Saturday, February 17, 2007

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability. oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'" [Slashdot] 10:01:49 PM      Google It!.

Progress on 'codecasting'. In the wee hours of the morning I got code working that reads the code-feed, importing objects that are new or updated since the last time we looked. It was a very straightforward continuation of the project I discussed yesterday, and will easily fit into the OPML Editor (and Frontier as well if the developers there want to adopt this method). [Scripting News] 7:35:48 PM      Google It!.

Haiku Tech Talk at Google a Success. mikesum writes "February 13 was Haiku's big day at Google, and we can say with a good degree of confidence that the Haiku Tech Talk was quite successful. We had a very special guest for this event: former Be Inc. CEO Jean Louis Gassée, who not only joined us at Google for our presentation, but also gave a few words of support and encouragement for our project. It was great to have JLG's presence, as well as that of the several ex-Be engineers who showed up for the talk. We were also glad to see Java for BeOS developer Andrew Bachman join us for this special event. Have a look at the pictures taken during the presentation, as well as the video of the event." [Slashdot] 7:32:40 PM      Google It!.

Creating Power From Wasted Heat. Roland Piquepaille writes "Today, about 90 percent of the world's electricity is created through an indirect and inefficient conversion of heat. It is estimated that two thirds of the heat used by thermoelectric converters are wasted and released. But now, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have found a new way to convert this wasted heat into electricity by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles. So far, this method of creating electricity creation is in its very early stage, but if it can scale up to mass production it may lead to a new and inexpensive source of energy." [Slashdot] 6:54:13 PM      Google It!.