Reasons Unbeknownst

The slowest, most unreliable, and out-dated hunk of machinery in any computer, Mac, PC, laptop, whatever, is the hard drive. Computers today are like incredibly hi-tech cars driving around on wooden buggy wheels. Millions of dollars are poured into developing faster engines and fancy suspension systems but much of it goes to waste because the wooden wheels can only handle speeds under 30 miles per hour.

Hard drives are basically just shrunken down record players. They are no doubt marvels of engineering but they suffer from an unavoidable need to physically move an arm around, reading and writing data onto a spinning hunk of metal (see video). That’s all changing thanks to the emergence of solid state drives. These are a lot like the USB thumb drives stuck to countless key chains except they’re bigger, faster, and you can install your operating system on them.

Next Level Hardware just reviewed the latest generation solid state drive from MTron and it gives a really interesting glimpse into software performance on computers that are no longer bottlenecked by wooden wheels. I won’t get into the geeky details but the thing basically boots Vista more than twice as fast as the fastest mechanical hard drive. I had Vista on a pretty capable laptop with 2Gigs of RAM and it would take minutes of watching the hard drive light blink before I could actually use the thing. But what if Vista wasn’t such a slug? Would it be worth another look?

These drives are horribly expensive but prices are dropping fast. The NLH review is interesting because it’s now possible to imagine a world where there are no more computer bottlenecks and reliability is no longer a concern because of the durability of the new crop of drives.

If performance and reliability are no longer issues some obvious questions come to mind: Why would anybody ever buy a new computer? Will Vista finally find acceptance once the performance issues are solved by better hardware? If nobody needs to upgrade because even cheap PCs are just good enough will the hardware industry collapse?

I predict that people will continue to buy new computers because the cost will be much lower as we move towards system on chip processors from Intel, etc. near the end of the decade. Got a virus? Just buy a new computer for $40. Storage will be remote if Google keeps its promises so even a computer failure will cease to be a big deal.

I’m still skeptical about Vista. By the time these solid state drives are cheap enough for mainstream use Vista will have been declared dead. There are rumors that MS is working on a really solid new OS that could replace Vista but Linux distributions may be good enough by then that it won’t make sense to pay an extra hundred dollars for a DRM shackled OS. Apple is interesting because standards are making the OS of choice nearly irrelevant but they’re also opening up Apple to competition from Linux. Virtual machines are probably the most interesting development because they will make applications OS agnostic. Want to run Office 07 in Linux or Mac? No problem, just boot XP in a virtual machine and do what you need to do.

Soon computers will be nearly free, performance will be more than anybody can use, at least for today’s apps, and the prospect of spending $150 for an operating system running on a $100 PC seems unlikely. Technically, economically, philosophically, Linux would seem destined for world domination.

While working on HoundWire I would often go to Park Bench Deli (a few blocks up the hill from where that photo was taken) in Altadena with various interesting people. One fellow diner was our intern from Caltech. Caltech is the west coast rival of MIT so they have some very smart professors wandering the halls. One out of every thousand alumni has received the Nobel Prize. The point is that the professors there know a little bit about what they teach.

To the story. Stephen, the undergrad, had a math class that was being taught after an economics class. The econ teacher inconsiderately left his scribbles on the chalk board for the math professor to deal with. According to the story the math professor walked in, looked at the econ equations for a minute, turned to the class and proclaimed “This is complete nonsense”.

A great analogy I heard about economics is that of a book report. Modern economists look at novels, run statistical analysis on the average words per paragraph and paragraphs per chapter. It’s all very scientific, high brow stuff based on calculus. Then they use that information to try to predict what the author’s next novel will be about. Of course that’s completely ridiculous but it explains why economists have predicted 9 of the last 4 recessions.

The Austrian School argues that you can’t predict the author’s next book unless you understand human nature. One of the most important books in the Austrian School is called Human Action by Mises. It just makes sense in my not yet well enough read opinion.

If you have an hour to kill I highly recommend this 70 minute podcast about the Austrian School from the Econ Talk website:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/12/boettke_on_aust.html
I’ve listened to it about 4 times and it’s sinking in. Good for long, caffeinated drives.

Photo info

OpenID is basically an attempt at single sign on. In theory you’ll be able to go to any site and log in or comment without the need to remember 31 passwords and user names.

So far it’s working great. I have it setup so that I just have to type in my blog’s url unbeknownst.net, it remembers my password, and I can log in and comment at a growing number of sites. My next goal was to add my blog to said growing cadre of OpenID compatible sites.

The best option currently looks like the WP-OpenID plugin. It was a pretty straight forward install but for some reason it was giving me blank pages when I submitted a comment at first. Seems to be humming along now. Feel free to try it out with your OpenID if you dare. I’ll leave the first comment using my OpenID account.

I allow anonymous comments on this blog so it’s not a big deal but you do get to bypass the spam filter if you’re using OpenID (at least for now).

* Update: Delegation doesn’t work. On other sites I can use my blog URL to log in but this plugin won’t let me do that for some reason. I’m sure they’re going to fix this in an update one of these days.

One argument I hear repeatedly regarding housing is that rents will increase as people foreclose and seek shelter as non owners. The problem with that argument is that they’re leaving houses behind. Houses that will eventually rent out or be purchased. That will either increase the supply of rentals or reduce the pool of renters if it’s purchased.

Another point. First time buyers who enter foreclosure and are forced to rent again are probably going to have ruined credit and a load of debt which means they’re likely to rent a less expensive place after their foray into the housing debacle.

We also had a residential construction boom. If you look at downtown San Diego you’ll see dozens of new condo towers. I saw an ad on Craigslist the other day. You could rent the place for $1800 a month or buy it for $470,000 plus HOA dues. A large number of those new condos are now rentals.

When you build vastly more places to live than population growth would dictate it’s hard to imagine rents doing anything but falling.

Click photo for detail.

As some of my long time readers know… let me rephrase that. As my long time reader knows, I’ve been working on a driving simulator with a few gear heads from around the world for the last few years. We all got busy and development stagnated for a while but there are rumblings in the belly of the beast.

Here’s a clip from what we had working a couple of years ago.

We learned a lot on attempt one and we’re all better coders now so it might just have a fighting chance this time.

I can sum up the point of this whole post in one sentence. If real democracy cannot exist without a free press then real capitalism cannot exist without the Internet.

A few years ago I paid $10 for access to an online discussion board frequented by Noam Chomsky and I asked him a question. “How has the Internet affected your understanding of the media?” His response was “I’m an innocent as far as the internet is concerned. I don’t even know what blogger.com is. Better raise the question with others.”

I haven’t tried to understand his work in linguistics but I think his analysis of the media is brilliant. He is a mesmerizing speaker but I was always disturbed by his notion that capitalism is fundamentally flawed. In “Manufacturing Consent” he talks about a requirement of rational central planning as an alternative to the evils of capitalism.

Here’s what I think was going through his head. He buried himself in the study of media and realized the disastrous consequences of communication monopolies when applied to democracy. Those media monopolies were allowed by capitalism which may explain his fear and loathing. And he was absolutely right at that time. His mistake was failing to predict how fast the Internet would break down the system as it existed when he wrote “Manufacturing Consent”. You get the sense that he assumes alternative media will always be crushed due to the inefficiencies and corruption associated with capitalism. Howard Dean and Ron Paul are living proof that the Internet is starting to allow the spread of previously taboo political beliefs.

Chomsky gets communication. He doesn’t get technology (as evidenced by his reply to my question) and based on his insistence upon “rational central planning” as a way forward it looks like he also doesn’t really understand economics or at least the power of emergent order, which is a bit strange considering his love of democracy. My plan is to bump into him some day so I can ask these questions.