Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI | Building at the intersection of Ai, Payments & Fintech

Why and how to ditch your slow-ass hard drive for an SSD

Posted on February 11, 2010 by Thomas Purves

The setup:

Putting it to the test:

The Results:

SSD are the single best upgrade you can give your computer. This one a Runcore device is even compatible with older 1.8″ PATA drive systems found in common ultra portables like my Dell D430 or the Macbook Air. Remember when Apple was trying to sell SSD upgrades for $900? This particular 64GB model is faster than Apple’s fist-gen Samsung SSDs and cost only $250 on ebay at time of writing. Took about 20min to physically install (the SSD even came with a USB adapter, external case and software to mirror your existing drive, easy!).

Boot times are 54% faster and everything about the computer is much much snappier. Waking up and hibernating the computer just takes seconds. Plus there’s now no fragile spinning disks to break down and steal all my data.

SSDs are the future. Recommended.

Posted in Archive, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Why it’s Google that needs a Twitter too, more than twitterers need some new g-twitteroo

Posted on February 9, 2010 by Thomas Purves

So what’s the deal with this new Google buzz thing.

Google’s core premise is the googlerank, that uncanny linking metric that derives all its notions of web page authority from what other pages and links of authority link to such pages. But, these days, with 90% at best of pages and links on the world wild web being churned out by spammers and search engine scammers, google needs more sources of organic and authentic web sharing behaviour. It’s getting harder and harder to hear the signal through the noise.

By not owning a twitter, Google is missing out on having visibility or being able to track and index a huge part of modern web. That huge part is the so-called “real-time web”, formerly knows as social presence. Basically all those status updates and link sharing that twitter has become the killer app for.

Google must be craving their own twitter just to be able to see and track all the links that real actual humans are sharing with each other and what real humans are talking about and finding interesting. They need this badly for their search results and their ad targeting. And even better to have such a source whose data they don’t have to share with Microsoft.

Thats google’s eminent reason anyway. What’s the rest-of-our’s reason for using buzz over twitter or fb? Who knows yet.

Aside: perhaps first thing twitter could do to defend against buzz? Publish a twitter interface that resolves and thumbnails web links, pics and videos inline with the twitter stream. Or maybe that would be sacrilege.

Posted in Archive, twitter | 4 Comments

Forget the SuperBowl, the America’s Cup is on

Posted on February 7, 2010 by Thomas Purves

Tonight, right now is the eve of the 33rd America’s Cup. Now two years late, this race is a culmination of 2 years of legal battles between Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli over the rules, venue, boats and every other aspect you can imagine. What it’s resulted in however is something spectacular for sailing and engineering nerds. What should have been a long contest between 20 countries match racing by elimination in 20 boats, is instead only a two boat race, 3 races only with the only rules becoming a sailing boat, 90 feet long, no limit on budget.

And what we have are two monsters BMW Oracle‘s solid wing sail trimaran, and Alighi‘s giant wave piercing catamaran. These boats were built at a cost of 500 million dollars to race for one week.

No one’s ever match raced boats this huge and fast before. These boats may go 40 knots downwind. No one knows what’s going to happen, all the ordinary match racing tactics go out the window. The boats are different enough that it could be a blow-out or a blow-up, gear failure is not unlikely.

There is no television coverage of the Americas Cup in North America, but there are plenty of places to watch the coverage online.

Throughout the week, also have an eye on the epic sailing blog Sailing Anarchy

Either way, first gun is at 10am Valencia time or 4am EST (ouch) on Monday, race two is on Wednesday, race three on Friday. We’re going to be brewing strong coffee and putting up the race on the big screen right at 4am, you know if you’re in the neighbourhood.

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