1 I've never seen anyone use "PB" as a unit of storage before. Something of a milestone.

2

I have a vague memory that in one episode of ST:TNG Data was asked for his operating characteristics, especially his neural net. And I have a vague memory that his memory was on the order of 100 terabytes. Does that sound right?

If so, you've exceeded him already.

3

Apparently I'm remembering wrong. The number was 100,000 terabytes. Which means you've reached 1%.

Which in itself is still pretty amazing.

4 Interesting; they came up with a very reasonable number there.  10^18 bits is a good guess as to what advanced technology could encode comfortably within the space of a human head, neither too low nor implausibly high.

Wonder if they did the numbers (there have been some good scientific advisors on ST over the years) or if they just lucked out.

5 You should be using Fusion-io's ioDrives instead of traditional SSD. :-)

6 We have a few ioDrives, and they're nice, but they run about 10x the cost of regular SSD.

We're looking at Intel's new SSD cards, which aren't as fast but are much more reasonably priced.

7 For some reason my Japanese acquaintances are way more enthusiastic about Fusion-IO's wares than European and American ones (and I basically have just one Australian). Cost-no-object culture, better marketing, or a statistical fluke, I cannot tell.

8 80TB of SSD? Holy crap how did you made the money to buy all of these expensive things? Which SSD models do you recommend for RAID and professional use?

1

My Kindle Fire doesn't have an SD slot either, micro or any other size. I was a bit surprised by that. It's got 8G of memory, but if you're downloading video that can get chewed up really fast.

For me,  since all I'm doing is books, it's huge. And it does have a USB port.

I think the reason for not including an SD was user interface, not hardware. The bookshelf metaphor for the GUI doesn't really easily represent an external storage device. If you add an SD, you need some way to move things onto it and off it again.

I think they probably could have fit the hardware in; it isn't really all the complicated. But it would have made the GUI far more unclean and confusing.

I bet it's the same with the Nexus 7.

2 Steven: In theory, you have a point, but in practice, the SD card is for advanced users, and is only for side-loaded content; anything you buy through the B&N store gets downloaded into the internal flash. The book reader application simply scans both the internal flash and the micro SD card and puts the content in a single list. I should qualify that, this is true on a first generation Nook, I suspect later Nooks continue this practice. (I have a Nook Color, but I've barely used the stock firmware, I'm using it with mod firmware as a basic Android tablet--the most used app is the Kindle app *grin*)
If the display quality on the Google Nexus 7 tablet is up to the standard of the Kindle and Nook tablets, I expect Amazon and B&N will have to drop prices significantly to be competitive; most other cheap ($200-$250) tablets have much lower quality displays.

3 Thinking it over, I suspect it's simpler than that.  At $199, Google are probably making next to nothing on the 8GB model.  But with no expansion slot, a lot of customers (me, for instance) will opt for 16GB model, paying an extra $50 for about $5 worth of flash chips.

I'd be more upset if it wasn't still amazing value for money.  Back in the day, I ran an entire phone company on less hardware than that.

4

Google doesn't care if they make money on this. What they're trying to do is to make internet access devices into commodities, and to put such devices into as many hands as possible.

That's because internet access devices are complements to Google's business.

They don't care about selling units with more memory, either. They don't want you using these devices stand-alone. They want you using them to get online, because when you're online then there's a good chance that Google is making money off you.

That's the entire point of the Android project. It's the reason Google spent a lot of money developing it, and then gave it away to anyone willing to build and sell hardware underneath it.

5 "I think the reason for not including an SD was user interface, not hardware."
I can't speak to Kindle and Nook, but this makes no sense for generalized Android hardware:  there's already a simple UI in the system settings for mounting/unmounting an SD card.  Google would have had to actively disable the feature in the OS.  Pixy's probably right in comment #3.
Stephen, bear in mind that on Android phones, large apps--typically games--are frequently designed to go onto an SD card instead of in the device's internal memory.  My phone has ~1GB of free internal storage but comes with an 8GB micro SD.

6 The UI for mounting-unmounting is there, but UI for data manipulation is not. There is no File Manager nor Finder.

Lack of GPS in Kindle Fire was a bit of a problem for me, and surprisingly, too. Getting a WiFi GPS to work was kludgy and expensive.

7

The Kindle Fire is a device which is supposed to help the owner buy books and movies from Amazon. Would inclusion of a GPS make the owner even more likely to buy books and movies?

1

Hmmm...The game sounds like it would be disappointing when compared to Age of Wonders, let alone Master of Magic.  It would probably be inferior to Elemental but given the mess that game was released as (Being gradually patched by Stardock to acceptable mediocrity, if with some glaring flaws still remaining from birth.), Warlocks probably sounds like a better game to play.

Still waiting for a true successor to MOO.  Oh, Kickstarter, where are you?

C.T.

2 Yes.  In this case the technical execution is sound, and they just need to add more options to sustain interest.  I expect that's a lot easier than scrambling to fix a bug-ridden mess.

3

I think I might have some reservations about the game design, probably identical to your reservations about Warlock, and the need for more and more varied content.  I am interested in it but probably not enough to buy it before there is a sale on it again, and with more than two DLC.  Then again, the number of turn-based strategy games of either sci-fi/space opera setting or fantasy is not exactly overflowing at the moment, and the number of turn-based RPGs is only slightly larger.

Heh, maybe time to play Xenoblade to distract from how depressing the gaming scene can be...

C.T.

 

 

4 I picked it up, too. It was billed as a spiritual successor to the Majesty series, but really is only shares the same fantasy setting (Ardania?). Aside from the magic and multiple worlds/maps (very much like MoM), it's Civ5.

So far, the closest I've seen to being Master of Magic 2, are the Age of Wonders series and, recently, Stardock's Elemental series. Granted, Elemental: War of Magic was a dismal failure, but I'm playing the beta for the sequel, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, and it is measuring up relatively well. (At least, not a dismal failure, :-D )

5 I picked up the Age of Wonders series on GOG, but haven't had time to play them yet.  And I was intrigued by Elemental, but never got around to trying it.

6

Age of Wonders, especially Age of Wonders 2 and its stand-alone expansion pack/sequel Shadow Magic, is the closest any fantasy turn-based strategy game has gotten to being a MOM2 in my experience.  My only complaint is that there is not nearly enough of MOM's city building/Civ features in any AOW title - otherwise AOW would be perfect.

Elemental had some nice ideas for a fantasy turn-based strategy game, but woeful execution, along with questionable design choices, crippled it.  I bought it the day it came out, and while each version of the patch has made it more playable, I still find it lacking, both from problems in execution and problems with design concepts.  As mentioned earlier, some of the more objectionable features of the game have been left untouched by the patches.

I find it strange that Warlock is a spiritual successor to Majesty, since Majesty is a real-time fantasy strategy game - which I quickly came to loathe and drop after buying it.

BTW, I should mention that with the possible exception of Civ3, any Civilization or Civ-like game developed by Firaxis after Alpha Centauri - which is my favorite computer game ever - does not exist to me.  But I am eagerly awaiting their XCOM game.

C.T.