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Hardware

Submission + - Data Centers Springing Up in Old Chip Fabs (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by miller60
miller60 writes: A growing number of former semiconductor fabs are becoming server farms. A data center company will convert a former fab near Dallas into a massive data center that will offer between 700,000 and 1.4 million square feet of server space. The company, QTS, followed a similar path with a huge former Qimonda facility in Richmond. In Silicon Valley, Facebook's servers live in an old Seagate plant converted by Fortune Data Centers. Up in Oregon, a former Hynix chip plant is becoming a data center. These facilities offer several attributes that make them good covnersion prospects: lots of existing power and cooling capacity, with raised floor already available in many faciltiies. Data center companies says this existing infrastructure saves them money, leaving less to retrofit.
Facebook

Submission + - Ginormous Data: The Story of Facebook's Analytics Back End (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "Forget ‘big data’ — Facebook’s data challenges are ‘ginormous,’ to quote Jay Parikh, the company’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. Everybody knows that the social networking site is also the world’s largest photo sharing service, storing some 240 billion photos, with another 350 million uploaded every day (about 7 petabytes per month). But Facebook’s vast and detailed activity logs, which are spread across huge Hadoop clusters of 100 petabytes or more, have received far less attention. This Xconomy article takes an in-depth look at how Parikh’s team manages this back end, and more importantly, how Facebook product engineers use it track the tens of thousands of A/B tests running on the front end on any given day. ‘Our top priority, beyond keeping the site up and running and fast, is enabling our product teams to move at lightning speed,’ Parikh says."
Software

Submission + - Game Closure "DevKit" for Mobile HTML5 Games is Open Source (gameclosure.com)

Submitted by
Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor writes: "Silicon Valley startup Game Closure has open-sourced their HTML5 game development toolkit. The trailer video showcases some interesting new technology. It allows game developers to write code in JavaScript on Windows, Mac and Linux desktops to rapidly create and then deploy new games on the Internet, Android, and on iOS cellphones. The source code for the entire stack is available on GitHub, including the changes to Google V8 and Mozilla SpiderMonkey."
Space

Submission + - DragonEye: 3D Laser Space Camera (pinehead.tv)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While a DragonEye LIDAR sounds like a subplot to a James Bond movie, it is what the Dragon spacecraft uses to approach and position itself to dock with the International Space Station. Laser precision comes in handy when trying to attach the 1.3-meter hatch of the Dragon to the football-field-sized space station which travels at an astounding speed of 4.71 miles per second. Once the Dragon capsule passes the R-Bar, it has to preform a series of staggered maneuvers to gradually approach the ISS Keep out Zone, a 200-meter border around the ISS, and get ready for the Canada Arm to grab it at 10-meters out.
Linux

Submission + - Valve Releases Steam For Linux Client, Celebrates With Week-Long Sale

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Valve on Thursday announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. You can download the client now for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. In typical Steam fashion, the company is celebrating the big day with a sale: over 50 Linux titles are now 50 percent to 75 percent off until 10:00AM PST on Wednesday, February 21. This means you have just under a week to take advantage, and should be plenty of time for Valve to set a new record in Steam for Linux downloads.

Submission + - Building a community-based GSM network in Mexico (rhizomatica.org)

Submitted by
ciaby
ciaby writes: "We are a small group of hackers, media makers and community organizers who's mission is to increase access to mobile telecommunications to the over 2 billion people without affordable coverage and the 700 million with none at all.
The network will be based on free/open source software (OpenBTS and OpenBSC for the GSM part), and we are currently trying to raise enough funds to get the initial equipment and begin the tests. There is a Indiegogo campaign where you can donate money. If you can't, at least spread it around!"
Microsoft

Submission + - IE standardization fading fast (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Just as Internet users in general have defected in huge numbers from Microsoft Internet Explorer over the past several years, the business world, as well, is becoming less dependent on the venerable browser. Companies that used to mandate the use of IE for access to web resources are beginning to embrace a far more heterodox attitude toward web browsers. While it hasn't gone away, the experience of having to use IE 6 to access some legacy in-house web app is becoming less common. "A lot of it has to do with the emergence of the modern web and the popularity of mobile. They have made it very different for companies to truly standardize on a browser," says Gartner Research analyst David Mitchell Smith.
Wireless Networking

Submission + - First bionic eye gets FDA blessing (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The US Food and Drug Administration today approved what it says is the first bionic eye, or retinal prosthesis, that can partially restore the sight of blind individuals after surgical implantation. pecifically the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System includes a small video camera, transmitter mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, video processing unit (VPU) and an implanted artificial retina. The VPU transforms images from the video camera into electronic data that is wirelessly transmitted to the retinal prosthesis."
Transportation

Submission + - Driver Trapped in Speeding Car at 125 mph

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Guardian reports that Frank Lecerf was driving his Renault Laguna in Northern France when the car's speed jammed at 60mph. Then each time he tried to brake, the car accelerated, eventually reaching 125mph and sticking there. While uncontrollably speeding through the fast lane as other cars swerved out of his way, he managed to call emergency services who immediately dispatched a platoon of police cars. Realizing Lecerf had no choice but to keep racing along until his fuel ran out, they escorted him at high speed across almost 125 miles of French motorway, past Calais and Dunkirk, and over the Belgian border. After about an hour, Lecerf's tank spluttered empty and he managed to swerve into a ditch in Alveringem in Belgium, about 125 miles from his home. "My life flashed before me," says Lecerf. "I just wanted it to stop." His lawyer says Lecerf will file a legal complaint over "endangerment of a person's life"."

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