Thursday, April 26, 2012

The end of personal data storage?

My house server's 1TB hard drive is giving me SMART drive warnings that the disk is about to fail.  I immediately started looking for its replacement and looking into SSD storage which of course costs substantially more.   It was then I realized what do I need this space for anymore?

Once upon a time my entire life revolved around data stored on my server:  Source Code, Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, Software, etc.  That landscape for me has totally changed in the last couple of years mainly brought about by faster Internet connectivity (currently have 50 / 5 mbps).

I am (or *will be soon) using:
  • Google Docs - Documents
  • Amazon/Netflix/Vudu - Movies / TV
  • Smugmug - Pictures / Personal videos
  • Grooveshark / Slacker - Music
  • Linux - Every program I use is either online or comes from apt repositories
  • *Github - Personal projects / source code
  • *Google Drive - Miscellaneous?

Basically, I dont have any need for personal data storage anymore.  Quite frankly I am curious why anyone else has need of local storage anymore?  Trust?  Re-acquisition costs? Internet Speed?

How about you?

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Three Best Paper Gliders

Just saw an article on Slashdot about what is the best paper airplane.   Piqued my curiosity as  I use the Paper Airplane Factory Game sometimes when I am presenting on Agile / Lean processes.

Of the designs presented in the post, I have narrowed it down to the following three that interest me the most.

1.) The "Harrier", built for stability and speed
2.) The "Bat", built for entertainment
3.) The "Ball", a crushed paper ball that will sometimes out-perform even the best plane designs ;)