Corporate servers have used network storage, ranging from fileservers, to SAN for several years. Now, with USB IDE external drive cases selling for as little as $20, people are using external drives on their PC, and get pretty good response with 400 mbit USB 2 or with 1394/firewire. You can get most of the capacity of a 7200 rpm drive over USB 2.

So I want to call for the production of a cheap home external storage box. This box would have slots for 4 or 5 drives and cooling for them, ideally as big a fan as possible to keep the rpms and noise low in the desk model, and an even more powerful fan in the basement model. The desk model might have sound insulation though that's hard to combine with good cooling.

While this box could and probably should have USB or 1394, even better would be gigabit ethernet, which is fast enough for most people's storage needs, especially if there is a dedicated gigabit ethernet card in the PC just for talking to the storage.

This could allow for a radical redesign of PC cases of all types, with no need for the space and heat of drives. And of course these diskless PCs would be much quieter. You could put your disk cube under your desk (and thus have it be a bit quieter) but ideally you would like the basement model, to which you string cat5e cable and get a mostly silent PC.

read on...

I've written a few times about Peerflix the P2P DVD trading system similar to some of my own ideas. After trying it for a few months, I have to report trouble.

I am told an interview I did a few months ago on USENET and elements of its history will air today on the American Public Media show "Marketplace." The audio can be played from the Marketplace web site in realplayer format. It airs on most NPR stations at times ranging from early afternoon to about 6:30pm.

ICANN is pleased to announce that the independent evaluation process, which began last year, has resulted in a further sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD) application moving to the next stage.

As the process for selecting new sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLDs) continues from a pool of ten applications, ICANN has now entered into commercial and technical negotiations with an additional candidate registry, ICM Registry, Inc, (.POLINC).

The .POLINC top level domain will be a voluntary arena for sites that wish to express ideas that are politically incorrect or inflammatory. Sites that promote ideas including racism, homosexual advocacy, embryonic stem cell harvesting, creationism, evolutionism, opposition to the war in Iraq, defence of the liberation of Iraq and other topics that are inflammatory can voluntarily register in the .POLINC domain to make it clear what sort of material can be found on the site.

"We're not trying to suprise anybody with the fact that our sites have unpopular an inflammatory opinions on them," said Brad Templeton, Chairman of the www.eff.org web site notorious for its opposition to the surveillance tools the Justice Dept. says are needed for the War on Domestic Terror. Templeton also operates the www.netfunny.com site, which contains jokes, some of which lampoon stereotypes of all manners. "By giving us our own domain, people will know exactly what they are getting. Our views are for adults. We're not trying to push them on kids."

Operators of .POLINC domains believe that by using this domain, they will have an answer to any user who complains about finding their material on the internet, in particular parents who don't want their children exposed to highly radical views. Internet filtering software, commonly sold to parents, schools and libraries, will be able to easily and reliably block access to .POLINC sites by children and library patrons.

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