Computers have life? Hard-disk reacts badly to screaming

When J.C Bose first proved that plants have life, he used a crescograph and showed that pleasant music or a friendly chat with plants helped them grow faster. On the other hand, plants didn't like someone shouting on them... Now, as weird as it sounds, computers (hard-disks) also don't like it when someone shouts at them.

This was experimentally verified by Brendan Gregg from Sun Microsystems Fishworks lab where they create loud noises around a JBOD disk array. Due to the vocal vibrations, there is a spike in the I/O operations and a clear increase in the disk latency. The finding is interesting because it can be useful to make datacenters quieter to improve performance. The finding was put on Youtube on 31st Dec, 2008 and you can look at the video below:

So with that video you realize that computers don't like someone screaming at them. Next-time when Windows hangs on you, don't shout, your PC will slow-down further!! May be it has some form of life ;-)

Google Wants All Your Videos

Google's YouTube has announced today that it will be releasing its API for YouTube for use by web developers. Earlier, users were required to go to the YouTube website and upload videos or read/write comments on videos. With the release of the API by Google, users can upload videos, write and display comments on their own website.

Today's announcement allows Google to fulfill its goal of Google video, which was to bring all the videos on the web to its servers. With the release of the API, people will host the videos on YouTube's servers and still be able to access the content like their own. Google in return will be able to get a lot of videos and many users to watch the videos. It will allow Google to show its ads to a larger audience as well as improve search results on videos.

YouTube already owns a lot of the videos floating on the web. But with other alternatives like Blip.tv, DailyMotion, FlickLife... catching up, this announcement is sure to bring back a lot of web publishers to YouTube and in turn Google. Adsense for Video is also not doing as well as Google might have anticipated. This decision of allowing people to upload to Google's servers will allow Google to bring more targeted ads.

It should be an interesting development with what people will come up with YouTube's API. You can actually come up with an exact clone of YouTube.com without any investment...but I guess Google would be waiting to sue you!!