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http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait

For the many people who wonder why the computer takes so long to respond even while it’s not ‘doing anything’ (myself included). Of particular interest, while your computer may operate mainly within close caches and system memory, reading data or code from the hard drive can take up to approximately 164,000 times as long as reading from main memory, and about 13.6 million times as long as reading from the fastest cache available to processors. Of course, this is the initial seek time, and is much slower than what are called ’sustained reads’, where a large block of data is read at the same time. Think of it as travelling across the world to read something out of a book. Reading the first word takes 12 hours, but reading the next word is much faster.

Much research has gone into reducing hard drive reads, as many software architecture and operating systems professors/books can attest, and the reality of the situation is much better than the bolded numbers might suggest. Compact, well-written applications coupled with large and nimble CPU caches and main RAM can reduce the number of hard drive reads and writes to a minimum, but it still happens. Those hard drive hits crush the performance of any application, and keeping data in line and ready to be read can really improve performance.

This performance hit is felt the most during system boot, when nothing is cached in memory. Your computer has to load the basic core of Windows/Linux/Mac, followed by drivers, services, and other essential processes that allow you to use the computer. All of these require many seeks to the hard drive to get the files into memory, then into the CPU, and it hurts. The same effect is exhibited when computers resume from sleep or hibernate, where some or all the memory has been written to the hard drive and must be pulled back into memory at the comparatively excruciatingly slow pace that hard drives run at. So when you unfold your laptop, the computer is unresponsive for a few seconds as all the data is read back into memory while processes are trying to restart where they left off.

To combat that evil seek time, some computers (such as the MacBook line) have Solid State Drive options. These work just like RAM (although quite a bit slower, but not near as bad as hard drives), in that there is very little seek time! So when your system boots, all the files it needs can be loaded quickly without seeking all over the hard drive, easily speeding up system performance!

Sadly, solid state drives are hard to come by for desktops, and are normally just laptop drives in desktop casings, so my desktop will sit with standard seeking hard drives for the foreseeable future.

So Apple released a bunch of new stuff today (read most of it at http://apple.com/hotnews), but of most interest to me is iTunes 8, and more specifically, the Genius mode.

The Genius is supposed to investigate the information in your library (playlists, track played counts, ratings, etc), upload it to the ‘Genius in the iTunes Store’ and receive some sort of information back. This information is used to match up songs you have that are supposed to go well together. For example, my laptop has a (somewhat) small library consisting of some speedy rock, some techno, some classic rock, some metal, a bit of Apocalyptica (a band that plays metal cellos), and various other songs. When I play one of the heavier songs and ask the Genius for recommendations, I get more metal, and some of the heavier versions of my speedy rock (and the heaviest songs from Apocalyptica). It’s actually pretty impressive.

This idea is also used by radio services like Last.fm and Pandora to match like songs together. Last.fm has always been pretty good at recommending music I like, and while I haven’t used Pandora enough to give it a fair shake, the people who use it swear by the accuracy of it. Upon watching the keynote speech, however, I realized just how powerful this iTunes Genius could be. With at least 63 million users/libraries, Apple has tapped into the largest collection of music ever amassed. Jobs made multiple references to the Genius getting smarter as time goes on, and as more and more people add their collective music information to the database, it will get better at recommending music.

It depends on how Apple has implemented their Genius algorithms, but this is probably one of the larger Artificial Intelligences with gobs and gobs of data to pick through. If AI’s are getting this good, it’s going to be an interesting future. Google’s algorithms consistently find the pick of the Internet litter, and if iTunes Genius is going to do the same with music, it stands to reason that other forms of information could be as easily integrated, categorized, and processed to find the most relevant information for any one situation. This high level of semantic awareness is quite the stuff of Science Fiction.

Since the iTunes Genius is primarily built to sell songs on the store (which it does with aplomb), one doubts it will have the stereotypical self-awareness moment and strike against humanity. in 20 years from now though… it’s definitely going to be interesting

3 minutes of social commentary on corporatism and economic dystopia.

[Every other Jason Statham movie ever made]

One movie-ending awwww moment.

I gotta say, the process of upgrading from an iPhone to an iPhone 3g is way too easy for it’s own good.

Even let me chill out in the store, activate it using my Mac as opposed to the store’s Mac, and restored all my old data. And for the locations with 3G, the speed difference is outstanding.

We’ll see about the much-touted battery life…

So today, Apple released an update to Leopard: 10.5.3. Plenty of bugfixes abound, but a new feature was snuck in: Google Contacts Synchronization. This allows you to keep your address book in sync between Google, your Mac, and your iPhone. I say this because the caveat of this new feature is that it’s only enabled for Mac users with an iPhone, but not for anyone else. This is absolutely nuts. Address Book has had Yahoo! synchronization since the beginning of Leopard, and I don’t see why Apple (or Google?) only enabled it for iPhone users…But worry not, fellow Mac users without iPhones, because Lifehacker comes to the rescue with a moderately-tricky edit for Mac users with any iPod. The steps are more-clearly outlined on the article, but you open a .plist file generated when you connect an iPod to iTunes, and lie to iTunes, saying it’s an iPhone, forcing Address Book to give you the option to sync with Google Contacts.If you’ve built up contacts on both services, expect about an hour of conflict resolution and duplicate deletion… oh joy. 

Just got back from a trip to Cancun for the weekend, and I’ve learned a few things:

• No matter how technologically advanced we get as a civilization, you still need to carry a pen.
• Laws should be written with some semblance of intelligence assumed in the people. Things move a lot quicker.
• I appreciate the ability of US Airports to publish their gate number assignments more than 50 minutes before flight time.
• I can appreciate why people get buzzed socially. Still don’t know if I enjoy it that much, though.
• It’s quite possible to walk around for 10 minutes and find 8 different USD-MXN exchange rates. It is also mathematically impossible to make any money playing the exchanging game between those vendors.
• The US Dollar is starting to suck.
• When relying on SPF50 suntan lotion, be sure you get every square inch of your body. I have an interesting sin(x)/4x shaped line down my back (with the 0 near my right shoulder)
• If you’re going to visit a foreign country, at least attempt to learn some aspect of the language before you visit. Baño, bien, y tu, para ti, and gato only take you so far.
• Bodyboarding is still freakin awesome.
• As is snorkeling. We saw 3 dolphins in 30m deep ocean!
• Take more shirts then you think you’ll need.
• The intracity buses in Cancun are 6.50 MXN, roughly 60 cents US. Freakin nuts!!

There’s probably a few more, but those are the ones I remembered to write down on my phone between planes.

Nine Inch Nails has released another album, this time completely free. It’s shakin up the music industry!!!

Of course, Trent has plans to sell physical CD’s and such, but the full album is available to download for free!

read more | digg story

It’s not the data that’s important, it’s the links between them that matter.

That’s one of my policies about data, especially now with relational databases allowing businesses and people to see the links between people. Advertisers don’t care who you are, they just care that one person has gone to X, Y, and Z places and that they must enjoy reading about C to advertise C to you. Police really don’t care what person you are, so long as they can identify you buying a gun, then holding up a liquor store, then going to a residence so they can arrest you. Doctors don’t need to know your name to know that you have the flu because you have D, E, and F symptoms. Given most circumstances where data is collected, the name of the person is irrelevant. It’s all about tying the data together.

Computers have allowed us to rapidly collect data, organize it into a standardizable format, and (most importantly) perform analysis on it. The Internet, merely a vast collection of information and links to other pieces of information, is the crowning achievement of interconnected data. Wikipedia, which makes linking between data dangerously easy, has been the source of many a curious perusal. Facebook, in particular, has been an excellent repository of links between people, pictures, messages, status updates, demographical data, and more! While Facebook has always made this information usable for advertisers, Facebook has revealed a new feature that is genuinely helpful (if not a little scary) to users.

Facebook calls it “People You May Know” (must be logged into Facebook to do anything with it), and it’s a very compelling feature in my opinion. Basically, Facebook takes your friends’ friends and finds the people that show up the most often. Their logic is that if many of your friends are friends with someone, then that person has a good chance of being your friend. Normally this would be a very hard thing to look at by hand, as you would need to compare something along the lines of n^3 people, where n is the amount of friends each person has. You take every single person I have as my friend, then for each of them, you have to take every one of their friends and see if they exist in all the other n lists of friends. Even using efficient algorithms, it’s an NP-complete problem. Assuming everyone on your friends list has 50 friends, that’s anywhere from 100,000 to 125,000 comparisons (assuming a good amount of efficiency on the programmer’s part about removing people once they’ve been matched from other friend’s lists). Of course, I currently have 282 friends, and I know of about 5 people on my friends list with over 400 friends, so this would take a LONG time.

Whatever crazy amount of processing power or super-efficient algorithms Facebook is using to find these common friends, it’s impressive. I’ve used the feature to add 5 new friends from high school and college. Of course this increases the work Facebook has to do when calculating my new “People You May Know”, but that’s not my problem :). As soon as Facebook starts guessing my political philosophy based on the friends I keep (and they can, it’s easier than doing what they just did), then I may need to get out. But I don’t think I can very easily…

Wow, it’s funny. In Pidgin, one can view the Member Since information on any user on your buddy list (you might have been able to for some time, but I just noticed it). Apparently I’ve been on AIM since May 5th, 2002. Of course, I’ve been on the Internet for quite some time before that, but it’s interesting to take a look back. More than half my life, I’ve been on the Internet, and it’s impressive to see how it has grown since the original ARPANET. I distinctly remember an assignment in 5th grade where I had to track a few stocks. Back in the day, I’d have to get on AOL, a painstakingly slow process considering our Windows 95 machine. Then you had to browse for every individual stock (also slow).

Nowadays, with Google Finance, RSS, and internet enabled cell phones, that information would come to me at blazing speeds anywhere I was. There’s so much more out there, and so much more to be had. Let’s hope these next 6 years (and those to follow) provide similar enhancements

Today, the sequel to the widely-popular Super Smash Bros. Melee: Super Smash Bros Brawl, launched in the US. Getting an average of 96 out of 100 according to the major game review sites, it’s quite a great game! While I do not own a Wii, I’ve played both the Japanese import and the English version, and Brawl takes everything that Melee had, made it better or kept it the same, and added 9 more characters, many more items, and an extensive story-arc called “The Subspace Emissary” which makes a valiant attempt to spice up the otherwise shallow single player modes.

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