Tag: elegant-bride

Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

If Intel gets its way, old-school server racks will go the way of the dinosaurs. David Monniaux Intel is working to replace the traditional server rack with a more efficient architecture that separates CPU, storage, power, and networking resources into individual components that can be swapped out as needed. Power and cooling would be shared across CPUs, rather than having separate power supplies for each server. Server, memory, network, and storage resources would all be disaggregated and shared across the rack. Incredibly fast interconnects will be needed to prevent slowdowns because disaggregating components pushes them further apart, and Intel is thus building an interconnect that’s capable of 100Gbps. “We are developing a rack-scale architecture,” Lisa Graff, VP and general manager of Intel’s data center marketing group, said in a briefing with reporters last week. “We’re working with end users, OEMs, and ISVs to drive common standards in a reference architecture.” Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links

Meet the nice-guy lawyers who want $1,000 per worker for using scanners

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Starting late last year, hundreds of US businesses began to receive demand letters from secretive patent-holding companies with six-letter gibberish names: AdzPro, GosNel, and JitNom. The letters state that using basic office equipment, like scanners that can send files to e-mail, infringes a series of patents owned by MPHJ Technologies. Unless the target companies make payments—which start at around $9,000 for the smallest targeted businesses but go up from there—they could face legal action. In a world of out-there patent claims, MPHJ is one of the most brazen yet. It’s even being talked about in Congress. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who has sponsored the anti-troll SHIELD Act, cited the operation as a perfect example of why the system needs reform. After publishing a story on the scanner-trolling scheme , Ars heard from letter recipients and their lawyers from around the country—Idaho and Texas, California and South Dakota. Before the AdzPros and GosNels took over, the patents were owned by an entity called Project Paperless, which threatened dozens of businesses in Virginia and Georgia. Project Paperless ultimately filed two lawsuits, prosecuted by lawyers at Hill, Kertscher, and Wharton, an Atlanta firm with complex connections to the patents. In late 2012, Project Paperless sold the patents to MPHJ Technology Investments. Today, the anonymous owner of MPHJ operates GosNel, AdzPro, JitNom, and at least a dozen other shell companies now targeting small businesses around the country. Read 65 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the nice-guy lawyers who want $1,000 per worker for using scanners

Ubuntu “Raring Ringtail” hits beta, disables Windows dual-boot tool

A ring-tailed cat, a type of raccoon and inspiration for Ubuntu Raring Ringtail. Wikimedia Commons Ubuntu 13.04, scheduled for release on April 25, is now available for testing in its second and final beta release. Nicknamed “Raring Ringtail,” Ubuntu 13.04 is one of the final releases that’s just for desktops and servers. By this time next year, Canonical intends to release a single version of Ubuntu targeting all form factors, including smartphones and tablets. Ubuntu developers decided to disable a tool that allows easy installation of Ubuntu alongside an existing Windows instance. Wubi, short for Windows-based Ubuntu Installer, lets users install Ubuntu on the same disk partition as a Windows instance. “Due to various bugs in Wubi that have not been addressed in time for this Final Beta, the Ubuntu team will not be releasing the Wubi installer with 13.04,” a Raring Ringtail technical overview states . “Combined with the fact that Wubi has not been updated to work with Windows 8, and the focus on mobile client over desktop, the Foundations team does not expect Wubi to be in a releasable state for 13.04.” This doesn’t mean users can’t dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu. Without Wubi, dual-booting is slightly more complicated to set up and requires separate disk partitions. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubuntu “Raring Ringtail” hits beta, disables Windows dual-boot tool

Apple says VPN changes coming in iOS thanks to VirnetX verdict

Apple has been forced to change how iOS devices use VPN following a $368.2 million patent verdict in favor of patent and research firm VirnetX. The company wrote about the changes in a support document posted to its website on Thursday (hat tip to AppleInsider ), saying the behavior of VPN On Demand would be different from expected starting with iOS 6.1, and the changes would come in an update that will be released this April. “Due to a lawsuit by VirnetX, Apple will be changing the behavior of VPN On Demand for iOS devices using iOS 6.1 and later,” Apple wrote. “This change will be distributed in an update later this month.” The changes are relatively minor—devices with VPN On Demand configured to “always” will instead behave as if they’re set up to “establish [a connection] if needed.” Apple says the device in question will then only establish a new VPN On Demand connection if it’s not able to resolve the DNS of the host it wants to reach (these settings can currently be found within Settings > General > VPN). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple says VPN changes coming in iOS thanks to VirnetX verdict

Solid electrolyte may end the catastrophic failures of lithium batteries

Batteries like this one with liquid electrolytes may eventually get a run for their money. pinkyracer Lithium batteries have become a very popular technology, powering everything from cell phones to cars. But that doesn’t mean the technology is without its problems; lithium batteries have been implicated in some critical technological snafus, from exploding laptops to grounded airplanes . Most of these problems can be traced back to the electrolyte, a liquid that helps ions carry charges within the battery. Liquid electrolytes can leak, burn, and distort the internal structure of the battery, swelling it in ways that can lead to a catastrophic failure. The solution, of course, would be to get rid of the liquids. But ions don’t tend to move as easily through solids, which creates another set of problems. Now, researchers have formulated a solid in which lithium ions can move about five times faster than any previously described substance. Better yet, the solid—a close chemical relative of styrofoam—helps provide structural stability to the battery. Don’t expect to see a styrofoam battery in your next cellphone though, as the material needs to be heated to 60°C in order to work. The problem with liquid electrolytes has to do with the fact that, during recharging, lithium ions end up forming deposits of metal inside the battery. These create risks of short circuits (the problem that grounded Boeing’s Dreamliner 787) and can damage the battery’s structure, causing leaks and a fire risk. Solid electrodes get around this because the lithium ions will only come out of the electrolyte at specific locations within the solid, and can’t form the large metal deposits that cause all of the problems. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Solid electrolyte may end the catastrophic failures of lithium batteries

Internet Explorer 10 almost doubles its users thanks to Windows 7 release

Net Marketshare There were no big changes in the browser landscape in March. The top three held their positions, and Windows 8 continues to grow at a sluggish pace. The biggest change? Internet Explorer 10 almost doubled its market share, thanks to the late February release of its Windows 7 version. Net Marketshare Net Marketshare On the desktop, Internet Explorer saw no meaningful change, at 55.83 percent for the month compared to 55.82 last month. Firefox and Chrome both edged up a little, gaining 0.09 and 0.18 points for shares of 20.21 and 16.45 percent respectively. Safari and Opera both nudged downward, losing 0.11 and 0.08 points to drop to 5.31 and 1.74 percent respectively. Net Marketshare Net Marketshare In the mobile space, Safari bounced back, up 6.38 points to 61.79 percent. After a surprising high last month, Opera Mini fell 4.32 points to 8.4 percent. Symbian likewise dropped from an unusual high, losing about two thirds of its February usage. It fell 0.83 points to 0.54 percent. Android Browser was down, losing 0.96 points for a share of 21.86 percent. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 almost doubles its users thanks to Windows 7 release

Bitcoin value triples in a month to all-time high of more than $100

At the end of February, bitcoins hit an all-time trading high of just over $33 . That suddenly looks like chump change, with the value of bitcoins today moving past $100. You can see nearly real-time changes in the value of bitcoins at Coinlab  and track the currency’s steady rise over the past month at Blockchain . We’ve seen the value go up and down today, fluctuating between $99 and $105. The new high is remarkable given that bitcoins were only worth about $13.50 at the beginning of this year. The total value of the nearly 11 million bitcoins in circulation (its ” market cap “) has also soared past $1 billion, after being at less than $50 million one year ago: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin value triples in a month to all-time high of more than $100

Solar power, white spaces bring 16Mbps broadband to towns without electricity

Microsoft White space networks haven’t exactly revolutionized Internet access in the US, but that doesn’t mean the technology can’t have a major impact in countries that lack consistent access to the Internet. The latest project showing the power of white spaces is unfolding in Kenya, where a solar-powered network is bringing the Internet to people who aren’t even connected to an electric grid. Microsoft deployed the network last month in conjunction with Kenyan government officials. It is serving a health care clinic in Burguret, a primary and secondary school in Male (that’s pronounced “mah-lay”), a secondary school in Gakawa, and a library in Laikipia. The network will be expanded to 20 locations in the coming months. “Down in the valley, nobody has electricity,” Paul Garnett, director of technology policy at Microsoft, told Ars. Garnett has been shuttling back and forth between the US and Kenya to get the white spaces network up and running, and he gave me an update on the project in a recent phone interview. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Solar power, white spaces bring 16Mbps broadband to towns without electricity

“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

Nvidia’s Shield tablet can stream full PC games from your Steam library as long as you’re using a GeForce graphics card. This may be the best way to stream your PC games to your tablet. Andrew Cunningham In practically every one of its major press conferences since last year’s GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia has reminded us that they want to virtualize the graphics processor. The company wants to take it out of the computer on your lap or on your desk and put it into a server somewhere without you noticing the difference. It introduced the concept at GTC 2012. Then over the course of the next year, Nvidia unveiled the actual graphics cards that would enable this tech, started selling them to partners, and also stuck them in Nvidia Grid-branded servers aimed at both gamers and businesses . The difference between Nvidia’s initiatives and more traditional virtualization is that the company’s products support relatively few users for the hardware they require. The Grid gaming server supports 24 users per server box and the Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) only supports eight or 16 depending on the model. Most virtualization is all about dynamically allocating resources like CPU cycles and RAM to give as many users as possible the bare minimum amount of power they need. Instead, Nvidia’s is about providing a fixed number of users with a pretty specific amount of computing power, thus attempting to recreate the experience of using a regular old computer. There are situations where this makes sense. Given the cost of buying and maintaining workstation hardware, Nvidia’s argument for the VCA seems more or less convincing. But I’m slightly less optimistic about the prospect for the Grid gaming server, or any cloud gaming service, really—call it leftover skepticism from OnLive’s meltdown earlier this year . Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

How whitehats stopped the DDoS attack that knocked Spamhaus offline

Unlike Unicast-based networks, Anycast systems use dozens of individual data centers to dilute the effects of distributed denial-of-service attacks. CloudFlare As an international organization that disrupts spam operators, the Spamhaus Project has made its share of enemies. Many of those enemies possess the Internet equivalent of millions of water cannons that can be turned on in an instant to flood targets with more traffic than they can possibly stand. On Tuesday, Spamhaus came under a torrential deluge—75 gigabits of junk data every second—making it impossible for anyone to access the group’s website (the real-time blacklists that ISPs use to filter billions of spam messages were never effected). Spamhaus quickly turned to CloudFlare, a company that secures websites and helps mitigate the effects of distributed denial-of-service attacks. This is a story about how the attackers were able to flood a single site with so much traffic, and the way CloudFlare blocked it using a routing methodology known as Anycast. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How whitehats stopped the DDoS attack that knocked Spamhaus offline