Yellow Fever

Heat Reflecting Gold Foil, With Laptop

Mostly, this is an excuse to post one of the race weekend pictures, however I do have to say that I'm feeling a bit under the weather today. Thursday, we both got our yellow fever shots and it does warn that after a couple of days then you may experience mild symptoms such as fatigue (check), sort throat (check) and slight temperature (3 for 3).

Oh well, should be fine by the time it's Monday and hence the work week again. However, if I never post again then you know it turned out to be more than a mild reaction, becoming instead the full-up thing and likely making me at least a side story on the 6 o'clock news. View this as my epitaph, therefore, until you see something else and can decide otherwise.

Whirly Magnetic Disks Still Rule

Couple of interesting things popped up today here and here pointing to new laptop users being disappointed in both the performance and reliability of solid state drives (SSDs), a feeling that's probably amplified by being asked to fork over in excess of $1,000 extra for the privilege of being on the bleeding edge. Oh yes, and battery life wasn't any better either, it seems.

These stories echo what was written in Business Week a couple of issues ago when they profiled IBM's work to develop a new super thin and light laptop, the X300. IBM pulled SSDs from the first iteration of this machine because suppliers couldn't meet the contracted levels of quality.

Some experiments done by ARS technica on a Macbook Air show that, for a premium of $1,300, you only win with the SSD-equipped version when doing random-access based disk reads. In daily use, despite a 200 Mhz clock speed advantage over it's HDD-based sibling, the SSD-equipped Macbook was only noticeably better in one circumstance, namely, "it didn't suffer entire machine slowdowns when there was a lot of disk activity—or at least less so than the HDD model. "

So there you have it. Further proof that it's sometimes better to lag than it is to lead, especially when you plonk down your dollars before the pundits get their hands on a new advance, in advance of you. And for the more cynical amongst you, another victory for Jobs et al in their relentless war to squeeze increasing profits from hardware before the law of commoditization kicks in.

Apple acolytes please note: this is one expensive religion to adopt, particularly if you are relentlessly at the head of the queue for the latest blessing.

Me? I'm just disappointed that this technology doesn't appear, at least at first blush, to be the answer to achieving a major step-up in both the performance and reliability offered by current generation laptops; one piece of the puzzle perhaps, but not a complete new picture.

Answer To A 21st-Century Maiden's Prayer?

Toshiba are now shipping what is, as far as I know, the first laptop with a fully solid-state hard drive. The new Toshiba Portege R500 can be had with a 64Gb solid-state memory, resulting in a machine that has "no moving parts" they say. Except, one might hope, for things like the keyboard keys, screen hinge etc. but we'll let that pass for now.

Much is made of its light weight (1.72 lbs) and long running time on battery power ("tremendous", is the exact description!), all of which can be had for a mere 2,699 of your Yankee dollars.

Couple of minor points, though:

(a) How come they aren't shouting about how fast Windows now boots, applications run, birds sing, etc? Access times have to be, what, 10% for a SSD vs. seek times for even a very small physical disk? What gives? This ought to be the #1 thing to crow about unless, somehow, Bill's bits manage to lose all those gains again somewhere along the way?

(b) The type of non-volatile memory used in the SSD has a limited life span, dictated by the number of read/write operations it sees. Don't know what that equates to in this case but I saw elsewhere that in digital TV applications they are planning to provide a lower-quality of picture storage for the time-slipped stuff in order to extend the life of the memory chips set for inclusion as an on-board, low-rent TiVo capability.

(c) The detailed specs take a paragraph to tell you about all the features included to provide "Executive Durability" (any one reckon this PDF was a rushed translation from the original Japanese flyer?) which include things like HDD shock absorption. Great! Err, but hang on, there aren't any HDDs in it any more, which is surely the whole point of the thing in the first place?

Whatever, I will eagerly await the PC magazine reviews to see if this is the ultimate way, finally, to get the bloody things booting and restoring in anything less than a week.