Thursday, July 28, 2011

Tech Review: Thursday, July 21, 2011

How to build your own 135TB RAID6 storage pod for $7,384


Backblaze Storage Pod partially filled case

  • About $54 per TB
  • With Raid 6, that is really $63 per TB
  • This is a single unit.  
    • Speed within it is good
    • Raid 6:  1-2/15= 85%
    • Redundant
    • 45 3TB drive
    • groups of 15 drives grouped together using RAID6 to create 39TB partition
    • ext4 has a 16TB limit
    • used logical volume manage (LVM) to access the full 39TB as a unit

IBM's Watson charts new frontiers for computer science


  • David McQueeney, VP of software
    • keynote speech at FOSE
  • "a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence to emulate a slice of human behavior"
  • Understanding unfiltered language hard for computers
  • Jeopardy
    •  statistical analysis approach
      • did not work
    • uses structured data only 15% of the time
  • built-in temporal reasoning
    • find data through time and geospatial calculations
    • weight evidence
  • pre-loaded data
    • not connected to internet
  • Watson in 2007 could only answer Jeopardy questions 50% of the time
  • DeepQA
    • massively parallel probabilistic evidence-based architecture
  • made of off-the-shelf components
    • not technically a supercomputer
    • 80 teraflops of processing power
  • Won 71 percent of the time in 55 sparring matches

Mono, open-source .NET for Android, Linux and iOS, lives on



  • support for SUSE-Attachmates' Linux Branch
    • given mono new life