Energy costs bring retooled computers
The struggle against the high cost of energy isn't confined to the fuel pump. A relentless war on energy waste is also raging in computer rooms across corporate America, and the fallout is reshaping the US computer industry.
Bob Doherty is on the front lines.
As manager of computer operations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Doherty oversees a data center with an IBM mainframe and about 225 smaller server computers, all vital to the well-being of hundreds of patients.
"My electric bill two years ago was like $10,000 a month," Doherty said. "In this year, I have seen my electrical bill more than triple." One recent bill was for $35,000.
Computers must be kept cool or they malfunction, and today's computers run so hot that a data center like Doherty's feeds more juice to its air conditioners than to its computers.
Doherty is fighting back. He's deployed sophisticated software to let each server do five times as much work as before, so he can make do with fewer machines. [ read full article ]
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Podcasts are audio files that can contain literally anything. Typically, podcasts are usually produced in some type of talk show format with one or more persons hosting the program.
Topics available are as varied as the human experience. In addition to amateur endeavors, professional broadcasters have found the podcast to be an effective venue in which to distribute their content where it can be listened to at any time and on a global basis. Most radio talk shows are now available on the Web as podcasts. Listeners can subscribe to the podcast, which lets their computer automatically download and save it into an attached media player such as an Apple iPod. Even after you discover a podcast that you like, you still really don't know what's on it until you listen to the entire download. Oh sure, the podcast may have some associated text along with it, but it's minimal at best. And even if you know what's on it, the only way to find it is to try and intermittently scan by fast forwarding a few moments to see what is being said. It's clumsy at best.
But now a new Web site has come up with a way to let you literally pinpoint what you want to hear within the podcast itself. To do this, it uses speech-to-text recognition.
PODZINGER is an amazing new Web site that literally lets you search for any spoken words within an audio podcast. Until now, most podcast searches worked by searching the limited description text such as Subject or Category or the small amount of metadata that had to be included manually by the podcast creator. PODZINGER works by literally listening to the entire podcast and creating a text transcription using a sophisticated speech-to-text process. Once the text file is created, the PODZINGER Web site lets you search the file for any number of search words and phrases. [ read full article ]
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I think it's fair to say that throughout the many years I've been using a computer, I've laid my hands on a lot of mice. The first one I ever used was in Cherry Hill, N.J., where Apple unveiled its Lisa computer. It was, for the most part, a corded little beige-colored rectangular brick with a flush-mounted single button at its upper center and a rubber ball underneath.
The computer mouse has certainly come a long way, Minnie. I remember the excitement it generated when we all got to try one out. And I also remember leaving that seminar knowing that the personal computing world would be forever changed by it.
The mouse has seen many technological improvements, but I maintain that there are three that really stand out.
The first was the use of light to replace the clumsy little rubber ball that would deposit dirt and other foreign matter into the friction wheels so that they would eventually stick and cause your mouse cursor to move erratically on the screen. The first optical mouse required a grid mouse pad, but thankfully today's models work on most any desktop and the better ones use lasers for more accurate tracking on a wider variety of surfaces.
The second significant advancement was losing its tail. While corded mice still exist, the cordless ones offer the best mousing experience. [ read full article ]