Author: kenmay

Cray brings top supercomputer tech to businesses for a mere $500,000

A Cray XC30-AC server rack. Cray Cray, the company that built the world’s fastest supercomputer, is bringing its next generation of supercomputer technology to regular ol’ business customers with systems starting at just $500,000. The new XC30-AC systems announced today range in price from $500,000 to roughly $3 million, providing speeds of 22 to 176 teraflops. That’s just a fraction of the speed of the aforementioned world’s fastest supercomputer, the $60 million  Titan , which clocks in at 17.59 petaflops. (A teraflop represents a thousand billion floating point operations per second, while a petaflop is a million billion operations per second.) But in fact, the processors and interconnect used in XC30-AC is a step up from those used to build Titan. The technology Cray is selling to smaller customers today could someday be used to build supercomputers even faster than Titan. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
Cray brings top supercomputer tech to businesses for a mere $500,000

More Digitally Fabricated Records: Listen to the Velvet Underground on Laser Cut Maple

We were pretty impressed with Amanda Ghassaei’s 3D-printed records , but apparently the Tech Editor at Instructables isn’t content to blow our minds with her digital fabrication prowess just once. As of this weekend, she’s back with a veritable encore: a Laser Cut Record . Although all the documentation for that project is available here, and the 3D models can be printed through an online fabrication service, I felt like the barrier to entry was still way too high. With this project I wanted to try to extend the idea of digitally fabricated records to use relatively common and affordable machines and materials so that (hopefully) more people can participate and actually find some value in all this documentation I’ve been writing. As with the 3D-printed vinyl, the laser cut record is hardly high-fidelity… but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s really f’in cool. (more…)        

Taken from:
More Digitally Fabricated Records: Listen to the Velvet Underground on Laser Cut Maple

Senate passes Internet sales tax in final vote, 69-27

Flickr user: 401(K) 2012 The US Senate passed an online sales tax in a vote this afternoon after a heated final round of debate. A small group of anti-tax Republicans, as well as Democratic Senators from states without sales tax like Montana and Oregon, argued vociferously against the bill—but to no avail. The final vote was 69-27, not much different than the 74-20 procedural vote that took place two weeks ago. The proposal has hardly changed at all in two weeks. The Marketplace Fairness Act, S.743, would allow states and localities to make Internet retailers collect sales tax from their customers if they do more than $1 million per year in out-of-state online sales. “Today the senate is voting to take a few more inches off the little guy,” said Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has fought the bill hard. “You saw ads taken out by some of the biggest businesses in the country. It’s easy to see why Mr. President. With this vote, what you have is big businesses being given the ability to force new regulations onto the start-ups, onto the small businesses.” Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit site:
Senate passes Internet sales tax in final vote, 69-27

German court convicts, sentences BitTorrent site operator to nearly 4 years

A German district court in the western city of Aachen has handed down one of the harshest sentences for abetting copyright infringement: three years and 10 months in prison. The 33-year-old alleged operator of the Russian-hosted torrent.to , who was named only as “Jens. R” in court documents, remains under investigation for fraudulent bankruptcy filings and embezzlement. Other than pleading not guilty, Jens R. did not offer a defense in the case and is expected to appeal. Like similar sites, such as the Pirate Bay, the defendant was accused of selling ads against links to torrent files. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
German court convicts, sentences BitTorrent site operator to nearly 4 years

Say Goodbye to Creative Suite: Adobe CS Is Now Creative Cloud

At Adobe’s annual MAX conference today, the company announced a major overhaul of the ten-year-old Creative Suite, which will now be known as Creative Cloud. From now on, you won’t buy CS6 or CS7—you’ll buy a $50 per month subscription to CC (happily, the first year will only cost $30 for anyone with a CS3 or later serial number). Read more…        

View article:
Say Goodbye to Creative Suite: Adobe CS Is Now Creative Cloud

New Flying Car Design Unveiled

An anonymous reader writes “Terrafugia has unveiled plans to build a semi-autonomous, hybrid-electric, vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle for personal aviation. The new design, called TF-X, is in the works even as the company’s first product, Transition, is still awaiting production because of technical and regulatory hurdles. Terrafugia’s founder says the goal of TF-X, if it can get past the safety issues in both aviation and automotive industries, is to ‘open up personal aviation to all of humanity.’ But it will have a lot of competition from companies including AgustaWestland, Pipistrel, and the stealthy Zee.Aero, all of which are working on vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for consumers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
New Flying Car Design Unveiled

Adobe kills Creative Suite, goes subscription-only

Just a year after launching its $50-per-month plan, Adobe has made its Creative Cloud the only way to get the new versions of its full software suite. Customers “overwhelmingly” prefer it. [Read more]        

See the original article here:
Adobe kills Creative Suite, goes subscription-only

Injectable Nanoparticles Maintain Normal Blood-sugar Levels For Up To 10 Days

cylonlover writes “Aside from the inconvenience of injecting insulin multiple times a day, type 1 diabetics also face health risks if the dosage level isn’t accurate. A new approach developed by U.S. researchers has the potential to overcome both of these problems. The method relies on a network of nanoscale particles that, once injected into the body, can maintain normal blood sugar levels for more than a week by releasing insulin when blood-sugar levels rise.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More:
Injectable Nanoparticles Maintain Normal Blood-sugar Levels For Up To 10 Days

Los Alamos National Lab has had quantum-encrypted internet for over two years

Nothing locks down data better than a laser-based quantum-encrypted network, where the mere act of looking at your data causes it to irrevocably change. Although such systems already exist, they’re limited to point-to-point data transfers since a router would kill the message it’s trying to pass along just by reading it. However, Los Alamos National Labs has been testing an in-house quantum network, complete with a hub and spoke system that gets around the problem thanks to a type of quantum router at each node. Messages are converted at those junctures to conventional bits, then reconverted into a new encrypted message, which can be securely sent to the next node, and so on. The researchers say it’s been running in the lab for the last two and a half years with few issues, though there’s still a security hole — it lacks quantum integrity at the central hub where the data’s reconverted, unlike a pure quantum network. However, the hardware would be relatively simple to integrate into any fiber-connected device, like a TV set-top box, and is still more secure than any current system — and infinitely better than the 8-character WiFi code you’re using now. Filed under: Science , Internet , Alt Comments Source: Cornell University Library

View article:
Los Alamos National Lab has had quantum-encrypted internet for over two years