Sybreon Ones Nought

We have got net-books, net-tops and now I am wondering if we will ever see the net-servs. Personally, I like the idea of having a small, low-powered server sitting in the corner. I have a number of VIA machines like that at home but they are more than 6 years old and showing their age. I would love to get my hands on a small server. Let us speculate on the technical specifications of just such a machine.

CPU: Dual-core Intel Atom or Via Nano.
RAM: 2Gb minimum and 8Gb maximum.
VGA: None or just minimal graphics.
HDD: Minimum of two SATA drives with a maximum of four.
ETH: 1000/100/10 Ethernet only.
USB: A couple of ports.


Such a machine would be low powered enough to sit in the corner. If it had up to four SATA slots, it could become a very good file-server system. Otherwise, it would also serve as a very good basic server that would be useful for both home and small-business use. It would be more than sufficient to cater for up to 10 people using it as a file server and also as a application server. It should be sold for under RM1,000. There is no reason why it should cost much more than that since you can get net-books with similar specs with an LCD screen and keyboard for just RM1,200.

I would buy a whole shelf full of these machines. They would be infinitely expandable. I could always start by buying one and using it as a file-server. Then, I could get another one to use as a virtual machine host. Then, I can continue to add more units as computational demands increase. There would be a massive market for just such a device as long as it is kept low-power and low-cost.

Unfortunately, it is a pain trying to buy such a machine. Apple comes close with its Mac mini Server but that costs a whopping RM3,600. At that price, you can already get a full featured 1U rack-mount Xeon server. There is no reason why a home or small-business server should cost this much.

Come to think of it, a D945GCLF2 (under RM300) should do fine. Add in 2Gb of RAM (RM100) and two harddisks (RM400). That leaves RM200 for a suitable power supply and casing. Unfortunately, small and low-powered casings are difficult to find. Most people who self-assemble machines are interested in flashy high-powered casings and power supplies. However, this is definitely something that I can consider building on my own. The only draw-back is that it only has 2 SATA slots but this can be fixed by adding an additional PCI-SATA card.

Let’s do that one of these days. I need to assemble a new server at some point anyway.

Update@2010-01-07 I forgot that the Compaq CQ line of net-tops would also do the trick and they come under RM1,000 with a DVD-RW and 6-in-1 card reader. All it needs is more RAM.

I have finally finished reading Dune by Frank Herbert. This is not my first exposure to the Dune universe though. I have played the PC games based on the universe in the early 90s and watch both the movie and the mini-series. Needless to say, none of that prepared me for the mind-fuck that was the novel. The novel is just so rich that it is easy to understand how it is generally considered the mother of all science fiction.

Personally, I think that it should be made required reading for all would-be politicians. There are so many plots within plots that I lost track of the political intrigue at certain times. It should also be made required reading for all would-be people managers as it has so many useful anecdotes on how to lead people instead of commanding them. It will even please the eco-mentalists with its strong sustainable environment message or how to truly screw up a world.

I am now looking forward to reading the rest of the original series. Rumours are that there is a Hollywood film in the making as well. Here’s me hoping that Hollywood will not trash the originality of the story and the strength of the characters. Dune is really good.

Bi-lal kaifa!

Update@2009-01-04 I actually had a dream in a Dune setting last night. Brilliant!

Even after all the ups and downs of our relationship, I still love PETRONAS for their messages in the national ad campaigns. I rarely read the regular print papers these days but my dad brought back a copy of TheStar last Friday and I happened to peruse it while having breakfast this morning. The PETRONAS ad caught my attention and I thought that there were many messages hidden between the many lines. Since I doubt that I am more eloquent than the ad, I’ll just reproduce it ad verbatim here:

Some people hate
Some people love

Some people are procrastinators
Some people act now

Some people love to point fingers
Some people love to extend their hands

Some people question every answer
Some people have an answer to every question

Some people hate to lose an argument
Some people love to win hearts

Some people want a change
Some people want to be the change

Some people are blind except to their own colour
Some people are colour blind

Some people are proud to belong to their race
Some people take pride in belonging to the human race

This New Year, it is not about who is perfect
and who is not. It is about sharing One Legacy,
One Destiny, 1Malaysia. Because to build a great
nation we must all learn to see the perfections
in the imperfections.

Happy New Year! May the blessings of the Triple Gem be with you always.
Live long and prosper.

Recently, I was reminded of something said by an investor during one of the talks I attended at Judge. It was a talk about funding, particularly venture capital funding. VCs love to ask you if you would rather have a smaller slice of a big pie or the whole piece of a small pie (or pizza). Whenever I was asked that question in the past I was unable to answer it because the question was incomplete – it depends on the size of the pie! However, VCs would like you to believe that a slice of a big pie was always better. Vultures!

You see, most entrepreneurs get hoodwinked into thinking that VC funding is the way to go to hit the big-money. We are constantly inundated with fantastical stories in the media about how some kid invented something in his parents’ kitchen, got some VC funding and became some multi-millionaire. The media just loves these sort of stories. There are also many entrepreneurs out there who made it big, without VC funding but their stories are just less sensational and too boring for our media to tell.

The investor taught us that VC funding may not be the right or ngam way to go for all businesses. He recounted the tale of a company that was founded by a single person with about £250,000 from his home mortgage. This entrepreneur did not get any additional investment throughout the lifetime of the business and did not dilute equity in the process. In the end, this person sold off the business for £60 million and got to bank the entire sum.

Then, the investor told us about a hypothetical scenario. This proved to be valuable lesson in equity dilution to those in the talk because few entrepreneurs want to think about this. If that entrepreneur went through a typical VC funding process and took on several rounds of funding, the entrepreneur might be lucky to be left with 5% of the business at the end. Assuming that the business was worth a whole billion at the end, that entrepreneur would finally bank £50 million.

Of course, £50 million or £60 million, both amount to fairly nice sums of money to have in the bank. However, the lesson here was – how many businesses reach the £1 billion mark? Not too many. So, it may be more profitable to do a £60 million single ownership business than a £1 billion corporation. Entrepreneurs should not fret too much if they get turned down by investors – it might actually be a blessing in disguise.

Anyway, this article by Paul Graham makes good reading.

There’s a Malay saying that involves eating chillies and feeling the sting. I now read that the MACC has jumped the gun entirely by making police reports against the pathologist. I shall now quote the article which says that:

Two Malaysian Anti-Corrup tion Commission (MACC) officers have lodged police reports against PKR party organ Suara Keadilan and Thai pathologist Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand over an article “confirming” that political aide Teoh Beng Hock had been murdered.

Honestly, I don’t know what is wrong with the MACC. I assume that Dr Pornthip conducted her investigation professionally and came to her conclusions based on the evidence. I also assume that this is not her first time dealing with the courts and she knows what she can and cannot say with regards to legal process. Based on those two assumptions, which I think are fair, I would think that she would not risk her reputation on a whim.

The thing is that, the paper Suara Keadilan printed a story that claims to have obtained information from someone who has got first hand information about the findings of Dr Pornthip. I am not an expert but I would consider that a speculative article since it is predicting the results that she is going to announce next week. After reading about it, I merely became curious about the implications since it is an opposition paper and will actually wait for the official results to be announced before drawing my own conclusions.

While I think that the MACC officers are right to make a police report against the paper, I don’t really know how they could possibly make a report against the doctor except for the purpose of intimidation. They most certainly have the evidence that the paper wrote a speculative article but I am not sure how they could have evidence that the doctor leaked the results. Since she has already concluded her report and will be making it public next week, I would think that she would have had to hand over copies of her report to the relevant people by now so that everyone has fair notice on what she is going to say next week and also so that she can get paid. So, anyone who has obtained a copy of her report could have leaked its contents – the government, the grieving family, the hospital, the observing pathologists and possibly even the police.

Sigh.

Now, I wonder if this could be a case of some people consuming too much chili. Let us just hope that the monkeys running around do not turn this into a diplomatic incident.

PS: The doctor sure has style.

This is why I miss Top Gear!

I just read an article on Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, talking about his early days of computing. Turns out that he and I both started computing at a similar time – circa 1990. At the time, he was a starving Finnish university student in computing scienc and I was a easily excitable primary school boy who spent too much time reading and watching telly.

386, DX33, 4 Megs of RAM, no co-processor, 40 Megs hard disc

I had half the RAM but about double the hard disk. I still have that old machine at home with me, although it has been taken out of its shell. I can still remember hitting the old turbo button to give the machine a clock boost. Those were the days.

I also did some programming back then. The year after Linux was released, I had just finished writing my first graphical strategy game called Dinobots. It was a simple board game with a number of procedurally rendered dinosaurs moving on them. The rules are no longer something I remember but I distinctly remembered playing with it for a while. It was my crowning achievement in QBASIC because it had graphics, animation, sound and a computer opponent worth playing against. (There was only so much one could do with the limitations of QBASIC).

Ahhh, this brings back memories.

I then moved onto PASCAL for more programming power and wrote a number of useful applications and tools with it including my first virus-like TSR (terminate stay resident) programme. I can still remember what it was – a key-logger! It would quietly sit in the background reading the keys read and them randomly spitting them out to the screen when the opportunity presented itself. It had to play nice and hook onto the timer and keyboard interrupts.

All this and much more even before I completed high-school.