Last week my ISP gave me the offer to upgrade for free to their new 8Mbps ADSL service. I still have to pay more (about twice what I was paying for my 512Kbps service), but the actual upgrade (or regrade) was free.

I chose a bad week though - the upgrade coincided with a major failure at my ISP, then at BT, not to mention the additional time it took to sort out the occasional reboot of the ADSL router to see how the upgrade and retraining were going. The result was more down time than I expected, although to be fair that was because failures, not the ADSL regrade process.

Now I'm back, and things are a lot faster. Unfortunately, I'm a long way from the exchange, and with the 512Kbps service I was a couple of hundred meters over the limit, but just able to get the service. With the 8Mbps service I'm too far away to get the full 8Mbps, but the speed has increased almost five-fold to just under 2.5Mbps, and it's amazing how significant a difference it makes to everything from downloading movie trailers through to general browsing.

There's a very good commentary on Sun's Project Blackbox (see I'll take one datacenter, to go) and Sun's approach to virtualization by Stephen Swoyer (Sun’s Virtualization Push). Stephen makes good points, and ones I can only agree with.

Project Blackbox is a datacenter in a ready to run format, and could be a quick and easy way to setup a 'blackbox' (literally) of computing resource. Merge that fundamental idea with the idea of virtualization, where you can create your own discrete machines (either using Solaris Containers or the forthcoming Solaris on Xen technology). Merge the two with some light desktop devices, such as the Sun Ray or other X terminals, and you could have a complete company computing resource in a box.

There's a very good commentary on Sun's Project Blackbox (see I'll take one datacenter, to go) and Sun's approach to virtualization by Stephen Swoyer (Sun’s Virtualization Push). Stephen makes good points, and ones I can only agree with.

Project Blackbox is a datacenter in a ready to run format, and could be a quick and easy way to setup a 'blackbox' (literally) of computing resource. Merge that fundamental idea with the idea of virtualization, where you can create your own discrete machines (either using Solaris Containers or the forthcoming Solaris on Xen technology). Merge the two with some light desktop devices, such as the Sun Ray or other X terminals, and you could have a complete company computing resource in a box.

I've literally just watched an advert from PC World, a massive computer selling chain here in the UK.

They were advertising a Packard Bell PC packed with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor and made two claims which just don't ride. What concerns me here is that they are trying to convince the general public of facts which are not only not untrue (or at least misleading).

The first claim was that 'Intels latest processor lets you run two applications at the same time'. This is not exactly untrue, but I don't think the statement applies in the way they expect. Computers have been running multiple applications for years, even since the lowly days of the 8086.

I've literally just watched an advert from PC World, a massive computer selling chain here in the UK.

They were advertising a Packard Bell PC packed with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor and made two claims which just don't ride. What concerns me here is that they are trying to convince the general public of facts which are not only not untrue (or at least misleading).

The first claim was that 'Intels latest processor lets you run two applications at the same time'. This is not exactly untrue, but I don't think the statement applies in the way they expect. Computers have been running multiple applications for years, even since the lowly days of the 8086.

The legal issues that are affecting the Spamhaus are heating up. If Spamhaus were shut down, even temporarily, then the increase in spam that makes it around the Internet would be significant.

Regardless of the figures and the discussions (including those on the Slashdot page for the story), any increase in spam would be a bad thing.

I don't know what your email statistics are like, but for me about 98% of all the email I received in the last year is spam. An increase of any kind would be bad and there's been a recent splurge of spam in my inbox that has required some changes and improvements to my filters and techniques.

The legal issues that are affecting the Spamhaus are heating up. If Spamhaus were shut down, even temporarily, then the increase in spam that makes it around the Internet would be significant.

Regardless of the figures and the discussions (including those on the Slashdot page for the story), any increase in spam would be a bad thing.

I dont know what your email statistics are like, but for me about 98% of all the email I received in the last year is spam. An increase of any kind would be bad and there's been a recent splurge of spam in my inbox that has required some changes and improvements to my filters and techniques.

Back in my college years I applied for a job at a company that provided computing power for a stock trading company. Understandably here, time was money, and so part of their disaster recovery plan was a complete duplicate of their internal setup that was, and I quote, 'kept in the back of a lorry round the corner'.

The intention was that in the event of some sort of failure, they could bring the hardware out of storage and get the system back up and running within a couple of hours.

Sun now provides something similar, but perhaps more off-the-shelf than a custom built setup in a lorry, in the form of Project Blackbox. The concept is interesting -- take a standard-sized shipping container, stack it full of the equipment you want and then provide a single access point on the outside with power, networking and cooling connections to provide a ready to run datacenter.

Back in my college years I applied for a job at a company that provided computing power for a stock trading company. Understandably here, time was money, and so part of their disaster recovery plan was a complete duplicate of their internal setup that was, and I quote, 'kept in the back of a lorry round the corner'.

The intention was that in the event of some sort of failure, they could bring the hardware out of storage and get the system back up and running within a couple of hours.

Sun now provides something similar, but perhaps more off-the-shelf than a custom built setup in a lorry, in the form of Project Blackbox. The concept is interesting -- take a standard-sized shipping container, stack it full of the equipment you want and then provide a single access point on the outside with power, networking and cooling connections to provide a ready to run datacenter.

There's always lots of talk of computers becoming autonomous and self-aware and able to make their own decisions about their environment and operation. Many films and TV shows over the years have based their entire plot around this very fact.

Yesterday I was fully expecting to be able to start a normal day of work, but then I heard the tell tale click-click-click of a dying hard drive. To me, this isn't a problem (it's backed up, afterall, although as a large drive it'll take me a day or so to achieve that).

The link? Yesterday I got confirmation that the new hardware (servers and drive storage) that will be replacing these older components will soon be shipped.