Links June 2008Links June 2008
Paul Graham has recently published an essay titled How To Disagree [1]. One form that he didn’t mention is to claim that a disagreement is a matter of opinion. Describing[...]
Solving Rubik’s Cube and IO BandwidthSolving Rubik’s Cube and IO Bandwidth
Solving Rubiks Cube by treating disk as RAM: Gene Cooperman gave an interesting talk at Google about how he proved that Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 26 moves and[...]
TED – Defining WordsTED – Defining Words
I recently joined the community based around the TED conference [1]. The TED conference is expensive ($6000US) and has a long waiting list (the 2009 conference is sold out) so[...]
ISP Redundancy and VirtualisationISP Redundancy and Virtualisation
If you want a reliable network then you need to determine an appropriate level of redundancy. When servers were small and there was no well accepted virtual machine technology there[...]
Letter Frequency in Account NamesLetter Frequency in Account Names
It’s a common practice when hosting email or web space for large numbers of users to group the accounts by the first letter. This is due to performance problems on[...]
The Cost of Owning a CarThe Cost of Owning a Car
There has been a lot of talk recently about the cost of petrol, Colin Charles is one of the few people to consider the issue of wages in this discussion[...]
What is Appropriate Advertising?What is Appropriate Advertising?
Colin Charles writes about a woman who is selling advertising space on herself [1]. Like Colin I haven’t bought a t-shirt in about 9 years (apart from some Cafepress ones[...]
I’m Skeptical about Robotic NanotechI’m Skeptical about Robotic Nanotech
There has been a lot of fear-mongering about nanotech. The idea is that little robots will eat people (or maybe eat things that we depend on such as essential food[...]
Wyndham Resorts is a Persistent SpammerWyndham Resorts is a Persistent Spammer
Over the last week I have received five phone calls from Wyndham Resorts asking if I would like to be surveyed. Every time I tell them that I am not[...]
ECC RAM is more useful than RAIDECC RAM is more useful than RAID
A common myth in the computer industry seems to be that ECC (Error Correcting Code – a Hamming Code [0]) RAM is only a server feature. The difference between a[...]