RoboGeek

Re: Vista flexes its power

Vista flexes its power is about a supposedly new feature with Vista that allows companies to save energy.  namely: "With Windows Vista, Microsoft plans to put machines to sleep after an hour of inactivity"

Excuse me while I yawn.  Mac's have had robust ability to go to sleep for a looooong time.  And, for that matter, Windows has had a similar ability (through ACPI hardware in the computers) but in my experience the standby or hibernate modes have not been reliable.

It's wonderful to hear a computer company talk about enabling computers to use less power.  It is painful considering the power wasted by desktop computers staying turned on all night long.  Those computers, when left turned on all the time, are directly tied to poisons being introduced into the environment because most methods humanity has developed for generating electricity involves poisons or other ecological damage.  Hence it is a good idea for humanity to figure out how to minimize the damage introduced by the gizmos we use around us.

But back to the article -- while the beginning of the article sounds like a clueless reporter mouthing hype from Microsoft it does go on to some specifics.  Such as fixing several issues around the machine actually going to sleep when the user thought they put it to sleep.  Another issue mentioned is corporations requiring a desktop PC being left awake so that patches etc can be installed, and their fix is a way to remotely wake a computer. 


(2006-10-17 09:08:04.0) Permalink

Data center in a box?

Sun to unveil data center in a box  We are?  That sounds cool, I hope that really is what we're unveiling later today.  The article claims we'll be demonstrating a standard-sized shipping container containing racks of computer gear, water cooling system, air filtration system, etc.  It's a box you can quickly deploy just by dropping it (literally?) into a vacant piece of land, run power, water, and network connections to it, and you're good to go.

Sounds cool.  I remember reading a rumor-story of Google working on a similar idea.  And in the article they liberally quote from Gerald Murphy, a Robert Francis Group analyst who six years ago designed shipping container-based computer systems for customers performing classified work.  He said:  "If they're thinking they invented it, they're wrong".  Heh, howzabout if you wait until the announcement to see if we claim to have invented this.  Okay?

And speaking of spooks (er.. classified work) and deployable computer systems.  The scenario that came into my mind was ... is this meant for, say, military operations where they're invading a country and need to quickly parachute in a bunch of equipment?  The modern American Military Machine depends on high technology and what could be higher tech than a rack of computer servers deployed onto the battlefield?  Yeah, the military has gobs of servers back home and they can more easily deploy sattelite communications to give access to the computation resources.  Maybe they will want the computation on the battlefield?

The article says the gizmo can withstand a force 9 times the force of gravity, and equates that to a six-inch drop.  Hmm, doesn't sound like a parachute drop to me.  Who knows.  Certainly this gizmo could be attractive to rapidly growing organizations.

For example in my organization (Java SE, and in general the Santa Clara Campus) we're having trouble with crowded lab/server areas.  At the same time there's some underdeveloped land on the campus where we might erect a building or two later, but if we had one of these blackbox gizmos could put some servers on campus without having to erect a building.

What's amuzing is this video clip that Sun StorageTek published on YouTube.  I linked to that video on an earlier blog posting (click on the second of the videos).  Coincidentally (?) the video shows capacity being expanded by dropping big boxes into neat columns in a warehouse.  Hmmm...

And that video raises a couple interesting points.  If you react to expanding needs with the idea of "I'll just add more" then what of the environmental consequences?  The more computational gizmos you deploy, whether it's in a traditional data center, in an office environment, or whether it's in a black box in the parking lot, the more capacity you add to your system the more power and energy you've expended.  So far humanity has only found methods for making electricity that involve introducing poisons into the environment.  When you say "I'll just add more" you're also saying "I'll just poison the environment some more".

The CNET article doesn't discuss whether this portable data center gizmo has any attempt to optimize power usage per unit of computation capacity.
(2006-10-17 07:16:06.0) Permalink

I don't get the attraction to bittorrent The other day Mandriva announced their new release, the 2007 version of their distribution.  I've been wanting to try their system out so I went to the download page.  A couple days prior I'd downloaded the RC2 ISO's and those were done with an FTP arrangement, but today the final bits are downloadable only with a bittorrent thingamajob.

Bittorrent is one of those gosh wow technologies that has the geeks glowing and saying it's the neatest thing since sliced bread.  Supposedly bittorrent is a technology that would, if deployed by the media companies etc, revolutionize the distribution of multimedia entertainment.

Well, as a user of this technology I am completely and totally underwhelmed.

The mandriva distribution .torrent file specifies the downloading of four ISO's plus a small number of related meta files.  I started the download yesterday afternoon, and 20 hours later the bittorrent client (qtorrent running on Ubuntu if that makes any difference) says it's only 50% downloaded, and there are 18 hours left to go.

Just a few days earlier when I was able to grab the prior ISO's using FTP they downloaded within an hour, and within two hours after that I had the ISO's burned to CD.

Seems to me that as a user of the two technologies, FTP (or HTTP "get" or the like) is superior over bittorrent, because I get quicker satisfaction.

So can someone explain the superiority of bittorrent?

Oh and to toss a few more worms into the pot ... Last year sometime I was curious what all the rage over the Azureus client was about.  So I installed it, ran it, and to get some .torrent files I found the torrentspy web site.  Good golly what a flashback to the unethical sharing of copyrighted content.  Is that what bittorrent normally used for?  The unethical sharing of copyrighted content?

(2006-10-04 11:10:10.0) Permalink Comments [6]