* Gearhead: More product updates * Backspin: Bad behavior online * Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Gearhead: More product updates
This week we have updates about significant upgrades to a couple of products that we’ve reviewed previously. First up, we have a new version of Storm Predator published by IntelliWeather.
To read this week’s Gearhead, click here.
Backspin: Bad behavior online
I just sat in on a Web conference hosted by the National School Boards Association on the topic “Postings, Protection, and Policies: What School Leaders Need to Know About Online Teen Hangouts.”
To read this week’s Backspin, click here.
Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Why I Don’t Understand the Voting Machine Brouhaha
As we have just had an election and the whole voting machine brouhaha has repeated itself I have to throw in my $0.02: How come automated teller machines can function reliably and banks can get the account details right for millions of customers performing billions of transactions every day but for no obvious reason accurately counting something like a paltry 160 million votes is apparently next to impossible.
Can someone tell me why we aren’t more outraged at the willful incompetence involved? Anyone?
Cost Effective, Easily Installed, Low Power Consumption Supercomputing
Without wanting to sound South Park-like, this is totally awesome: A supercomputer which delivers Top500 performance that you can just roll into your data center, plugs into a regular power supply, consumes a fraction of the normal power requirements, and requires no special air conditioning. This beast is the SiCortex SC5832 which has 5,832 1GFlops 64-bit processors.
According to the company: All interprocessor communications logic plus two DDR-2 memory controllers and PCI express I/O logic are on the same node with the multiple processor cores. Complete with its 8 Terabytes of system memory, the SC5832 fits in a single cabinet and requires less than 20 kilowatts of wall power.
The SiCortex SC5832.
Check out the system tour — a great presentation.
Wow. If you don’t have the $1.5 million for the SC5832 there’s also the SC648 with a measly 648 processors for only $200,000.
The SiCortex SC648.
I have no idea what I’d do with one but it would look so cool in my office …
When OS X’s Disk Utility Doesn’t Work, DiskWarrior Does
If you have ever had to use OS X’s Disk Utility to fix a problem and found that it was useless, I have a solution for you: DiskWarrior from Alsoft, Inc.
This will most likely get discussed in a future Gearhead but my problem, briefly, was this: I had a Kano SureVAULT RAID5 setup that suffered a physical assault (the Firewire 800 connectors got wrenched off the i/o board because the data cable was pushed against a wall).
The worst part was that the violent removal of the connectors caused the disk volume to become unreadable! Very unfortunate and even more so because the drive array stored my photo collection which I had put there for safety while I tested some software on Mac that need more disk space than I had left.
I reconnected the array using the remaining USB and then the Firewire 400 port and in both cases the volume wouldn’t mount under OS X. You might think that Apple’s Disk Utility would be of assistance but all it would do is produce this error message:
Oct 13 20:18:48: Disk Utility started.
Verifying volume “Kano SureVAULT 800”
Invalid Volume Header
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
The volume Kano SureVAULT 800 needs to be repaired.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
Pathetic!
Thus it was that I came to try DiskWarrior. To use the software you simply boot from the DiskWarrior CD and tell it to fix the damaged volume. Less than five minutes later the volume on the drive array was back up and running! Outstanding!
DiskWarrior also does a lot more than recover damaged volumes (although that would be more than enough!) — see the Web site for more information.
If you are a Mac OS X user you absolutely MUST have DiskWarrior. At $79.95 it is a very low cost way to ensure that you avoid having a very, very bad day.
Intent on voting, Pa. woman, 95, calls 911
Associated Press
READING, Pa. – Anna Urban has been voting since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and wasn’t about to miss an election.
When the 95-year-old Reading resident didn’t have a ride to the polls Tuesday, she didn’t hesitate. She dialed 911.
Alexaholic Chartlet
Here’s an interesting interactive Web site traffic analysis widget from Alexaholic. The one below is for Network World’s current domain (networkworld.com) and its previous domain (nwfusion.com).
Subscribe to Network World on Web Applications, Alexa and Alexaholic will be discussed in the second weekly issue to be published next Thursday.
Platial Mapkit Test 5
Interesting Google Maps mashup from Platial.
