Tracking Drive Reliability and Late Gadgets

Geeks Lyle, Sean, and Miles talk tech and take your calls; Google tracks hard drive reliability; computers big and small wrestle with recent daylight savings time changes; no one can read doctors’ handwriting; and computers are using more and more power, doubling in the last five years.

Google Tracking Hard Drive Failures

Google has published a paper documenting [what makes a typical consumer-grade disk fail|http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf], and when. (PDF reader required)

Daylight Savings Time Trouble

With recent changes to the daylight savings time, as dictated by Congress, a lot of software isn’t ready. [Small gadgets may be the hardest hit|http://news.com.com/Gadget+owners+beware+Daylight-saving+time+has+changed/2100-1041_3-6159908.html] by the change.

Digital Prescriptions

Doctors’ [poor handwriting can actually harm their patients|http://tinyurl.com/y748hf] when pharmacists can’t read their writing. Perhaps transmitting prescriptions digitally could help?

Power Hungry Servers

Servers are using [twice as much power as they did five years ago|http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070215-8854.html] to provide our email, web pages, and more. Is this a problem?

Alex, have fun at the [Griffith Observatory|http://www.griffithobs.org/] with your little sister.

In this episode Miles and Lyle talked a bit about [Virtualization|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization] and how the new GeekSpeak server is using [QEMU|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU].