Out of Retirement

I had gone into a kind of retirement by the end of last year. Had been doing some freelance on-line consultancy. Now suddenly I am back at a job again full time. Having been at development management job for such a long time everything I have been doing gives such a sense of deja vu! We flew in, we stayed at a hotel, we hunted around for a house, moved to it. Arranged gas connection, got furnishings and furnitures (that's a change, other times we got the packers & movers to get the furniture and stuff), got phone line, got mobile connections, arranged broadband connectio, the list goes on! On a larger scale there's another deja vu! We came back to Pune. Last dozen year's or so we lived in Pune. We kept going out on job changes yet kept coming back here. In fact, in dec we left Pune to go to Kolkata yet, in 6 montrhs we are back here! Is that destiny or what!!??

Solid State Drives Are Going To Take Over The World!

The world of drives that is! That's what you'd expect with a large blob of solid state memory mimicking the lumbering HDDs with their rotational latencies and seek time and so on ! That's what many an expert would lead you to believe too. But here are two opinions, actually a hands on test and a studied opinion that says that ain't so!

First, some testing results. Bill O'Brien does some testing and is not impressed at all by the performance to two SSD against two old world hard drives. He took 32 GB drives from Advanced Media Inc and Crucial Technologies .

So drive1 was Crucial's internal 2.5" SSD
drive 2 was RiData's 2.5 " SSD
drive 3 was Seagate's Barracuda 3.5" HDD
drive 4 was Seagate's Momentus 2.5 "

Test results came up as follows.

Dr1 Dr2 Dr3 Dr4

Burst Speed 137.3 71.2 135 214.3 MB/sec
Boot Speed 40 32 40 40 Sec
Restart time 78.6 54.8 59.9 55.6 Sec
Data copying 243 264.5 185 185 Sec*

* for 4666 files totaling 8.05 GB of data, copied to/fro. because at the end of the day the SSD drive data may have to be sync'ed to the main system. Conclusion: no significant gain in any department.

On the other hand the HDD's keep growing in size. 1 TB or a 1000 GB drives are mainstream. That's quite a lead over the SSD's of 60 GB may be! I am sure both are going to be in use for a long time to come!

PSLV launches 10 satellites In One Go!

PSLV's thirteenth flight on Apr 28th successfully deployed the payload of 10 satellites that it carried. The main one was the the Cartosat 2A, Indian mini satellite IMS-1. The mini satellite is going to be a test vehicle of future technologies. Cartosat , of course, is the mapping vehicle of the dept of space. These two were the heavyweights. Cartosat is 690 kg, the minisat is 83 kg respectively.

The other eight were micro satellites from universities and research institutes in Canada and Germany. Sapce technology surely has come a long way since the late seventies and early eighties when I had first contacts with the ISRO ( Indian Space Research Organization) ever!!

Eee PC 900 is Born!!

I discussed the news about XP support on the UMPC or the ULCPC as some call them couple of days back. Now comes news of Asus releasing their biggest UMPC, the 9" Eee PC 900 family. Besides the 8.9" display at 1024x 600, the system has 1 GB memory, a 1.3 MP camera, a 12/ 20 SSD and a multi touch trackpad. Either Linux or XP indtalled the machines with XP come with the smaller drive.

The first reveiw that has appeared is also quite complimentary. particularly in the value for money department the series 900 scores a perfect 10. The scorecard reads as follows,

Design 9/10
Features 8/10
Performance 8/10
Value for money 10/10
Overall 9/10

The price is expected to be around $500.

MontaVista Linux Available for Atom Now!!

MontaVista Linux version has been released for the new Intel Atom 2500 processors. These power efficient processors are positioned as the processing heart of a new generation of mobile internet devices that possibly address a very very focussed functionality rather than trying to be a general purpose processor/PC.

Linux has successfully been used in a range of devices with the real time version from MontaVista being successful in mobile devices and a range of appliances. This commercial grade release should help rapid design for connected devices with the Intel Atom processors. The release is supposedly optimized for programmed power management for longer battery life, 802.11n support that provides Wi-Fi connectivity and Bluetooth support for connectivity and speedy boot up. The power efficient Intel processors are expected drive a new class of devices.

UMPCs Are Growing !

Looks like more companies are coming out with these ultra mobile stuff. Latest announcement comes from Everex. But that's not the musings here about. I notice dome trends happening with these new fangled devices.

First and foremost of course is the price. Whatever devices are for sell almost all cost upwards of $300. There's something interesting here. People are ready to pay higher for a smaller and most often less capable device. Popularity of Asus Eee PC is an indicator to that. Also there's this constant push for bigger display real estate that sees 20", 27" or even bigger displays on the desktop and sizes like 17" coming over on laptops, here's device that does with a lot less. Displays on these devices are around 8"diagonal.

Other major thing is that solid state drives are finally here. These SSD devices of useful size is likely to become the sole drive on such notebooks first, looks like.

Intel Atom Processor

Ultra portables or the UMPCs are taking off looks like. So does the Intel Atom processor. Engadget announced the Intel made Atom based UMPC. This is how it looks.












Couple of other machines are being shown off at the Intel Developer's Forum at Shanghai. Asus has announced a Eee based on the Atom, that is well known. But Thinno's Eee clone was a surprise item.
Register Hardware reports from IDF at Shanghai:

Intel was keen to show off its Atom processor in the run-up to Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and drummed up a trio of machines to show it off - including the 7in Asus Eee PC.

Asus' plan to adopt Atom is well known, at least as far as the upcoming 8.9in Eee PC 900 goes. Less well known is new brand Thinno, which was showing its unnamed Eee-alternative. Demo'd with two laptops - one running Red Hat Linux; the other, Windows XP - the Thinno machines were fitted with 1.6GHz Atoms and 512MB of memory.

It's worth keeping a eye on the UMPC developments as well as the Atom.