A few weeks / months ago, Nature Magazine had a small series of articles on gigantic data-sets, data mining, and the new studies based on meta investigations of those data-sets. So when I read this article I read in that context. So I had assumed that most people needing to store a few petabytes have most the infrastructure (power, personnel, polices) you are describing... only they are facing budget shortfalls. I think that shortfall could be the motivating factor to employ these things.

Though truthfully, I don't have petabyte requirements, so I have no real idea.

Someone explained to me a good way which required 3 wireless routers...

I've long since forgotten what he said... pity that.

I started with iNode and UPC bought iNode. I think maybe they still use the "iNode" name for their DSL offerings?? So anyway I have the largest DSL package, with the VoIP package. I hate them and I wish they would die in a fire.

I would like to use 24e and get glassfiber. They are laying out a lot of fiber in Graz as (I think) they somehow related to the Grazer Stadtwerke... but alas the property managers of my house have no interest in making this happen, despite the fiber being within 50 meters of the house. Other than that I have no recommendations.

That trusted editor bit is going to become very "interesting". Frequently I go to Wikipedia to figure out who the people are in American political news and what they have purportedly done or said in the past. A large percentage of these figures have militant gate keepers who use their knowledge of the rules of the Wikipedia system to prevent other people from adding new events which reflect poorly on the person on question. Like say, they appeared on the Daily Show and made a fool of themselves and clip made its way to youtube.

I use UPC in Austria. I don't think this is anything new. They been fucking with my bandwidth for ages.

The best thing I can think to say about this is:

Burn-in is a severe problem with any currently manufactured Plasma Television (apologies to those with Sigs turned off).

I am awaiting for someone to make use of a processor metaphor... after all the car metaphors this is least we can do.

Man, that should really be a huge black mark against someone's credit rating.

People were saying that about the US starting in about November 2001... and look how well that worked.

It's not just netbooks... it's other small boards too because they impose other I/O Limits as well.

My expectation is that the only way batteries are going to able to really compete with liquid fuels as an energy storage mechanism for vehicles is through some sort of comprehensive and mandatory recycling program. And I'm not just talking about just the actual batteries but rather a complete infrastructure and financing system which makes it difficult and expensive to ignore, opt-out or avoid. Otherwise, the whole thing will be an expensive and short lived boondoggle.

Having said that, I'd love to be able to build a 3D printing machine that could produce batteries and fuel cells.

And the PSP has been out for quite some time... is that the most recent consumer device to use a MIPS32? Or are there devices which could compete with the upcoming ARM based devices?

I bought an electric bicycle for much the same reason. As far as I am concerned it is the best way to get around within the small city I live in. My Ducati is too fast to comfortably drive within the city. Finding a parking space for my car is frequently a pain. The electric bike gets me into the city in minutes, it park anywhere and on all but the hottest of days I get where I am going without soaking myself in sweat... often in similar or less time than using my car. I'm using this experience to engineer an ultra-lightweight electric motorcycle for the city.

Down the street from me is a place which teaches kids gymnastics and unicycles... Watching them, I think an electric unicycle would be a blast!

Trying to block 4Chan just encourages them

I don't think folks have to avoid MD5 as strongly & immediately as you suggest... the attacks are for the most part theoretical or require more compute power / patience that people outside of this blackhat con can muster. It was my understanding the PS3 cluster actually got a cert which could be used nefariously... and this guy showed he could do it cheaper and faster. This is perfectly inline with my understanding: Attacks always get better, they never get worse. So I suppose it is time to work out a migration plan for whatever uses MD5

On your closing comment: I think the author was suggesting that if people had been paying attention a lot more of them would be using ATI GPGPU clusters for stuff they used to use Vector processors and now use fleets of X86 variants for.

I don't completely disagree with him but there a lot of small GPU clusters out there and there are a lot of reasons why more people haven't really got with the program. I think the biggest reason is the difficulty developing for GPGPUs. It's not the hardest thing I've ever done but it really takes a deliberate effort to get into a different state of mind. And the ATI SDK just plain sucks. I'll take the performance hit and develop using a C superset with a NVIDIA target. The process can run during that extra time I am not pounding my head against a hard flat surface. Actually now that I think of it, I've just kept a lot the old FORTRAN code I have and used the NVIDIA kit... rather than porting to the ATI SDK.

Having said that I don't think that this state will last long at all. The rate of increase of performance in GPUs is steeper than that of CPUs; AMD & NVIDIA are really serious about getting into the general compute market (with the same or similar chips to what they already market); The power consumption, cooling, and noise are all really favorable.

I am sort of curious what OpenCL will be like, being a Mac user... but here lately Apple has been going further out of their way to make things suck, so I am not holding my breath.

I've seen some pretty complicated stuff with layers on Google Earth, so I thought the same thing while I was in the "Screw it, I'll build it myself" stage a few days ago. Truthfully I don't have the time or the skills to pull off something on that scale... but still I like the idea. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1317323&cid=28851655&art_pos=2#