Posts by Ammaross Danan

Amazon cloud fell from sky after botched network upgrade

Fences

Cloud computing is the "new thing" that can be a life saver in businesses. However, rare events like this outline just how much of your business you're risking. There are still several advantages to using a cloud service, especially for small businesses using outsourced IT or the like, but there's just no beating a local network setup with a competent IT staff (even if that staff is just one person). A smaller business can likely handle 30min of a server (even an entire VM host) being offline while a critical component is replaced (competent implies being smart enough to stock a spare part of non-redundant server hardware, if the risk assessment is high enough). Likely your ISP will have an outage before a cloud provider will have downtime, so if your local servers have less downtime than your ISP (fairly doable actually), you could be better off having a local setup. Disaster recovery you say? If your business burns to the ground, you run into the question of why you would need access to your servers anyway? Your competent IT staff would have an offsite backup from the day prior anyway, so access to data is there. Sure, you won't be able to bring all your systems back online and operating until you replace your server(s) (unless you have a very inventive IT staff), but with the "disaster" hobbling your place of business, such would not be required.

Money and skill are the primary game-stoppers for a decent local setup. Your budget can't afford the ideal redundancy, infrastructure, internet-connectivity, or staff that a cloud provider can. It really comes down to if you can afford the one-in-a-blue-moon Amazon-style snafu (with the potential loss of your data), or if you prefer to rely on your potentially less adequate DR plan.

Google sued over – yes – Android location tracking

Evil

Evil would be "Lets see where Jim in marketing has been going...." *punches in two locations (Jim's home and work) to pull up all UIDs that fit both criteria* ... *crunch crunch crunch* .... Computer dumps out the obvious handful or less of UIDs that have sipped both work and home WiFi/cell towers on a frequent basis... Ok, now pipe that UID into a mapper to show plots of where he's been. Oh look, the neighborhood strip club on Tuesdays....now where's his number. Perhaps he's willing to give us a pint on Tuesdays to keep it from the wife. Which is likely this other UID....

What is it REALLY being used for?

Phone: I'm -70db for wifi: ActionTek MAC: 00-03-04-94-90-30 (yes, fake MAC), Where am I?

GoogleServer: Likely somewhere near 37.0625,-95.677068

Phone to User: You are HERE --->

All without having to GPS (sucks battery) or actually works (if indoors or otherwise blocked). WiFi wardriving is quite low power since your antenna is technically only in receiving mode. It's sending signals that drains power. If this information is cached in advance, your phone wouldn't even have to talk to a googleserver (which is what Apple does).

As for the UID bit, it's likely to prevent people from crap-flooding their records. If they get sprayed with crap data from a single UID, they know they can just purge all data from that UID from the system. If they get sprayed with crap data from randomly-generated UIDs, they know they can disregard the RNG UIDs since they don't belong to an activated device. It's a quality assurance thing. Unfortunately, they don't purge the UID after X days/weeks/months, which is how I would have implemented the system. "Sure, we collect UIDs for data-integrity purposes, but we sanitize even those after 3 months when we have validated the quality of the associated data."

Citrix profits fluffed by XenDesktop, NetScaler

Not just that

But Xen is still immature in some ways. They just recently added memory ballooning and they STILL don't have a virtual network environment (VMWare has configurable VSwitches that support VLAN and the like). It's ridiculous to leave one server NIC empty just so your P2V machines can be given a NIC, but not exposed to the network prematurely. A detached VSwitch in VMWare solves this problem easily. Even allows for a completely isolated network all internal to the system. Another sign of ad-hoc immaturity? XenConvert: Makes a MS VDisk image of the machine, remounts that and /requires/ DHCP for a transfer VM to copy the contents of the mounted VDisk image (yes, it mounts it and requires you to enable auto driveletter assignment). In contrast, VMWare Converter images directly to the VM server and can resync changes post-copy. If Xen fixed these issues, I'd be more tempted to use it over ESXi.

Boffins pull plug on SETI alien-seeking antenna array

Intel

Intel had just donated a boatload of server equipment. Perhaps they would be in a position to raid their petty cash for board meetings and keep SETI afloat? Of course, one could argue that if we did find "the signal," we'd have to be lucky enough we get something like in Contact: full instructions on how to get to them. Even in the movie, we STILL were simply told "your not alone" and "eventually" we'll be allowed to know more. The only real benefit SETI would have would be /potentially/ (very large stretch btw) uniting to make a global space program and development effort. We might even get Star Trek-style ships in 100 years with such motivation. At the current ESA and ObamaSA (formerly NASA) rate, we might reach the moon (again) by 2030. Maybe.

/where's the "I didn't vote for him" icon? (M.Python reference for those interested)

Toshiba readies über-thin 7in touchscreen

Fail

You do realize the photo is a cropped, shopped image right? The screen can have any size of bezel a manufacturer wants to put around it. The image is likely a in-car dash demo unit, not a tablet.

Save the planet: Stop the Greens

@"Payback time" people

"The average wind farm in the UK will pay back the energy used in its manufacture within six to eight months, this compares favourably with coal or nuclear power stations, which take about six months."

However, this is likely factoring in the subsidies payed out for deploying a windfarm "renewable" solution. Also not mentioned is the power generating capacity of said windfarms vs a coal plant. If the coal plant generates 5x the amount of power of a given windfarm, that's 5x capacity it's profiting off of. Stop subsidies and see how fast they switch to a "this is not even near economically feasible" mindset.

OCZ shares trashed by short seller's research note

Requirements

It just means wall street needs some government (law) regulations to prevent the ability of selling something you don't already own (naked short selling). Selling off shares that you borrowed (loan) is "acceptable" however, since you took the responsibility for the loan. Would buy like borrowing $1 million at 3% interest and loaning it back out at 5% (think of a bank that offers savings accounts). However, writing sensational documents (false even) to cause a stock crash after having shorted stocks? Make it illegal. How to catch people? They sold X stocks just prior to the dump, and bought back X+y (y being an offset with intent to "hide" their practice) shortly after the dump. Especially telling if they recently borrowed the stock. A bit of regulatory overhead (logging who borrows what, in addition to who sells what), but would smooth out the problem. Or at the very least, make it harder to do.

Google and friends wrap open video codec in patent shield

Why to not Open Source Honeycomb at the moment:

"Given the grief that Google are getting trying to "open source" something as relatively simple as video compression it's no surprise that they are not promising to do the same for a much more complex product."

Sorry, but Video Compression is not "relatively simple." There are not many ways to do it, true. Most rely on keyframes and differentials from such over time. Now, HOW to come up with WHEN to put in a keyframe, and how to get the best, most compressed differentials is where most of the patents sit. This is where On2 has stepped gingerly (and it seems somewhat non-gingerly), to come up with good quality and better compression.

As for not Open Sourcing "a much more complex product" (Honeycomb), there's two good reasons: 1) They're requiring a non-fragmentation contract for their early adopters (Xoom, GalaxyTab [2.0]) and, 2) The code likely looks like crap. They would like to clean it up (remove copyright infringing/grey code???) before opening it up to public scrutiny. Their licensing model allows them to do this, and it is good for the market in the long run, even if it prevents us from getting Honeycomb tablets for under $300 that ship with resistive screens and build quality similar to a preschool glue project.

Windows 7 takes PC upgrade for a cycle

@OP: In addition

"Bugger the lot and do something sane like RHEL in the corporate world, or Ubuntu at home."

Let me put it this way: if software in the "corporate world" is having enough trouble being 100% able to do what it says on the tin (interface with a sigpad for instance), what makes you think switching to RHEL or Ubuntu will work better? Sure, a desk monkey could use LibreOffice (just explain to them the difference between that and OpenOffice....) to do spreadsheets, but what about their in-house Access database? Oh, need WINE now. Or perhaps a VM. Piece of Windows-only mission-critical software (that won't run in WINE [likely])? Yep, VM now. Or Terminal Services. Now what about 2000+ computer organization? Need the benefits of Group Policy management? How about those that can't find "My Documents" and are too dim to know what a "home" folder it? Hope you like talking on the phone, I see you needing to get down from your IT Director position just to help out the front-line help desk staff. Oh, that's right, you're not an IT Director in the first place.

/rant

'Anti alpha' mirror-matter made from gold in atomsmasher

I for one

Welcome our mutually-annihilating anti-matter-based alien overlords. Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson would simply have to shake hands with them rather than expose them to water....I'm sure the world would be better for it too.

Apple sued over iPhone location tracking

Another Angle:

"Jobs reply: "Oh yes they do. We don't track anyone. The info circulating around is false.""

Quick bit about Jobs' reply. Google tracks users web habits, and likely collects "anonymized" usage data (no different than Microsoft being able to determine which buttons in IE are used most often). Jobs is tracking a user's physical location indefinitely. Do they send it back to Cupertino? Likely not. The info circulating is not false, as anyone can pull up these specific files (depending on iOS version) and see for themselves. Jobs is a liar in this case.

If you have an iPhone for work (because you requested it over a blackberry for instance), then your work would have every right to have physical access to your device. They can see where you've been, even during off hours. This in itself is a violation of privacy plain and simple. You might as well have a tracker in your work-issued badge (which is likely in your glovebox perhaps?). You don't have to have something to hide for this to be a problem. There's a privacy uproar for internet browsing, so much so there's "Do Not Track" methods being implemented in browsers now. Simply put, there's no need to keep an indefinite log of location on a phone. The last few hours? Sure. "Take me home" or the like. But not "Show me where I went on vacation last year."

How I learned to stop worrying and love SSDs

To Answer the questions....

1) Yes and No. SSD awareness is more of an operating system feature. Windows Vista/7, newer Linux versions (don't remember the kernel version number), and yes, even MacOSX (to some extent) recognize SSDs and behave differently (ie: pass TRIM commands to the drive). As far as MBR and the like, yes, works the same.

2) Read my #1 response.

3) It's not imperative, but definitely SSD-debilitating if your OS "defrags" your SSD regularly. Debilitating, meaning reduces lifespan (unnecessary writes) and can cause your drive to run in a "dirty" state, like an unTRIMed drive.

Best bet is to run a TRIM-capable SSD and OS, or at least have garbage collection capabilities for the SSD.

A few other notes:

1) Glad the author used a V+100 Kingston drive. Their older counterparts (the SSDNow 64GB and such non-V+100 drives) are horrific performers compared to other like-priced SSDs.

2) "There's just one fly in the ointment – the age of the upgradeable computer is vanishing." - I would just like to refute this concept outright. Most PC laptops come with easy component bays for hard drives and RAM. They're even making it /easier/ to access such components. It's the world of Apple that you are seeing the "upgradable computer" vanish. They go so far as to (attempt to) require Apple-branded marked-up SSDs (via drivers) to support TRIM. This quote is from the skewed perspective of an Apple user.

ET, phone back: Alien quest seeks earthling coders

Space

The sad fact about all of this is that it will take SETI finding a viable signal for ANY government to take space travel seriously. Within months of finding a true extraterrestrial signal, I'm sure will be the beginning of a "to the moon"-style pursuit of who can first exploit...erm "contact and get to" the source.

'Real' JavaScript benchmark topped by...Microsoft

Re: g e

"On a Microsoft report of a Microsoft product?"

As stated before, a Microsoft report said IE10 was the fastest, so an independent developer (of JSON none-the-less) took his Javascript program and ran benchmarks on it that were independent of the DOM or browser APIs (likely full of just raw Javascript since it's a javascript debugger and analyzer, rather than looping <div> ID lookups and the like). His results concurred with Microsoft's findings.

ARM's Intel challenger set for 2012 release

Until....

Once software is written with 8+ cores in mind (note that many are simply dual-core or quad-core capable and gain no benefit from, say, an Phenom II X6), then we can have 16 cores. Currently, the better poke would be from a more capable pipeline and faster GHz. Hence why the Sandy Bridge parts are rather tasty....you can pump a 3.4GHz part to 4.6GHz reliably. Gives substantial performance gains across the board.

Hopefully ARM's entry into the low end (which will likely hurt AMD more than Intel btw), and AMD's potential (please say it's so!) counter-punch with Bulldozer, will cause Intel to innovate and stop holding it's punches. It likely has the ability to pull a Pentium-to-Core2 jump again, but is trickling out the performance gains due to lack of competition in the high-end. No sense playing all your cards at once, right?

Calling all readers: Want some new icons?

Nah

Nah, FFS doesn't quite work as RTFA (A for Article, as opposed to the common "M" for Manual).

PlayBook won't play nice with BlackBerries on AT&T

Security

Just full-encrypt the PlayBook and it might be able to play host to email. BBs get away with security via password, so why not a playbook?

"'iPad? well, we dont know if thats secure, and it needs itunes installed, and its too shiny'"

Apple has shown next to no interest in making the iPad a "secure" device. It's not in their market goals, but if corporate users insist on utilizing the iPad for work, it's the IT dept that suffers, having to work around the lack of security on the device.

Samsung threatens Apple in response to patent lawsuit

Don't forget

There would also be a significant price bump since Apple would be out in the cold and any potential supplier would know that they could take Apple to the cleaners on pricing, just for the privilege of doing business with them. No deal? No products. Ouch. Shoe meet other foot.

US proposes online IDs for Americans

Reading

"It should be strictly for government to person business for tax, health and benefits and not for general inquiries, monitoring / tracking or frivolous uses (e.g. lending libraries)."

In case you missed it, they're recommending it for online banking and the like too. It's supposed to be an "online identity" like Microsoft's Single Sign-on (LiveID) or the like. Once your username (email address likely?) and password is phished, logged, DB hacked, etc, your life is now an open book with access to any accounts in the system and government services.

As for the SSN bit, yes, Americans (mostly) do have it memorized. However, a hacker getting your SSN isn't going to get them into your bank account (without some social engineering at least...). Basically this online identity will exacerbate the problems we have with SSNs.

The government should invest more time into proper fraud protection schemes and less with helping end-users reduce password re-use with implementing a single password for everything. At least with password reuse, you don't have a convenient list of all the places you use said password. (yes, email would be a list, but if you lose your email account you're toast anyway).

Seagate sucks up Samsung storage biz

Buy a few now

Get some F4s while you can, and sit on your hands for 2 years to see if Seagate incorporates Samsung reliability or if Spinpoint drives incorporate Seagate's "quality"... *sigh*

Smartphones eat games handhelds and cameras for lunch

Statistics

If you notice, it's % of users. Therefore, if new accounts are created for people to host their iPhone snaps, it (by the very nature of percentile statistics) will cause other camera types to drop. Of note is that the Nokia camera is still increasing, even with the iPhone increase.

What should be shown? Number of users of each type. Of course this would expose their userbase count, but they could not display the numbers and simply give us a chart of "relative" camera use by user count. This will give us a true idea of which cameras are actually dwindling in use and which are increasing, having no bearing on each others numbers.

Statistic fail, merely for hype.

Intel reports record first quarter

I wonder

Makes you wonder if this is including their losses for their Cougar Point "recall." They make excellent processors. Unfortunately they don't have any competition in the high-end market. The Sandy Bridge parts are pointless to buy a non "K" series part, since a 3.4GHz i5 can OC to 4.4GHz reliably with the stock fan that comes with it....who wouldn't want an extra 30% bump in single-thread performance? If there was competition, these parts would likely have higher base-clocked non-"K" parts...

But I digress...12.8bn should allow them to continue improving their CPUs. Can't wait for the next-gen architecture. Even a die shrink will be a nice bit of thermal/power reduction.

Seagate to buy Samsung's disk drive biz?

Ditto

I've been running F2, F3, and F4 drives for quite a while now. I also have an assortment of Seagate and WD, and a solitary Hitachi drive. Care to know which ones have failed? Two Seagate 320GB drives. That's all. Granted, they lasted nearly two years and their replacements have lasted another two years now. However, I do back them up quite regularly to my F4 drive....

Pope says gravity proves technology can't supplant God

Title

hypothesis: a proposition assumed as a premise in an argument

theory: a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

fact: something known to exist or to have happened

Therefore, "I believe there is no God" is not a statement of "fact" but, at best, could be considered a Theory. However, theory (or theorem for those maths people) is something at seems to work, but doesn't have definitive proof to make it a "law" or "fact." So, the statement then takes the actual role of "hypothesis" since there has been no supporting evidence for or against the existence of the beardy sky-man.

However, I think everyone is missing the point that a religious leader has denounced humankind's push to control the world around us and stated we should all give it up. This is definitely blind devotion if I've ever heard of it. Any (other) religious person would suggest beardy sky-man would want us to learn and grow in knowledge....or was that passage simply skipped over in bible study?

Got a buck to send M Night Shyamalan to film school?

Problem

"considering that grandfather plots are approximately the third most hackneyed cliche in all of science fiction."

And the most misconstrued considering the alternate timeline theory to solve the grandfather paradox. Granted, time travel isn't called such by physicists, but "closed time-like loops"

Reviewers slam BlackBerry PlayBook software

PlayBook

Likely, the figured "PlayBook" would relate to (American) "football" and could be used in meetings and the like to suggest productivity and such (since the "playbook" has all your tactics and "plays"). Will it work that way? Likely not. Easier to say "It's a blackberry" and get instant "OOOoooo"s by your business associates. About the same as whipping out an iPad2 in a coffee shop will do.

As for the 350(insert your currency here) Honeycomb 10.1" tablet, my money will quickly follow yours. My requirements for a tablet worth my money will be: dual core, 1GB RAM+, 16GB onboard storage (apps and whatnot), SD slot (32GB+ capable) for videos/music/docs (flash stick replacement potential basically), and capacitive touchscreen (obviously) with a decent viewing angle (where every tablet [minus iPad2 and a single Android tablet] so far fails). I'd even be willing to sacrifice 3D game performance for better battery life (retaining video decode and the like of course).

@Carol

I couldn't call the Xoom cheaper, and not quite better either compared to the iPad2's gfx capability (superior still) and screen. Now, the Samsung 8.9" and 10.1" Tabs are/will-be superior (with a performance hit in gfx compared to iPad2). By years-end, the iPad2 will look quite antiquated, just like the iPhone or MacBook Air does now. That's Apples biggest problem: they're high-end market without necessarily having high-end components/features. Their "high end" is in "Oooh shiny," as a status symbol (phallus waving) and UIs.

Plane or train? Tape or disk? Reg readers speak

A few things

First interview person Henry Wertz: "The big one? Price; tapes cost about 1/10th the cost per byte of hard disks."

1.5TB Maxell LTO5 tape from Amazon: $67.95. 1.5TB Western Digital Elements external HDD from Amazon: $78.62. If you want to get really technical, you can get one of those HDD docking stations (similar to requiring a tape drive for tapes [which run about $2,600 for LTO5 btw]) and buy raw disk drives: Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB from NewEgg for $59.99. If you want to get really picky, you can assume no compression on the hard disk and an optimal 2:1 compress for the tape to achieve the 1.5/3.0TB capacity, then you have to get a HITACHI Deskstar 3TB (NewEgg $139.99), but mind you, compression on disk is quite easy and 2:1 is by no means difficult to achieve using even low on-the-fly streaming compression. Back up a video or JPEG library and you'll only see 1.5TB out of the tape. Therefore, even worst case (no compression for disk and optimal 2:1 for tape) lands at 2.06x the cost of tape. Best case is only 88% the cost of the LTO5 tape for like capacity. So no, not 1/10th the cost. Sorry. Especially when you factor in the $2600 tape drive vs a moderately priced Cavalry EN-CAHDD2BU3-ZB disk dock (for instance) at $64.99 @NewEgg.

Second interviewee Evan Unrue: "but also, disks keep spinning, so doing this comes with a larger physical footprint in the datacenter and a larger power bill. Tape scales by adding cartridges which don’t spin when not being use and don’t take up space in the IT room as they scale"

Why is it that everyone assumes that a disk-based solution mandates the drives are always on? Sure, the first target in the D2D2T or D2D2D will be required to spin, but not the last stage. Disks would work as removable medium just as effectively as tapes in this regard. I would suggest that disks are less vulnerable to environmentally-caused "bit rot" as well, due to the platters not prone to going brittle as tape has a tendency to do (at the very least it can withstand being in a less-than-ideal storage location better [think attic of IT Director's house or the like] if necessary).

I applaud the third interviewee Chris Evans for pointing out some of the shortcomings of tape solutions. Granted, disk has disadvantages too, and as Chris said, it comes down to finding a balance between the two based on your RTO/RPO requirements. The key is finding the best spot to use the appropriate medium. For enterprise environments with hundreds (or even tens) of TBs to backup, you can't beat a tape library for convenience. For anyone with 3-6TB or less for a full backup set, anything more than tape drive or external HDD is likely overkill, especially for the sub-1TB market.

As always, check your logs on your backup jobs frequently. If that's too much of a pain, find a way to have the results emailed (same as paged nowadays) to you upon completion/failure. For those willing to roll up the sleeves (such as the ZFS/CopyFS commenter above), there's plenty of methods you could employ to produce a better setup for your organization than BackupExec or the like could provide, and using HDDs just makes that solution even easier and more feature-full.

WTF is... 4K x 2K?

Usefulness

From the article: "for most of us, a 4k TV set still remains years away. So too does suitable content. Most broadcasters are still not solely operating in HD, and Blu-ray capacities aren’t high enough for 4k video right now."

OP: "great that technology is taking leaps forward but not really viable for the residential consumer."

Even though the storage medium isn't there to use this "4K" set natively, upscaling can be more than useful as a stop-gap. Many people are quite happy with how their DVDs upscale to their 1080p displays. So much so that Bluray uptake might have been hampered by the prolific upscaling support in modern DVD players. I've seen 1080p on even a 48" screen look grainy (from a Bluray over HDMI btw), being clearly able to see pixels (dot pitch was the likely culprit, I'll admit). 4K with upscaling will make Bluray quality leaps and bounds above DVD (DVDs would likely look quite horrid at 4K upscaling compared to Bluray).

Once a proper size format comes out (multi-layer Bluray or the return of the superior capacity HD-DVD [yes, unlikely I know]) then people can start having native 4K video. But until then, start mass producing these things so by the time 4K video comes out, the TV prices will be within reason.

Viking Modular plugs flash chips into memory sockets

@Chris

"(1) DIMM slot does not properly signal power-loss"

The article said they put a supercap on the board in the event of power loss.

"(2) memory hub has not been designed with microsecond-level time-out in mind"

You can be forgiven for thinking it uses the mem controller as an interface. The article wasn't very clear on that point. It's mounting into, and powered by, the mem slot. Data is likely a SATA port soldered onto the SATADIMM board.

Microsoft reveals WinPhone 7 'Mango' details

@Flybert

"he hardware specs to pull these features off aren't in the current phones"

So, if the hardware specs are not on current phones....then why was the alpha build of Mango being demoed on a "current" HTC phone?

AMD backs USB 3.0 on desktop and laptop chipsets

But....

Still slower CPUs per cycle and a half-step behind on die shrink :(

Updates galore in Microsoft's biggest ever Patch Tuesday

W7 SP1

"I'm still picking up the monthly patch update from MS, but was there any news on the SNAFU that was W7 SP1."

SP1 worked fine for me. On all 7 machines I've patched with it so far.

Nvidia: 'old' tablet development kit won't get Android 3.0

However

"Many of the devices are locally branded tablets from from Asian manufacturers, and how many of them will ensure Honeycomb support without Google's say-so or Nvidia's aid?"

If you look at tablets like the Advent Vega or Viewpad, the ability to download and build your own Android firmware is what gives groups the ability to provide those desired updates to antiquated devices. Will 3.0 be able to be hacked to work on these older devices? Perhaps. Will I buy one on that hope? Definitely not. But it is nice to know that there are options to upgrade your firmware, even if your manufacturer has long since (since it was launched?) abandoned your device.

Ten... 40-42in net connected HD TVs

Expensive

That's a large price premium for network (non)connectivity.

Find a larger, or cheaper TV without worrying about network connectivity and pick up a Western Digital WD TV Live Plus 1080p HD Media Player. Then, in 2 years when it's obsolete, ditch it and buy a newer one. Loads cheaper than just ditching your TV and buying a newer one....

Upgrade-hungry office drones ponder PC prangs

Computers in Work Environments

The computers of 5 years ago weren't even fast enough to do the menial office tasks of yesteryear. People merely suffered along because it was as fast or faster than most of the kit out there. Now that home computers have exceeded office kit, people feel like they step into the dark ages when they use their work computer. It IS slower. They can't have 3 memory-intensive applications open at once (Windows, Excel, and Internet Explorer.... :P) like they do at home. Granted, the CPU has been more than powerful enough since the Core2 line came out. RAM has been insufferable on "business class" machines even now. I'm hard pressed to find a vPro-enabled "business class" machine on HP with more than 2GB of RAM without going to the $800 mark. Most businesses likely buy the kit stock or request an extra stick of RAM (if they're smart). This will definitely help things a little bit. What's the other problem? The biggest bottleneck in modern computers: the hard drive. Business machines get a bog standard cheap hard drive. A Western Digital Black would be a decent slot-in for an extra $20 over the de facto. However, many business machines don't store files locally. They host their OS and a hand full of assorted programs. The best idea would be to slap an SSD of a ~60GB variety (or less even) en lieu of a spindle drive. This will place the performance bottleneck back where it should: the CPU. I've seen my old Pentium D machines out-perform newer quad-core Core2-based machines with just an SSD swap-in. (Disclaimer: "out-perform" is entirely user-perception and is not based on CPU benchmarks nor the like, but simply windows boot time and application load time). Granted, code monkeys or other compute-intensive users need better hardware, but the receptionist computer would be a new beast just with a bit of RAM and an SSD.

Air cooled data centres are hot!

So...

You're expecting a data centre that requires less power than it takes to run the data centre? A PUE of 1 means zero energy is used in cooling (the bottom co-efficient is the power required by the computing equipment mind you). So, unless the servers are generating their own power from an alternate universe (see Stargate for precedent), then you won't see <1 PUE.

Hot Water

The difficulty you run into with the "hot water" idea is that you can only heat the water up to the temperature of the hot air exhaust (perhaps ~48*C or so if you're running dense), which is still about 12*C colder than the energy-conscious "low" setting of a hot water boiler. Heating the water more than that would require energy to push the heat into already-warmer water.

Now, they already heat the building the data centre is in, but the idea of heating a surrounding residential zone is kind of interesting. Granted, they can't do so during the months when most would prefer AC over heating....and they'd have to figure in the cases of "what if most of the homes are already 'hot enough' and turn off their heat at the same time?" It starts adding complexity when you can't for-sure dump your heat. Ground pipes have the same general problem as the water heating method: once the immediate surrounding ground is saturated, the cooling effects become less efficient, and you're forced to dump heat elsewhere. Unfortunately for your "reclaim it in winter" idea, the heat would have long since dissipated by the time the season changes.

Your "joined-up thinking" would work, if your view of thermodynamics was actually accurate...

Ideas

They've already thought of that. Look up DC Bus Bars or the like. They have a single large UPS to high-volt bus bar transformer, and it's from that bus bar that a step-down transformer powers each server.

Avast alert finds WHOLE WEB malign

Could....

Could just turn off the webshield. It would catch the script in the web cache, but you'd at least have been able to surf the internet.

iPhone 5? You might be waiting till 2012

They have to brag....

....so it gives meaning to the premium price they paid for the closed architecture.

US Navy laser cannon used to set boat aflame

Likely because....

"I'd say the ban should extend to "any weapon where you cannot see directly that the enemy combatant you are about to kill or maim is a human being"."

Likely desired so that he can say a quick "Hail Mary" before he's jibbified?

Last I checked....

"The kinetic energy generation system is smaller than the laser and uses a loading and targeting system that is completely immune to computer failures and ECM."

Doesn't the launcher rails destroy themselves after about 3 shots?

Seven... SSD sizzlers

Shame

It's a shame The Reg didn't crunch numbers for the Vertex3 drives. The Crucial m4 drive does have some nice specs, but it eats more than 3 times the power of the F120 drive under load (3 watts, one of the highest among these models). So, not necessarily the best for a "laptop." I'd be more inclined to get the Samsung for such, but I don't have wattage numbers for it. The F120 runs strides against any of the others with real workloads (rather than synthetic) due to it's on-the-fly compression. Crystal uses incompressible data I believe, so these numbers are a worst-case for SandForce-based drives. Going off performance and power consumption, a SandForce-based drive (like the OCZ or F120), or the Intel 320 drive would be the best for performance and power consumption. If you want raw performance, Samsung or Crucial would definately be on the table. However, with those price margins, the Vertex3 240GB would be a forceful contender, if not leader.

Anand or Toms has the numbers you'll need. :)

Verizon iPad 2s suffer 3G blindness

Don't worry....

"It just works"

GIVING UP BOOZE CAUSES CANCER - shock study

Yep

Loads of things they didn't control for their test subjects. They likely just junked all forms of cancer that could be attributed to other things (skin/lung cancer) and focused on other cancers (stomach perhaps?). They should have found a source group that didn't have sunbathing/tanning in their habits, didn't smoke, do drugs, drink coffee, or have a family history of cancers. Then perhaps they'd have a better subject group they could split out based on drinking habits.

Record Patch Tuesday with 17-bulletin bumper crop

Holes and Cheese

"Why would you want to Start a Shutdown????"

It hasn't been a "start" button since XP was replaced by Vista. It's the "Windows" button. Hence the icon on it.

""Windoze" is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese."

Wow. Quotes AND slang spelling. Grow up much? Either way, if you don't like all the leaky holes in your Windows box, pull up your Windows Firewall and close those open holes. You don't need SMB? Close the ports. The difference between Windows and Linux in this instance is Linux asks you what ports you want to open during install (since it has them all [well, almost all] closed by default), whereas Windows just assumes you'll want all the "it just works" file sharing, printer sharing, DNLA, etc to work.

Windows hasn't been "swiss cheese" since WinXP.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought

Last I checked....

...Lewis didn't write the research paper, nor the conclusions therein. He merely brought it to our attention.

Commodore USA prices up revived C64, VICs

Not only that...

"to $895 (£548) for a fully specced model with 1TB of storage, 8GB of memory, built-on 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi and a Blu-ray drive."

Seriously, who wants to fork over $900 to chain down 8GB of RAM and blu-ray to an Atom CPU? Would be as useful as dumping that 8GB into the original Commodore....

Apple Digital AV Adapter

Buy-in

"Well no one takes these people down the shops at gun-point and forces them to buy these things at these stupid prices."

Actually, if you consider they're (at the cheapest) $500 into the platform, if they wanted the "extra" features, such as HDMI, they either have to change platforms or shell out for the adapters. Another $50 is small compared to a shift to something like the Xoom. Hence, they're literally being forced to buy these magical addons to get the functionality out of their iDevice. Granted, they could simply just live without such features. The sad thing is, no one seems to care what the down-the-road costs of their devices will be.

New marketing idea for Android tablets:

Cost of iPad2: $500

Cost of our tablet: $450

Cost to made the iPad2 able to do the things WE can out of the box....hook up to a set of speakers or connect to your car stereo, play 1080p (impossible, but still...) across HDMI to your TV, connect to your digital camera, work as a mass storage device or read an SD Card: $XXX.

True cost of the iPad2: $700 (we'll call it an even $200 for the adapters)

Our tablet: Still $450. (plus a fiver for your HDMI cable).