Happy Birthday to the RISKS Forum!
Tech: One of the first online periodicals I started reading regularly, when I first got access to USENET back in 1989 or so, was comp.risks – Peter G. Neumann’s RISKS Forum. Since then, I’ve been reading it religiously, in various formats over the years.
It appears that RISKS has just celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Every couple of weeks it provides a hefty dose of computing reality to counter the dreams of architecture astronauts and the more tech-worshipping members of our society, who fail to realise that just because something uses high technology, doesn’t necessarily make it safer.
I got to meet PGN a couple of weeks ago at CEAS, and I was happy to be able to give my thanks — RISKS has been very influential on my code and my outlook on computing and technology.
Nowadays, with remote code execution exploits for e-voting machines floating about, and National Cyber-Security Czars, I’d say RISKS is needed more than ever. Long may it continue!
Tags: access, code, comp, computing, couple, forum, online, risks, tech, technology, usenet
Virtualisation is good for the environment
Computing: mentioned in a Slashdot thread about green server farms — a page extolling the OpenVPS virtual-server software’s environmental benefits:
OpenVPS is good for the environment: a low-end server these days consumes no less than 200W. Given that typical servers run 24/7/365 this amounts (to) 1752 KWh per year. And because every joule of energy consumed by a server is transformed to heat, you need to at least double this to consider the air conditioning costs, which brings us to 3504 KWh per year. …
At some point this becomes an ethical question: If my CPU is 99.9% idle, is it environmentally (not to mention fiscally!) responsible of me to keep this server running?
Virtualization technologies such Linux VServer used by OpenVPS offer a very viable alternative. If the server acts and feels like a dedicated server, what difference does it really make if it’s actually virtual? Yet consolidating 30 physical servers into 30 OpenVPS accounts running on one (albeit power hungry) server would save over 100000 kWh per year. That’s as much energy as is consumed on average by 10 houses!
What an excellent point! The OpenVPS dev’s slashdot commment reveals another good demo of this –
# cat /proc/uptime 16000520.62 9482790.31
The first number is seconds of uptime, the second number is seconds spent in a CPU-idle state. So the server for taint.org, going by those numbers, has spent 59% of its time in a CPU-idle state — and converting fossil fuels to waste heat in the process…
Tags: computing, cpu-idle, energy, kwh, number, openvps, point, server, slashdot, uptime, year
Redistributing the Future
Politics: WorldChanging.org
on open source: ‘we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that
several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing,
they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the
world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?’
‘… as William Gibson reminds us, the future is here, it’s just not well-distributed yet. The answer to our problems is not to redistribute wealth, it’s to redistribute the future. In very practical terms, that’s what the open source (OS) movement is doing.’
Great article — and great picture from the CSMonitor (copied above) to illustrate it!
Tags: attention, computing, future, lot, org, pay, realm, software, source, worldchanging
