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
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.