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Tuesday, February 20, 2007 |
Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong. modapi writes "Google's wasn't the best storage paper at FAST '07. Another, more provocative paper looking at real-world results from 100,000 disk drives got the 'Best Paper' award. Bianca Schroeder, of CMU's Parallel Data Lab, submitted Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? The paper crushes a number of (what we now know to be) myths about disks such as vendor MTBF validity, 'consumer' vs. 'enterprise' drive reliability (spoiler: no difference), and RAID 5 assumptions. StorageMojo has a good summary of the paper's key points. "Further, these results validate the Google File System[base ']s central
redundancy concept: forget RAID, just replicate the data three times.
If I[base ']m an IT architect, the idea that I can spend less money and get
higher reliability from simple cluster storage file replication should
be very attractive."
"[Slashdot]
6:12:50 PM  Google It!.
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4 GB May Be Vista's RAM Sweet Spot. jcatcw writes "David Short, an IBM consultant who works in the Global Services Division and has been beta testing Vista for two years, says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With Vista's minimum requirement of 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's 'sub-XP,' he says. (Dell and others recommend 2GB.) One reason: SuperFetch, which fetches applications and data, and feeds them into RAM to make them accessible more quickly. More RAM means more caching."[Slashdot]
6:10:08 PM Google It!.
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UK Taps 439,000 Phones, Now Wants To Monitor MPs. JPMH writes "With the largest density of CCTV cameras in the world, and an increasing network of automatic number-plate recognition cameras on main roads, Britain has long been a pioneer for the surveillance society. Now new official figures reveal that UK agencies monitored 439,000 telephones and email addresses in a 15 month period between 2005 and 2006. The Interception of Communications Commissioner is seeking the right for agencies to be allowed to monitor the communications of Members of Parliament as well, something which has been forbidden since the 1960s. It must be that it is bringing their numbers down: on the law of averages they should be monitoring at least 5 of the MPs."[Slashdot]
3:11:39 PM Google It!.
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Australia Outlaws Incandescent Light Bulb. passthecrackpipe writes "The Australian Government is planning on making the incandescent light bulb a thing of the past. In three years time, standard light bulbs will no longer be available for sale in the shops in Australia (expect a roaring grey market) and everybody will be forced to switch to more energy efficient Fluorescent bulbs. In this move to try and curb emissions, the incandescent bulb [~] which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light [~] will be phased out. Environmental groups have given this plan a lukewarm reception. They feel Australia should sign on to the Kyoto protocol first. A similar plan was created together with Phillips, one of the worlds largest lighting manufacturers."[Slashdot]
3:08:19 PM Google It!.
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Don't Believe What You See at the Movies. MattSparkes writes "Many images you see in a magazine are Photoshopped, and it's getting less and less likely that what you see at the cinema is any more genuine. In the film 'Blood Diamond', tears were added to Jennifer Connolly's face after a scene was shot. According to The Times, digital effects artists can even change actors' expressions. 'Opening or closing eyes; making a limp more convincing; removing breathing signs; eradicating blinking eyelids from a lingering gaze; or splicing together different takes of an unsuccessful love scene to produce one in which both parties look like they are enjoying themselves.' The article mentions the moral qualms digital effects people have over performing these manipulations, and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets."[Slashdot]
3:07:21 PM Google It!.
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Europe Moves To Track Phone and Net Use. An anonymous reader writes with a NYTimes piece on the early moves by European governments to implement an EU data retention directive. The governments of Germany and the Netherlands are initially proposing much more stringent programs than the EU directive requires. For example, the German proposal "would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal." The Times notes that, early days as it is, nevertheless some people involved in the issue are "concerned about a shift in policy in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals' privacy rights."[Slashdot]
3:03:35 PM Google It!.
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Recording Your Entire Life. Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass [~] that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.[Slashdot]
3:02:06 PM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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