Sunny.Molini

HP to bring Memristors to market

Sunny — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:58:08 +0000

HP announced earlier this week that they will be working with Hynix to bring memristors to market availability.

Imagine a resistor that can change how much electricity it resists simply by the application of voltage to it. You could build circuits that change their optimal efficiency on the fly, memory chips that store 10x as much data using 1/10 as much power, and replace static processors with dynamic ones that change their circuitry based on most frequently executed commands (jk).

Sounds dull and techy, but this really is a big deal that will significantly improve computer tech over the next 5 years.

This I Believe: Freedom > Wealth

Sunny — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:20:44 +0000

There are billions of people in this world, the vast majority of whom have well functioning brains with a wide array of goals, preferences, and desires. Those goals, preferences, and desires define the wonderful stuff we commonly refer to as ‘wealth.’ Freedom is about affording each one of them the right to exert effort to improve the world toward their concept of perfection. Law is about ensuring that those billions of conflicting interests can pursue their goals without unduly harming others. Economics is about how to structure those laws to best maximize whatever it is you wish to maximize.

Money is NOT wealth. Many things that increase wealth can be bought with money. Even the wealth of options that are available to somebody with lots of money can be highly valued in and of itself, but even then, it is the opportunity, not the money, that is valued. Wealth is time spent doing things you enjoy with people you love, like surfing, or walking, or simply talking. But money can buy many tools that make these actions easier to do, or more enjoyable while doing them.

I recently declared that ‘My preference is to avoid a government driven economy even if it were to lead to greater overall wealth, which I still do not believe is accurate.’ This was in response to a James Galbraith interview by Ezra Klein stating that there is nothing to fear from large government deficits. (to those who may find the argument convincing, I’d like to point to the role inflation plays in Galbraith’s analysis)

If the government were to decide that X is better for the wealth of the country than Y, but X is worse for your wealth, then the amount of money taken from you to accomplish X should be minimized to afford you the option of securing Y for yourself. (that’s very poorly written, I’ll have to revise it later, but that’s how my brain is working right now.)

Wealth is good, but only insofar is it is created by Freedom and Law. Freedom is the good, wealth is the result, hard work and vision under law is the means.

I call Freedom the good because life is not just a finite series of events during which one enjoys either luxury or a lack thereof. Life is not even a roller coaster of hills and turns that you have no control over. Life is a jungle of challenges and opportunities that can pop up and disappear in the blink of an eye. The choices you make affect your life and the lives all around you.

Money plays a key role in this because money provides access to an array of opportunities that are not afforded to less endowed individuals. More importantly, money tends to flow to those who provide value to others while it flows away from those who detract from that value. Government distorts that flow though when it redirects money to flow for political purposes.

YouTube - The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody

Sunny — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:14:30 +0000

Under the new category of, #thingsthatmakemesmilebroaderthanmyshoulders.

Dave ‘Whiner’ Complains About Google Reader

Sunny — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:42:01 +0000

Dave Winer, one of the creators of RSS, has always been vocal about his vision of the way RSS ‘should be used.’ He has always been fairly critical of the way that Google Reader shows RSS data. I’d like to equate this to the inventor of the hammer complaining that people use it to actually remove nails in addition to pounding them in.
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Mr. Winer, I fully appreciate the great contributions that you’ve made to the Internet. Your input on the variety of new technologies that have and are emerging are invaluable and I subscribe to many of your feeds. I do, in fact, agree with your perspective of RSS as a river of news, the vast majority of which can and should go unexamined. I must say though, that your ire against Google is significantly misdirected.
In the first place, you assume that the model of email is that it is general practice for users to examine every email that enters their inbox. I can assure you that this is certainly not true for many people. I have no desire to read my 5-6 daily emails from twitter telling me about each individual new follower I have, but they are good to have because I can then go back through those emails and examine for possible followbacks. Email is as much for record keeping and formality as for actual communication. Good email programs help the user prioritize and sort emails into ‘read now,’ ‘read later,’ and ‘just store for reference later.’
Different users have different needs for RSS too. The biggest difference is that RSS is generally public, and widely accessible. As opposed to email which is single target. Users want to be able to sort their feeds into ‘catch every one,’ ‘check frequently,’ and ‘mostly ignore, but scan for headlines.’ Google Reader gives users exactly that kind of flexibility. In fact, I use Google Reader precisely because it gives me the level of granularity of control that I need and provides a great river of news look. Only thing that could make it better would be auto-refresh and the ability to suppress the ‘unread’ on selected folders if I wish to.

‘Friendlier’ Face of Terror

Sunny — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:05:42 +0000

Yaakov Teitel is facing charges in the Israeli court system for, among other things, sending a bomb disguised as a Purim gift to a Messianic Jewish family, injuring a young boy, and putting poisoned bottles of fruit juice by the side of the road near a Palestinian village. Apparently this dude (he confessed) eventually succeeded in killing 2 people, a taxi driver and a shepherd. Not cool, hope this guy gets put away.

Sarcasm: Real bad ass, man. Killing shepherds & taxi drivers. Hardcore.

Advance in Quantum Processing

Sunny — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:40:12 +0000

Researchers at NIST have created a programmable, 2-qubit quantum processor.

Mr. Hanneke suggests that while this is just the first 2-qubit processor, one could combine many such processors by linking them together.

Qubits, are roughly similar to the ‘bits’ used in traditional computing, except that qubits can be both 1 & 0 at the same time. The NIST processor uses ultraviolet lasers to manipulate individual atoms to track such qubit information.

This is a big step towards ‘Quantum Computing,’ which is a new kind of computing that would (it doesn’t exist yet) use stuff much smaller than electrons to process data. This is science fiction slowly becoming reality here. The final product will probably depend on this other research being done on quantum teleportation.

Who Pays How Much Taxes?

Sunny — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:39:37 +0000

To those of you who think that the rich get away with a free ride in our ‘capitalist’ society:

Personal FinanceSoftware – Mint.com

ISP Competition

Sunny — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:00:18 +0000

It’s my guess that the debate on Network Neutrality has just gotten started. This will continue to be an issue for decades, unless we find a better way to sell Internet access.
Net Neutrality gets mostly contentious on the question of how much control Telecom companies can exert over the traffic that travels over their infrastructure. My gut pushes me to defend the telecom’s right to do what they want with the systems they’ve built or bought, that’s what a world of strong property rights would do. The fact remains though that the level of competition in the ISP market is incredibly low.
Customer choice typically lies in the choice between ‘fast’ cable or ‘less fast’ dsl. Or in some cases the same company that offers the ‘less fast’ dsl also offers the ‘faster’ fiber. The ‘fast’ company has little incentive to reduce rates or increase speed because there is no ‘faster’ option that they can hope to draw market share from.
Net Neutrality seems like nothing more than a new spin on the age old question of monopoly regulation. When you resolve the symptoms of monopoly the debate usually fizzles because there is no longer any need for it. It’s hard to ask for a better accountability master than a working market. That’s what I’m now looking for.

Disney Princess Pattern

Sunny — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:17:05 +0000

Notice anything?
You know, other than that they are all melodramatic divas?
How about that they were all brought up from their graphite infancy to be objectified symbols of paternalism?
Keep guessing, you’ll get it…

USB 3.0 Rolling Out to No Fanfare

Sunny — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:38:22 +0000

Not sure how I missed this, but apparently, the first device certified for USB 3.0 released in September.

Just want to make sure everybody knows how cool this is! It can transfer about 600 Megabytes each second. That’s most of the contents of a full CD, transferred to your flash drive in 1 second. It also carries substantially more power, so charging devices over USB won’t take nearly as long over USB 3.0.