Undeterred by a rash of arrests, the hackers at Anonymous are boasting “about one gigabyte” of data from NATO. But they’re not going to publish most of it, as it’d be “irresponsible.” The rest? “Interesting data,” they say. More
Joining a health club or gym gives you access to a variety of equipment and classes to spice up your workouts, but if you don't like the cost or environment of a gym, you can also get great exercise versatility—and more convenience—by turning your iPhone or iPad into a portable gym, complete with all the classes you'd find at your local gym. Here are a few excellent, inexpensive apps you can use to create a customized fitness program or “gym in your pocket.” More
Flash on OSX Lion is a TAD BIT BUGGY right now. That’s not lost on Adobe, and they’ve posted a document of all known issues with 10.7. One issue they suspect, but can’t prove: Apple disabled hardware acceleration with Flash. More
Undeterred by a rash of arrests, the hackers at Anonymous are boasting “about one gigabyte” of data from NATO. But they’re not going to publish most of it, as it’d be “irresponsible.” The rest? “Interesting data,” they say. More
Bill Gates, nowadays basking in the accolades his philanthropy provides, noticed that toilets kind of suck in the developing world. Wanting to help stop the spread of communicable diseases, he’s ready to put down $41.5 million for potty advancements. More
Holographic disc storage may not have worked out so well for InPhase, but the folks at General Electric are still trying to make HVD work. Their latest breakthrough, shown off today at an IEEE symposium in Hawaii, is a new micro-holographic material which is 100x more sensitive than its predecessor and ups recording speed to that of Blu-ray discs. In the two years since we saw it last some of the hyperbole has apparently been lost — no claims of “two to four years left for Blu-ray” this time around — but manager Peter Lorraine still thinks the DVD-sized discs have a future in archival and consumer systems. That’s getting tougher to imagine in a world with FiOS and Netflix streaming, but if there is ever another disc format you may be looking at it right now.
Continue reading GE’s new holographic storage burns 500GB discs at the speed of a Blu-ray
GE’s new holographic storage burns 500GB discs at the speed of a Blu-ray originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jul 2011 22:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Sure, it’s been just a few months since the National Security Agency asked for a $900 million supercomputing complex – you know, to help out with all that internet wiretapping. But concern about deficit spending will mean shuttering 800 other federal data centers in the US, or 40 percent of total government capacity. The closures are part of a larger push toward greater efficiency and consolidation, with an estimated savings of $3 billion a year; moving services to the cloud will mean more savings in licensing fees and infrastructure. Single-digit savings might sound like chump change when you realize the federal information technology budget runs around $80 billion a year, but hey, it’s a start, right?
US federal government to close 800 data centers, walk into the cloud originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Although you won’t find any Apple users who will admit it, Macs do occasionally crash and fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. In my experience, while they have far fewer visible errors, the ones that users end up seeing are more serious than the scattered Windows annoyances and driver issues. But by and large, recovery and error management haven’t needed to be among Apple’s marquee features. Graceful failure is a merit, but not something you want listed next to Mission Control and AirDrop.
So it’s no surprise that an interesting little feature built into Lion is receiving next to no promotion — though Apple is far from hiding it. The improved recovery console is a nice feature, but it’s the Internet Recovery thing I’m more interested in.
Here’s Apple’s succinct user-facing explanation of the feature:
If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically. It downloads and starts Lion Recovery directly from Apple servers over a broadband Internet connection. And your Mac has access to the same Lion Recovery features online.
Perhaps it’s not being trumpeted because it’s not really a new feature. Macs have been able to boot from a networked drive for quite some time — over a decade, in fact. The fact that it was limited to locally-administrated networks with locally-hosted disk images isn’t a limitation of NetBoot itself, but was simply a pragmatic measure considering remotely downloading even a couple hundred megs on a circa-1999 connection would be impractical. So the capability is nothing new, but making it a standard recovery feature is.
Apple is making itself the net admin and switching from a local protocol to a remote one, that’s all. Like so many cloud services, it is a possibility now because of improvements in bandwidth and storage capacity, not because of any magical new powers possessed by MacBook Airs.
An interesting bit is that this recovery mode works even if your drive is blank — as in zeroed. The normal Recovery HD stuff occupies a (quite hefty) partition of your boot drive, so Internet Recovery can’t live there if it’s to work with a fresh or scrambled drive. It must live in the onboard EFI firmware, which is reassuring but a little creepy. Even if you crack open your Mac and swap out the drive, it’s still going to wake up thinking I am a Macintosh.
From there on it’s business as usual. It loads a Recovery HD disk image from Apple’s servers and you’re off to the races. The little recovery partition is likely nothing more than the most basic graphical and executable items necessary to interface with the wifi (WPA only), store, decode the disk image, and so on.
This shouldering by Apple of bandwidth and administrative duties for non-power users is certainly indicative of their upcoming iCloud and iTunes strategies. They’ve got motive and opportunity (not to mention the cash and the hardware) to shift pretty much all your content server-side, including (though by baby steps at first) the OS itself. And the statement they want to make to the consumer and user is this: “We’ve got it.” They’re taking responsibility away from the user in other ways as well (to be discussed later), and obscuring the inside of the machine has been a priority for Apple for a decade; this is just another, slightly less visible, portion of their moving everything but the very facade of their devices away from the grasp of the user, for good or ill.
Lion will come on a USB drive next month for the rather curious price of $70, but you can save money by making your own bootable disc or drive. The “installESD.dmg” file is lurking inside your Lion installer, and making it bootable is… a job for Google. You paid for it, so do what you want with it. I’ll be damned if I’m paying $40 extra for their USB drive, so I’ll be doing this as soon as I upgrade.
[some info via this Hacker News thread]
Read the original post:
Lion’s Internet Recovery Feature: The Past Meets The Future
What if I told you that you could be a singer if you just spoke into an app. Seriously, that’s all you have to do with Songify. The app autotunes your voice and stitches it against a song. YOU SOUND AWESOME. More
We covered BackBlaze’s cloud-based backup system way back in 2008, when $5 for unlimited storage must have sounded like a Christmas present. Since then the business has matured somewhat, but one thing they nailed that perhaps has become more important is scaling the hardware. With cloud backup and media services firing on all cylinders, data storage space is more valuable than ever, and providing the terabytes and petabytes of space is increasingly important to emerging companies.
In 2009 BackBlaze was kind enough to let everyone in on the top-secret design specs for their “Storage Pod,” the custom server unit that they claimed made their prices possible (CEO Gleb Budman explains in this Ignite talk). And now they’re doing it again. Want to build your own ultra-low-cost storage solution for far less than the likes of Dell and HP? They’ve done the legwork and provided a part-by-part breakdown.
Many items from the previous build are no longer available, which makes things difficult both for them and for aspiring cloud lovers. The new parts will likely die out in two years or so, but if anything the primary cost (the drives) will go down and the capacity will go up, while the other parts (motherboard, RAM, etc) will remain sufficient.
The basic layout is a micro-ATX server motherboard with the usual array of ports and slots. There are six SATA ports but they’re not used for the storage itself. Instead, BackBlaze put in four PCI Express SATA cards, then connected three of their four ports to multipliers with five ports each — a lot of numbers that in the end add up to 45 hard drives in one case. There are two 760-watt PSUs, 4GB of RAM, and one 160GB drive for the system itself. I thought that last bit extravagant and said so, but BackBlaze’s Gleb Budman assured me that’s pretty much the cheapest drive you can get new right now (~$40). It all goes inside a fire engine red custom case made by ProtoCase, which is the single most expensive component at $350.
An unavoidable consequence is the greater magnitude of unit failure, but that’s something that can be controlled by redundancy at a huge scale, and certainly there are algorithms and top-secret software that make avoiding data loss like that a snap. I guess if a SATA controller were to go rogue (or something, I don’t know), even 135TB of lost data is manageable if you’ve taken the correct precautions. And the far more likely failure here (drives) don’t seem to be at any additional risk.
The benefit of having lower cost hardware is obvious, but I think there’s something more to it than saving money. Being the master of your domain counts for something: BackBlaze is in control of their hardware in a way many companies aren’t, and they aren’t beholden to, say, Amazon or Dell for support or maintenance. Plus every part is easily replaceable and they designed the system (it’s really quite straightforward, not to say easy) so they know it top to bottom. Maybe it’s that forward-thinking leanness that almost got them bought?
You can read far more technical details (such as file system changes and cluster stats) at BackBlaze’s blog. I build my own systems as well, and while I don’t have eight grand lying around to replicate their baby, I do like their style.
Taken from:
BackBlaze Presents Their Bare-Bones, $7348, 135TB Storage Pod For Backup On The Cheap