............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Comcast Caps
Bandwidth
The 250GB bandwidth
cap Comcast announced
for residential
consumers in August
goes into eff ect October- Comcast says less
than 1 percent of users
actually exceed the limit,
which is meant to curb
excessive bandwidth
use by a handful of
high-traffi c customers.
A fi rst infraction
results in a warning; a
second off ense within
six months leads to
suspension of service.
Despite the new
rule, Comcast isn’t
making it easy for
consumers to monitor
their bandwidth use.
The company suggests
installation of third-
party router fi rmware or
the monitor included in
its free McAfee security
suite—neither of which
compares to seeing the
same metering numbers
Comcast is using. When
asked about a more
transparent solution,
company reps would
only say, “Expect one in
the future.” –N E
Rip DVDs
Legally
RealNetworks’s new
RealDVD software, which
is still in beta, fi nally gives
users a way to copy their
DVDs on the up-and-up.
Besides being legal,
the program trumps
illegitimate apps with its
easy, one-click method
for importing a DVD’s
contents—including menus,
extras, metadata—to a
hard drive, albeit in an
uncompressed format.
What might dissuade
converts is the fi le’s
proprietary format, which
can be played only with
RealDVD’s built-in player
on a PC (a rip can be played
on up to fi ve machines,
each requiring its own
individually purchased copy
of the $30 to $50 program).
RealDVD transfers
the original disc’s DRM
to ripped copies and
adds another layer of
copy protection to boot,
to keep the fi le from
being used otherwise.
While constraining, such
measures are the only
hope RealNetworks
has of avoiding the
entertainment industry’s
notorious wrath. –F ITom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor
for Byte magazine and is now an analyst for
Microprocessor Report.I
f your computer crashes more often in an airliner
or a high-altitude city like Denver, don’t be too
quick to blame the software. You may be the
victim of an attack from outer space.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone of “soft errors”—
momentary hardware faults, not manufacturing de-
fects or permanent malfunctions. The leading cause
of soft errors is cosmic rays. Our planet is constantly
bombarded by these rays, which are actually storms
of subatomic particles.
These particles have great penetrating power.
Billions are passing harmlessly through your
body right now. But when they hit a transistor in a
microprocessor or memory chip, they can reverse
the transistor’s state from zero to one, or vice
versa, resulting in a transient error. It can crash a
program or even the whole computer.
Soft errors are more likely at high altitudes.
In Denver, Colorado, one mile above sea level,
neutron fl ux is six times greater than it is in a
coastal city like San Francisco. In an airliner
cruising above 30,000 feet, neutron fl ux can be 100
times greater than at sea level. These differences
are signifi cant. In 2004, a huge 2,048-processor
computer system kept crashing at Los Alamos Na-
tional Laboratory in New Mexico (7,000 feet above
sea level). The problem was traced to cosmic rays
scrambling the processors’ caches.
Another culprit is earthbound alpha radia-
tion. Years ago, chips from IBM and Intel suffered
mysterious failures. It turned out that radioactive
materials from distant uranium mines and chemical
plants were contaminating the chips’ packages dur-
ing manufacture.
Smaller transistors are more susceptible, so
the problem worsens as chip-fabrication technology
advances. Error-correction circuitry is one solu-
tion, but it adds complexity and cost. Some critical
systems run multiple copies of the same program
in parallel—a majority vote decides which results
are accepted as correct. However, that solution
multiplies power consumption.
In PCs, buggy software is so rampant that it
masks the soft-error problem. Who can say why
your machine crashed? But soft errors are becoming
such a threat that chip designers are adding more
error-correction circuitry, despite the cost.FAST FORWARDAttack from Outer
Space
Google to Hit
the High Seas
The recent discovery
of a patent Google filed
in February 2007 is
prompting speculation
that the company plans
to establish large data
centers at sea. The idea
makes a lot of sense.
By using ships to house
computing centers just
three to seven miles
offshore, the company
saves big on real estate
costs and can harness the
ocean to both generate
electricity with a Pelamis
Wave Energy Converter
and provide cooling to
the hot hardware. Not
only could the ships be
easily deployed and
moved according to
need, but the patent
describes a modular
design using cargo
containers that would
make it possible to add
and remove computing
resources at will. –K S
TOM HALFHILL......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Attack from Outer
Space
TOM HALFHILL....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................(^5)
G 0
(^) B
1
00 G
B^
150 GB (^)
(^20)
(^0) G
B (^)
(^)
(^)
(^25)
G^0
B
Download in progress...
http://www.maximumpc.com|DEC 08 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| 09