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Pentium-3 vs Pentium-4

I recently was giving away some old P3 and P4 machines and was surprised by the level of interest in P4 machines. As you can see from my page on computer power use [1] the power use from a P4 system is significantly greater than that of a P3. The conventional wisdom is that the […]

Air Filtering for Servers

Serious server rooms have large (and expensive) air-conditioning and filtering systems. Most “server rooms” however are not like that, often it’s just some space in a store-room, sometimes near printers (which are a source of air pollution [1]).

The servers that are stored in serious server rooms have air filters as a standard feature. For […]

Election 2007

I am a member of the Greens. The main reason for joining them is that they have principles. The Greens Charter [1] guides everything, policy must comply with the charter and candidates agree to uphold the policies which have been ratified if they get elected. There are no “non-core promises“.

The policies of the Greens […]

Drugs and an Election

As mentioned in my previous post [1] the government is using our money to advertise its policies. I previously covered the “Internet as a threat to children” issue, the other big one is drugs.

The first significant message in the “Talking with your kids about drugs” document concerns the criminal penalties for drug use. That […]

Internet and an Election

Before the election was called the Howard government (being unethical in every way) started using public money to campaign. Part of this election campaign was two documents sent out to every home (AFAIK) coupled with a media campaign, one was about children and drugs, the other was about children and the Internet. I have to […]

BoingBoing and Licenses

Today I was thrilled to see that Cory Doctorow (who among other things wrote one of my favourite Sci-fi novels [1]) copied one of my blog posts on to BoingBoing.net [2].

Then I reviewed the licence conditions (which had previously been contained in the About Page and is now a post on my documents blog […]

RAID and Bus Bandwidth

As correctly pointed out by cmot [1] my previous post about software RAID [2] made no mention of bus bandwidth.

I have measured the bus bottlenecks of a couple of desktop machines running IDE disks with my ZCAV [3] benchmark (part of the Bonnie++ suite). The results show that two typical desktop machines had significant […]

Perfect Code vs Quite Good Code

Some years ago I worked on a project where software reliability should have been a priority (managing data that was sometimes needed by the police, the fire brigade, and the ambulance service). Unfortunately the project had been tainted by a large consulting company that was a subsidiary of an accounting firm (I would never have […]

Conditions of Sending Email

Update: Due to the popularity of this post I have created a T-Shirt and put it on sale at http://www.cafepress.com/email_eula .

Update: Unlike most of my blog content I permit anyone to copy most or all of this post for commercial use (this includes blogs with google advertising) as long as they correctly identify me […]

WTF – Let’s write all the code twice

There is an interesting web site WorseThanFailure.com (with the slogan “Curious Perversions in Information Technology”) that documents amusingly failed projects. The name used to be TheDailyWTF.com but changed due to the idea that for some projects success (interpreted to mean limping along in production) is worse than failure (being scrapped and re-written). I’ve created a […]