Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Walked babes to school. Interested to see the IM 25nm NAND flash, double the capacity in the same footprint. At 167mm^2 (a square 13x13) - 8Gb == 64Gbit; to convert that to the world of hard-disk geometries (all in bits per inch^2 [nice]) is ~1/4 of an inch squared, giving an areal density equivalent of 240Gbit/inch squared (highly contrived without leads, packaging, and/or hard-disk spindles, read heads etc. but interesting). So that gives us - numbers courtesy of man-in-the-pub (wikipedia)

Media Density Gbits/inch^2

CD 0.9

DVD 2.2

Blue-ray 7.5

IM 25nm flash 240

holographic 250

best holographic 250

hard disk 400

Of course, ideally storage densities would be measured in mm^3 (the world is going metric - inch by inch) - and of course, for eg. a backup medium, ultimate density of leaking capacitors is not the key consideration; but interesting nonetheless. I'm looking forward to the next generation of flash-ssds - but, if we could get the (rather good idea) of hybrid disk + some flash in a single box to market fruition things could get better rather more quickly. Incidentally - one reason doubling capacity in the same footprint makes a difference is the fixed cost: ~$1 per chip for etching, sawing, packaging etc.
Tried to book an hotel at FOSDEM on Alasdair's recommendation, I suppose I should at this point insert some graphic suggesting I'm going to FOSDEM: it's going to rock. By some miracle of scheduling, I also seem to have a talk on boot performance Saturday @ 16:15. The abstract for which should read:
A quick expose on boot time profiling tools, show-casing the slightly-less-lame: "bootchart2" - a new and improved boot time profiling tool, and other ways to speed things up. Which of the seven+ 'readahead' tools do you want, and why ? With a summary of recent fixes and wins in the area, and how to get involved with improving Linux boot performance
If you have content I am likely to miss: a new uber-funky boot, ultra-fast boot subsystem (or something) I'd love to hear about it for then.
I don't think I ever realised that Andy Wingo's past before GStreamer was so interestingly Nucular - a fascinating set of insights. I must say that, I'm more optimistic that you can blag money out of the military, and use it to generate something socially useful - the internet might be a case in point.
Poked LXF, odd. Clarity; one-to-one with JP, sync with Aaron. Worked late on git based code auditing tool. Printed out some lovely pictures of the children for their God-parents.

Media	Density Gbits/inch^2
CD	0.9
DVD	2.2
Blue-ray	7.5
IM 25nm flash	240
holographic	250
best holographic	250
hard disk	400

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2010-02-01: Monday.