I hate to be pedantic, but 5081 Hollerith cards had 12 holes per column, which means you could actually encoded 12 bits per column if you wanted to. 12 bits x 80 columns = 960 bits per card, or 120 bytes. 120 x 3,000 = 360,000 bytes; divide by 1024 = 351.5 KB

"I'm just a simple caveman, ..." with a mainframe background, so I have a question of curiosity here At what point does the bandwidth/throughput of the DMA start limiting the performance of your backup? In my world, DMA for I/O is called a "channel". We have many, and while there are a lot of nuances we could discuss, basically we try to segregate the I/O for the input to backup (disk) and the output of backup (usually tape) , and have the backup task process in parallel as much as possible - my nightly backup, for example, runs 9 parallel tasks, 9 being the limit that this particular backup program has. I could run multiple instances of the program, but then I have to have mechanisms to make sure I don't back up the same disk twice between two concurrent executions; with one instance and 9 tasks I can just say 'back up everything that's online at the moment'. So, the throughput is limited by the performance of the slowest devices, multiplied by the parallelism we are able to achieve. In the PC / server environment, does the DMA limit the I/O capability?

Chaos Monkey start up get working Chaos Monkey is a hoot Chaos Monkey's preferred new target is instance of a group... (the rest is left as an exercise for Coulton fans)

Isn't this the Lytro camera concept?

This is not the answer you're looking for... Could you post a reply here with whatever you chose to do?

Perhaps the discovery of graphene will be viewed as the event which tipped us over into the Singularity !

I believe "graphene" is single-molecule-thick silicon, isn't it?

1. As many have said, this is Windows on a blade, in a frame that is part of the mainframe box
2. It will most benefit Windows-based applications which access mainframe things on the back end (such as GUI .Net apps with DB2), because the servers are attached through a high-speed internal network.
3. The system management tool for the hardware will provide unified management of the z/box and the blades, which will help some folk.
4. There actually was a "Windows" implementation on the mainframe at one time, Bristol had ported Wind/U (a Windows API implementation) to z/OS Unix Systems Services - but after some pushback from Microsoft I believe their license to do so was revoked.

Let's not forget that Palm had a lot of good experience developing simple UIs for use on portable devices and they had some good design ideas for not wasting battery life in applications, either. Some of the PDA functionality that Palm was so good at wouldn't be bad to have on a Kindle, really.

We might drop our subscription to our paper, but we have elderly people living with us who prefer their news (and *their* crossword puzzle) on newsprint. I, myself, don't really think it matters what medium my news is delivered on, as long as it's a good news organization (competent at gathering and reporting the facts). I think it also depends what company owns your paper. When Knight owned our local paper it was pretty good. Gannett bought it, and ever since it has shrunk in size, the national news page is now basically a facsimile of the one USA Today prints, and their moves to be "conversational" and "blog-like" have detracted from their ability to convince me that they're a serious news organization. It is also difficult to trust that a news organization is giving me the news correctly when they don't bother to copy-edit what they write any more: as long as the spell checker passes it, it goes in the paper - hence, multiple instances of things like "meat" for "meet",

What is your philosophy on software tools? Do you prefer to use a lot of small pieces, loosely assembled, using scripts to join things together and get things done, or do you like to find a software suite (such as Office) and work within that?

"Look at me! I said look at me!! There now, that's better. That's a good boy... now, type in the password... . Good, good... Now turn away, I don't want you to see the routing code and account numbers for these funds. You just don't need to know now, do you? "

I've only had time to skim a lot of these comments, so forgive any redundancy, but one of the first questions to ask is: Will you really spend time tagging or organizing things as you add them? Many people think they will, but then don't follow through. Perhaps make sure you have full-text indexing and search - it is costly to implement at times, but might automate some of the work of getting the stuff ready to search.

HTML and CSS are used as a presentation markup language. Adding "meaning" to those is approaching it backward. First, mark up the document / data, using XML or RDF (for this argument the preference doesn't necessarily matter). Then, use XSLT to provide a transform into the presentation language of your choice. I guess we could argue that XHTML _is_ XML at its core, though, so adding attributes to add "meaning" might be doing what I said, anyway. As far as 'why are the big companies agreeing to this, why isn't everyone consulted?' argument - hey, at least we're making progress. If one large group of pages is marked up in a standard way, then that's a lot of "meaning" that can suddenly be extracted and used in our apps / widgets / mashups / things-to-be-named-later-when-someone-thinks-them-up. In that sense, I'm all for it; let's get started! There's also a mechanical precedent for this: think back to when the auto industry in the US decided to standardize the "markup" of wheels with a 5-bolt lug nut pattern, spaced the same way - suddenly wheels were interchangeable, and making special chromed add-ons for people was economically more feasible too. They didn't consult a body of international automobile enthusiasts - Ford, GM, and Chrysler pretty much drove that one.