A cheaper method has been suggested for cooling down servers: warpping them in bubbles.

Is it just my imagination or is the wrapping going to warm up the server due to the ‘blanket effect’? If one of these temprature-controlling containers (like the ones astronauts use in space) gets used, does it really save energy?It turns out that air conditioners work on pumping the excess heat from the servers out so that they needn’t cool down the entire room. It makes no difference how warm the room gets outside of the bubbles, but how will the engineers feel about it? I am ‘privileged’ to have experienced the unpleasant feeling one gets in a room with hundreds of racks, namely in Manchester Computing where I work.

According to The Enquirer, Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has purchased an iPod.

Hurray to iPod mentality!

The hard-drive peripheral in for the Playstation 3 will run Linux. This news is by no means surprising as Sony’s direct opponent in the realm of home gaming is Microsoft. This news item, as usual, opens the door to common jokes (snippet from my post at Slashdot):

Who wouldn’t buy the Playstation 3, even just to play a game that no-one can resist: compiling the Linux kernel. That sure can keep one up until 5 AM.

…

Salesman: Here you see the latest Xbox which renders a zillion polygons per second.

Customer: Does it come with gcc?

Salesman: Is that one of the latest patches?

Customer: *sign* Not interested…

For the past day or two, a small item of graphics (30 x 100 pixels) was snatched from my site. To make things worse, it was HotLinked and appeared at the front page permanently. This means that my site was exploited for traffic. Webmasters would definitely be familiar with the nuisance. To cut this story short, below are the results of my intervention:

An explanation: The large PNG image with the yellow glow comes from my domain. The site shown is in no way related to schestowitz.com; it displays graphics it does not own by forming a link, placed at the right-hand-side bar. I simply changed the image, which some would say was a harsh move.

Graphics and photography on this site is either openly shareable or self-produced. Yet, there are cases where thieves HotLink images — that is — they refer to images on another site, thereby exploiting others for bandwidth. Fat Sam from NNTP://alt.www.webmaster posted this hilarious message today:

We’ve probably all experienced the problems of people remotely linking to images on our websites….

Well, this made me laugh…I found it in another newsgroup, but I thought it would be relevant here….

Imagine the scene

Ebayer1 decides to sell a graphics card, and in order to better show the product, he links to some images that he has stored on his own server….

Along comes Ebayer2, who happens to be selling the same graphics card….He checks ebay to see if anyone is selling anything similar, and finds Ebayer1′s auction with all those lovely extra images….
So he decides to remotely link to them too….

Naturally, Ebayer1 notices this extra traffic, probably in his referral logs, so he changes the images on his server…..

The resulting page of Ebayer2′s auction can be seen here (UPDATE: The seller changed the pictures after a few days, but one of the pictures is shown at the top of this item)

I especially love the image of the Plasma TV with the caption, “This Plasma TV included free”….

Yahoo may not do so directly, but…

Om Malik said:

Flickr is making money off Google AdSense even though it is a Yahoo company. There are Adsense text ads appearing on your photo albums etc.

I have always suspected that Google make a larger profit than that of their clients, who happen to be Flickr (Yahoo) in this case. After the initial “Welcome to AdSense” E-mail, one only communicates with the Google server. All the placement chores are left to the client. Have we become Google’s peons? Verging evil perhaps? I doubt it, but here is some comic relief.

We are not truly peons to Google’s founder, Sergei Brin,
shown in this very genuine photo from 1996.

Nevertheless, many of us are peons to the man below.

Bill Gates posing for a teen magazine in 1985
with a Mac at the back, from which he nicked the GUI

The latter photo had to be posted to balance this discussion.

A bunch of hilarious amateur posters making fun of major Linux distributions. UNIX fanatics will find it amusing.