Near HD conversion for DVDs

Toshiba lost out on the high density video recording war to BlueRay. But they have now announced a device that up converts standard DVD to HD resolution of up to 1080p. This would not be quite like HD video recorded on a media that can store it(like Blue Ray for example) but is an improvement on the standard definition DVDs. Standard definition being 480i/p resolution. The device should do well considering the Blue Ray take over of the worls is going to take tiime and until the time HD recorded media are universally available this transition product should do well. At $150 it is cheap enough to tempt people and give their collected SD DVDs a second lease of life!

"Time Bomb" in Software

Release and management thereafter of software products has always been difficult. As size and complexity of the products grow this becomes even more complex. But then there are more reasons for being careful too. The latest problem report comes from one of today's hot products the VMware. The CEO had to publicly apologize on the company website for an oversight that caused quite a few users a lot of stress.

Apparently developers had left some so called "time bombs" in the code, usually done to set a time limit on beta testing for example. These would be/should be cleaned up prior to release but obviously some did not get cleaned up even legitimate users could not install their systems that were paid for and all that.

Also goes to indicate how people in the testing and QA as well as the developers them selves need to be careful about such issues besides the regular bug management issues!

Cottage Industry In The Digital Age

It is possible to collect a set of individuals today and form an enterprise. Unlike the cottage industry of yore these individuals can be anywhere, any part of the globe in fact. It is probably easier to co-ordinate their work except where time difference cause problems. I am in the process of setting up such a virtual enterprise. Who would have thought, even probably 5 years back, such a thing would be possible in India. It's not too difficult to find people with a PC and a internet connection at home who can take up work that can be done on such a combination.

Samsung has announced volume availability of the 128 GB solid state drive. 256 GB drives should be coming out before the year is out. This is getting really interesting. Looks like these multilevel or the MLC flash chips are going to provide the higher capacities fairly quickly. The SLC or the singkle level chip flash technology seemed to slow down around the 60 GB capacities some time back. While HDD have already reached a terabyte capacity with vertical recording technology stuff, the SSDs are not too far behind now. It'll be interesting to watch the race! These 128 GB devices are available in 1.8 and 2.5 inch form factors.

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!!