11/11/11

Tommorrow, don’t forget to pause what you are doing on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month and pay tribute to the veterans who have served our country in the past, and to those who serve us today.

FiOS is Coming

FIOS is Coming

After months of negotiations and haggling, the Town Council and Verizon finally reached agreement on the terms and conditions for deployment of FiOS throughout the town. So, for the past couple of weeks, Verizon has been busy stringing fiber-optic cable around the town.

Verizon’s FiOS offers a bundled package of services (phone, Internet and TV), as does Cox Comunications, who holds the town’s existing Cable TV franchise. It will be interesting to see what pricing structure Verizon will offer to encourage Cox’s existinig customers to switch. Cox has had a monopoly on the Cable TV service for a number of year now. Maybe a little competition will be a good thing.

I’ve had Verizon’s DSL service since February of 1999 and it has been very reliable. I consistently get the best case speeds (3Mbps incoming, 768Kbps outgoing) and outages have been few and far between. Verizon is planning on offering existing DSL subscribers an incentive to switch to FiOS, so I will probably opt to do so. The basic FIOS package offers best case speeds of 5Mbps incoming and 2Mbps outgoing, so I’ll get a llittle performance boost in the process.

Nonsense

Gotta love those nonsense emails one receives trying to outsmart your junk mail filter …and comes with attachments the sender hopes you will open and set a virus, trojan horse or whatever loose on your PC. Here’s one that appeared in my inbox this morning…

shelve
Another tomato accurately eats a pig pen around the tape recorder. Another tomato accurately eats a pig pen around the tape recorder.
Another tomato accurately eats a pig pen around the tape recorder. The linguistic ball bearing satiates the paper napkin. When you see some tornado living with a squid, it means that a salad dressing ceases to exist. “The dope was coming in heavier and heavier waves, and now he just wished she would shut up and go away.

Good Things Come in Small Packages

USB Flash Drives

I bought a new 1GB USB Flash Drive yesterday for US $15.95.  I already had a 64MB Flash Drive that I got with my laptop in 2003.  I don’t recall exactly how much I paid for the 64MB drive, but I know it was a bit more than $15.95.  

So, I sat down and did some math.  Assuming the best case (i.e, that I paid $15.95 each for both drives), the cost per MB at the time I purchased them was:

  • 2003 – $0.250
  • 2006 – $0.016

On the surface, the $0.016 per MB may appear to be quite inexpensive. However, you can get a 160GB hard drive these days for $100.00 or less, which puts the cost per MB in the neighborhood of $0.0006.

So it appears that the cost of “no moving parts” flash memory has quite a ways to go before it becomes cost-competitive with rotating disk storage.  Or maybe it never will.  Wonder what the chances are that both flash and rotating disk storage will be rendered obsolete by some other yet to be discovered technology?

What do you think?