Wired Magazine in Belgium: expensive habit
05 Jan 2005In this geeky world I’m in, there are few magazines as spot-on and influential as Wired Magazine. It’s one of the magazines I keep around for years after publication.
In this geeky world I’m in, there are few magazines as spot-on and influential as Wired Magazine. It’s one of the magazines I keep around for years after publication.
I recently stopped reading blogs with SharpReader. It’s a great product, but I had over a hundred feeds that I was monitoring and that’s just too much information coming in. No way to get through all that and still get your job done. I now started from scratch with BlogLines and am trying to think twice before adding a new feed (currently at 10).
UPDATE: I received a cease-or-desist from DRoA in March 2006 about this post.
Restaurants and hairdressers in Belgium are complaining because the costs for playing muzak in their businesses (performers’ rights or ‘naburige rechten‘) will rise with 30% to 37% (De Morgen, Dec 4, 2004, p.9).
I wonder: is that the same for people who just play Radio 2 in their shops, those who use a PC with some brand of MP3 player shuffle their CD collections around, and even those who pay for subscription-based digital no-commercials no-talking theme-grouped music?
I recently discovered Brewster Kahle’s speech on the NotCon ‘04 podcast about the ambition of The Internet Archive to archive absolutely everything (all books, all movies, all music, …). (There is an excellent transcript on www.hotales.org .) They are currently setting up a second datacentre in Amsterdam, as an off-site copy of the original archive.org. They use massive parallel storage nodes grouped together in a PetaBox rack. You actually need 10 Petaboxes to get to 1 Petabyte (1 rack = 80 servers x 4 disks x 300 GB/disk = +- 100 TB). Since the rack uses node-to-node replication (every node has a sister node that holds a copy of all its data, so that if one of both nodes crashes, the data is still available), the net storage is 50TB.
So this got me thinking: how do you ‘copy’ the contents of PetaBox A to PetaBox B, how do you move 50TB?
Let’s try some numbers from my bandwidth calculator:
In order to send an email over SMTP, you need 2 sets of information:
There’s only one way to check if podcasting can change your life, and that is by diving completely into it. Since last week, I am the proud owner of a 20GB iPod, (the first Apple product I have ever bought) and it is hard not to be enthusiastic about it. It might not be the cheapest hard-disk MP3 player around, but it is by far the most funky. Especially the user interface was very intuitive, which is important for the ain’t-gonna-RTFM person that I am.
I have one server with apparently an exceptional stability:
While working on some bandwidth-related stuff (my bandwidth calculator), I came across an excellent article on “latency vs. bandwidth” by Stuart Cheshire. It was originally written in 1996, so focuses a lot on modems, but Fact 1, 2 and 4 are still valid.
