Cody Taylor

Hugh Pickens writes “Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM or Sun Microsystems, but Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. For the first time, Google revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference this week about data center efficiency. Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. ‘This is much cheaper than huge centralized UPS,’ says Google server designer Ben Jai. ‘Therefore no wasted capacity.’ Efficiency is a major financial factor. Large UPSs can reach 92 to 95 percent efficiency, meaning that a large amount of power is squandered. The server-mounted batteries do better, Jai said: ‘We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency.’ Google has patents on the built-in battery design, ‘but I think we’d be willing to license them to vendors,’ says Urs Hoelzle, Google’s vice president of operations. Google has an obsessive focus on energy efficiency. ‘Early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query,’ says Hoelzle. ‘We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low.'”

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teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting: “A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include ‘1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;’ ‘OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;’ and ‘JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?’ Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King’s legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian’s Twitterised archive as ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,’ eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.”

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Nieriko writes “Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components. Here are a couple of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports: — ‘… shortly after midnight local time, an ATM in the capital city of Reykjavik began spewing 100-Krona notes. … A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.'”

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cstrep writes “Eight years ago, Opera introduced Mouse Gestures as a way to speed up your interaction with the browser, and focus on what’s important: Content. In 2005, Voice Navigation was introduced, and more recently we’ve worked with Nintendo to create a browser that takes full advantage of the ‘Wiimote’ and later, the touchscreen in the DSi. Today Opera introduces Face Gestures, a revolutionary technology designed to make interacting with Opera easier on computers with cameras. Face Gestures lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures. By using an internal technology dubbed ‘Face Observation Opera Language’, we are able to recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser.”

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Google on Tuesday is expected to announce more details of its venture capital fund, including a 0 million investment in the first year, according to a report Monday on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site that cited people familiar with the matter.

Hugh Pickens writes “Six volunteers have climbed into a small metal capsule in Moscow as part of a three-month experiment meant to simulate a voyage to Mars. The crew — a German engineer, a French airline pilot, and four Russians — will spend the next 105 days living in a minimally furnished facility erected in a hangar on the outskirts of the Russian capital. The German said, ‘I think we are going to learn a lot about each other.’ A cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission was quoted: ‘On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it’s the science of sensory deprivation.’ A similar experiment in Moscow virtually collapsed when a multinational team of men and women were allowed to drink alcohol on the eve of the millennium, and simmering tensions between Russian and non-Russian volunteers exploded in a fight for the affections of a female Canadian scientist. Only men are involved this time, and no alcohol. Scientists will keep a constant vigil on the team via cameras erected in each of the facility’s three modules. Those who survive more than 100 days will earn a ,000 reward. The current project is a warm-up for a much more ambitious experiment, scheduled for December, which will see another group of volunteers spending over 500 days in the same conditions. With current technology it is estimated that a return trip to Mars will take at least 18 months.” The amazing thing is that 5,600 people applied to be part of the experiment.

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N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: “NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer.” They’re still working on the parachute.

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It could be a while before studios release home versions of big pictures like Coraline and Monsters vs Aliens in 3D. But you don’t need to wait. Provided that you have a 3D-capable HDTV, turning it into a 3D home theater that is capable of playing any off-the-shelf DVD in 3D is surprisingly easy. Here’s how to make the conversion.

“With less than billion in recovery funds available, we believe it is impossible to blanket the nation with the broadband capacity that our local governments, anchor institutions, businesses and residents ultimately require,” Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer wrote to the Federal Communications Commission on March 25.

uctpjac writes “London media lawyer Emily MacManus argues that UK libel law has three features which make it the ‘defamation tourism’ capital of the world and a serious threat to web free speech. First, there is no free speech presumption in the UK as there is, for example, in the US. Second, every access of a web page is considered to be a separate act of publication in the UK (unlike the US, where ‘original publication’ holds). Third, ‘no-win-no-fee’ libel litigation is now allowed in the UK. If any blog, anywhere, publishes something you’d like taken down, threaten libel action in the UK: no one except the super-rich can afford to even take these cases to court, so media lawyers advise publishers to ‘take it down, take it down quickly, take it down again.’ There’s not much chance that the judges will move the law any time soon because they just aren’t seeing the cases that could cause them to set new precedent.”

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