Summer’s on us and most are planning their beach vacation. Us geeks are worrying over our next storage upgrade and simultaneously strategising on ways to avoid sunlight. So it was that I have been interested in Apple’s announcement/Sun’s slip that the next version of the Apple operating system will use the ZFS filesystem. Except that’s it’s hardly just a filesystem, it’s most geeks wet dream, and a good reason to miss the summer vacation. One of the cool things about it is the sheer vastness of it’s storage capabilities.  In fact it’s so vast that if it were ever to be fully used, “our oceans would boil” as we started bumping up against some quantum mechanical limits.  The “oceans would boil” quote comes from the project leader Bonwick said, “Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn’t fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.”:

Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 10⁵¹ operations per second on at most 10³¹ bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, “.” Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2¹²⁸ blocks = 2¹³⁷ bytes = 2¹⁴⁰ bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2¹⁴⁰ bits) / (10³¹ bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.

To operate at the 10³¹ bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc², the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×10²⁸J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×10²¹ kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×10⁶ J/kg * 1.4×10²¹ kg = 3.4×10²⁷ J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.

It seems that temperatures have been flaring over the issue. I just came across this couple.  He said he wanted to upgrade his storage.  She tells him not to boil the ocean.

So enjoy your summer holiday and spare a thought for all the geeks shying away from the sun and trying hard to resist the temptation to boil your ocean.

Kino Design (quite why a graphic design company requires everything in flash I don’t know). On second thoughts perhaps they don’t deserve a hyperlink.Well I’ve never heard of them before and hope to never again.  Londoners are gearing up for for running the 2012 Olympics by (not building any new trains or stations) designing a hideous new logo.

You’d think that after spending £400 000 on branding they could at least come up with a logo that had the word “London” looking like it was just plonked in the middle AND spelt with a capital letter.What does it all mean, what is it? 

• Someone on the BBC website speculates that it’s Vicky Pollard’s new tracksuit design.
• Perhaps it represents the mental olympics in the form of a tangram puzzle.
• There was a logo and someone dropped it on the way to lunch (complements of the Telegraph)
• A Blue Peter paper cut exercise.

I think that Olympics minister,  Tessa Jowell, has it about right.  She is quoted as saying the new brand “sums up what London 2012 is all about – an inclusive, welcoming and diverse Games that involves the whole country."  Sure it sums up the olympics.  The disorganised mess  of random colours reflects the half-assed approach of the current government’s olympic planning.  And then footing Londoners with the bill and hassle.  Cheers Tessa.

Lets compare:Barcelona:

and the upcoming winter games in Vancouver:

Both of these say what they are for.  I haven’t a clue about he London one.  And now I have a headache from looking at that pink and yellow and must sleep.