Category: Science/Tech Stuff

Someone with a web server and a sense of humor…

Ebuyer.com runs on a Commodore 64

Online retailing can be a rough sport. The competition is rabid, customer loyalty is fickle, and IT expenses can go through the roof.

That’s why The Register can appreciate an e-tailer with a unique business model.

A hawk-eyed El Reg reader points out that UK online retailer Ebuyer.com appears to be cutting costs by running its site on servers dating back to the late Cretaceous period – roughly speaking. According to internet monitoring company Netcraft, the e-tailer has bypassed run-of-the-mill legacy servers for some serious heirlooms.

[…]

Next, you’ll find not one but two Commodore 64s. The Commodore debuted in 1982 with 64KB RAM, a 1.02MHz MOS Technology 6510 processor, and a 16-color, 320×200 resolution monitor. Not to mention a creamy BASIC 2.0 operating system.

Morons of DRM

iPod, iTunes Cited in Cease and Desist For Apple

Accordingly, MRT has filed Cease and Desist letters against Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Real to stop production or sale of products that infringe on the DMCA.

MRT’s X1 SeCure Recording Control has proven effective against stream ripping, the company said in a statement, and these companies have been “actively avoiding the use of MRT’s technologies.”

“Buy our technology or we’ll sue you.” Bunch of right wankers!

“[It] could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history”

This is why I’m glad I bought my new laptop BEFORE Vista came out… indeed, pretty much *right* before they started shipping the “free upgrade” coupons:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history [Note A].

Second Life: a pet rock for the new millenium.

Are there really two million people using Second Life?

Bobbie Johnson
Thursday December 21, 2006
The Guardian

You’d think so. With glowing press coverage, virtual world Second Life would appear to be going from strength to strength: last week it broke through the 2m sign-ups barrier.

But not everybody is convinced by such milestones. Clay Shirky, the respected internet analyst and thinker, questioned how many of those 2m ever return after signing up.

…getting to the punchline below…

And it may be worse even than Shirky’s bleak estimates. Philip Rosedale, the founder of SL maker Linden Lab, last month said that churn was probably around 90% – meaning just one in 10 people who sign up use it in any meaningful way.

For comparison, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft had 5m subscribers – all paying a monthly fee – this time last year.

I haven’t yet found an MMOG I actually like, but I totally understand the appeal the when there’s a significant and enjoyable gaming to them. Something with only a dubious gaming nature, like say The Sims Online (do they even still exist?) I don’t really get the appeal of, but … de gustibus, and all that. When they’re just an online not-a-game, like Second Life, it seems like a glorified form of IM, and I do not get it at all… seems like a real wankfest to me (to borrow a Britishism.)

Software price woes in Britain.

Are we being ripped off over software?

With sterling at nearly $2, the price difference between here and the US looks starker than ever

Jack Schofield
Thursday December 21, 2006
The Guardian

Buy a copy of Microsoft Windows or Office, Adobe Photoshop or even a game in the UK, and you will usually end up paying much more than you would in the US. It could be as little as 20p more for a music download (though even after VAT that’s a near-25% markup), up to an amazing £181 extra for a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2, if you are paying manufacturers’ suggested retail prices.

At least for games and other things not needing localization (*) for functional reasons, why not order from the US Amazon? Though I’m not clear how much of that would be lost to shipping.

In any event, sorry to our neighbors cross the pond, and hey, at least remember you’ve got the NHS while we’ve got the freakishly bad US private healthcare market.

Another step towards an effective artificial heart

Man with no pulse considered a medical breakthrough

PETER RAKOBOWCHUK
Canadian Press

MONTREAL — A 65-year-old Quebec man who received a new long-term mechanical heart last month is being described as the only living Canadian without a pulse.

Dr. Renzo Cecere implanted the “Heartmate II” mechanical heart into Gerard Langevin in an three-hour operation Nov. 23.

Officials at the McGill University Health Centre say the device, which is about the size of a flashlight battery, could last up to 10 years.

via RASSF

An interesting night…

  • First, I discover this afternoon that my server has rebooted on an older Kernel and the SATA drives aren’t being recognized. No wonder it’s going so slow; the RAID is running in degraded mode (not inherently slower for RAID0/mirroring, but in practice it’s going to mean that the system does everything much more carefully wrt flushing buffers and stuff.) So I had to rebuild that tonight; the Linux mdadm tool made that surprisingly easy.
  • Second, the phone line has gone tonight. No DSL, no nuttin’ – I host my own server, so I can post this now, but who knows when y’all are going to get to see it. And I think I’m going into some minor case of internet-access withdrawal (no dialup backup, since the voice phone is down too, but at least I have my PDA thing… slow though it is at home.)

So I downloaded the Vista beta/preview…

…and tried it out on my laptop, using a spare hard drive. It installed easily, but recognized relatively little of my hardware. The performance was very poor, despite a decent system; part of that may have been the video, which despite a terribly common video card (Radeon Mobility 7500) was not recognized and was running using the standard VGA driver (VESA, probably). Neither was the internal NIC, despite being a truly ubiquitous 3Com chip (3c920, compatible with the 3c905). The XP driver for the video card would not install; fortunately the NIC driver did.

I am highly undecided on the new UI elements, a lot of which seemed too great a departure from existing Windows UI – I mean, if I have to learn something entirely new, I’m going to just bite the bullet and start using Linux full time and just boot to Windows for video games, and it’s bordering on that big of a change. We’ll see how it looks in final release.

Hybrid storage to hit the mass market…

While the news that Samsung announces PCs with Flash instead of a real HD is itself interesting, further down they note that:

As we reported last week, Samsung will also start shipping NAND-hard drive combos with 128MB and 256MB of NAND during the third quarter.

The authors go on to note that Intel is releasing it’s own Flash-caching technology, called Robson.

This is very much related to the MRAMFS work I did; I mean, I doubt they read my compression papers, but it’s all based on the same underlying concept. Very cool.

Reminiscences about old computers… part 1

Inspired by a thread on RASFF (I think, might have been RASFC) here are the first in a set of reminiscences about computers I’ve owned. The lengthy bit will follow breaks, so that those of you who are here for humor and/or politics can ignore them.

I got my first computer, a Commodore 64 with tape drive, on Saturday 10/22/1983. My memory for a long time was ’82, but I distinctly remember it being a Saturday – earlier on the day of my birthday party, which was always on a weekend either before or after my birthday – and I eventually found the receipt in my father’s old papers.

Continues following the break…
Continue reading “Reminiscences about old computers… part 1”