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)