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Businesses

Submission + - The Green Grid helps IT to save money and power

Submitted by squishylimbs
squishylimbs writes: A new industry group called The Green Grid is made up of Intel, AMD, and other big tech firms, and it's trying to make the data center more efficient. Why? Because they claim that current servers are wasting almost 35 percent of their power through power conversion alone.

From the article: "Electricity is being wasted at an alarming rate by most current servers. A typical 2U server with dual processors runs on a 450W power supply. Of that, 35 percent (160W) is lost just in the power conversion process inside the machine. This doesn't just cost money for a bit of wasted power; it also costs money for the additional cooling required to keep the datacenter at a constant temperature, and it limits the total number of servers that can be installed in a datacenter due to power constraints."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Boston Bomb-Squad Strikes Again

Submitted by Brian
Brian writes: Boston Police discover (and destroy) the latest pseudo-threat. This time it's not an animated LED sign, but something far, far more nasty — A Traffic Counter. You know, the little boxes that the city (!) places on a roadside to measure the number of cars that pass in a given amount of time. Wow.

Link
via BoingBoing.
The Matrix

Submission + - NY Fed Paper examines IT effect on productivity

Submitted by li'l opie
li'l opie writes: While early studies on US productivity gains in the mid 1990s concluded that "IT was relatively unimportant", the latest report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York states it is "now widely recognized that information technology (IT) was critical to the dramatic acceleration of U.S. labor productivity growth in the mid-1990s." Brought to you by recently more productive "who knew?" department. Link to the paper-> http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/s r277.pdf Are we there yet?
Software

Submission + - MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility

Submitted by RulerOf
RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.
Networking

Submission + - LimeWire Breaks Vow of Silence

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LimeWire has been very quiet since it was sued by the music industry. However according to Slyck news, they have broken their silence to address several compatibility issues with Microsoft Vista. Although problems remain, this news proves they are indeed still working on the LimeWire project despite the RIAA lawsuit.
Communications

Submission + - Is statewide Wi-Max possible?

Submitted by Philetus
Philetus writes: While many politicians seem dead set on shutting down or locking off parts the Internet, is it possible that one Deep South state could provide broadband wireless access to all of its residents? That's the pledge of a new bill that was introduced in the South Carolina Statehouse this week.

From the article:
"Toward that end, (Dwight) Loftis, House Speaker Bobby Harrell and others have introduced a bill, H. 3569, that would create the S.C. Wireless Technology and Communications Commission, a body tasked with implementing a statewide wireless broadband network, possibly as early as late 2008."

Is this another case of politicians getting their tubes mixed up, or is a statewide wireless network possible?
Microsoft

Submission + - Ballmer To India: Cut Piracy, Create 50,000 Jobs

Submitted by Pranjal
Pranjal writes: In an interview in Tuesday's edition of the Times Of India, Ballmer says piracy is having "a huge negative impact" on economic growth in India. He also cites an unnamed study indicating that 70% of all software used in the country is pirated. Reducing that number by 10% would lead to the creation of 50,000 new jobs in India, Ballmer says in the interview. InformationWeek.com has a commentary on the news item — "The concern, of course, is that a larger Microsoft presence in India would come at the expense of programming jobs in the U.S. Microsoft employees in Redmond may be hoping that India doesn't take its piracy problem too seriously — it may be the best job protection they have."
Google

Submission + - Google, meet Uncle Sam

Submitted by
InternetVoting
InternetVoting writes: "Looks like Google is trying to increase its stake in government and military operations. At a meeting of about 200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members Google pitched enhanced versions of Google Earth; search engines that can be used internally by agencies; and the new Google Apps. From the article:
"Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community. Already, agencies use enhanced versions of Google's 3-D mapping product, Google Earth, to display information for the military on the ground in Iraq and to track airplanes that fight forest fires across the country.""
Movies

BitTorrent Video Download Store Falls Flat 195

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the working-as-intended dept.
seriously writes "We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how usable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM: 'Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.'"
The Internet

Submission + - We did domain registrars, now how about hosting?

Submitted by wwphx
wwphx writes: As a result of the GoDaddy nastiness and our domain registrar bash, I created my newest domain at NearlyFreeSpeech.net. My annual contract is coming up with my current hosting service, and I just found out that they may be going out of business, so I need a new host. I'm looking for a linux-based host that offers cPanel, PHP, MySQL, the Fantastico suite, 10 gig of transfer (I rarely use more than 1) and 500 meg of storage for a reasonable price (OK, cheap price: $5 a month or less). I'm running four or five domains now and near future. I've looked for hosting comparisons that run down the features, but what I've found isn't really useful or adequate. I'm also wanting a host that "does no evil". Any suggestions?
Security

Submission + - Open vs. Closed: Security

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "ACM Queue has an article investigating how open- and closed-source systems differ in terms of security. "Open source tends to do badly from the perspective of 'days of risk,' where one counts the time between the disclosure of a vulnerability and an 'approved' fix." but "When using a closed source product, the user is left entirely at the mercy of the code developer in terms of functionality changes or security patches." "The cases where one is clearly better than the other are few and far between. Most software sits somewhat uncomfortably between the two.""
Software

How Open is Open Source Really? 151

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the buzzwords-and-the-companies-that-kill-them dept.
jg21 writes to tell us that several industry leaders have chimed in with a response to Nat Torkington's recent piece "Is 'Open Source' Now Completely Meaningless". In the original piece Torkington raised the question of whether the term "open source" had lost any meaning because of companies that use the label yet largly restrict user interaction. Sun's Simon Phpps chimed in by stating: "I see open source as a term relevant to the way communities function and I'd support the reunification of the terms 'Free' and 'open source' around the concept of Free software being developed in open source communities. On that basis it's not dead."

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