iPad has been receiving a lot of press, lately. Much of it is positive, although it has its detractors. Much of the negative press seems unwarranted and looks like a FUD campaign. Indeed, many of the hits to my “iPad? How bad?” post are from searches for the terms “iPad” and “bad” — people looking for ammunition; these people should fuddle duddle. One thing that seems to be brought up consistently is the inability for iPad to run multiple applications at once at the behest of the user.
Green Backups
If, say, your entire office burns down due to an electrical fire from a photocopier next door, off-site backups are worth their weight in platinum. If you don’t believe me, just look up how much professional data recovery services cost and compare that to the weight of a hard drive or fifty. Some people use e-mail as a back-up system, but it isn’t really appealing as a long-term, scalable solution. Amazon’s S3 provides variable pricing and is scalable, but may be overly complicated for backing up small amounts of data. Some off-site back-up services such as Backblaze are great deals for people with large storage needs ((I am not affiliated with or endorsing Backblaze. I just find their blog posts interesting.)).
The Silver Lining
I think my research supervisor‘s optimism is contagious. Last Tuesday, I returned home to discover my laptop wouldn’t boot. After a couple of hours of trying to coax it back to life, at around 2 am on Wednesday, I realized that the problem was that the hard drive was dead.
At the Sustainability Unconference
On Thursday, I attended the Environmental Justice and Sustainability Unconference put on by the Office of Student Life at the University of Toronto. At this “unconference”, individuals could set up shop in various parts of the venue and lead a conversation about different topics. I participated in two discussions: Which are the most energy intensive buildings on campus and why? and on Conservation and consumerism. I thought I would share some highlights from these conversations.
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Towards better energy-efficiency labels
The following post is a collection of excerpts from a draft of my Ph.D. depth paper, less citations, which exist in the original document.
Few computer systems spend all of their time at full utilization; even in always-on situations such as servers, a properly provisioned system will be spend almost all of its time at less than 50% utilization. Since most personal computers remain idle for extended periods of time ((In the context of this document, idle systems are ones that are on but performing no useful work.)), consumers should be considering a computer’s idle power draw when purchasing a computer. However, performance per watt is often the number that is compared.
Low-powered computer attempt #1 — One year later
One year ago last week, I put the finishing touches on a new computer. I started my game plan for a low-powered device in January 2009, but I was teaching a course at the time so it wasn’t until reading week that I found three (almost) uninterrupted days to bring my plan to fruition. While I’ve seen a number of articles and blog posts about building a low-powered computer, I’ve seen only a few documenting the end result after real-world use.
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Cur bloggo?
People keep blogs for many reasons. So why do I blog? I haven’t really figured that out, entirely, yet. All I know is that this blog is here to help with my research… somehow. It’s sometimes helpful just to write thoughts down. Feedback is useful for more mature thoughts. My recent blog posts are all related, if only tangentially, to my depth paper. I’ll start posting excerpts here, soon. Meanwhile, some of my blog posts will magically be transformed into my depth paper. I hope to update this blog on a weekly basis (instead of every other day as I have been for the last few weeks). We’ll see how that works out!
The Big Toolkit
When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. — Abraham Maslow
I used to think versatility and choice were always good things. In fact, I wrote something to that effect just over a week ago. Knowing what is out there means not having to reinvent the wheel. It means being able to select the right tool for the right job. When all you’ve got is a hammer, you end up writing messy 50-line snakes and ladders programs in assembly language when you could instead write the same thing in 7 elegant lines of Python. But?
Tragedy of the Commons: Part IV — In the World
But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me. – Vizzini (The Princess Bride)
Contrary to initial expectations, we’ve found that a perfectly rational player ought not to defect in a game described in Part I. So what? How does that apply to the real world? Game theory is useful for modeling decision making processes where abstractions reduce the variables to be considered. Examples in real life of situations modeled by a tragedy of the commons dilemma are readily available.
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Tragedy of the Commons: Part III — The Debeakered Take
In Part III of the Tragedy of the Commons 4-part series, I give my analysis of the game played in class. You should at least read Tragedy of the Commons: Part I — The Setup for a description of the game before reading this section.
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