Rich’s Random Podcast Generator: Technology in a Post-9/11 World, Remote-piloted Commercial Flights, VirtualBox and Hyper-V, Frozen HDD’s, and Lasers – RRPG005
John Stutsman, Jay Moore, and Mike Howard join this week’s show. John is an Electrical Engineer with some power industry experience, Jay is a systems admin for TriWest Healthcare Alliance, and Mike is a fellow podcaster and creator of jpeg2RAW over at novstudios.com. Topics include post-9/11 technology, the electric power grid, virtualization, and discussions around PC builds and repairs.
Memorials marked the 10th anniversary of 9/11 recently all over the USA. The guys talk about people they know who were either in Trade Center building or the immediate area on the morn
ing of the attack.
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Mike talks about technology that protects buildings. One company in particular, Line-X, makes a spray-on coating called PAXCON. An entire wall coated with the product merely flexes from the force of a bomb blast, whereas a normal, untreated wall is blown to pieces. Pentagon officials were impressed enough to use it on their building. Check out the video.
Jim is ready for remote-controlled commercial flights; the other guys, not so much. They want someone piloting the plane who has the same thing at risk as they do. Then again, FMS (flight management systems) is already in use on all commercial flights, doing much of the work of a pilot.
John talks about his experience with power grids, as well as the big problem that occurred recently in California. NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) is charged with ensuring the reliability and security of our nation’s power grid.
New computer users, which is easier to pick up and learn? Mac or PC? It’s debatable but one thing is certain, Apple provides their users with training whereas Microsoft does so such thing. 
VirtualBox is a great virtualization product for enterprise as well as home user. If you do a lot of testing, this could be your solution. Don’t forget to install Guest Additions for seamless integration between host and VM.
Andrew hooks up a friend who recently spent $4K for a successful hard drive data recovery with an HP Proliant Microserver. Price for the little box is ~$300. All decked out with OS, hard drives, and a couple of external drives to backup the server pushes the price to ~$1200.
And yet another story, two actually, courtesy of Andrew and Rich, about putting a failing hard drive in a freezer in order to facilitate a DYI data recovery. They’ve both done it, they’ve both had success. Lucky.
In the show this week: Jim Collison, Rich O’Neil, Mike Howard, John Stutsman, Jay Moore
Rich’s RPG is a weekly show hosted by Jim Collison and Rich O’Neil. We talk tech with like-minded folks, using Google + hangout to facilitate discussions. Together we cover whatever’s interesting – hot or not, current or historical. No outlines, no agenda, no worries. Join us!
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