Bloglines presented some days ago a new design for its well known feed reader, making extensive use of AJAX, and providing several new features, such as a customizable start page and multiple read view options (full, headlines only and e-mail style).

The Spanish Congress of the Deputies (ES: Congreso de los Diputados) approved a budget for the design of a new web site and the renewal of the computers in the building. The total cost is 14.304.113 €, between 2006 and 2007. The official document can be found here (in Spanish): BOE n.278

Yes, that's 14 million, divided into four sections:

• Computer systems and other services: 4.264.840 €
• General-purpose computers: 3.613.848 €
• Technical assistance and maintenance: 1.017.750 €
• Consulting: 5.407.675 €

While the third and fourth section are difficult to calculate (maintenance and consulting), the first two should be easy. Let's see what are they spending our money in.

Part One. 4.264.840 €

Five servers: One database server, two application servers, one web server, and one development server, all of them complying the following specs: 4xPower-5 (up to 12) CPUs, 16GB of RAM (up to 32), 4 hot-swappable 73GB disks, with RAID support, including an AIX license.

Let's see, a database server, a web server, and two application servers, for a site with a 90987 Alexa rank.

That's nice. They should be able to use the spare cycles on those machines to fold proteins or something. I know sites with 4 or 5 times more hits hosted on shared servers for 10€/month.

Firewall: Two Dual Intel Xeon 3GHz, 2GB of RAM, RAID 36GB, 4 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

Nice Firewall indeed. Let's use it for SETI@home this time.

SAN: 48TB, up to 80TB. 2 Fibre-Channel switches with 32 ports each.

SMS Server: Same as above, Windows 2003 Server + SMS + SQL Server.

Licenses: Windows 2003 Server, Oracle 10g, SQL Server.

Streaming Servers:
Intel 3GHz, 2 GB RAM, Disks: 2x36 GB, 50x300 GB
Intel 3GHz, 2 GB RAM, Disks: 2x36 GB, 50x250 GB

Tape Server: 35 TB (up to ~100TB)

Streaming WS: 14 x Intel Xeon 2,8 GHz, 512 Mb RAM, 73 Gb disk, Windows XP.

And what does all this computing power give them? According to the following article (in Spanish, but you can see the screenshots): ¿Qué pasa con la web del Congreso de los Diputados?, the site even has the default Oracle pages left on. They must have thought: well, we already have a Dual Intel Xeon firewall. We are secured.

Not only that, but this is a screenshot of the web right now. Besides the poor cross-navigator design, they don't even check the SQL queries are correct before submitting them to the database, leaving the Oracle error lying around the right side of the page.



Apparently the site was designed by Telefonica, the spanish ex-monopoly for telecommunications, and they feature the site as a successful case (in Spanish). They should feature Terra as a success too.

Part Two: 3.613.848 €

After seeing the computing power they use to power their web servers, they must have bought  a 17-inch MacBookPro and a 24-inch iMac for each deputy, right? Not really. Isn't it better to buy the cheapest computers, and get the rest of the money for themselves?

This is a relatively easy section to calculate, so let's see how much we would have to spend to buy the following components:

• Workstations: 620 x Pentium-4, 1GB of RAM, 60GB disk, Win XP, MS Office, with 17-inch screens.
• Printers: 400 x BW Laser printers. 75 x Color Laser printers.
• Scanners: 50 x Automatic feeder scanners.
• Laptops: 30 x Pentium-M 2GHz, 1GB of RAM, 60GB disk, 15-inch monitor
• PDA's: 400 x PocketPC
• Network: 40 x Switches, Routers, etc.

The workstations should cost at most 1000€, with a total sum of 620000€.
The printers should cost about 1500€ the BW ones, and 2500€ the Color ones, with a total sum of 787500€.
The scanners, let's say, a very expensive one, may go around 1000€, with a total of 50000€.
The laptops should cost no more than 1000€, making it 30000€.
The PDA's should go about 500€, totalling 200000€.

Without counting the undefined "40 network elements", this makes 1687500€, 1926348€ less than the total sum, which means, even if the network elements cost 500000€, the socialists are getting for themselves just in this section, about 1.5 million.

Microsoft Surface is a new concept table computer with a big multi-touch 30" screen, similar to the one in the iPhone, where you can resize photos with two fingers and that sort of things. Internally, however, it's much more complex. It uses cameras to sense objects, hand gestures and touch, and it's based on Vista, they say.


It also autodetects devices when you put them on top, showing its contents. The "file copy" thing is quite cool if you ask me, and the idea overall, well, I think it's brilliant.

Apparently they have been working in it since 2001, and they will start selling it now for a whopping $10000. You still can't buy it anyway, but you will be able to play with its dirty screen in some shops and several hotel chains.

Check out the official videos in their Surface site, and a Popular Mechanics video in Gizmodo.

One day after the presentation of the iPhone in the MacWorld Expo, Microsoft announces they will be launching their new zunePhone, in a similar size and style as in the Zune music player.

The commercial follows:


Awesome!

Esta mañana, como imagino ya os habréis enterado, ha habido un ataque terrorista, al parecer de Al Qaeda, contra la ciudad de Londres, en la línea de metro y autobuses.

No pretendo hacer un post para informar sobre ello, ya que existen infinidad de periódicos online que lo explicarán mejor que yo.

Lo que sí quiero es expresar mi más profundo pesar a los británicos por el terrible atentado.

En otro orden de cosas, me parecen despreciables los comentarios de ciertos progres (me ahorraré otros adjetivos calificativos que ahora me vienen a la mente) que he leído en otros blogs, comentando que el atentado era debido a la alianza del Reino Unido con los Estados Unidos en la guerra de Irak.

Por suerte, ni el gobierno del Reino Unido, ni la mayoría de sus ciudadanos parecen dispuestos a ceder ante las presiones de los terroristas de Al Qaeda, al contrario que las reacciones cobardes del gobierno español al retirar las tropas de Irak. Al Qaeda debe ser destruida, no se puede pactar con terroristas.

Acabo con la frase de Tony Blair: "No nos aterrorizarán, no nos dividirán y no nos intimidarán"

Lo primero, desearos a todos un feliz año nuevo, y que todo os vaya genial ;)

En Slashdot leo que el diario The Independent ha publicado una lista de predicciones (en el sentido tecnológico) para el nuevo 2004, en algunas estoy de acuerdo, y en otras no. A ver que opinais vosotros...

Cual regalo de navidad, hace unos dias, hemos visto como el kernel 2.6 de linux pasaba a ser estable, sustituyendo a la serie 2.4.

Qué novedades nos trae este nuevo kernel?
A continuación os las detallaré.

Bé, com alguns ja sabreu, aquest darrer cap de setmana va tenir lloc a Madrid la reconeguda fira d'informàtica, so, imatge i telecomunicacions anomenada SIMO.

Us explicarè de que va anar tot això del SIMO i si tornaria o no

Según leo en Slashdot y Newsforge, en una nota de prensa, RedHat ha comunicado que dejará de dar soporte a la versión "gratuita" de RedHat Linux, a favor de la versión comercial, RedHat Enterprise Linux, aunque comentan que RedHat seguirá apoyando el proyecto Fedora.

Según un estudio realizado por el Instituto Holandés de Investigación Tecnológica, las radiaciones de las antenas de la llamada tercera generación de móviles (UMTS), pueden provocar dolores de cabeza y náuseas.