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George Washington Racks Up 220 Years of Late Fees At Library
Everyone knows that George Washington couldn't tell a lie. What you probably didn't know is that he couldn't return a library book on time. From the article: "New York City's oldest library says one of its ledgers shows that the president has racked up 220 years' worth of late fees on two books he borrowed, but never returned. One of the books was the 'Law of Nations,' which deals with international relations. The other was a volume of debates from Britain's House of Commons. Both books were due on Nov. 2, 1789."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Aren't SSD Prices Going Down?
Lucas123 writes "NAND flash memory makers took an economic beating from 2007 through the first quarter of 2009 due to supply outstripping demand. During that time, solid state drives dropped in price 60% year over year. But after the economic meltdown, fabricators pulled back on production and investment in new facilities and the price of SSDs have remained flat or increased over the past year, and that is not expected to change until 2011. Until that time, SSDs remain 10x more expensive than hard disk drives. SSD vendors, however, are using a few tricks to get sales up, including selling lower-capacity boot drives that hit a sweet spot in the techie/gamer market."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cows On Treadmills Produce Clean Power For Farms
separsons writes "William Taylor, a farmer in Northern Ireland, recently developed the Livestock Power Mill, a treadmill for cows. Taylor uses the device to generate clean, renewable power for his farm. Cows are locked into a pen on top of a non-powered, inclined belt. The cows' walking turns the belt, which spins a gearbox to drive a generator. One cow can produce about two kilowatts of electricity, enough energy to power four milking machines. It may seem like a kooky idea, but Taylor could be onto something: According to his calculations, if the world's 1.3 billion cattle used treadmills for eight hours a day, they could provide six percent of the world's power!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This Is Apple's Next iPhone
An anonymous reader writes "There has been some speculation about it. Not anymore: 'This is Apple's next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It's the real thing, and here are all the details.' Judging by Gizmodo's reaction, it looks like a winner."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In Defense of Jailbreaking
Keith found a nice manifesto saying "There's a trend that's been disturbing me lately. When the topic of modding or jailbreaking comes up — say, in the wake of the iPad announcement, or Sony's restrictive PS3 update — there is an outcry. Who am I to tell Apple what's best for their devices?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Life Recorder
Bruce Schneier writes "In 2006, writing about future threats on privacy, I described a life recorder: A 'life recorder' you can wear on your lapel that constantly records is still a few generations off: 200 gigabytes/year for audio and 700 gigabytes/year for video. It'll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wisconsin Designates State Microbe
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that state legislators in Wisconsin raced against the clock to pass a bill designating Lactococcus lactis as Wisconsin's official state microbe. 'The first time I heard the idea, I thought, I've got more important things to do than spending my time honoring a microbe,' says Gary Hebl, a Democratic state representative who proposed the bill which, he says, would make Wisconsin the first state in the nation to grant such a designation, 'but this microbe is really a very hard worker,' added Hebl, referring to the bacterium supported by the Department of Bacteriology at UW — Madison used to make cheddar, Colby, and Monterey Jack cheese. The proposal faced only one detractor in committee ('the opponent was clearly lactose-intolerant,' says Hebl), and there was no sign of a last-minute campaign from other bacteria, so by evening, the Assembly had approved the measure, 56 to 41. In case there were any doubts about Wisconsin's priorities, a separate bill also awaits consideration in Madison, declaring cheese Wisconsin's state snack."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The cost of High Availability (HA) with Oracle
What's the cost of downtime to your business? $100,000 per hour, $1,000,000 or more? The recent Volcanic ash that has grounded European flights is estimated to be costing the airlines $200M a day. In the IT world, High Availability (HA) architectures allow for disaster recovery as well as uninterrupted business continuity during system failure.
This post focuses on a customer’s backend, comprised of a business application stack supported by a dozen Oracle databases. They wish to equip this infrastructure with HA features and ensure that outages do not cost business. How do we address the challenge of pricing the complete solution, with hardware, software, services and annual support?
Read more on BigDataMatters.com
New Documentary Film "Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system"
New documentary film "Patent Absurdity" is set to expose how the judicial activism that led to the patenting of software has broken the US patent system's promise of promoting the progress of science and useful arts
Categories: ICT users' rights
Strategy: Order Two Mediums Instead of Two Smalls and the EC2 Buffet
Vaibhav Puranik in Web serving in the cloud – our experiences with nginx and instance sizes describes their experience trying to maximum traffic and minimum their web serving costs on EC2. Initially they tested with two m1.small instance types and then they the switched to two c1.mediums instance types. The m1s are the standard instance types and the c1s are the high CPU instance types. Obviously the mediums have greater capability, but the cost difference was interesting:
Time for nonprofits to leave proprietary fundraising software systems behind
BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that CiviCRM has earned its recommendation as a fully featured donor and contact management system for nonprofits.
Categories: ICT users' rights
Hot Scalability Links for April 16, 2010
- Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API; 105,779,710 registered users; 300,000 new registered users a day; 180 million unique visitors a month; 55 million tweets a day.
- Who has the most servers? Google 1 million+; Intel 100K; 1&1 Internet 70K; Facebook 30K; Akamai 61K; Rackspace 56k+.
- Cloud Computing Economies of Scale. James Hamilton gives a fabulous talk breaking down where the costs are in the cloud. It's not where you may think. Higher utilization is the key. More here.
- Erlang Factory: Andy Gross: Distributed Erlang Systems In Operation: Patterns and Pitfalls by Martin J. Logan. Great overview of architecting distributed systems in Erlang. Covers what you want and don't want in a distributed system and how to compromise those elements, what's common, system design, cluster membership, load balancing, upgrades, debugging, and more.
- Extreme Scale Computing by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. “An exascale supercomputer capable of a million trillion calculations per second – dramatically increasing our ability to understand the world around us through simulation and slashing the time needed to design complex products such as therapeutics, advanced materials, and highly-efficient autos and aircraft.”
Breaking the dependency on proprietary software: A call to nonprofits to refuse Microsoft Windows 7
"sinking money and time into proprietary software is
inconsistent with the core values of freedom and progress."
Categories: ICT users' rights
Why is free software important to you? Submit your response to our new video campaign!
At the Women in Free Software Summit and the Boston celebration of Software Freedom Day 2009, the FSF kicked off a new video testimonial campaign. See how it went, and help support the campaign by submitting a video response to these questions!
Categories: ICT users' rights
