Storage Nostalgic

Nostalgic is something of taking pleasure in experiencing the glories of olden days.

When I rewind my life clock by 25 years, I'm thrilled to recap the storage experience. During my Under-graduation @ late 80s, our lab had one powerful (note the point) PC (Personal Computer) from IBM; of course high cost too. The name of the system is IBM PC XT 286.

That powerful PC configuration was "Waugh" factor, then:

Processeor : 80286 @ 6 Mhz
Main Memory : 640 Kb Ram.
Graphic Adapter : CGA.
Hard disk : 20 Mb.
Floppy disks : 5"¼ 1.2 Mb & 3"½ 720 Kb.
Operating System : IBM PC DOS 3.3.
Bios dated : 21/04/1986.

The above picture is so called near super computer during my college days with 20 MB hard disk storage. Today, on watching the news of SanDisk's 1 TB SD card (nearly million times better), I'm amazed !!!

SanDisk has unveiled the biggest SD card in the world — a prototype card with an outrageous 1 terabyte of memory. Ref: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/sandisks-1tb-sd-card-has-more-storage-than-my-computer/

Interesting to note that it was only 16 years ago that the company introduced its first 64 megabyte SD card, while two years ago they debuted the 512GB card, which was then the world's biggest. Things have moved fast, though, and compared to the 64MB card, today's 1TB version offers 16,384 times more storage.

This SDXC card is only a prototype at this point, with no details available on price or release date, but it's still an impressive milestone. The company says the 1TB card is necessary to match the increasing demand for memory-heavy formats, including 4K and 8K footage, 360-degree video and mixed reality (MR).

However, there will be some downsides. The 1TB card is certain to be prohibitively expensive, and at such a large capacity, read and write speeds are going to be comparatively slow. Now imagine the anguish if your 1TB card corrupts and you lose everything on it.

Itz no wonder, the world can see SD card of PetaByte or ZettaByte in a d(r)ecent time-frame. Isn't it a drastic IT growth in last few years?

Fire Price Slash

Couple of weeks back, I wrote about Amazon Alexa and its functionality.  Amazon is taking this emerging technology with dog-food mode i.e. to leverage in its own tablet product - Fire.

Amazon wants to be under the Christmas tree this year. It's cut the price of its new Fire tablet almost in half and added its popular voice assistant, Alexa, in hopes of making it a hot holiday item, despite a slump in overall tablet sales.

The new Fire HD8 tablet will cost $90, down from $150. Mixed-use battery life is up to 12 hours from 8, and the base storage is doubled to 16 gigabytes.

The biggest change is that the tablet will have Alexa functionality. That means that when users tap and hold the tablet's home button, they can ask the assistant for anything from weather reports to news queries, and also get the device do things like adjusting the lights or temperature on compatible smart-home devices.

Are you ready for XMas Fire purchase ?!!?

Linux Silver Jubilee

Waugh, Silver Jubilee of Linux Kernel Development.  Yeps, exactly 25 years ago, on August 25, 1991, which was a Sunday, Linus Benedict Torvalds informed Minix users that he was doing a free computer operating system as a hobby.

"Hello everybody out there using Minix. I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU) for 386 (486) AT clone," read the announcement.

2016 report will show you how fast Linux is going, who is behind it and what they are doing to improve the code each day, as well as which companies are sponsoring it's development.

This report provides insight into the development trends and methodologies used by thousands of different individuals collectively to create some of the most important software code on the planet.

Linux kernel powers your Android or Ubuntu smartphone as you read this story on your handhold device.  Itz used by search engine giant Google, as well as 99.9% of the websites you're accessing daily.

Linux kernel, as the core component of a GNU/Linux operating system, is everywhere around us.

Successful Silver Jubilee Celebration for Linux !!!

PayPal Squbs

Read an interesting architecture article, adopted by PayPal.

I'm wondering how did Paypal take a billion hits a day system that might traditionally run on a 100s of VMs and shrink it down to run on 8 VMs. At the same time, it stays responsive even at 90% CPU at transaction densities.

Paypal has never seen before, with jobs that take 1/10th the time, while reducing costs and allowing for much better organizational growth without growing the compute infrastructure accordingly.

Answer is tha PayPal moved to an Actor model based on Akka. PayPal told their story here: Squbs: A New, Reactive Way for PayPal to Build Applications. Itz available at https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2016/05/11/squbs-a-new-reactive-way-for-paypal-to-build-applications/

They open source squbs and you can find squbs on GitHub. Ref: https://github.com/paypal/squbs

Alexa in Macadamian

Last month, Amazon released Alexa Skills Kit, which allows outside developers to create new services to work with the voice-activation technology.

Developers can use the Smart Home API to enable smart home capabilities, such as controlling lights, door locks or alarms. They also can create custom skills using the ASK to design their voice user interface, and building cloud-hosted code that interacts with cloud-based APIs.

Among the companies drawn to Alexa is Macadamian, which has developed two of its own skills. One is a new service called "Fantasy Scoreboards," which allows users to control a WiFi-connected National Hockey League scoreboard when connected to Amazon Echo.

The company initially explored voice interaction through phone -- like with Siri on iOS -- before shifting to Alexa. Noted by Martin Larochelle, chief architect of Macadamian.

The company previously developed a skill to send text messages using the Twilio API. It is considering adding a third skill this summer, which likely will give users a way to set reminders for upcoming city services -- like recycling and garbage pickup days or other routine services.

Alexa Skills Kit is a free SDK for developers, providing a low-friction way to get an Alexa skill up and running within the space of a few hours. No experience in speech recognition or natural language is required, as Amazon handles the chore of understanding spoken word requests.

AWS Lambda can help in the development process, Amazon noted, as it runs the developer's code in response to triggers, and manages compute resources in the AWS Cloud.

Yahoo Collapse

In my last blog, I wrote about Verizon acquisition of Yahoo. Ref: http://ganesansenthilvel.blogspot.in/2016/07/yahoo-verizon.html 

With my financial market background, I did a fair analysis on Yahoo market history. We got to learn a lot as an individual and as a firm.

In 1998, Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for $1-2 Million in its nascent years ! They said Google's PageRank ain't worth the pennies !

In 2002, Yahoo had the might to buy Google for $5 Billion. They said Google is overvalued !

In 2008, Microsoft proposed to acquire Yahoo for $45 Billion. They said they are undervalued !

Now, Yahoo got sold to Verizon for a mere $4.8 Billion while Google is valued at over $500 Billion.

Moral: Never underestimate others and overvalue yourself ! You lose your own value in the process !

#YahooCollapse

Yahoo Verizon

Itz official, Verizon has acquired Yahoo in a $4.83-billion deal . The deal ends months of lengthy process which saw participation from companies including AT&T and a group led by famed wealth manager Warren Buffet.

Itz always nostalgic to put the reverse gear on looking back the history.

Yahoo began in 1994 as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” a list of websites curated by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo. It grew quickly as millions of Americans began turning on dial-up Internet connections and needed a home page that would direct them to all their essential destinations.

In 1996 it went public and rode the dot-com bubble to epic heights, reaching a peak of $500 a share in January 2000. Yet Yahoo missed the opportunity of a generation to convert its early lead and millions of users into more than just a portal.

Over the last four years, Mayer, a former Google executive, tried to right Yahoo’s ship.  Announcing the big news, CEO Marissa Mayer sent a mail to Yahoo employees across the globe. The closing note of the mail, is:
"Yahoo is a company that changed the world. Now, we will continue to, with even greater scale, in combination with Verizon and AOL."

It’s an ironic end for Yahoo’s founders ever could have dreamed when they first launched.