Submission + - Cell phone service in a bomb shelter
hedgemage writes: I work at a retirement home and we have trouble with the cell phones that our nursing and maintenance staff use. The problem is that our nursing home area is built into a lower level that was originally constructed as a fallout shelter in 1960. There's a lot of solid concrete in the walls and ceiling. We have paid out tens of thousands to try and get an on-site mobile to work using NEC Dterm PSII phones, but they have proven absolutely unreliable (not just in the bomb shelter but throughout the campus) and the only solution our telecom provider has is to install several thousand dollars more in transcievers. If we could use ordinary cell phones, it would be ideal for everyone. Is there an off-the-shelf solution that could boost regular cellular signals in our bomb shelter?
Feed Lost in Space: Astronaut's Wasabi (wired.com)
Submission + - Who's driving the revolution?
hlovy writes: "Ethanol vs. electric cars. Well, if market demand or technological progress outpace the ability or willingness of an industry to adopt change from within, it's time to let the old ways simply implode under the weight of their own inadequacies. An "ethanol economy" is change from within. The all-electric Tesla represents real revolution. More here"
Submission + - Best Buy Confirms 'secret' Website
Iberian writes: Courant.com confirms Best Buy does indeed maintain a second website for what one could only assume is for fraudulent purposes.
State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.
State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.
Submission + - Disk drive failures 15 times what vendors say
sysrammer writes: "Computerworld has an article on disk drive failures from the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose, showing, among other things, "no evidence that Fibre Channel (FC) drives are any more reliable than less expensive but slower performing Serial ATA (SATA) drives", and that "that temperature seems to have little effect on drive reliability" (it looks like they're talking about temps closer to the upper operational limit, not catastrophic a/c failures, etc.).
FTA: "About 100,000 disks are covered by this data, some for an entire lifetime of five years. The data include drives with SCSI and FC, as well as SATA interfaces. The mean time to failure (MTTF) of those drives, as specified in their datasheets, ranges from 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours, suggesting a nominal annual failure rate of at most 0.88%.
We find that in the field, annual disk replacement rates typically exceed 1%, with 2-4% common and up to 13% observed on some systems. This suggests that field replacement is a fairly different process than one might predict based on datasheet MTTF."
The authors did not identify particular vendors vs. the drive stats...their goal "is not choosing the best and the worst vendors but to help them to improve drive design and testing". Another note is that the study shows disk replacement rates, not necessarily actual failure.
The article is at... http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012066&source=NLT _AM&nlid=1 ...and the Usenix site is here... http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder .html
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Project zBot (sourceforge.net)
zBot is a modular IRC-Bot written in Python. It includes a small engine to handle IRC communication and user management. It can easily be extended by plugins that add commands and handle events. Some plugins for basic functionality are included.
