1×4 GB DDR3 SODIMM price prediction update

I am currently waiting for the 1×4 GB DDR3 SODIMM memory module to reach at least 200 USD before it’s even reasonable to purchase. At the time of this writing, it’s nearly double that, so I have a little while to wait. While I’ve been collecting prices over at Other World Computing, I wrote a little script for GNU Octave to read in and parse an easily updatable list of prices and predict when 200 USD would be reached. The script is building upon some results I had previously.

There are a couple of funny little bugs* I haven’t taken time out to squash yet, but it doesn’t affect the mathematical result, so here it is.

My basic assumptions about the model is that the price is dropping quadratically. Of course, this assumption is obviously not perfect, considering it does not account for an obvious slowdown that will occur at some point. Since I only care about getting to 200 USD, then my assumption essentially is that the price will drop quadratically through 200 USD.

Using a least squares approximation from the data I’ve collected from OWC, I am expecting the price to hit my threshold on 12 Feb 2009.

* I’ll release the source script and an optimize MATLAB version that utilizes some vectorization that shows speed improvement up to 3X. Of course, for data this small, it doesn’t matter (what’s 0.001 s versus 0.003 s), but for larger data, the vectorization is a great way to get performance improvements. I don’t know yet if the vectorization could work with modification in GNU Octave.

A simple outlook on torture

Barack Obama’s first major official action (and campaign promise) was to close down the prison at Guantánamo Bay, along with an apparently existing network of CIA prisons around the world. It is widely assumed that torture goes on in these prisons, though the congressional order will be sealed for a long time.

Here’s the conundrum. There are clearly humanitarian issues at stake here with respect to the human life and dignity that I believe to be immutable. However, there’s the very cruel reality that there is a group of persons who are life taking, and there needs to exist effective ways of dealing with that threat.

It seems apparent that coercion through physical intimidation or force (an insanely mild way of putting “torture”) is effective in its information gathering prowess. However, what kind of a society are we that we are not willing to find the most humane alternative to torture?

One argument for the allowance of torture is that this one presumed bad person is being sacrificed for the salvation of potentially hundreds or thousands of “good” people. What is the cost of such a tradeoff? It is simply that any one life is expendable to advance the cause of any other group of lives. This is not sensible to me, since that places a particular value on each individual human life that we think can be counted like beans with which to barter.

Additionally, in the particular paradigm in which we are the ones who are counted among the presumed “good,” this does not affect our lives directly. Yet in a paradigm shift, the same logic could be applied to bring our own lives and loved ones under the same conditions that our fellow humans may well be facing in these internment camps.

As with the standards that are in place for research on human subjects, which undoubtedly impede the progress of science, there are standards that exist for the treatment of political prisoners. It is our ethical and humane duty to conduct our activities well within these standards.

I do not know what the solution is. I believe that, in times of war, there should be additional measures to hold and try suspected war criminals. They should get their day in court, as unfortunately this is the only way to protect those who are, in fact, being detained improperly. But they should not be held indefinitely without trial, and they simply should not be tortured, mentally or physically. The Geneva Convention speaks toward this in an internationally recognized way, though this does not necessarily mean that it is “right,” in the absolute sense of the word.

QnD memory price prediction

[Update 28 Jan 2009] There is an updated prediction at this post.

It is well known that technology prices fall quickly. Unless latest and greatest is vital to someone’s needs, it’s almost always advisable to wait for prices to fall. Recently, with the upgrade of laptop memory to a 204-pin 1.1 GHz DDR3 specification, prices are very high for 1×4 GB SODIMMs. Two of these will allow for 8 GB of memory in many modern laptops. I need at least 6 GB for comfortable overhead running simulations and data analysis. So, in the spirit of trying to predict when I can afford this upgrade, I’ve been compiling memory pricing data from Other World Computing for several weeks to see if there is a trend to the falling prices. My threshold is approximately $200, which is still a lot of money but, in the words of Don from Keeping the Faith, “it’s worth it.”

I’ve collected 7 prices (blue dots) over approximately 50 days (prices are updated about this frequently). Using this data, it looked like there was a slight increase (though with limited data), followed by a sharp decline in price over the last several weeks, which was expected. This looked vaguely quadratic, so using a least squares method and GNU Octave, I calculated a quadratic polynominal fit to this curve, which is shown in red. By extrapolating this curve until it crossed my threshold of $200, I see that occurs at approximately 73 days.

I also noticed that the price after 45 days ($567.99) dropped considerably in just 6 days ($479.99), so I recalculated the polynomial fit to account for all data up until this last change, and here’s how it changes the prediction.

As you can see here, the prediction line (red) intersects $200 in 80 days after the start of this. Not terribly different from the first prediction. However, once we get away from the quadratic fit, things start to look a little more grim. If we take away that first point and look at this data as a linear trend, we see the following:

This is not as positive a sign. That prediction says that, from the start of my data collection, I would expect it to take a full 120 days (approximately 4 months) for the prices to reach my acceptable threshold. Other linear trends, that don’t include the most recent, most drastic drop in price, are even more grim, suggesting approximately 150 days, or 5 months from the beginning of this collection, before the price reaches $200.

Well, as it happens, we are already in day 51 of this figure. So, assuming that the most recent drop in price is part of the ongoing quadratic trend, this would suggest that I only have 22 days (less than 1 month!) of waiting for the price to go down to my threshold of $200. If, however, the linear models are more accurate, I could be 2 or 3 months away from salvation from page out hell.

MacBook Pro 17″ Speculation

The recent round of rumors for Apple’s presumed forthcoming 17″ MacBook Pro has a lot of people kicking and screaming already about a possible battery situation that might have the Interweb up in arms. The idea here is that the MBP will have an internal battery that is not easily removable/replaceable, like any of the iPods or the iPhone. It’s been a point of contention among those who demand unplugged power and require multiple batteries, and it’s even been the subject of at least a few lawsuits.

While I don’t use my MBP unplugged for long enough periods to really care, I do think that it’s sounding like a poor move – at least superficially. But here’s what criteria Apple would have to meet in order to make it a more palatable decision.

The 17″ MBP is a new design problem that was sure to yield answers to some interesting questions, as I’ve noted previously. One of the obvious design difficulties will be the fact that the 17″ MBP is not, as many seem to assume (incorrectly) a simple problem of scale from the 15″. That is, Apple cannot simply put everything in the same place and be as space conscious in the 17″ design. It is, again, a separate engineering problem, which I believe is the reason it’s being introduced at least almost 3 months after the 15″ redesign.

Essentially, I think Apple may have hit a wall with the new machine and had to figure out what to do about the battery. The best solution may come in the form of taking full advantage of Lithium-polymer technology, which is apparently more forgiving on form factor than its Lithium-Ion predecessor. In other words, Li-poly batteries can be squeezed into weirder shapes than your traditional Li-Ion battery. This is my incredibly rudimentary and probably inaccurate understanding.

But if this were the case, then it could be squeezed between logic boards and other components and still retain a fair amount of capacity.

Another interesting idea would be the use of the newest battery technology that was recently introduced in conjunction with a partnership with HP recently. While I would hope for such progressive steps in portable power, I am also hoping that batteries for the 15″ based on this technology are also released … for selfish reasons, of course!

The crux of the non-removable issue is at least two fold. The less serious issue to me is the notion of hot-swap. As I alluded to (flat out stated?) before, I would not be among those missing hot swap. Moving to the higher efficiency battery would bring even more people to this position, though a few die hards would undoubtedly remain and swear allegiance against Apple for all eternity. Which may well be justified (see lack of FireWire in new MacBooks).

The more serious issue is one of long term viability. Basically, because batteries die eventually, users have a very reasonable expectation that they should still be able to use their laptops unplugged for its entire lifetime. Non-replaceable batteries threaten that status quo. The more serious issue has a solution, as far as my ignorance can see.

If the non-replaceable battery were really just not hot swappable but actually replaceable, then a reasonable trade-off would be the implement the battery in such a way that it were, in fact, easily accessible beneath the bottom panel of the Unibody case. This could at least allow people to change the battery when it does, inevitably, fail, which would give more people confidence in this technology. Making this installation stupidly easy (remove the bottom panel, pull the star-armed battery out of the case, replace with new battery?) would silence most of the clamor about this issue.

Current trends in portable devices from Apple suggest that this might not be so easy. While they were able to make earlier iPods easy enough to get into and swap out dying batteries, the form of the iPod touch and iPhone have made that process far more difficult. I think these users have a completely legitimate claim to annoyance for this problem.

It could additionally create a third party market of batteries and installations that could be fruitful.

Finally, there has been some speculation regarding some of the wording that the non-replaceable internal battery could be an auxiliary battery. This is a phenomenal idea as well. A large internal battery that would serve as the main battery and a smaller, hot swappable battery would be a great compromise. Make the internal battery actually replaceable after it wears out in time, and you’ve got a better design than currently exists – further innovation amid a lot of speculation about several portable power related problems that are begging to be addressed.