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Cloud

Submission + - Apple Reportedly Planning Streaming Music Service (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Apple plans on taking a big bite of the streaming-music market, according to unnamed sources speaking to The New York Times.

Those sources suggested that an Apple streaming-music service would “probably” center on an app of some kind, and link to iTunes in order to better evaluate the listener’s musical interests. In broad strokes, that would make it similar to Spotify, a streaming-music service that also requires an app. Other popular cloud-music hubs, including Pandora and Last.fm, operate primarily as browser-based services.

The Wall Street Journal, citing its own unnamed sources, indicated that any Apple streaming service would work on iOS devices such as the iPad, Macs, and “possibly on PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.” In keeping with Apple’s intense rivalry with Google, one source added, the service would not appear on Android devices."
Cloud

Submission + - Pogoplug Uses Amazon Glacier for Backup (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Amazon’s Glacier storage allows companies to archive a lot of data in the cloud. As a backup service it’s modestly priced ($0.01 per Gigabyte per month) and durable, but any data stored in its vaults can take hours to retrieve.

But that’s not stopping a smaller company, Pogoplug, from using Glacier as the basis for its own cloud storage service aimed at individuals and SMBs (small and midsize businesses). Because Pogoplug stores data locally in addition to mirroring it in the cloud, the service can rely on Amazon’s infrastructure for backup while sidestepping Glacier’s epic data-retrieval times."
HP

Submission + - HP, Intel to Power World's Greenest Data Center (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been selected to power a new petascale HPC system, designed to be the world’s most energy efficient, which will reside at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

And there’s a nifty energy-saving twist, too: Like the SuperMUC—Europe’s most powerful supercomputer—the NREL HPC system will use warm water to cool the servers. That water will then be transported to the ESIF offices and lab space, where it will serve as the primary heat source. Excess heat can also be exported to adjacent buildings and other areas of the NREL campus.

The $10 million HPC system will reside at the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF), currently under construction on the Golden, Colorado, campus. The Alliance for Sustainable Energy operates NREL on behalf of the Department of Energy."
Data Storage

Submission + - Will Baidu's Data Center Be the World's Largest? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Chinese social networking giant Baidu said this week that it will spend a massive 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) on a cloud-computing center in China, potentially one of the largest investments ever for a data center.

Baidu is essentially is the Google of China, enhanced even further with the Wikipedia-like Baidu Baike online encyclopedia. In September 2011, Baidu ranked 6th overall in the Alexa Internet rankings, according to Wikipedia. All that traffic requires a massive infrastructure investment, and the Chinese company appears ready to make it.

Baidu touted the investment at a conference this week at its Baidu Technology Innovation Forum in Beijing, without disclosing specifics such as an estimated date of completion. It also announced a mobile browser and a version of the Android operating system."

Submission + - Amazon Debuts Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Fire HD (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Amazon used a Sept. 6 event in California to debut a range of products, including a backlit Kindle e-reader with a higher-resolution screen, an updated Kindle Fire, and the new Kindle Fire HD in two screen sizes.

First, Bezos showed off a new version of the Kindle e-reader, the Kindle Paperwhite, complete with a backlit, higher-resolution screen (221 pixels-per-inch and 25 percent more contrast, according to Amazon). The device weighs 7.5 ounces and is 9.1mm thin; battery life is rated at eight weeks, and the screen brightness is adjustable.

He then showed off the updated Kindle Fire, before moving to the Kindle Fire HD, which features a choice of 7-inch or 8.9-inch screens, dual stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus, two antennas for better WiFi pickup, and a Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 processor (which Bezos claimed could out-perform the Tegra 3).

The Kindle Fire HD’s 7-inch version will retail for $199 and ship Sept. 14, while the 8.9-inch version will cost $299 and ship Nov. 20. An 8.9-inch, 4G LTE-enabled version with 32GB storage will be available starting Nov. 20 for $499, paired with a $49.99-a-year data plan."
Open Source

Submission + - Countly Developer Talks Mobile Analytics, Open Source (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "The Countly project provides analytics tools for mobile applications. SourceForge’s Rich Bowen recently interviewed Onur Alp Soner (Countly’s lead developer) about building Countly, and how community involvement can result in a better software platform.

According to Onur Alp Soner: "Countly server is built on top of Node.js and MongoDB. It is made up of two parts – one is the API, which is a plain Node.js server listening for read and write requests, and the other part is the dashboard which is built using Express.js. Countly is client side heavy and there are several javascript frameworks and utilities used on client like backbone, underscore, handlebars and jQuery.""
Intel

Submission + - Intel Gives Oil-Based Cooling Thumbs Up (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Chillers? Dinosaurs of the server-cooling world. Water misting? Tired. Last week, Intel gave its seal of approval to dunking a server full of electronic components in a bath of dielectric oil, lowering the PUE to an eye-catching 1.02.

Mike Patterson, senior power and thermal architect at Intel, told GigaOM that Intel submitted the servers to an independent testing lab to discover whether any of the components had been adversely affected: “[They] came back with a thumbs up that a year in the oil bath had no ill effects on anything they can see.”

The technology was developed by Green Revolution Cooling, which offers a CarnoJet system for a 90-day evaluation lease (it costs $300, plus shipping and installation). Each 13U rack can handle between 6 kW and 8 kW of heat, depending on whether the heat pulled away from the servers is exchanged via a traditional radiator or a water loop."
Facebook

Submission + - Data-Mine Your Own Facebook Data with Wolfram Alpha (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Ever wanted to mine your own Facebook data? Wolfram Alpha is offering you the chance.

Wolfram Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine.” In contrast to other search engines such as Google and Bing, which return pages of blue hyperlinks in response to queries, Wolfram Alpha offers up objective data: type in the name of a person, for example, and you might receive their dates of birth and death, a timeline, and a graph of Wikipedia page hits.

Now Wolfram Alpha's offering a new feature that can spit back years of your personal Facebook data sliced, diced, visualized and analyzed."
Microsoft

Submission + - Leak Shows What Could Be Nokia's New Windows Phone 8 Devices (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Did images of Nokia’s upcoming Windows Phone 8 smartphones leak a few days early?

That’s the question after a Twitter feed, @evleaks, posted a set of images early on Aug. 31. The first, it claimed, was of the “4.3-inch Nokia Lumia 820." While the second purported to show the “4.5-inch Nokia Lumia 920 with PureView.”

Corporate-sanctioned leaks are a fairly regular thing in the tech world, but they tend to follow well-defined patterns: a public-relations executive—wait, sorry, “unnamed source”—will email a journalist with an image of an upcoming device, for example, or a disgruntled former engineer will data-dump information onto their blog. Glossy publicity images originating from a new, relatively unknown Twitter feed is less common, although the Twitter feed in question has leaked other images in the past."
IBM

Submission + - IBM's Predictive Analytics, Apps Power US Open (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "IBM plans on using the 2012 US Open tennis tournament to show off its prowess in everything from predictive analytics to mobile apps, trusting that a blockbuster performance at one of the world’s most prominent sporting events will let it stand out in a competitive tech landscape.

IBM’s efforts include using analytics software to digest millions of tennis-related Tweets during the course of the tournament, and using that data to determine which players are fan favorites. An interactive digital wall at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, the home of the competition, will display that sentiment analysis along with other data such as live scores.

IBM and the US Open—and professional tennis in general—go back a number of years. IBM’s Slamtracker analytics platform, developed for tournaments such as the US Open and next year’s Wimbledon, pairs real-time analysis of individual matches with historical data in order to find potentially winning patterns for players."
Intel

Submission + - Gelsinger Shoots Down EMC on ARM (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "EMC president and incoming VMware chief executive Pat Gelsinger most likely shot down any hope that the company’s storage arrays would be built around the ARM architecture.

Gelsinger, who also helped orchestrate the VMworld show in San Francisco this week, presented an Aug. 29 keynote at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, Calif. Afterward, an audience member told Gelsinger that as many as 25 percent of all servers could be shipped around the low-power ARM architecture, then asked if Gelsinger agreed with that estimate.

EMC previously shifted its product lines to Intel processors. Gelsinger told the audience member that the situation is unlikely to change, even if ARM could deliver workloads at a fraction of the power of an X86 chip."
AMD

Submission + - AMD Preps for Server Graphics Push (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "AMD named John Gustafson as senior fellow and chief product architect of AMD’s Graphics Business Unit, the former ATI graphics business unit. Gustafson, known for developing a key axiom governing parallel processing, will apply that knowledge to AMD’s more traditional graphics units and GPGPUs, co-processors that have begun appearing in high-performance computing (HPC) systems to add more computational oomph via parallel processing.

At the Hot Chips conference, AMD’s chief technical officer, Mark Papermaster, also provided a more comprehensive look at AMD’s future in the data center, claiming that APUs were the keystone of the “surround computing era,” where a wealth of data—through sensors, gestures, voice, augmented reality, metadata, and HD video and graphics—will need to be contextualized, analyzed, and either encrypted or assigned privacy policies. That, of course, means the cloud must shoulder the computational burden."
Politics

Submission + - Can Data Mining Win a Presidential Campaign? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "The Republicans and Democrats are betting big on data analytics in this current election cycle.

According to the Associated Press, Mitt Romney’s campaign has contracted consumer-analytics firm Buxton Co. to drill deep into consumer data, with the aim of digging up “wealthy and previously untapped” donors. (Romney digital director Zac Moffatt told political Website Politico as far back as June that the Romney campaign would “outsource” its data analytics rather than develop the necessary infrastructure in-house.)

In addition to hooking the digital side of their campaign to the Facebook data hose, Obama’s election managers have hired a mix of digital directors, software engineers and statistics experts. “Obama for America is looking for Quantitative Media Analysts, Analytics Engineers, Battleground States Elections Analysts and Modeling Analysts,” reads a want ad on the campaign’s Website. The goal: to create data processing pipelines, integrate new data into models, build tools, and generate reports.

In an election this close, with a rapidly shrinking number of undecided voters and contested states, a razor-thin advantage created by data analytics could mean the difference between success and victory."
Google

Submission + - Google Distances Android from Samsung Patent Verdict (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "On August 24, a California court ruled in favor of Apple in its patent-infringement case against Samsung, hitting the latter with a $1.05 billion fine. Tech pundits spent the weekend chattering about the possible repercussions of the decision, which Samsung will surely appeal. One of the biggest issues under discussion: how Apple’s victory will affect Google Android, the operating system that powers the majority of Samsung’s mobile devices, and itself a player in the patent-infringement actions shaking the tech world.

For its part, Google made every effort to create some distance between Android and the smoking ruins of Samsung’s case. “The court of appeals will review both infringement and the validity of the patent claims,” the company wrote in a widely circulated statement. “Most of these don’t relate to the core Android operating system, and several are being re-examined by the US Patent Office.”

Google didn’t end there. “The mobile industry is moving fast and all players—including newcomers—are building upon ideas that have been around for decades,” the statement continued. “We work with our partners to give consumers innovative and affordable products, and we don’t want anything to limit that.”"
Government

Submission + - Seattle Forced to Shut Off City Data Center (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "On Aug. 23, Mayor Mike McGinn of Seattle informed residents that the city would partially shut down its municipal data center for five days including the Labor Day weekend. As a result, city residents will be unable to pay bills, apply for business licenses, or take advantage of other online services.

In a Webcast press conference, McGinn isolated the issue as a failure in one of the electrical “buses” that supplies power to the data center. Because that piece of equipment began overheating, the city had to begin taking servers and applications offline to prevent overloading the system. The maintenance will cost the city $2.1 million of its maintenance budget.

A second power bus will remain operational, supplying enough electricity to power redundant systems for critical life and fire safety systems, including 911 services and fire dispatch. The city’s Web sites should also be up and running in some capacity."

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