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Google

Amazon, MS, Google Clouds Flop In Stress Tests 154

Posted by samzenpus from the dark-clouds dept.
Eponymous writes "A seven month study by academics at the University of New South Wales has found that the response times of cloud compute services of Amazon, Google and Microsoft can vary by a factor of twenty depending on the time of day services are accessed. One of the lead researchers behind the stress tests reports that Amazon's EC2, Google's AppLogic and Microsoft's Azure cloud services have limitations in terms of data processing windows, response times and a lack of monitoring and reporting tools."
Christmas Cheer

White Christmas In Antarctica 84

Posted by timothy from the plus-they-can-exploit-all-the-time-zones dept.
The idea of a white Christmas may seem magical for many of us, but Science Daily asks you to "spare a thought for a team of scientists forgoing the festive season to take part in a novel campaign being carried out in one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth to support ESA's CryoSat mission." Plenty of people cooped up in the upside-down parts seem to find good ways to amuse themselves; I am especially fond of this introduction to Condition One weather, and Cops McMurdo. If anyone is reading this down there, I hope you're having a nice holiday.
The Courts

Legal Troubles Continue To Mount For Diebold 115

Posted by Soulskill from the voted-off-the-island-with-no-recount dept.
dstates writes "The State of Maryland has filed a $8.5M claim against Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold), joining Ohio in seeking damages from the company. The claim alleges that election officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address multiple security flaws in the machines. Previously, Diebold paid millions to settle a California lawsuit over security issues in their machines. The dispute comes as Maryland and Virginia prepare to scrap the touch screen electronic voting systems they bought after the 2000 presidential election. California, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa have already switched to optical scanners, and voters in Pennsylvania are suing to prevent the use of paperless electronic voting systems in their state. Meanwhile, Artifex Software is suing Diebold for violations of the GPL covering the Ghostscript software technology used in the proprietary voting machines."
Biotech

Submission + - Inventor to help world's poorest see better (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
mpthompson
mpthompson writes: "A retired professor of physics at Oxford University, Josh Silver, is on a quest to help the world's poor see better. Intended for the poorest regions of the world where the optician to population ratio is 1:1000000, Silver has developed a pair of very inexpensive adaptive glasses which are "tuned" by the wearer to correct his or her own vision. The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane between tough outer plastic lenses, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. Some 30,000 pairs of his spectacles have already been distributed in 15 countries and next year a trial is set to begin in India which will distribute 1 million more pairs of glasses to the poor. His hope is to reach up to 100 million pairs annually and reach a billion of the world's poorest people by 2020. The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor communities are enormous, allowing people access to education and work that would otherwise be out of reach due to poor eyesight."

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