A recent /. post prod me to do some research on CD-Rs for archival purposes. It looks like the MAM-A (and MAM-E in Europe) lines of CD-Rs, with the combination of Phtalocyanine dye and superior uniformity/quality make it ideal for archiving (and it looks like there aren’t many other players in the market anymore). Their top of the line Gold/Gold (650MiB) goes for $0.94/pop in quantities of 100 ($1.48/GiB), while the Silver/Gold (700MiB) can is $0.66 in quantities of 100 ($0.97/GiB).

Of course, doing large backups makes one wonder, why not DVD-Rs? And why not? A 50/pack of MAM-A DVD-Rs is $169.99 for 50, which comes out to $3.40/disc, or $0.78/GiB.

BTW, doing searching for the cost/GiB conversions has firmly convinced me that separate binary unit notation really is needed, otherwise evil marketing causes confusion.

• How Much Data Is On a CD/R? – nice table of sizes, CA-DA and CD-ROM data numbers
• DVD FAQ: DVD-R – interestingly enough, while CD-Rs are sold labeled in MiBs, DVD-Rs aren’t.
• MAM-A Technology: Technical Papers – some actually useful information here
• Mitsui Chemicals sells CD-R/DVD-R production – trivia bits; MAM stands for Mitsui Advanced Media
• cynikal’s Powerbook Superdrive Firmware Update – uncripples PB G4 Superdrives; 2X DVD-R, 16X CD-R, DVD-RW support
• Region free DVD hacks – UJ-815 has no region free firmware yet. see also: xvi’s page

Microsoft’s big role on campus:

Bearing gifts of cash, software and computers worth $25 million, Microsoft Corp. came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, saying it wanted to jointly develop educational technologies. Some scholars expressed more suspicion than gratitude.

So, I’m not quite running around with my head cut off, but I haven’t really had a chance to post anything recently. Last week was spent trying to tie up loose ends, filling out lots of paperwork (class registration, financial crap, etc.) and this weekend was topped off by coming down with a nice little bug. My first class starts tomorrow, so we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’ve realized that I’ve acquired almost 40 open browser windows (it’d be too scary to count the number of tabs).

• MT-Medic – less messy than writing Data::Dumper debug code, semi-related: can’t wait for Perl6 Method Introspection
• Recent Cogent talk:
  • What about Cogent Communications?
  • Impressed with Rackshack and Interland’s new offers
• Fixe Orbit Network Search – shows peering data, etc.
• The Netlantis Project – visual network graphing
• Programming with Twisted:
  • Network programming with the Twisted framework, Part 1
  • Network programming with the Twisted framework, Part 2
  • Network programming with the Twisted framework, Part 3
• 0.9 = 1
  • Conceptual Proof – since there’s no number however small that is >0.9 and <1, they must be equal
  • Algebraic Proof
• iSpeakIt – takes a webpage and converts it w/ Text-to-speech into sound-file — hmm, not to impugn the authors here, but selling this for $10? This is pretty trivial to do w/ standard system calls (probably can be done in Applescript even).
• MyIE2, Avant Browser – two IE shells
• Remove Content from Google’s Index, Automatic URL Removal interface
• MIT Media Lab Viral Communications Program
• Berkeley DB XML development weblog
• Macromedia – new site, now in XHTML/CSS.
• Deep Navigation examples, comparing some IT sites:
  • IBM
  • UW Computing and Networking
  • NYU Law Library
  • NYU ITS

  My thoughts: listings are fine, but for large sites, it probably makes sense to organize by role (more specifically function) – need to come back to this later

• Justin on Machine Friendship and Portraiture

Matt has a writeup of how the Lazyweb helped him set up VNC to get his PC and Mac to happily coexist.

Hey, notice that windowsupdate.com is now running Linux? via, Akamai, but still, a good poke in the eye regardless. As if Blaster and Sobig.F in a week weren’t enough.

I haven’t been keeping track of BlogShares much, although it looks like my site’s been doing pretty well recently. With how busy I’m going to be this fall, I’m sure to be spending more time than ever on the blog.^*

^*past performance is not indicitive of future gains

• LWN: Why SCO won’t show the code

  Comment by mdrejhon:

  Found the V5 source code in its entirety:

  Photo of SCO Slide:
  http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-19.08.03-000/imh1.jpg

  Near exact match to 30 year old source code in V5:
  http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V5/usr/sys/ken/malloc.c.html

  What the heck is SCO doing, claiming 30 year old source code as their own?

  Interesting, this code was removed 7 weeks ago because it was “ugly as hell”:

  There’s also a very informative lkml thread [theaimsgroup.com] about this and it’s already been removed from the source tree [bkbits.net], but apparently not because of copyright issues but because it was just “ugly [theaimsgroup.com] as hell [theaimsgroup.com]”.

• Analysis of Linux Code that SCO Alleges Is In Violation Of Their Copyright and Trade Secrets. – Bruce Perens
• TWikIWeThey: SCOvsIBM
• SCO’s now claiming over a million lines of offending code (Linux 2.4.20 is ~4.4M LOC) – that they can’t show anybody, um.. because it’s a big secret, yeah… that’s the ticket

  Insight from FJ:

  Perhaps a more informative estimate would be to take the difference in the number of lines in the 2.2 kernel vs the 2.4 kernel, since SCO claims 2.2 is fine but 2.4 has copied code.

  3,377,902 (2.4) – 1,800,847 (2.2) = 1,577,055

  In other words, SCO claims that 2/3 of the improvements in the 2.4 series kernel belong to them. That is a rather unrealistic statement since a lot of those enhancements didn’t come from IBM.

  Also:

  The SMP code (all platforms) seems to be ~15000 lines of which ~800000 lines is copied verbatim from sysV.

  So, am I to assume that the Linux kernel is 5333% infringing code?

  Man, I wish I could code that efficiently.

Hey, so if SCO claims the GPL is invalid, by what license are they distributing Samba in their new version of OpenServer?

The SCO Forum crowd applauded when SCO executives announced that an
upcoming version of its OpenServer–code-named Legend–will support the
latest releases of Java; include new hardware support, such as
universal serial bus (USB)
printer drivers; contain expanded security features; and provide better
compatibility with Microsoft Windows through version 3 of Samba,
which is developed by an open-source group. The OpenServer update is
scheduled to debut in the fourth quarter of next year.

• US notches world’s highest incarceration rate – take that China!
• US DOJ: Justice system’s impact on crime – inconclusive
• The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
  

  We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

• find that article on NYC crime

Y bother: men are doomed after all

“Like the face of the moon, still pitted by all the craters from all the meteors that have ever fallen onto its surface, Y-chromosomes cannot heal their own scars. It is a dying chromosome and one day it will become extinct.”

According to Bryan Sykes’ estimates, males will cease to exist in about 125,000 years. I’m not sure how certain this prediction is (why haven’t other species’ males suffered the same fate?) or how relevant (I suspect either we’ll have hit the singularity or go extinct long before).