My Great Mate Solid State and the Quest for Qim.

"Samsung will early next month ship the first notebook PC… fitted with 32GB of solid-state NAND Flash storage instead of a regular hard disk drive…"

From http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/23/samsung_to_ship_flash_pcs/

Oh so cool. Have you ever heard the rattling swan song of a hard drive's failing bearings? If you have… and you waited a few more days … or weeks (Its happened to me twice) then you will know how the reliance on motion in your PC is something that should belong in antiquity. Like the Bleep Slurp of a 56k modem.

Solid state is great. Its less power hungry, quieter and for the most part faster and more reliable.

I was working on a short story last night, set a few years in the future. One of the themes was the lack of memory in the future (sounds like a riveting short story, huh?). I don’t mean not enough memory, I mean more than ever enough.

QIM - Quasi Infinite Memory

Imagine if you had enough memory to store whatever you could conceive of. Both in terms of storage and processing. It doesn’t matter if the memory is physically about your person or just accessible instantly, the effect is the same.

Anal Analysis is the new Stonehenge

• There are the hallowed gardens of faith that shall always remain sacred.
• There are the murky ponds of history where the fish of fact swim midst the algal goo of falsehood and deception.
• And then there is the world of what people really want and care about.

Googles new tool, Google Trends, has revealed a strange consonance in the cosmos of web searches that, frankly, makes all the hubba bubba and mystery about the Da Vinci Code + The Nazca Lines + Lord Lucan + American Democracy dwindle into insignificance.

anal analysis

The Anal Anlaysys Iconograhy of DOOM- realtime

1.	Peru
2.	Brazil
3.	Argentina
4.	Chile
5.	Turkey
6.	Portugal
7.	Colombia
8.	Mexico
9.	Switzerland
10.	Australia

As you can see from this enigmatic pictogram and associated histogram there are correlations and inversions which nothing can explain and less surprisingly people from South America are much much more curious about "anal" then the rest of us.

As a whole, the world is much more interested in "anal" than "analysis".

Sorry, this post started off as a more serious announcement about the new Google Trends but I got carried away. Its interesting to play with for like, 30 seconds.

Other trends of note:

• There has been a decline in people searching for the English language's most offensive word.
• The second most offensive word has shown a linear continuity over all.
• There has been a exponential increase in the last 12 months in people searching for google, which is quite strange. Why the would anyone search for "google" in Google??? Actually that's stranger that the anal analysis thing, and I probably could have written a funnier post about that too. But I'm tired. Goodnight.

Attack Iraq with an IPAQ

In this interesting Washington Post artcile, there is a highlight of some of the flaws in electronic voting.

I have long thought that low cost/high security electronic voting's it’s the key to future democracy not only in the western world but in the third world.

E-Voting has to be open source. It has to be public reviewed. It has to be transparent at every stage, unlike in the article.

But enough about this…..

Imagine a device, like a ruggedised IPAQ.

• It has a finger scanner.
• It has a SD card.
• It has GPRS/Wifi

I guess it would cost about 200 US in today's money to build.

These devices I will call a Portable Polling Station.

The PPS has one function, it will take a register an individual by their fingerpring and then allow them to vote on a candidate by their picture on the screen.

Once it has the vote it will encrypt the vote and the fingerprint hash and save that in memory, on the SD card as well as send it "home" over GRPS and, if in range, share it with any other PPCs by WIFI. The PPSs form a network of robust data sharing, the data being the votes.

1. To a significant degree of certainty, people can only vote once. If someone tries to vote twice then the second vote wouldn’t be registered because of the finger print duplication.
2. Whether used portably in the Tora Bora or in hard polling stations in Umbongo the PPS system has a coherence of polling results and tolerance for fraud that seems to far exceed paper based polling.
3. Because just the hashes are registered there are no issues of voter security, the polls are still anonymous.

The system is rough. Trying to help democracy get a foot hold in tough places is rough.