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My old college roommate and groomsman Ben Williams was recently interviewed for NPR’s Science Friday’s radio program to talk about his new energy-startup, Open Sky Energy. Ben’s company specializes in solar photovoltaic and solar thermal heating and hot water installations. They work closely with customers to design and install solar projects for both homes and businesses. They even guide clients through the regulatory and tax benefits of going extra green. How cool is that.

Click to listen to Ben’s interview on NPR

For more, checkout Ben’s website, Open Sky Energy.

The one thing Ben didn’t mention in the interview was whether they offer “friends and family” discounts on solar panels. I’m going to assume they do.

The second installment in Microsoft’s $300M ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates has been released. It’s not really funny but the theme of the campaign has been introduced, namely that Bill and Jerry need to connect with “real” people.

Like the churro in the first ad, there’s more strange symbolism in this TV spot. The grandma is seen throughout the ad doing work while the rest of the family, well, who knows what they do. Does this old lady, who’s “been here for 12 years”, symbolize Windows NT/2000/XP¹ and the fact that it’s still the workhorse in the Windows family? More importantly, what’s the significance of the fancy mustard?

I think we could really dive into this ad and find lots of things to analyze, but in the end, it’s just a weird commercial.

And Bill Gates doing the robot is just creepy.

¹ Windows NT was released in 1996 and Windows 2000 and XP were built on the same kernel as NT.

Google probably has more hard drives running at any one time than anyone else out there. Well they’re at least in the top 10. So it makes sense they have a ton of experience with hard drives failing (aka dying). In typical Google fashion, they decided to actually use this information and put it to good use.

Google has released a research paper entitled “Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population” (warning: pdf). They analyzed the failure rates of their hard drives which they describe as “high-volume, consumer-grade disk drives” (i.e. the same type of ones you or I would be likely to buy when we need a new drive). What they found goes against the common wisdom in the industry, namely that hard drives tend to fail more when subjected to high temperatures or long periods of heavy activity.

One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels. Such correlations have been repeatedly highlighted by previous studies, but we are unable to confirm them by observing our population. Although our data do not allow us to conclude that there is no such correlation, it provides strong evidence to suggest that other effects may be more prominent in affecting disk drive reliability in the context of a professionally managed data center deployment.

Google was careful not to highlight any one drive manufacturer as having higher failure rates than others. But they do admitt that their results confirm that some models, manufacturers and “vintages” sometimes turn out to be lemons and have high failure rates. But just because one drive model from one manufacturer is crappy, that doesn’t mean a different drive from the same manufacturer is bad as well.

They recommend paying attention to the SMART monitor built into most hard drives and suggest that users run periodic scans of their hard drives. After all, they found that once an error is found by a diagnostic scan, that drive is 39 times more likely to fail within 2 months than a drive with no errors. So run those tests and if you find an error, you’ll probably want to make sure your stuff is backed up. You ARE backing up all your data, right?

For new purchases, if you’re looking at a bleeding edge, brand new drive, you won’t have much historical data to go on and will just have to hope for the best. But if you’re in the market for a mid-level drive, make sure to check reviews and user comments to see if a very high number of people complain about drive failures.

Apple has been running their “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC” ads for years now. All the while, Microsoft has basically been holding their hands over their ears saying “I can’t hear you!” over and over. So it was big news when they announced they were actually going to fire back with a new $300 million ad campaign starring none other than Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

Unfortunately, the first new video ad is out, and oh-my-gawd is it awful. The Apple ads are short, to the point, and for the most part pretty amusing. The Microsoft ad is rambling, confusing, and not really funny.

Somewhere in here there’s a good analogy to recent Microsoft software versus Apple software. But at this point I feel too bad for Microsoft to keep ripping on them. Just watch the video and be amazed (in a bad way):

You’d think millions of dollars could buy you a laugh, or at least a chuckle. I’ll say this, they have definitely brought the “wow“, but like Vista, they just didn’t do it in a good way.

I have to imagine this took a fair amount of programming. Next up: turning the building into one big game of space invaders!

Technology Students Mess with Dormitory Lights