Archive for May, 2008

A Look At the Workings of Google’s Data Centers

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Doofus brings us a CNet story about a discussion from Google's Jeff Dean spotlighting some of the inner workings of the search giant's massive data centers. Quoting: "'Our view is it's better to have twice as much hardware that's not as reliable than half as much that's more reliable,' Dean ...

Bank of NY Loses Tapes With 4.5 Million Clients’ Data

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Lucas123 brings news that Bank of New York Mellon Corp. has admitted they lost a box of unencrypted data storage tapes. The tapes contained personal information for over 4.5 million people. From Computerworld: "The bank informed the Connecticut State Attorney General's Office that the tapes ... were lost in transport ...

Class Action Suit Against Bell For Throttling

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

doppiodave writes "Hard on the heels of the Net Neutrality bill introduced in Canada's Parliament, a class action suit was filed yesterday against Bell by Quebec's Consumers Union, asking that extensive compensation be paid to all Bell's DSL subscribers for fraudulent advertising and privacy violations. The press release is available ...

Philip K. Dick’s ‘Ubik’ To Be Filmed

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

bowman9991 writes "Could this be the new Blade Runner? SFFMedia reports that Celluloid Dreams has obtained the movie rights to Philip K. Dick's science fiction masterpiece 'Ubik'. First published in 1969, Ubik's central character is Joe Chip, a technician for a telepathic organization that employs people with the ability to ...

Satellite TV Hacker Tells His Story

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Wired is running a story about Christopher Tarnovsky, the man who was accused of working for NDS, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to sabotage a competitor's satellite TV system. Wired had a chance to speak with Tarnovsky and get his description of how the smart-card hacking war ...

Phoenix Mars Lander Deploys Robotic Arm, Possibly Finds Ice

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

The Phoenix Mars Lander has successfully deployed its robotic arm and tested other instruments including a laser designed to detect dust, clouds, and fog. The arm will be used to dig up samples of the Martian surface which will be analyzed as a possible habitat for life. A camera on ...

Seagate Announces First SSD, 2TB HDD

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Lucas123 writes "Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate's inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but ...

Change Firefox 3’s URL bar behavior

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Mozilla, makers of Firefox, a popular alternative to Safari on many users' machines, will very shortly release Firefox 3--the product is currently at release candidate stage, which typically means a final release is imminent. The latest version of Mozilla's browser includes a number of new features to make browsing faster, ...

Splashtop Linux conquers Asus laptops

Friday, May 30th, 2008

It's a small step for an operating system, perhaps, but it could be another giant leap for Linux. DeviceVM has announced that its Splashtop 'instant-on' Linux is to appear on Asus laptops from this summer.

Free BlackBerry downloads: 5 open-source mobile apps

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Contrary to popular belief, when it comes to software, open source does not always mean "free." Not always...but in this case, it does.