The Null Device

Shedding light on rumours

The Reg digs up some corroboration of the rumoured Google mobile phone:
We've been making enquiries too, and a picture is beginning to take shape. In August 2005 Google acquired a stealth-mode startup called Android, founded by Andy Rubin. Rubin was a veteran of Apple and General Magic, but is best known for leading WebTV and subsequently Danger Inc. Danger produced one of the most-photographed phones of recent years, thanks to Paris Hilton: its Hiptop was marketed by T-Mobile as the Sidekick.
But plans have become more ambitious, as the recruitment of Apple veteran Mike Reed and Canadian mobile app company Reqwireless suggests. Graphics expert Reed worked on the ill-fated QuickDraw GX and on font technology at Apple. Google acquired his start-up Skia, which produced a vector graphics suite for resource constrained devices.
Meanwhile, Alec Muffett reckons that Apple's solid-state laptop may be the reason for them adopting Sun's next-generation filesystem, ZFS, which has, as one of its many features, the ability to ensure that all blocks of storage are used evenly, something that is important when writing to devices that can only stand a fixed number of write cycles.

There are 2 comments on "Shedding light on rumours":

Posted by: alecm http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/articles/comp Mon Mar 19 11:52:08 2007

>which has, as one of its many features, the ability to ensure that all blocks of storage are used evenly, something that is important when writing to devices that can only stand a fixed number of write cycles.

Not quite correct but ZFS is halfway there with its copy-on-write structure; no blocks get overwritten in the course of file I/O, the old ones get re-used once they've been dereferenced. It would require pretty simple modification and a small amount of book keeping to make ZFS the ideal filesystem for Flash, just something which migrates "read-mostly" files around so as to even-out the wear patterns on the rest of the "disk".

Please update.

Posted by: alecm http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/ Mon Mar 19 11:56:26 2007

Your software truncated my URL :-(