“The hottest event in San Francisco last night was a birthday party,” Ina Fried reports for AllThingsD. “Why? The birthday boy is Steve Wozniak.”
“Fusion-io, where Woz is chief scientist, planned the party as a surprise for the Apple co-founder at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Guests secretly invited to the museum received pink boas, noise makers and a chance to test their skills on Tetris — a Woz favorite,” Fried reports. “The word from the party is that, despite the social media-happy crowd, it remained a surprise. One drunk tweet or text message supposedly popped up last night, but Woz’s wife deleted it from all of her husband’s many phones and gadgets.”
Check out the photos from Woz’s birthday party here.
“The company won’t just be partying for Woz, but celebrating an important technology advance. And while the press release it has put out doesn’t exactly make it accessible to the layman, it comes down to this: Servers that run in the cloud are going all flash,” Arik Hesseldahl reports for AllThingsD.
“Fusion-io’s stock in trade has from the start been about keeping those impatient processors busy. You put flash memory chips up close to the processor, let them grab a lot of data out of the hard drive and stuff their pockets full of it and then shovel it off by the armload to the processor,” Hesseldahl reports. “More computing work gets done, and in the long run, you get more computing oomph for your dollar, or spend less on computing hardware to get the same level of work done.”
“It’s because of this that companies like Facebook and Apple have loaded the servers in their data centers with Fusion-io’s memory cards. But the flash has always existed in a combined environment. Facebook, for example, treated the flash as a cache, pretty much as I described it above,” Hesseldahl reports. “But now, using this new technology that Fusion is announcing tonight, the boxes in Facebook’s data centers are going all flash… Today’s new product is Fusion’s play to deal its own blow to the established business for storage arrays. It’s called the ION Data Accelerator, and it’s software that the company says can transform any industry standard server into a wicked-fast ‘data acceleration device.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Happy birthday, Woz!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Judge Bork” and “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
“One drunk tweet or text message supposedly popped up last night, but Woz’s wife deleted it from all of her husband’s many phones and gadgets.”
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That’s a sign you’ve married the right person–she not only understands you, but how to operate all your various tech toys too.
“I have had dinner with them [Woz and his future wife], and she’s a thousand times more appropriate!” – Kathy Griffin, Woz’s ex-girlfriend
Yeah I never understood that attraction. Griffin & Woz are about as far apart on the partner compatibility spectrum as is imaginable. Griffin being too much of an opinionated loudmouth and not so warm ‘n fuzzy.
I worked with Imperial Technology 20 years ago. Their MegaRam SSDs did what is being described here. They. Used special circuitry and software to predictively load up a RAM disk with data most likely to be requestd from spinning disks to assure processor I/O channels wee never empty. 100% processor utilization. Back in the 80s this involved relatively small amounts memory housed in big rack mounted enclosures with huge price tags.
Back in the 80s, there wasn’t anything in this business that wasn’t expensive by today’s standard.
You can now buy a 256GB USB3 thumb drive – which is more storage than I installed for a global oil company at its research and engineering centre in Surrey, UK when we first migrated their servers from NetWare to NT – for £270.00.
In those days (1996 or so), a 4GB SCSI drive was at least double that and when I first started in this industry, back in 1984, a 354MB ‘Winchester’ disk from Data General was the size of a washing machine and £73,000 in the money of the day (about £195,000 in today’s money, or £550,000 per gigabyte).
Woz is a gentle and cuddly teddy bear, such a nice and friendly person and so down to earth. Happy Birthday Woz, and thanks for being the father of the apple 1&2 and the phenomena you help started. I am typing this from my iPhone 4s, and thanks to what you did all those years ago apple exists and why we have now what we have. You are a hero to humanity and progress, and also thanks for being a good friend to Steve Jobs, you were there with him from the begening, and you 2 complimented each other well 🎂🎂
I remember my brother coming back from the computer department at the college he worked at, and he told me, “I’ve just upgraded the mainframe from 4mb to 8mb of RAM. They will never figure out how to use that much memory.” Although if you are a sharp programmer, you’d be surprised how much functionality you can get out of 32KB of RAM.