Igniting Social Change

Its a tradition that dates back to the babylonian era. We all tend to set new year resolutions and try to work them to closure every year. Although a resolution can be made any time of the year - new year seems to be a good way to set new targets and goals. Reason - well forgetting the past is a tough thing - a new year automatically ensures -

a new diary

new dates

new holiday list etc.

But all our new year resolutions tend to be short lived. Here are a few tips to help them last longer

1. Set realisitic goals : Most new year resolutions are made in the wake of urgency. Normally decided upon just a day before or on the new years eve. Goals should be set much in advance and attempts muct be made to abide by the resolution prior to the new year eve.

2. Write down your new year resolution in your brand new organizer or diary.

Use the following format (more…)

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“One of the Best movies of the year 2007. Aamir lives upto his reputation. A definite soul stirrer“

Rating: Five Star
Comments: Must see

The central character of the movie is a bubbly eight year old child known by the name Ishaan Awasti. Ishaan is very weak in studies as compared to his elder brother who’s a topper.

Due to constant complaints from school authorities, his father decides to pack him off to a boarding school. Due to his seperation from his parents, Ishaan self confidence takes a deep plunge. His performance drops and he even stops painting. (more…)

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Did you imagine how much electricity we could save if we could stop the harddisk from spinning when not in use. Oh you might say, what big deal, how can one hard disk make a difference. For people who dont know much about data and storage, let me tell you that a even a small bank in India would be utilizing the services of 4000 disks for its banking data.

Bigger banks need more disks and more and more for backups, replication (disaster recovery) etc. Its very common for banks and telcos to have atleast 5 PB (petabyte) of data. I’m considering the least, the maximum I have heard is 20 PB.

Quick Info : 1 PB = 1000 Terabyte = 1000000 GB

Lets assume the average disk size to be 300 GB, then 1 PB/ 300 = 16000 disks approx.

These 16,000 disks keep spinning idly, consuming a lot of power. So why dont we buy as we grow, does any body need 1 PB or more. Yes and No..! Storage cannot be bought in the last minute, it has to be brought well in advance and allocated to each server specifically. The data is critical so the storage has to be mirrored, replicated etc. Basically a lot of preparation.

So companies normally buy storage and pre-allocate it to the servers, as per the application growth rates.

Say if the application is currenlty occupying a 50 GB of space, and is expected to grow to 300 GB by next year, then the IT manager buys disks for 500 GB just to be on the safer side. So when just one HDD is utilized, others keep spinning and contributing to power consumption. Thin provisioning helps you allocate the storage space prior to the adding disks. For example you can allocate 500 GB of space, and still have only 1 OR 2 disks. And when the requirement arises, you simply add disks to the pool.

This saves a lot of energy, as few disks are required in the storage system.

Another technology is the ability to selective hard disks or RAID groups in a a system, when not in use.

A few companies I know who have implemented thin provisioning are HITACHI, 3PAR, COMPELLENT etc.

So people, go thin to save energy, I hope you know that we only have a few watts left..

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E-mail retrieval is becoming increasingly expensive in today’s world. The expense is incurred by the receipient rather than the sender. The expense is more in terms of loss of time, bandwidth & productivity.

Spam filters are merely a workaround to solve this problem. Research projects such as Penny Black project are aimed at resolving the spam problem by attacking the root cause.

In a nutshell, the idea is this: “If I don’t know you, and you want to send me mail, then you must prove to me that you have expended a certain amount of effort, just for me and just for this message.”  The approach is fundamentally an economic one.  Suppose we measure effort in CPU cycles.  Since there are about 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational “price” of just ten seconds per message would limit a spamming computer to at most 8,000 messages daily. So spammers would have to invest heavily in hardware in order to send high volumes of spam.

Four Stanford undergraduates, under the supervision of Dan Boneh, implemented the computational approach using a very simple proxy architecture. The research component of this project is largely complete & the researchers continue to investigate how these ideas might be realized in practice.

Reference
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/demo/index.html
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/
 

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