A New Robot Provided These Unprecedented Views Beneath Antarctica

A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology has built a new needle-like robot that can descend through ice-fields to explore the sea floor beneath —and this footage from Antarctica is the first footage it’s returned. Read more…

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A New Robot Provided These Unprecedented Views Beneath Antarctica

Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance

Thorfinn.au writes with this paper from four researchers (Jehan-François Pâris, Ahmed Amer, Darrell D. E. Long, and Thomas Schwarz, S. J.), with an interesting approach to long-term, fault-tolerant storage: As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during their whole lifetime. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we have simulated the behaviour of two-dimensional disk arrays with N parity disks and N(N – 1)/2 data disks under realistic failure and repair assumptions. Our conclusion is that having N(N + 1)/2 spare disks is more than enough to achieve a 99.999 percent probability of not losing data over four years. We observe that the same objectives cannot be reached with RAID level 6 organizations and would require RAID stripes that could tolerate triple disk failures. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance

Telegram Not Dead STOP Alive, Evolving In Japan STOP

itwbennett writes Japan is one of the last countries in the world where telegrams are still widely used. A combination of traditional manners, market liberalization and innovation has kept alive this age-old form of messaging. Companies affiliated with the country’s three mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, offer telegrams, which are sent via modern server networks instead of the dedicated electrical wires of the past (Morse telegraphy hasn’t been used since 1962), and then printed out with modern printers instead of tape glued on paper. But customers are still charged according to the length of the message, which is delivered within three hours. A basic NTT telegram up to 25 characters long can be sent for ¥440 ($4.30) when ordered online. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Telegram Not Dead STOP Alive, Evolving In Japan STOP

HP Server Killer Firmware Update On the Loose

OffTheLip (636691) writes “According to a Customer Advisory released by HP and reported on by the Channel Register website , a recently released firmware update for the ubiquitous HP Proliant server line could disable the network capability of affected systems. Broadcom NICs in G2-G7 servers are identified as potentially vulnerable. The release date for the firmware was April 18 so expect the number of systems affected to go up. HP has not released the number of systems vulnerable to the update.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HP Server Killer Firmware Update On the Loose

New French Law Prohibits After-Hours Work Emails

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes “Lucy Mangan reports at The Guardian that a new labor agreement in France means that employees must ignore their bosses’ work emails once they are out of the office and relaxing at home – even on their smartphones. Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors (including the French arms of Google, Facebook, and Deloitte), employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones – or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita. “We must also measure digital working time, ” says Michel De La Force, chairman of the General Confederation of Managers. “We can admit extra work in exceptional circumstances but we must always come back to what is normal, which is to unplug, to stop being permanently at work.” However critics say it will impose further red tape on French businesses, which already face some of the world’s tightest labor laws.” (Continues) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New French Law Prohibits After-Hours Work Emails

Spectacular blue lava flows at this Indonesian volcano

Photographer Olivier Grunewald first learned about the Kawah Ijen volcano in 2008. A sulfur mine by day, this infernal Indonesian mountain turns into a surreal alien landscape when the night comes. His pictures—taken in very dangerous conditions—are stunning: Read more…        

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Spectacular blue lava flows at this Indonesian volcano

Disable Blur Effects in iOS 7 for Easier Reading, Better Performance

iOS 7 has its fair share of annoyances , but one that a lot of people have grown to dislike is the blurry background in Notification Center, Spotlight, Control Center, and anywhere else in Apple’s app it appears. Thankfully, if you’re not a fan of that effect, or it’s just slowing down your older phone, Guiding Tech shows off how to turn it off. Read more…        

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Disable Blur Effects in iOS 7 for Easier Reading, Better Performance

Chef 5 Minute Meals are Self-Heating Go-To Power Outage Food

Canned food, crackers, MREs, beer—it’s all fun to eat for a little while when the power’s out. Eventually, though, you want actual meals to eat, and that’s when you’ll be glad you found Chef 5 Minute Meals. More »

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Chef 5 Minute Meals are Self-Heating Go-To Power Outage Food