fighting the lack of good ideas
Most manufacturers will list an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) on their products – at least in the computer hardware industry. A typical number might be 1 000 000 hours. For those keeping track at home, that’s about 114 years! Now, since no harddrive has been running for more than a century, how could they…
Ars Technica has had a great series of articles recently on virtualization (1 2 3 4 5). But a statement made in part 5 repeated what has been too-often stated as a benefit of virtualization: the reduction of servers, and associated management tasks – The benefits of performing a large-scale P2V conversion are pretty clear:…
As recently promised, here is my review of Bruce Schneier’s seminal work, Applied Cryptography (2d edition). I received my now-signed copy of Applied Cryptography (2d ed) for my 16th birthday – about a year after it was published. Of all the “odd” books I asked-for when I was younger, this single volume had to take…
Microsoft is trying to buy ~650k IPv4 addresses from in-bankruptcy-proceedings Nortel (for $7.5m). What gets me is that IPv6 has been a standard for over a decade, and yet so few have moved to it. Way back when I was in college the first time – in 2000 – our networking professor told us we…
This morning I saw the headline on InfoWorld: “Oracle stopping development on Itanium — slap at HP or obvious decision?” At my previous employer, we were entertained by a couple visits from both HP and Intel folks ballyhooing the Itanium, HP-UX, and the future of the platform – especially in the database arena. I thought those visits…
For several months (I guess, more accurately, “years” now) I have been contributing to Stanford’s folding@home project. That’s my team I just linked-to (88135). If you’re interested in donating your spare CPU cycles to a pretty worthy cause, I’d invite you to join my team 🙂
I realized earlier this week that it’s been 19 years since I first started programming. Not my first exposure to computing, which was in about 1986 on my aunt’s Mac 512 .. but still a long time ago 🙂 My aunt gave me a Tandy 102 laptop that had a whole walloping 21446 bytes of…