Hypercognition: October 2005

the transistron

The most important device of the 20th century was invented not just once, but twice.

Newswise — In May 1949, shortly after Bell Labs announced the invention of the transistor, two German physicists working in Paris invented a strikingly similar device. They called it the transistron. As was true for the Bell Labs transistor, the technology that led to the transistron emerged from wartime research on semiconductor materials, which were sorely needed in radar receivers. In the European case, it was the German radar program that had employed the transistron's inventors, Herbert Matare and Heinrich Welker.

But after the invention made some headlines, the French government lost interest and the two inventors returned to Germany to embark on other work. It was left to the United States to pioneer the transistor, which eventually led to industries worth many billions of dollars. Just how close the French came to a device of their own makes for a fascinating piece of history.

internet power consumption

Internet's Energy Needs

Bob Cringely does some calculations for all the free services on offer:

Let's imagine some typical numbers. In the U.S. alone, according to Nielsen/Netratings, we have approximately 202 million Internet users, each of whom is eligible for a free Gmail account with two gigabytes of storage. Since my mother uses less than two gigs and I use more, let's do our rule-of-thumb estimate with that number, making the potential Gmail storage obligation 404 million gigabytes or about 400 petabytes. That's 400 times the current capacity of the Internet Archive, but it is also probably a tenth or less the total capacity of our PC and DVR hard drives today, so I think it is a very fair number to play with.
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Probably 80 percent of this capacity will be borne by the major players, with each of those taking a roughly equal share. That's MSN, Yahoo and Google, assuming that AOL will be somehow distributed between them, with each having about 100 petabytes of storage.
How much storage IS that, really? Well, the biggest enterprise hard drives available today hold 400 gigabytes each, which means each of these companies is going to need AT LEAST 250,000 drives, making Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor, and Western Digital all very happy. Though with volume discounts that's really only about $25 million in disk drives -- far less than Microsoft's legal bills.
Now let's build a data center using those 250,000 drives. A disk array can hold about 32 drives in a 3U space. In a typical cabinet you can store about 12 arrays or a total of 384 drives. That cabinet sits on a 2' x 2' floor tile, plus some aisle space, or about 10 square feet of floor space for planning purposes. 250,000/384=651 cabinets or about 6,500 square feet. Heck, that's nothing when you read about all the hosting companies, with their 20,000 square foot data centers containing 20,000 servers each.
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The problem comes when you start to think about power consumption. It's not that disk drives consume so much power or that they haven't come down in consumption over the years, but each of those cabinets will require using modern drives about 3,300 watts to run while the full 100 petabytes will require 2.148 MEGAwatts. And all that heat has to go somewhere, so the building will typically use three to four times as much power for air conditioning as it does to run the drives, taking our total power consumption up to just under 10 megawatts, which at typical U.S. industrial power rates will cost about $5 million per year.

offsite storage

Map FTP servers as local drives.

How to map a remote FTP server as a local drive. Means you can use your personal webspace to store files as easily as copying them to your D drive or a CD ROM. Except of course you’ll need a fast broadband connection to upload bigger files. Still, nice one.

Covering your links

What does a roll your own search mean?

Over at Everything and Nothing, Shawn Lea compiled a list Shakespeare resources on the web.
But wait, wouldn’t it be cool if you could search across all of those resources at one time from one place?
Um, yeah.
So Shawn created a Seeking Shakespeare Searchroll at Rollyo.

via Davenetics