Ganesh Swami

Gear6 is a Silicon Valley startup that just came up with an incredible product — a machine “CACHEfx” that uses standard computer RAM as storage cache. They come in blocks of 250 or 500 GB, and the operating system will virtualize it into a single pool of upto 5 TB.

The box plugs into a standard Gigabit Ethernet link and caches frequently used files. CACHEfx has a latency of less than 500 microseconds. They also have a handy tool to assess the speedup that you’ll gain by using their product.

If my lab had some more money and the need, we could get one of these. Currently, runs of fluidmatch can generate outputs of upto half a gigabyte. Multiply this by a hundred, and simple things like moving or copying files needs to be scheduled for overnight.

I just read that the CEO of Yahoo!, Terry Semel has stepped down. Jerry Yang, the co-founder, has taken over as CEO. We’ll see if Jerry can do a Jobs-style come back to save Yahoo!

• Official Press Release
• Jerry’s message

I’m a big fan of Yahoo!, and delicious and flickr are two destinations that I use multiple times everyday.

I found this gem from an interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google:

Q: Talking before, you’ve spoken glowingly about Larry and Sergey, and also Chad and Steve from YouTube. What are the characteristics of very successful entrepreneurs?

Eric: I think the most important characteristic of an entrepreneur is that they’re going to do it whether you give them permission or not. They are motivated by something inside of them. It’s not something that can be taught… they feel it, they want it, they’re driven to it. And when you find such a person, they’re usually a pretty good person to hang out with. They’re gonna do some interesting things. In Larry and Sergey’s case, and more recently with YouTube with Steve and Chad, they were going to be successful, and you can tell when you talk to them. Everything else is a tactic compared to that passion and vision that an entrepreneur has. It’s relatively rare, and it’s important to identify and respect it. (…)

(read the rest of the transcript)

I remember how expensive flat screen televisions were a couple of years back. These days it’s hard to find a CRT if you want to buy one.

(via digitimes)

I’m having a lot of fun with a Web2.0 startup that was just launched: Geni. From the about page,

Geni lets you create a family tree through our fun simple interface. When you add a relative’s email address, he or she will be invited to join your tree. That relative can then add other relatives, and so on. Your tree will continue to grow as relatives invite other relatives.

In about ten minutes, I was able to add thirty of my immediate family. As I get further and further from my immediate family, I couldn’t recall details off the top of my head. I have family with whom I’ve talked and chatted over IM, but never seen in person.

Some observations:

• It doesn’t seem to be able to keep track of last names as I add nodes. This shouldn’t be a very hard feature to implement.
• My family tree isn’t actually a tree, it’s a graph (in the mathematical sense.) It happens when you have nine kids with about thirty years between the first and last child.
• I don’t have a last name in the traditional sense. My last name is my dad’s first name and so on. Though that stops pretty soon up the hierarchy.
• I have just one word in my first name. My brother has two words in his name, but the second word isn’t his middle name.
• One fine ancestor of mine decided to stop using his family name, because it was uncool to do so back in the day. As a result of that I don’t have one too.

It should be interesting to look at my tree in a few years from now. I’ve heard that I have a lot of relatives in North America – let’s see if I can track them down. Maybe there’s a few in Vancouver!