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Thoughts of a Simpleton

Archive for March 12th, 2007

Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles and how I was victimized.

Mar 12

Posted by Ron Smith in Epiphany | 1 Comment

You haven’t heard? My all time favorite TV show as a kid is back and bigger than ever with a movie entitled TMNT.

Donatello

Seeing the commercial the other day I almost drooled all over myself; fond memories of my childhood and playing with my Ninja Turtle toys rushed into my brain as those thoughts quickly turned me into a happy go-lucky kid all over again.

Then, the sad truth of happiness was exposed as Joe from thestory discussed that my association of happiness connected to my toys was all an evil advertising scheme used by advertisers to explode children. I was a victim. I feel violated.

Adbusters writes a pretty in depth article here about my sad consuming addiction.

Basically what they are saying is that my generation has been studied and analyzed; corporations know how to tell me my wants, desires and needs – all at a low and decent price. And if I don’t want what they are offering, they know how to make other people tell me I am out of order.

In my honest opinion, I care about the negative effects corporations have on our society. But then the question is “Am I willing to go without to show my concern?” I don’t know if I am.

Isn’t that sad?

We live in a generation where it isn’t hip to stand for anything, except personal gain – no matter the cost.

Even with my rant, I am going to see this movie opening night; Donatello was my favorite Turtle.

Useless facts about your Hard Drive.

Mar 12

Posted by Ron Smith in Tech news | No Comments

I love Hard Drive space. Currently I own 750 gig of space on my computer at home (I really need to RAID it sometime)

What I love the most about hard drives right now is the price. It is SO cheap to buy storage. Not like when I first started using computers, it was SO expensive!

So I present to you, some uselss facts about Hard Drives that only nerdy people would even care for.

Enjoy!

• The magnetic HDD is 50 years old. In 1956 IBM introduced 305 RAMAC, which is like the great-great-great grandfather of today’s disks. It was the size of a refrigerator, and stored a total of 4.4 megabytes (about 1 MP3). It had a purchase price of $10,000,000 per Gbyte.

• Today’s laptop drives are typically 2.5 inches and are a size of a deck of cards, and can store up to 160 gigabytes – or 131 billion bits per square inch. Price is less than $1 per gigabyte.

• Consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year. That is 11 times what they bought in 2003. (NYT)

• In the U.S. alone, $600 million worth of external hard drives were sold in 2006, up 53% from 2005, The NPD Group, a market research firm, says. (NYT)

• External hard drive prices declined 28.4% from $197 in 2003 to $141 in 2006 and the amount of storage space on the drives doubled.(NYT)

• Per Gigabyte retail price of hard disk drive storage in 2003 was $2.04, but in 2006 it was 77 cents, according to The NPD Group.

• The recording density for data — aka capacity — has increased 60,000,000-fold in 50 years.

• The amount of worldwide information is projected to grow from 161 exabytes in 2006 to 988 exabytes in 2010. An Exabyte is a million terabytes.(WWD)

• By 2010, the total amount of data will overwhelm the total amount of digital storage by a factor of nearly 2 to 1. 2007 is the year that our ability to stuff bits into the digital universe will outstrip our ability to store them.(WWD)