Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Google

Google Confirms $600M South Carolina Data Center 144

Posted by CowboyNeal from the company-annexes dept.
miller60 writes "Google continues its furious data center building program in the Carolinas. Today the company announced a $600 million data center in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Google has already begun construction on a $600 million data center project in Lenoir, North Carolina, and is in the permitting process on another huge project in Richland County, South Carolina. Google's appetite for large tracts of land and cheap power are driving the site location process. Similar huge projects in central Washington are already transforming the tiny town of Quincy, where real estate prices have spiked, with open land fetching as much as 10 times its previous value."
Google

Submission + - Google Building 800 (yes 800) acre data center!!!

Submitted by
Bruce Taylor
Bruce Taylor writes: "The rumor has been rampant for months about a mammoth business coming to our town of 10,000. The local pols have been VERY tight-lipped. Tonight the local newspaper confirmed that Google is planning on an 800 acre site for a new project in the heart of Oklahoma. It will be a massive data center dedicated to handling Youtube video traffic. Here is the link to the story: http://www.mayescounty.com/extra/040507D.pdf Bubba Taylor Rednecks.TV"

Feed iPod takes bullet for soldier (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Portable Audio

Kevin Garrad of the 3rd Infantry Division looks to have gotten a little assistance from an unexpected source while on a street patrol in Iraq recently, when the iPod in his pocket got in the path of a bullet fired at close range, slowing it down enough that it didn't pierce his body armor. As if that wasn't a rare enough occurrence, as you can see above, the iPod in question was an HP iPod -- imagine the odds!

[Via Digg]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Google

Submission + - Tokyo Demands Youtube Play Fair

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Sometimes I think Google does more negotiating with foreign countries than the United States government. Recently, Tokyo has requested for political speeches to be pulled from the site claiming that it gave certain hopefuls an advantage over others for Sunday's election. You may recall Youtube being in trouble with more than couple countries. Is it fair that some government officials are being viewed more on Youtube than others or is it simply leveling the playing field for anyone with a message since it costs very little to put a video on Youtube? American politics seem to have embraced it either way."
Databases

Submission + - Review of Data Sharing and Visualization Websites

Submitted by VisualizationGuy
VisualizationGuy writes: Social websites are all the rage right now, and are not just hyped by the media (MySpace and YouTube in particular), but there are also large amounts of money involved. But does the social model make sense for data analysis and visualization? And will users play and interact with data the way they do with other media? Two websites were launched recently to find out: Swivel and Many Eyes. This review looks at the two sites in terms of their founders, approach, social aspects, technology, capabilities, broad appeal, and ethics.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Towards more aesthetic forms of cryptography

Submitted by
ChristW
ChristW writes: "A security expert currently working at the Philips Research lab in Eindhoven has set himself a new challenge, making encryption and decryption more aesthetically pleasing. From the introduction to his paper: "When a scientific or engineering discipline reaches a high level of sophistication, it ceases to be a purely function-oriented endeavour and acquires certain aesthetic qualities. Consider for instance robotics. The elegant and efficient motions of sleek robotic arms are delightful to watch. Another example is fractal art. The difference between a sophisticated and an immature discipline is like hearing a song instead of mere speech, reading poetry instead of mere words, seeing a sculpture instead of mere stone. Cryptography has clearly not yet reached this state of maturity. Not by a long way. Instead of being delightful, it a is messy, painstaking, boring, arduous business for all involved parties, especially for the cryptanalist. I hypothesize that when cryptography reaches a sufficient state of maturity, reading and analyzing ciphertext will be akin to submerging oneself in a profoundly poetic work of art. Cryptanalysis, even if unsuccessful, will fill the practitioner with joy, while the encrypting and decrypting parties will delight in the beautiful relationships between the plaintext and the ciphertext." See the paper on his home page for an example and his conclusion."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Boycotting Broken Gadgets

Journal by MattSparkes
I've become bored of my gadgets, because they don't seem to do what I want them to do. A few years ago I had a smart phone, which let me download and listen to MP3 tracks via bluetooth, carry files from computer to computer and lots of other tricks that were very useful. Now I have 'upgraded', and my phone does none of those things. My MP3 player looks very good, but I can't just drop MP3 files on and listen to them, and I can't sync with my work PC as well as my Mac at home. What are the option
Microsoft

Submission + - JetBlue's Windows Infrastructure Crashes

Submitted by hawks5999
hawks5999 writes: JetBlue's reservation and communication systems have been down for 5 days leaving thousands of passengers stranded and stockholders seeing red. It was almost exactly 4 years ago that JetBlue trumpeted it's reliance on Windows to help it see black. From a 2003 news.com article:

So we marched down the road of the Windows platform. We don't have any Unix; we don't have an AS/400; we don't have any mainframes — we don't have anything outside of Windows. There has been tremendous cost savings. ...everything's Windows. Every technician that works on a server works on a Windows server. Every technician working on a desktop works on a Windows desktop. That's quite a bit easier than other flavors of desktops or OS/2 or whatever else is out there.
I guess they didn't look at redundancy or reliability in their cost equation...
Programming

Submission + - Did D-Wave really demonstrate a quantum computer?

Submitted by Qubert
Qubert writes: Was D-Wave's quantum computer demo last week the real thing? Ars Technica takes a look inside the cold, black box and concludes that whatever was in there, it probably wasn't a 'pure' quantum computer: 'Jumping off the fence, we will say that we think D-Wave demonstrated a real device; however, we think their device is going to set off a debate in the physics community over where the boundary between classical and quantum computation is. At present, quantum computers are "globally phase coherent," which means that every qubit's state is entangled (and therefore correlated) with every other qubit... The D-wave system, however, is certainly not globally phase coherent, which raises the question of whether it is a quantum computer.'
Businesses

Submission + - CompUSA Gives Customer 4+ Month Run-around

Submitted by
Andy
Andy writes: "I've had an ongoing...adventure...with CompUSA's repair and customer service departments for the last four months, the short version of which is that — two years in a row — they damaged my laptop while repairing it (this second time more than once!) and are dragging their feet in responding to me and replacing the computer their service center damaged. I've tried to handle it privately for four months, but at this point, I'm running out of options and hope that Slashdot can help bring some attention to my troubles and turn the heat up on CompUSA a bit so they'll do the right thing!

In October 2005 I brought my Sony laptop to them for service, and it came back with all the case screws in the wrong places, causing physical damage to the case and a big loose gap in the front edge. Then, a year later, they again returned my laptop to me with incorrect screws, and with a wad of tape wedged between the keyboard and the cooling fan!

That started a saga, still ongoing, with more missing screws, a heat-related video problem, a damaged hinge cover, missing protective covers for the LCD's screws, and four months of broken promises, abysmal customer disservice, and lack of returned calls on all levels from the local store's tech services manager, operations manager, and GM up to the corporate manager of customer service and chief of escalation.

I've posted my story on my blog at http://www.onefromtheroad.com/index.php?cat=11 (posts are in reverse order, since it's a blog!)

Please help me spread my story, and hold CompUSA responsible for mistreating their customers like this!

— Andy

P.S.-For futher episodes of CompUSA being involved in grossly mishandling repairs, see http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=28004 5"
Censorship

Submission + - Journalist arrested for taking photo of CT Governo

Submitted by reub2000
reub2000 writes: Journalist Ken Krayeske was arrested for taking a photograph of Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell during a parade. Krayeske a pacifist, was on a list of "potential troublemakers" and his photo had been sent to cops on the parade route.

Slashdot Top Deals

Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein

Close