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VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

OH MY GOD, Amazon’s having a FIRE… sale . This is bad for business! 20th Century Fox Television Last week, VMware’s top executives displayed just how worried they are about the competitive threat posed by Amazon’s cloud computing service. With customers able to spin up virtual machines in Amazon data centers, VMware is concerned fewer people will buy its virtualization tools. According to CRN , VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told service partners at the company’s Partner Exchange Conference that if “a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.” VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.” Given VMware’s view of Amazon, Gelsinger and Eschenbach won’t like the latest news from the “bookseller,” which also happens to be a large IT services provider. Amazon today announced price reductions of up to 27.7 percent for Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Reserved instances requiring up-front payments already provide discounts over “on-demand instances,” which can be spun up and down at will. Using reserved instances requires a little more advance planning to make sure you get the most bang for your buck—although customers who buy more than they need can sell excess capacity on Amazon’s Reserved Instance Marketplace . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models

Seagate has had some skin in the hybrid hard drive game for some time, but always in 2.5-inch wide versions — great for your laptop, not so much the cavernous spaces of a gaming tower. Its just-shipping Desktop SSHD fills that gap in a nearly literal sense. Along with slotting neatly into a 3.5-inch bay, the larger SSHD carries both 2TB of spinning storage and 8GB of flash to speed up disk-intensive tasks without throwing away capacity (or money) on a pure solid-state drive. It should be as much as four times faster than conventional desktop drives, Seagate claims. Whether or not that’s true, the firm isn’t neglecting its portable-owning friends: it’s shipping a new 1TB, regular-height Laptop SSHD and a 500GB, 7mm (0.28-inch) Laptop Thin SSHD, either of which is up to 40 percent faster than its predecessor. Seagate hasn’t mentioned pricing for any of the drives at this stage, although it’s safe to presume they’ll undercut SSDs with equivalent space. Filed under: Desktops , Laptops , Storage Comments Source: Seagate

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Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models

This Warship Radar Can Detect a Tennis Ball From 15 Miles

And not just a tennis ball from 15 miles away, but a tennis ball 15 miles away and moving at three times the speed of sound . That’s the sort of sensitivity the radar operators on the UK’s HMS Iron Duke will have the chance to work with when it returns to service next year. More »

Canon Shows the Most Sensitive Camera Sensor In the World

An anonymous reader writes “Canon announced today that it successfully developed a super high-sensitivity full-frame CMOS sensor developed exclusively for video recording. The new Full HD sensor can capture light no other comparable sensor can see and it uses pixels 7.5 larger than the best commercial professional cameras in existence today.” There doesn’t seem to be a gallery of images, but the video demo (direct link to an mpeg4) makes it seem pretty sensitive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Canon Shows the Most Sensitive Camera Sensor In the World

This Antique Machine Measures Irregular Shapes Better Than a Calculus Professor

It’s assumed that just because modern machines use lasers and other electronic technologies, they’re far more precise and accurate than mechanical contraptions from many years ago. But as Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe discovered at a tannery, that’s not always the case. More »

Canonical announces Mir, a custom display server that will serve up future versions of Unity

The X Window Server has been serving Linux users faithfully for the better part of a decade. And Ubuntu has been using the standard-issue display server to push its GUI to monitors across the globe since its color scheme was more sludge than slick . Canonical originally planned to replace the aging X with another display server called Wayland, but the developers apparently couldn’t bend the compositing-friendly protocol to their cross-device whims. So, Mir was created. The goal for Mir is to easily scale from the TV, to the desktop, to tablets and phones while providing “efficient support for graphics co-processors.” That means Canonical is relying heavily on GPU acceleration, which will require the cooperation of manufacturers like NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm and others. As part of the cross-form factor convergence, Unity will be getting a rewrite entirely in QT and QML (the current version uses a Nux-based shell on the desktop). The Unity Next project will incorporate several core components from the Ubuntu Touch interface, inching the Linux OS closer to its goal of a truly unified codebase. Mir should make its debut on the mobile variants of Ubuntu soon, with Canonical aiming to get the UI unified and stable in time for the next LTS in April of 2014. For some more technical details check out the source links. Filed under: Software , HD , Mobile Comments Via: OMG Ubuntu 1 , 2 Source: Ubuntu 1 , 2

Gamer Rewrites Valve’s Steam Installer For Debian

An anonymous reader writes “Gaming on Linux is growing fast right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu, but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you’re using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop? If you’re a programmer called GhostSquad57, you rewrite the installer for Debian. GhostSquad57 uploaded his efforts to Github yesterday, and has since reached out to the Linux community.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gamer Rewrites Valve’s Steam Installer For Debian

Watch this lizard shoot a five-foot stream of blood from its freaking eyeballs

Yes, blood . Blood out the eyes. It’s a display that’s as impressive as it is shocking — in a last-ditch effort to ward off predators, several species of horned lizards will increase the blood pressure in vessels surrounding their eyes, to the point that they actually rupture, gushing five-foot fountains of hemoglobin at the faces of coyotes, bobcats, and other beasts of prey native to the Sonoran desert. More »

Eat a Banana to Remedy Over-Caffeination

Getting too juiced up on caffeine happens. Maybe you made a pot and nobody wanted it but you. Perhaps you got lost in a great conversation. In any case, baristas and amateur nutritionists suggest one possible remedy: eat a banana. Yes, a banana. More »

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Eat a Banana to Remedy Over-Caffeination

This is a taser sword. That is all you need to know.

Now you can stab and deliver an electric shock at the same time. Plus, it’s something you can make in your garage! If this weapon doesn’t show up in the next installment of The Hobbit , I’m just going to get drunk and go home. More »

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This is a taser sword. That is all you need to know.

Ken May

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