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Space

EPOXI Team Develops New Method To Find Alien Ocean 42

Posted by samzenpus from the in-space-nobody-can-hear-you-swim dept.
Matt_dk writes "Astronomers have found more than 300 alien (extrasolar) worlds so far. Most of these are gas giants like Jupiter, and are either too hot (too close to their star) or too cold (too far away) to support life as we know it. Sometime in the near future, however, astronomers will probably find one that's just right — a planet with a solid surface that's the right distance for a temperature that allows liquid water — an essential ingredient in the recipe for life. Now scientists looking back at Earth with the Deep Impact/EPOXI mission have developed a method to indicate whether Earth-like extrasolar worlds have oceans."
Data Storage

SATA 3.0 Release Paves the Way To 6Gb/sec Devices 248

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has just released the new Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specification. With the new 3.0 specification, the path has been paved to enable future devices to transfer up to 6Gb/sec as well as provide enhancements to support multimedia applications. Like other SATA specifications, the 3.0 specification is backward compatible with earlier SATA products and devices. This makes it easy for motherboard manufactures to go ahead and upgrade to the new specification without having to worry about its customers' legacy SATA devices. This should make adoption of the new specification fast, like previous adoptions of SATA 2.0 (or 3Gb/sec) technology."
Medicine

New Study Finds Flu Virus "Paralyzes" Immune System 84

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-just-stunning dept.
mmmscience writes with this excerpt from Examiner.com: "A study coming out of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found that the influenza virus manages to dysregulate the immune system, allowing other infections to thrive in the body. This discovery, coming at an opportune time as the world battles the new H1N1 flu outbreak, may be the first step in understanding why the flu can cause such high mortality rates in normally healthy individuals."
Sun Microsystems

Sun Announces New MySQL, Michael Widenius Forks 306

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-cracks-me-up dept.
viktor.91 writes "Sun Microsystems announced three new MySQL products: MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster 7.0 and MySQL Enterprise Partner Program for 'Remote DBA' service providers." which showed up in the firehose today next to Glyn Moody's submission where he writes "Michael Widenius, founder and original developer of MySQL, says that most of the leading coders for that project have either left Sun or will be leaving in the wake of Oracle's takeover. To ensure MySQL's survival, he wants to fork from the official version — using his company Monty Program Ab to create what he calls a MySQL "Fedora" project. This raises the larger question of who really owns a commercial open software application: the corporate copyright holders, or the community?"
Security

Using Conficker's Tricks To Root Out Infections 117

Posted by Soulskill from the fighting-fire-with-thermometers dept.
iago-vL writes "Despite having their domain blacklisted by Conficker, the folks at Nmap have released version 4.85BETA8, which promises better detection of the Conficker worm. How? By talking to it on its own peer-to-peer network! By sending encrypted messages to a suspect host, the tools will get Conficker.C and higher to reveal itself. This curious case of using Conficker's own tricks to find it is similar to the last method that we discussed. More information from the author is available, as well as a download for the new release (or, if you're a Conficker refugee, try a mirror instead)."
Networking

The Road To Terabit Ethernet 210

Posted by Soulskill from the more-is-better dept.
stinkymountain writes "Pre-standard 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet products — server network interface cards, switch uplinks and switches — are expected to hit the market later this year. Standards-compliant products are expected to ship in the second half of next year, not long after the expected June 2010 ratification of the 802.3ba standard. Despite the global economic slowdown, global revenue for 10G fixed Ethernet switches doubled in 2008, according to Infonetics. There is pent-up demand for 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, says John D'Ambrosia, chair of the 802.3ba task force in the IEEE and a senior research scientist at Force10 Networks. 'There are a number of people already who are using link aggregation to try and create pipes of that capacity,' he says. 'It's not the cleanest way to do things...(but) people already need that capacity.' D'Ambrosia says even though 40/100G Ethernet products haven't arrived yet, he's already thinking ahead to terabit Ethernet standards and products by 2015. 'We are going to see a call for a higher speed much sooner than we saw the call for this generation' of 10/40/100G Ethernet, he says."
The Courts

Supreme Court Declines Jack Thompson Appeal 100

Posted by Soulskill from the take-the-hint dept.
eldavojohn writes "Jack Thompson was disbarred last year in Florida, putting a halt to annoying lawsuits targeting game makers and the constitutional rights of gamers. Well, he had appealed to the United States Supreme Court (scheduled to be heard last Friday) to get this overturned, but instead they declined to even hear his appeal. They wouldn't even give him the time to review his appeal, so it appears his disbarment for life stands. Florida had declined to file a response to Thompson's appeal, and it turns out they didn't need to. Sad day for Jack Thompson, but a great day for gamers everywhere." This comes shortly after Thompson was frustrated by the vetoing of some legislation he promoted in Utah.
Businesses

Submission + - Comprehensive 10 Year Review of AIG s Accounting (thejunction.net)

Submitted by
mrinternet
mrinternet writes: "AIG now stands for "arrogance, incompetence and greed" ...according to U.S. House Representative Paul Hodes (D-NH). Now it ratchets way up...

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), said AIG executives should follow "the Japanese example" by publicly apologizing and "do one of two things: resign or commit suicide."

Careful review of AIG's disingenuous past reveals exactly how we arrived at the U.S Government's financial bailout.

Step inside Ladies & Gentlemen for the main event..."
Databases

Submission + - Brian Aker: What Happens to MySQL if IBM Buys Sun? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by
blackbearnh
blackbearnh writes: "With the industry all abuzz about the possibility of IBM buying Sun Microsystems, its easy to forget that Sun owns MySQL, which means that IBM would end up the owner of the popular Open Source database. O'Reilly was planning to interview him anyway for the upcoming MySQL Conference, but with the breaking news about the IBM buyout, they couldn't resist asking him to speculate on what life would be like under Big Blue's control."
IBM

Submission + - IBM to Cut US Jobs, Send Work to India

Submitted by smudge
smudge writes: Even though IBM had record profits in 2008 and has already had a resource action for 1Q09 they are doing it again. According to the Wall Street Journal, IBM appears to be slashing global services jobs in the United States while giving some of that work to IBM global services staff in India. Read about it here and here and here and lots more. Didn't IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano tell President Obama we all need to work at keeping jobs in the US?
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Build your own open source Twittering power meter (adafruit.com)

Submitted by
ptorrone
ptorrone writes: "Open source hardware company "Adafruit Industries" has released a "Tweet-a-watt" kit. It's an open source power monitoring kit that mods an off the shelf power meter which can "tweet" (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed & Cumulative Killowatt-hours to your Twitter account, Google App Engine, Facebook, IRC, whatever... They recently won the "GreenerGadget" design compition and have now released an open source hardware kit."
Government

Submission + - County Attorney says email not a "public recor 1

Submitted by couchslug
couchslug writes: In an attempt to block FOIA access to possibly compromising emails, Sumter County, SC attorney Jonathan Bryan is contending that electronic mail not printed out is not a "document". ""In my opinion, e-mail is a series of the numerals '1' and '0' in electronic format. I will acknowledge that once e-mail is printed on paper, then it becomes a document and potentially a public record," Bryan wrote. "However, I am not willing to concede that electronic media which require a computer and certain software in order to be deciphered constitutes a document." The squabble is over the medical costs of a bank robber shot by police (Sumter has the fifth highest metro area crime rate in the country) with the county suing the city over his medical costs. http://www.theitem.com/article/20090320/ITNEWS01/703209929
The Internet

Submission + - Internet Archive Moving Into A Blackbox (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by
1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: "The Internet Archive is moving into a Blackbox. Sun Microsystems says more than two terabytes of data from the digital archive of Internet pages will now be housed in a Sun MD (Blackbox), a 20-foot shipping container packed with Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" storage units. The Internet Archive previously housed its data in an enclosure known as a Petabox, which is seen as a predecessor to the recent surge in commercial data center containers."

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