Seeing Pi in a Pentium chip die

Amazingly, with the right microscope, you can see where Pi is encoded in a Pentium's internal ROM.

Poor HW pricing on AIX and OS/400 machines

Not really news, but IT Jungle breaks down the screwjob you get when buying identical hardware from IBM depening on what software you want to run on it. I guess some of those bits must be really taxing.

As you can see, this price differential is a big deal for customers who put a lot of memory and disk into their machines. Processing capacity is a bit more expensive on the plain vanilla Power 730, disks are somewhere between 1.3 and 2.6 times as expensive (I am rounding), and main memory is from 4.6 to 6 times as expensive.

I'm glad I don't have to pay six times as much for memory if I want to run OS/2.

Tapes are still around

Woot.

Researchers at Fuji Film in Japan and IBM in Zurich, Switzerland, have already built prototypes that can store 35 terabytes of data - or about 35 million books' worth of information - on a cartridge that measures just 10 centimetres by 10 cm by 2 cm. This is achieved using magnetic tape coated in particles of barium ferrite.

I for one am ready to upgrade from my LTO drive.

Non-ECC memory considered harmful

For me, bitflips due to cosmic rays are one of those problems I always assumed happen to “other people”. I also assumed that even if I saw random cosmic-ray bitflips, my computer would probably just crash, and I’d never really be able to tell the difference from some random kernel bug.

A few weeks ago, though, I encountered some bizarre behavior on my desktop, that honestly just didn’t make sense. I spent about half an hour digging to discover what had gone wrong, and eventually determined, conclusively, that my problem was a single undetected flipped bit in RAM. I can’t prove whether the problem was due to cosmic rays, bad RAM, or something else, but in any case, I hope you find this story interesting and informative.