From: Ken Meyering (ken@define.com)
Date: Sun Dec 06 1998 - 17:19:54 MST
Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com>:
> Well, duh, Ken, when are you going to come and do some of this - session
> work? eh?
Hi. I'm up here in Seattle at the moment, making a big skunkworks
kind of stink, in order to accelerate the downfall of Microsoft and
the uprising of superscalar ram fabs for no-moving-parts hard drive
emulators.
When I was 18 years old, I worked at Computer Sciences Corporation in
Lompoc, CA, as a Data Technician. One of the things we did there was
Terrain Mapping radar for data that went inside of cruise missiles.
Back in the old days, before GPS, we needed terrain maps to be stored
inside the missile, so it could use nose-mounted phase-array radar to
slip through the hills to its destination. The Tomahawk would
compare the stored data against it's real time scans.
Back in those days, that kind of processing power was expensive, thus
making the $1 million per/missile price tag justifyable.
Then we put up GPS. Of course, then the price tags of the missiles
went down to $250,000.00 per missile.
After leaving CSC, I went up to the Seattle Area, and lived at 724 S.
231st Place, in Des Moines, WA. I was renting the basement floor of
a two story house on the beach in Puget Sound. Cooincidentally, my
next-door neighbor was the President of Boeing Aerospace. I think he
still lives there, although he's now enjoying retirement.
See http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/missiles/
Nowdays, GPS circuits are being placed on chips, and soon to be in
Ericsson and Nokia cell phones. See the following:
http://www.sirf.com/
http://www.nokia.com/americas/phones/
http://www.ericsson.com/US/phones/
This leads me to wonder, where do you find a good chemist, capable of
puting the C4 explosives into *every* plastic case for *every* cell
phone, just in case. It's such a headache to have to retrofit the
battery packs, it would be much easier to just build it into the
plastic from the start. It's all about bang for the buck. Which begs
the question, who gets to keep the detonation activation codes?
Anyway, back to the no-moving-parts hard drives:
It's nice to Quantum making an attempt at solid state hard disks:
http://www.quantum.com/dv/SSDS-AVDS.pdf
But look at the size of these things! It would be so much more
efficient just to reroute the Microsoft fortune to superscalar ram
fabs. We could keep the form factor of good old fashioned head on a
silver platter ancient SCSI A/V technologies:
http://www.seagate.com/disc/prodmatrix.shtml
All the disc array hardware could stay the same, for now, except the
hard drives themselves would just be superscalar ram wavers, instead
of platters! Gee, what a concept! Time to bring back Melinda and
have her pull out the check book.
Now, what to do with Washington D.C., the White House, and the
Senate and the House of Representatives?
See http://www.disney.com/DisneyWorld/ThemeParks/index.html
I'm for giving Disney a contract to turn the place into a Theme Park
with old style herky-jerky animatronic droids. Oviously, the place
is currently filled with a puppet show cast of characters, but
unfortunately, today's puppet technology is so advanced that the
tourists are getting confused and thinking that these are all real
people with independent thoughts. It's probably better that we go
back to paper-mache style robots, just so nobody gets confused.
-------------------
ken@define.com
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