Lots of particular lessons learned.

Here’s the latest:

If Ubuntu’s System Monitor program and the Linux “top” program are to be believed about CPU and RAM usage, then modern computers are not memory or CPU bound.

They are disk bound.

After 30+ years of being RAM bound.

Now, spring is a modern, dual core Intel with 8 gig of memory. The CPU is rarely busy to any extent. Memory use doesn’t go above 3 or 4 gig after running for a couple weeks – with the XP VM running, remember. And lots of other things running (including throwing away those 20-30k emails every day).

But.

But, the cursor freezes – especially in the VM. And there are long delays in routine operations while the disk drive is busy, chattering to itself.

Test it yourself: rsync a 400 gig drive’s contents to your main drive. Don’t expect things to work well while this is going on. Programs will spend a lot of time in hourglass mode, whether they show the 11th century timepiece of not. It’s bizarre how the VM’s XP’s cursor goes in to mondo-lag mode, too. Huh? What’s going on? Is the cursor location cached to disk in a blocking thread?

This is interesting because of the current transition in mass storage.

Let’s review.

1) The optical guys muffed the transition up from DVD. Yeah, you can’t beat the media price of optical. 10x under hard disk. But that boat left the dock and they missed it futzing around with Blu-Ray/HDVD/whatever wars. It’s over. The gamers and Hollywood might use these things to pack better quality stuff and more content on ’em. But the computer world simply doesn’t have any need for cheap storage in the 10-100 gig range. Maybe not even in the 100-1000 gig range! Hard drives are too cheap and they don’t have the insert-the-11-teenth CD problem. Hard drives provide the bottomless bucket in which to put stuff now. Thumb drives and CDs satisfy the sneaker-net need.

2) NAND flash has plummeted in price. It’s possible to get a working drive for a couple hundred bucks and that will drop in a year.

The latter, I figure, is the reason why the drive manufacturers’ stock prices look like buggy whip companies. The Wall Street guys may all be running flash drives in their laptops already.

I have also figured a couple of things:

1) You can’t have too much storage. You’ll fill it with video and the like. And dupes. And backups. And history of everything ever done on your system, or seen or heard by your system, or whatever.

2) Hard drives are still staying 10x cheaper than flash.

And wondered, can a hard drive with some brains and a few gig of cache look like a terabyte flash drive?

The predicted death of disk drives (caused by bubble memory) was my key, early lesson to ignore hysteria-hype. Since learning that lesson I’ve only bought in to two hysteria-hyped things (with, by definition, no false negatives):

1. The internet.
2. Leave #2 for another time.

Heck, I even backed off predicting the death of CRT tubes for all these years. By the time it finally happened, it had been hashed over so many times that it was, “Uh. Yeah. Finally. … So, how ’bout them Ducks?”.

So, that’s it. Time for a fast hard drive.

Email stopped coming in.

I dropped the 11+ year tranzoa.com web hoster. What I said to the guys at AZC.com: “You don’t shut off someone’s email without telling them, dictionary spam surge or no. And, you don’t tell them to use gmail. Not on a $33 a month service … in 2008.”

So, poor asuka (aka tranzoa.net) almost worked its aged, 128meg, 200mhz Pentium II heart out hosting tranzoa.com.

gina (aka bran) overflew its 1 gig system disk and floundered its powerhouse, dual Pentium II 250mhz, 512mb trying to process email to the tune of 20k – 30k spams a day. It’s amazing what a 9 year old, $100 Boeing Surplus machine can do in a pinch.

The old ViewSonic 21″ secondary monitor faded to dark.

The replacement box, spring, took a week to find a working motherboard from Fry’s and had a hard disk failure in a month (power outage – maybe not something to even notice except that it failed on some data needed to boot).

To get spring running I managed to toast MegaSystem’s motherboard. This was not well timed.

For perhaps good reasons, perhaps not, spring’s OS is Ubuntu H 64. The new Megasystem XP runs in a VMWare box. That’s the theory. In practice, I have spent a boatload of time moving much of my personal computing operation to spring’s Ubuntu. Browser, email, IM, picture editing and much of the housekeeping stuff built over years.

This would be the fun part of computing if I were a computer person. Remember the verified, 70’s observation: “Normal people expect computers to treat them badly. Computer people demand it.”

I am not even a normal person. Computers exist for me, not the other way around. At 10 years old, I claimed as much while half-stepping arithmetic homework. And, I claimed right.

This has not been the fun part of computing.

Ah, well. I lied. There was one fun part. Since MegaSystem was dead, its 3 gig of RAM fit rather nicely in Scott’s old “tara” box with the Auburn VO stickers and all. So, to keep the status quo, asuka is still running on antiquated hardware. It’s just running on 10x the CPU and 20x the RAM. Makes a difference. Doesn’t take 5 minutes to deliver a web page, for instance.

Those glasses that disappeared on the logging road were found. Not by me. I walked past them twice and didn’t see ’em the third chance, even. But a woman waiting for her husband said she had seen some broken glasses near the car.

We looked about a quarter mile down the road.

Apparently, the woman, her husband, I, and 1 ATV had been on the road in the previous 24 hours. The ATV did not miss the glasses.

The frames were pretty flattened. The lenses were laying apart in the rocky mud.

I wiped the lenses. A little ding in one was all the damage. But, then poly-carb lenses are the only way to fly.

The frames? Well, that’s what’s amazing. They were flat. Later, at home, I figured what’s the harm in trying to bend them back in shape. They did! The lenses are now a bit off kilter in the frames. The frames are still a little twisted and oddly shaped. On the whole, not quite good enough. But usable in a pinch.

Which got me to pinch-land.

The glasses didn’t come from Costco. They were insurance fluff from a regular eye doctor’s office. So there was no way I was going to get a dupe of the frames to drop the lenses in to. Well do I remember back when vision insurance started “covering” glasses. Oddly enough, the price of glasses went up at the time (for me anyway) by exactly how much insurance covered.

So I went to Costco to order some lenses to fit one of my many old frames (Costco, $60. Lenscrafters, $255.)

Experience has taught me to keep my current eye script on my Palm. Guess what? “In this state we can’t make lenses without a signed prescription.”

Huh? I can’t get glasses without doing some kind of Bulgarian Post Office thing (stand in 6 different lines to mail a letter)?

It’s not hard to imagine how such a disgusting law got passed.

Back when I was young there was much discussion of “socialized medicine” (what the AMA called a proposed government medical system to make it sound as bad as possible). The AMA was really, really intent on not having the government get in to medicine. They were, even then, a closed guild and wanted the organization that protected the guild to butt out – of everything but protecting the guild.

Time went by and, as so many other groups have found, the AMA, et al, found that there are some good points to having a central system enforce consumption of product from one vendor. All to protect the consumer, mind you. Having your own army, paid for by someone else, can sure beef up the bottom line. But, anyway, at least they have a product! One can probably think of some tax supported entities without a product at all.

Whatever. My mind went back to when I had to get glasses made in a hurry while in some odd place where no one in the country had a head shaped and sized like mine. Apparently, that was a free country, where ever it was.