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Comment: Re: In otherwards (Score 1) 664

by DidgetMaster (#46144015) Attached to: Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash
...And if every gas company just happens to coincidentally charge $20 for each gallon of gasoline, then we are all in trouble because we would have to pay it, right? And if every worker just happens to coincidentally demand a base salary of at least $100,000 then small businesses would have to pay it because they would need the workers, right? No. The real "free market" does not work that way. Someone will decide to sell you gas cheaper, and then everyone will compete on price until the price reflects the true market value. Likewise, enough workers will settle for less until the right price for labor is reached. Businesses who adopt "antiworker policies" will lose them to companies with better policies. (Until the government starts demanding all kinds of regulations that drive out competitive behavior...)

Comment: Double edged sword (Score 1) 168

by DidgetMaster (#45168387) Attached to: Black Death Predated 'Small World' Effect, Say Network Theorists
The "small world" nature of modern travel is a double edged sword. Yes, infectious diseases can spread rapidly and can quickly affect people over long distances, but because societies are constantly interacting with other societies, a large segment of the population is able to develop immunities to a large number of pathogens. When Europeans first came to the Americas, large numbers of the native populations were decimated by smallpox and other diseases. Because they had never been exposed to these diseases before and had no immunities built up to defend against it, a whole villiage would be wiped out within a short time. I have heard that far more Native Americans died from diseases this way than were ever killed during wars.

Comment: Re:"Global" losses? (Score 1) 39

by DidgetMaster (#44609857) Attached to: McAfee Regrets "Flawed" Trillion Dollar Cyber Crime Claims
So by your reasoning, if someone steals your car, phone, computer, money...it isn't a loss...because it was someone else's gain??? Even by your calculations, there are real global losses when individuals and companies figure out that their property rights are not protected and thus fail to produce something of value in the first place because the chance of it being stolen are so high.

Comment: Replicate expensive things, not cheap ones (Score 1) 322

by DidgetMaster (#44450389) Attached to: Study Finds 3D Printers Pay For Themselves In Under a Year
These things will really take off when you can easily reproduce that $500 part that is broken in your oven, dishwasher, furnace, or AC unit. You know the parts that only cost about $10 to manufacture, but because only the appliance maker can make them, they charge an arm and a leg to replace.

Comment: Re:hierarchy (Score 2) 142

by DidgetMaster (#44428193) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Tags and Tagging, What Is the Best Way Forward?
This is exactly the problem that lead me to develop a whole new data management system. It turns files into objects called 'Didgets' (short for Data Widgets) and lets you tag them any way you want. Unlike extended attributes on files, these tags let you find your data fast and easy without something like Spotlight or Windows Search indexing all your metadata into its own database (taking a few hours to do each time). I can import my whole boot volume (about 500,000 files) and can then find anything in a second or less. "Find all JPEG photos with tags Vacation=Hawaii and Year=2011" will give me all my photos with those two tags in less than a second. It can do that if there are 5 photos that match or 50,000. Check out DidgetMaster.blogspot.com for info and video demonstrations.

+ - Ask Slashdot: Do you want a local object store (i.e. a flat file system)?->

Submitted by
DidgetMaster writes "Object stores have been around for a while now. For example, Amazon S3 storage is a set of buckets in the cloud in which you can store millions of files as "objects". Local file systems have been around much longer. For nearly 50 years now, we have been stuck with the traditional hierarchical file system storage model (e.g. a tree-like structure of folders or directories). Both systems make it easy to store a ton of data and to find a single item very quickly if you know its unique ID (full path for files, key for objects). But both systems are terrible at searching for all data that have certain features. If you have 2 million files on a file system volume and you want to find all pictures (*.jpg, *.png, *.ico, etc.), then it takes forever to scan the whole system looking for them. Cloud systems are not any better at search. Adding extra metadata (e.g. tags or extended attributes) can help distinguish one file or object from another, but searching for things based on those is even slower. "Find all documents where Author=John" is only fast if all the metadata has been collected and stored in a separate database, otherwise go to lunch while you wait for the results.
The Didget Management System wants to change all that by introducing a new object storage model designed to replace file systems. A Didget (Data Widget) is like a file that can contain any unstructured data stream up to 16 TB in length, but it is also like a row in a NoSQL database table where lots of searchable structured tags can be attached to it. Structured and unstructured data can be stored side-by-side within the same container and both types can be returned as the result of a query. Note: this is NOT like other indexing systems like Spotlight or Windows Search. See the 5 minute video demo at http://screenr.com/XV17.
Is the ability to instantly find "All photographs taken in Hawaii in 2011" when there are 100 of them among 5 million other pieces of data, enough for you to want to replace your file system with something new?"

Link to Original Source

+ - Ask Slashdot: Should I consider a Kickstarter (or other) campaign?->

Submitted by
DidgetMaster writes "I have over 25 years experience writing data management solutions — file system drivers (DOS, Windows, OS/2), disk utilities (PartitionMagic, Drive Image), custom file systems and online backup to the cloud. I have invented a revolutionary new data management system that is build from the ground up (block-based management, I/O, and cache). It has a great feature set and it can replace existing file systems and many database solutions. The architecture has distributed properties that will enable it to compete with Hadoop, CouchDB, MongoDB, and other "Big Data" NoSql solutions. A few friends and I are now two years into its development and we have a lot of the features working. It is blazingly fast and is designed to appeal to everyday consumers as well as large enterprises (it scales really well).

My problem: I have run out of seed money (self-funded) and I need to raise capital to get the rest of the features finished in a reasonable time. Most of the finished features are necessary for a consumer product, but the enterprise features need the most work. I am considering starting a Kickstarter (or other crowd-funding) campaign to raise the funds. That can be a good way to get cash without having to give up a huge chunk of equity. On the other hand, if we get a bunch of regular users that need to be supported it may take our focus off the enterprise features (the most fun stuff). If we can find an angel investor, we can work undistracted and get a good enterprise product out in about a year. Anyone wanting to know more can find info and links to video demonstrations at http://didgetmaster.blogspot.com/

What do you think is the best route to raise the funds?"

Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:What's the percentage (Score 1) 179

by DidgetMaster (#42348859) Attached to: Most Kickstarter Projects Fail To Deliver On Time
The mechanism is certainly in place. The problem is that too many inexperienced entrepreneurs don't know how to use it correctly. The guy starting the project has to know about most of the "large quantity" issues up front and plan for them. Too many projects get delayed because they didn't plan for them and now they are stuck dealing with many of the issues enumerated by tlhingan.

Comment: You'll be waiting a long time (Score 5, Insightful) 347

by DidgetMaster (#42326245) Attached to: SSD Prices Continue 3-Year Plunge
At $.90 per GB, SSDs are still about 15 times more expensive than the same amount of hard disk space. Forget about trying to put your 2 TB of data on SSDs. I like the trend of reduced prices for SSDs. They are finally affordable enough to put my most active data on (e.g. boot files, applications), but if you think they will be a viable complete substitute for hard drives anytime soon, think again.

Comment: To what extent is innovation stifled by legacy? (Score 1) 460

by DidgetMaster (#41587783) Attached to: Linus Torvalds Will Answer Your Questions
Backwards compatibility and support for legacy software, hardware, and archaic architectures can be a great stumbling block for innovative endeavers. Adoption of new technology requires a huge improvement in order to make the pain of migration bearable. Since the bar is often set so high, we tend to get more incremental improvements rather than revolutionary changes. How can this change?

Comment: Re:Hard to imagine the vastness (Score 1) 185

So, how do we assume that the light we are seeing in the picture followed a straight line? In other words, could one (or more) of the galaxies we see in this picture be ours (the Milky Way). If the light our sun emits can eventually loop back on itself, we could look in any direction and see ourselves if we looked far enough.
