Tag Archives: United States of America

Increasing RAM on an Android OS to Limitless Computing Capacity

As I was implying in other posts, it is possible, with a potential infinite capacity to expand the computing power of a Google Android device exponentially without potential limitations.  As I explored why all the devices produced by Android seemed to grow in CPU, but not in RAM it seemed to be implied that the Android model was progressing toward a cloud model, the computations on the device would occur using an Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon, EC2, and now Google is expanding into that arena. 

The other spectrum, Apple’s iPhone, has a business model, where it was clear that storage was their cloud model, no indications of cloud computations.  In fact, initially, there was no road map for cloud computing, philosophically, as the initial pricing model was indicating, although that might have had to change to compete, but wouldn’t admit it.

There have been several posts which specify how one would be able to hack the Android Operating System, and add RAM using the extendable, on board microSD.  The initial strategy to partition on board memory, such as leveraging the Secure Digital memory is the first step to increase your devices computing capacity.  The secondary evolving step is to use cloud elastic computing, especially in HotSpots, or home WiFi, when accessible, to utilize and expand your devices capacity to run applications at a high performing capacity.

There are opportunities to increase HotSpots through public access points, which will be hard, maybe impossible, for retail to compete with the free expansion of public accessible HotSpots.  Municipalities may decide to allow tax payers of a particular community to enter in a code, and as a result of residency of a local community, have access to the municipalities’ HotSpots.  It justifies the expansion, expenditure, and increase in revenues and local taxes for the municipalities.   Municipalities may even allow the local taxpayer to have a certain number of guest accounts.  Additional accounts may be charged a discounted fee for transient visitors to the towns, such as local shoppers that patronage local shops.  The question is, would expansion of municipality public access WiFi  offset the retail WiFi income potential for shops?  It seems that many shops are offering Free WiFi, or partnering with external national or regional providers of WiFi.  Municipality WiFi may use these 3rd party vendors to build up their infrastructure, and offer this plan.

The ability to scale up your device for both performance and storage is the sweet spot, which may entice retail shoppers to shop in a community, bring in additional revenues to a municipality.  In addition, local municipalities may offer tax breaks to registered WiFi secure HotSpots, which enable local shoppers to go through a municipality portal, and utilize the WiFi access.  The common proxy portal will enable users to register a code, or pay for the local access, just as hotels today perform the same service.  Revenue for the municipality would come both from the WiFi access, and retail revenue, i.e. taxes.

The important part of cloud computing, regardless of storage or real-time computations, must be able to encrypt the storage so the storage company doesn’t have the encryption access to the contents, but also the processing of information (CPU/RAM) in real time, or, Just In Time (JIT) encryption in the cloud.  People need to be able to trust the containment and the processing of their information within the cloud, and this is one way to be able to do so.  If each device has a mechanism, just like the one already in place by Google, and other firms,  they define and pass a Client ID,  and Client Secret to exercise there API for applications.  The one challenge to this is providing the company, which contains your information, the keys to your kingdom, a trusted party.

An alternate approach might be to allow an independent authority to control the keys, just like the original structure of the internet, where a single source controls the maintenance and control of domain (e.g. name.com) allocation.  The authority which manages domain names under a hierarchy is headed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). They manage the top of the tree by administrating the data in the root nameservers.   Many time governments administrate the authority, others delegate the authority, so please read, the Domain Name Registration article.

Memory wall

The “memory wall” is the growing disparity of speed between CPU and memory outside the CPU chip. An important reason for this disparity is the limited communication bandwidth beyond chip boundaries. From 1986 to 2000, CPU speed improved at an annual rate of 55% while memory speed only improved at 10%. Given these trends, it was expected that memory latency would become an overwhelming bottleneck in computer performance.[5]

Currently, CPU speed improvements have slowed significantly partly due to major physical barriers and partly because current CPU designs have already hit the memory wall in some sense. Intel summarized these causes in their Platform 2015 documentation (PDF)

“First of all, as chip geometries shrink and clock frequencies rise, the transistor leakage current increases, leading to excess power consumption and heat… Secondly, the advantages of higher clock speeds are in part negated by memory latency, since memory access times have not been able to keep pace with increasing clock frequencies. Third, for certain applications, traditional serial architectures are becoming less efficient as processors get faster (due to the so-calledVon Neumann bottleneck), further undercutting any gains that frequency increases might otherwise buy. In addition, partly due to limitations in the means of producing inductance within solid state devices, resistance-capacitance (RC) delays in signal transmission are growing as feature sizes shrink, imposing an additional bottleneck that frequency increases don’t address.”

 

Contractors, Healthcare, and Organized Labor

As I approach a gap in society, I take pause, and say, is that an opportunity, and why does that exist?  If people seize that opportunity who will it benefit, and who will it detract? In this case, I see a number of Information Technology contract positions as right to hire, or just 3 to 6 month or more contract roles, sometimes hourly, sometimes, rarely daily. So I ask myself, as I look at my 1930 AFL-CIO cane, I collect canes as a hobby, why isn’t there a very good health care / organized labor system for the IT industry. You too may have also been excluded as an independent contractor in IT, or your own field. In IT, you either work for a company as a full time employee with benefits, or work for a small to mid sized consultancy firm with no or some mediocre medical benefits. If you work for a large consultancy firm, and are able to transition to a firm, fantastic. You also have the ability to collect good benefits in a large consultancy firm. However, if you are an independent contractor in the United States of America, you may financial barriers securing premium health care insurance, such as a PPO with a small co-pay and without a referral. I am on my 18th month of COBRA and my current small company plan, if I got sick, I would be in serious financial trouble. This ‘Pains’ me to say, but why don’t we have good collective bargaining for Information Technology Independent Consultants? That is a rhetorical question. It would directly compete with large consultancy companies, their ability to deliver good benefits, and transition someone to an organization. If I took a count of how many people were on COBRA, or without healthcare, may be contractors, and would be more than willing to use collective bargaining to strong arm health insurance companies for a great health care plan through organized labor, I suspect we could do more than the United States Government has not been able to do for the American public.

Sign up to express your interest in contractor labor benefits.

Update: Since I originally posted this message, with a small budget, I’ve been able to reach thousands of people to read this post.  If you don’t sign up here, I urge you to try to do the same thing, and reach out to form local labor unions of your own.  Other fields are, and have done this for a long time.  Isn’t it time you’re field of labor collectively worked together in the hopes not just to network for jobs, but for [health] benefits?