Use a router

Even a cheap home router can be set to not pass FTP traffic. When access is needed then log in to the router to enable the traffic then disable it afterwards. For older kit where updates are no longer readily available or where taking the device offline would cause too much disruption using a router to filter the traffic is a cheap fix (much less than £100 per device to be secured)

The big firms are also disliked by many of their customers

Anyone who has been burned by new releases of Oracle software not supporting all the features of previous versions or by bugs that take ages to fix (if they ever are) or by prices that are excessive is unlikely to be a fan of Oracle. When a reasonably priced alternative becomes available then they are likely to want to ditch Oracle as soon as practical. (SAP probably has the same problems but I never used SAP but I was an Oracle DBA and systems admin for years.)

For a new company, there is probably NO reason to use Oracle or SAP. Below the multithousand employee level, much cheaper products from other companies are likely to be adequate and with far lower staff overhead requirements. (For an example of their high prices - the list price for Oracle standard edition database running on a six core Xeon CPU is $52500 to buy and $11550 per year in maintenance and this is only for the database - no applications. )

Amazon and Google NEED special hardware

With the size of their data centres, power efficiency is critical. The use of tailored hardware with lower power drain makes a BIG difference in the power bill and the amount of equipment that can be in a single data centre when the centres are as large as Google's. Also Google's equipment is designed to be capable of operating at higher than normal server room temperatures to reduce the cooling equipment power drain.

(By the use of these measures Google manages a power overhead of about 12% versus the industry average of 100%.)

Old data can be VERY important

Seismology records from early oil exploration when reprocessed with modern computers can lead to the discovery of additional oil reserves or hidden earthquake fault lines.

With current LTO 6 tape prices of about $93/tape and a 2.5TB capacity, the cost per TB per year would amount to around $50. (Assumptions - tape replacement cycle 5 years, cost of automated tape library less than $125/tape, tape library replaced with the tapes (no trade in value), cost of automated stager to newer tape less than $15 per tape copied to new media.)

For a large database of 100PB, this amounts to $500,000 per year which is probably lost in the noise of any organisation large enough to have a 100PB archive.

The cost of separating the wanted old data from the dross is probably so much higher than the cost of keeping it all that the best approach will often be to keep all the data.

On a much smaller scale - where I used to work, the fact that I was a confirmed cynic and digital pack rat saved the company a lot of money when a private backup copy that I had kept of an old project turned out to be the only one left when a modification was needed. Getting rid of old data can be an expensive mistake.

Rough calculation on RAW storage costs

For a production to be considered 4k according to the Digital Cinema Initiatives consortium, digital camera shots should be in 7680x4320 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution for details). Assuming high dynamic range sensors, more than 8 bits are needed per pixel so for ease of storage 16 bits/pixel is likely to be used. This requires just over 66 million bytes/frame. At 60 frames/sec this works out to slightly over 14 terabytes per camera hour. As multiple camera are used in production and multiple takes for many scenes, it is probably reasonable to assume in the order of 50 camera hours of footage kept for each production for a total of slightly over 712 terabytes. As the cost of production is so high, at least 3 copies of the footage need to be kept which increases the storage requirement to about 2150 terabytes. At current disk storage costs of about £50 per terabyte this amounts to about £100K and an ongoing cost of about £40K per year copying the data to newer disks as disks have a limited lifespan.

(Above calculations assume that the cameras have a single sensor with RGB filtering as in domestic cameras - if they use 3 sensors (1 per colour) then the above requirements are tripled.)

The cost of the active storage is much higher because of the bandwidth requirements, but the active storage can be reused for the next production.

Cheap basic switches needed

To drive 10GbE adoption, cheap basic switches are needed - the 10GbE equivalent of the 8 port 1GbE switches that can be picked up for under £50. For small outfits, managed switches are unwanted extra expense. (How many full featured managed switches are used as dumb switches throughout IT.)

To kickstart 10GbE, 8 port switches should be under £1000 and the NICs should be under £100 (10GBASE-T) with the switch ports being able 10 handle 10GbE and 1GbE (autoswitching). If and when these prices become available then 10GbE will be used as a matter of course.

(There are far more small companies than large ones and for a company on one site with fewer than 50 employees (>>90%) managed switches are not needed.)

Sacrifice some weight

As a workaround for the moment why do Boeing not use a NiMH (or even lead-acid) battery stack in the cargo bay cabled to the position occupied by the Lithium battery. It would increase the weight of the plane by a couple of hundred pounds and possibly reduce the number of cargo containers that could be carried by 1 but would allow the planes to continue flying while a permanent fix was being designed and implemented.

ASR 33

The keyboard on the teletype ASR 33 must rate highly amongst the "Worst keyboards of all time list" . Forget RSI - it was more like torn ligaments from the force needed to operate the keys. It was so bad that I much preferred the membrane keyboard on the ZX-81 or the dead flesh keyboard of the Spectrum.

Boot from a CD on a diskless system

If you need a secure setup then keep the data on an external disk or usb stick that is only accessed by a diskless isolated computer that boots from a Linux Live CD. If that data has to be sent to another party then it is encrypted and the encrypted copy put onto a USB stick that is taken to an internet connected computer to be sent. It does not matter if the connected computer is compromised as it never sees unencrypted data. For receiving data, the same procedure is followed in reverse. Malware that is put onto the USB stick by the connected computer does not matter as it would just be ignored by the Linux OS (no autorun on most Live CDs).

(The diskless system must complete booting before the data disk is connected to ensure that there can be no persistent malware to upset the Linux OS.)

If this is done then only physical access, concealed camera or RF sniffing will reveal the data.

(For the diskless computer go to a shop that you have not used before and buy a display model - the chance of it having malware targeted at you and able to get round a Linux OS is effectively zero.)

Reputation

One reason that CA will find it difficult to grow its business is its reputation. A number of people think that any time CA takes over a product, the prices rise and the support dwindles

Compressed air tank ?

Using an air tank that can be compressed (rather than helium) would allow for a larger weight change with less chance of losing expensive helium.

A better target animal might be a Portia spider

Portia spiders are small but seem to exhibit intelligent hunting behaviour. This system might just be big enough to simulate the brain of a Portia.

Redirect facebook to 127.0.0.1

If you want to stop Facebook dead in its tracks - edit the hosts file (needs root access on linux or android, admin user on windows) and add lines like

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

(do this for all facebook web addresses that you want to block)

This will prevent any application on the device connecting to facebook.

Scripting ?

In one of my jobs I had an Excel spreadsheet that was a container for a VBA application. It took a series of files in one directory and encrypted them using the command line version of PGP. How would such an application run with this security product.

A lot of commercial applications access things in other machines (e.g. a payroll application on a PC will access the main payroll files on a server). Unless a huge amount of rules get written to cope with each exception then the product will be unusable. Note also that some applications will only access some files very rarely (eg at year end or when an exception flag is triggered) so having a learning mode in the VM will not suffice.

Flash DOES have minimum size limits

Just like previous non-volatile memory systems ferrite core and plated wire, there is a minimum size limit for the cells in flash memory. (In this case as smaller cells have an unacceptably low write endurance.)

The competitor designs for NVRAM (eg phase change) do not reach their minimum size point until much smaller than the minimum size for a usable flash memory. When their production cost ($/GB) reduces below the cost of flash memory then the industry will move to the newer technology.

Users will still see SSDs with the same external interface (SATA 2) so at the user level the change will be invisible except for longer lifetimes from the newer SSDs.

As the newer technologies do not need wear leveling or write amplification minimisation, the complex flash controllers such as Sandforce will no longer be needed and much simpler controllers can be used.

It is firms like Sandforce and Indilinx that will suffer a revenue hit with the new technology, most of the flash ecosystem will be unaffected.

Gamma ray burst ?

A gamma ray burst from the far side of the Milky Way could have done the job. As a GRB only lasts seconds, if it hit the day side of the earth it could have been completely missed by human observers.

(A nearby GRB would have been lethal but from the far side of the galaxy and with the dust and gas in the way the biological effects would have been minor.)

Corruption ?

If the GPU has direct memory access to each VM then there is a gaping security hole - a corruption in one VM (software error or malware) could result in the corruption of other VMs. If the GPU does not have direct memory access then the performance is going to be crippled by the need for software to move the data in and out.

For Nvidia to have a bunch of Kepler chips with only 192 working cores instead of 1536 suggests that their yield problems are very bad (only 1/8th of the cores working).

Not that high power

A standard dual circuit 3 phase 4 conductor 400kV line as used in the main transmission lines in the UK can carry 1kA per conductor for a total power of over 6.7GW. The China link is high voltage but not very high power given the voltage.

The high voltage is probably to reduce the amount of aluminum (or copper) needed for the line (doubling the voltage halves the amount of conductor needed).

MKV player ?

The Sumvision's Cyclone Micro 2 MKV player which is available for under £30 is a cheap alternative box if you can replace the builtin firmware.

MLC can be used as SLC fairly easily

For 2 bit per cell MLC there are 4 voltage levels which correspond to bit values of 00,01,10,11.

If for example the voltage levels are in the same order then the lowest voltage corresponds to 00 and the highest voltage corresponds to 11. If the only values that are written to the array are 00 and 11 (lowest and highest voltages) then only 1 bit is being stored per cell. When the cell starts to wear out then on reading values 01 or 10 may be read instead of 00 or 11. This can be used to warn the controller that this block is starting to wear out and the data needs to be refreshed or copied to another block. Because there is a large margin between the valid states, the data is still readable when the cell starts to degrade without resorting to performance degrading ECC.

All that is needed for a controller to be able to use MLC memory as SLC is for the correspondance of voltage levels to bit values to be known (so that it only writes the highest and lowest values).

(If 01 is read then the data is 0, if 10 is read then the data is 1 in the above example.)

Vodka is a more likely explanation

Russians have one of the highest alcohol consumptions per capita in the world. Someone making a mistake while drunk is a far more likely cause.

See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/8343090/Russias-alcohol-and-tobacco-consumption-by-numbers.html for details of Russia's alcohol problem.

Attractive rates for performers

If Google is charging 30% commission, that is far below what traditional music publishers take and could be very attractive to many performers.

The extra features of each tablet are not shown

A number of tablets have special features (e.g. the Xoom has a barometer), these should be mentioned.

Teletext

The biggest problem with Freeview (and Freesat) is that the text service is pathetic compared to the Teletext on the analogue service. A large number of the pages are not available and the ones that are tend to be dumbed down so that they fit in a much smaller display area.