lot of extra RAM, superfetch should help you refrain from throwing things against wall because your apps take forever to load.
So, to recap:
1) Slow hard drive and lots of RAM? SuperFetch is your friend.
2) Slow hard drive and a fast USB memory stick? ReadyBoost is your friend.
3) You have a Solid-State Hard Drive (SSD)? Why then the SSD is your friend. And your helpful pals ReadyBoost and SuperFetch will just sit in the corner in sulk because they have nothing to do.
Feeling left out and resentful because no one invited you to the Google+ party? Well, put down that can of gasoline and those Google map directions* to the Google campus… I left the back door open for you.
*motions towards you*
Hurry though before some one sees.
GOOGLE+ INVITES ===V
https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3Dqsk2FnmDVOs%3A4fHXyMSTXWI
*The directions were off by 3 miles anyway, as usual. You’d just set fire to a fish hatchery.**
**Ok, that’s actually where Google thinks I live, but you get the idea.
I saw what you did there. Very funny.
Now put it back.
thx
Write. Write. Write. Edit. Write. Write. Rockstar. Write. Edit. Edit. Edit. Edit. Edit. Rockstar. Edit. Edit. Edit. Mushroom. Mushroom. SNAKE!
Print is Dead. We keep hearing that — but this time around it’s True. Or least, in the process of becoming True. We are probably roughly right before the main crest of what historians of the future might mark on a timeline as “The Decline of Print”.
So, let’s just skip past the entire dying bit. Who wants to watch that anyway? Once it’s buried and the new spring-time of the rendered word comes, what do we see? What remains?
There probably will always be quality hard-bound books. But they will be made-on-demand or in short runs that will cover projected yearly demands. Some works, such as the classics — Shakespeare, Poe, Plato, The Christian Bible, and so on — will always have people who want them physically sitting on their books shelves so they can occasionally touch them, and thumb through their favorite passages. Or more likely so that visitors to their homes can see and admire them.
Large wall-mounted or self-standing computing displays will probably be cheap and ubiquitous 20+ years out, as will portable pad-sized readers of various kinds. That is, both something as big as you can practically fit in a house and something you can conveniently carry around in your hand while you go about your daily business. It is unlikely for practical physical reasons that large-screen portable devices will be all that common outside artistic or engineering niche communities. Thus, large-sized photo-books may still be produced along-side hard-bound literature for the collectors. (Everyone else will just look at them on their large wall-mounted or table-top screens.)
Cheap pulp-books will probably not completely disappear for quite a while out on the fringes of modern civilization, partly because all the old print-books will be dumped there. But the day will come, and not far off, that there will be the ebook equivalent of pulp books. Perhaps mere throw-away novelties, having no more use than the paper hats occasionally showing up on New Years eve. And then forgot. But cheap none-the-less, as close to free as makes no difference, and then the days of print are finally done.
Six hundred years is not a bad run.
And so are you.
At least you are if you hold to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.
Consider for a moment that your actions, if we hold to the validity of that interpretation, do in fact precipitate a fully formed universe in-situ, complete with at least one world containing over six billion sentient (sort of) human beings. If that is not the act reserved to the domain of a God, by traditional definitions, then please tell me what is?
MMO Definition (c.f. WOW):
That nagging feeling you have about yourself when you walk down a road in a new zone and a horde of creatures 20 levels your senior come running out of the woods to take a bite out of you.
Example usage: “Be careful of the reds on the other side of that bridge as your cross it — you’re looking mighty tasty there.”
Once upon a time, long long ago — or at least that’s how the story goes — I made a box. A book box. It was assembled by hand from various bits of old wood laying about the property — cedar planks, redwood trim and various used pines. As I am likely to do, I doodled a few drawings up on and in said box, though, unlike most other times scribbling happens, a soldering iron was involved. If I etch symbols on you with fire and smoke, that means I like you. (Or very much not.)
The box, as it turns out, was a birthday gift. A place to hide away a manuscript from the light of day when my wife was not working on it.
I mention this because … it is so very dark outside tonight. And that has me wondering now, wondering whether it was I who burned in the script I see on the side of box (for it was so very long ago now)… and what language is this script?
A little sketch of Robbie the Robot.
I ordered a new Wacom tablet. They’re good for me to have around ’cause otherwise I tend to doodle all over the walls. And occasionally people if you stand still for too long. :-)
The whole bit about global warming that’s been talked about the last few years never really interested me much — because it’s such old news to me. As a geeky little kid 20+ years ago, I learned all about the concept of global warming from watching PBS and reading various semi-obscure on-the-fringe science books.
And you know what one of my very first thoughts about it all was? We may have accidentally saved our “stupid selves”* from an impending ice age. Ice ages come and go. It’s part of a complex cycle of nature, magnified by various out-gassings and geographic-based weather patterns of the Earth, but driven mainly by the solar output of our local Sun. I remember reading a few decades back how we were overdue for an ice age and thinking what could we do to stop such a thing? Well….
Honestly, one of the first things that occurred to me was reflective mylar sheets in space — all the rage in fringe-science for a while in its day, especially among the Russians who actually put up a small one for testing at one point. A thousand kilometers of taut reflective foil over our heads, keeping us warm on chilly days might be a way to go, but its tricky to maintain these things, and more expensive than you want to think about to actually haul up into orbit in the first place.
But aside from that, Carl Sagan had talked extensively about the Greenhouse Effects on Venus around that time — dense gases on the planet have it baking at 700 degrees (Fahrenheit). So it wasn’t far to go to start wondering if the runaway atmospheric processes on Venus could be used for good purpose here on Earth — that is, to keep an Ice Age at bay — if we could just convince the major nations of the world to pump enough of the the stuff into the air somehow. And then it all dawns on you … as such an irony.
Just remember, if you encounter any extraterrestrials in the next few decades and the subject of Global Warming comes up, just say we did it all on purpose. It looks so much more impressive to leave them thinking we came together as species and terra-formed our world in a bid to protect our Civilization than — well, the Truth.
*Note: I’m a long-time misanthrope. That means, as a person, you probably horribly disappoint me in some way. So, try to do better in the future ok? Thanks.
I made a few changes to the website to make it friendlier to use.
1) Removed the pesky captchas previously required for commenting — they don’t really work well (if at all) in this day and age anyway. And added in Facebook, Twitter, etc automatic login/verification options. So if you want to comment now, it shouldn’t be so much of a hassle.
2) Changed the url structure to something a little less cryptic and a little more search engine friendly. I’m happy about that. I am NOT happy that I just lost all my Facebook LIKEs and sharing counts (as the urls are different now). Grr. Well, it needed to be done. Re-LIKE any posts you feel like. ;-)
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