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Data Storage

Submission + - Direct Attached vs SATA SSD Performance Explored (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
bigwophh
bigwophh writes: "With any desktop PC architecture currently in use, whether you're plugging in an SSD or a standard spinning hard drive, at least two interfaces are at work to get the data off the drive and to the host processor. The SATA (Serial ATA) interface needs to be accommodated so the drive can be accessed via the legacy SATA command set and the SATA controller needs to be bridged to the rest of the system architecture. Bridging gives the host processor the ability to talk to an otherwise "non-native" interface (SATA) over a native one like PCI Express. An intrinsic problem with an implementation like this is that it adds latency and essentially slows things down. That said, a question lingers. Is the high performance SATA SSD as we know it today eventually going to end up on the endangered species list? This article takes a look at Intel's X25-M SSD in two and four-drive RAID 0 configurations and compares their performance to Fusion-io's ioDrive, a PCI Express-based SSD. Though the technologies are currently targeted at different markets and applications, this is definitely a case study in speed, and potential look at the future of storage on the PC."
Announcements

Submission + - Extra dimensions? Only if smaller than 3*10^-6 m!

Submitted by Vincenzo Romano
Vincenzo Romano writes: The website of the fortnightly scientific magazine Science News is reporting today an interesting article about the maximum size of any extra dimension, if any.
A team of theoretical physicists and astronomers has calculated that any hidden extra dimension beyond our familiar three-dimensional space, a world known in physics parlance as a 3-brane, must be less than 3 micrometers.
The study has been submitted online by Oleg Gnedin, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts of the Univesrity of Michigan and is based on observations on one of the oldest black holes ever found in our universe, lurking deep inside the NGC 4472 galaxy.
Basically, that black hole has not evaporated yet by the Hawking radiation on the predicted "short" short timescale, thus posing an upper limit to the size of any extra dimensions to less thab 0.003 mm.
So what? String theorists must buy better magnifying lenses if they want to prove to be right.
Privacy

Submission + - Court IP addresses not "personally identifiabl (mediapost.com)

Submitted by yuna49
yuna49 writes: Online Media Daily reports that a federal judge in Seattle has held that IP addresses are not personal information. "In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer," U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision. Jones issued the ruling in the context of a class-action lawsuit brought by consumers against Microsoft stemming from an update that automatically installed new anti-piracy software. In that case, which dates back to 2006, consumers alleged that Microsoft violated its user agreement by collecting IP addresses in the course of the updates.

This ruling flatly contradicts a recent EU decision to the contrary, as well as other cases in the US. Its potential relevance to the RIAA suits should be obvious to anyone who reads Slashdot.
Mars

Submission + - ESA and NASA establish a joint Mars exploration in (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Matt_dk
Matt_dk writes: "At the bilateral meeting in Plymouth, the executive board recommended NASA and ESA establish MEJI spanning launch opportunities in 2016, 2018 and 2020, with landers and orbiters conducting astrobiological, geological, geophysical and other high-priority investigations, and leading to the return of samples from Mars in the 2020s. The Director and Associate Administrator agreed, in principle, to establish the Initiative and continue studies to determine the most viable joint mission architectures."
Media

MediaDefender's Parent Company Joins P2P Market 40

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-both-sides dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news that ArtistDirect, the company who acquired MediaDefender, has launched another company called PiCast for the purpose of P2P video distribution. The reader says: "This is a strange twist for a company which last year set up a video-sharing site called Miivi in an attempt to entrap users uploading copyrighted content, and was caught launching a DoS attack against Revision3, which we discussed earlier this year."
Databases

6.7 Meter Telescope To Capture 30 Terabytes Per Night 67

Posted by Soulskill from the very-large-yet-very-small dept.
Lumenary7204 writes "The Register has a story about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a project to build a 6.7 meter effective-diameter ground-based telescope that will be used to map some of the faintest objects in the night sky. Jeff Kantor, the LSST Project Data Manager, indicates that the telescope should be in operation by 2016, will generate around 30 terabytes of data per night, and will 'open a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects.' The end result will be a 150 petabyte database containing one of the most detailed surveys of the universe ever undertaken by a ground-based telescope. The telescope's 8.4 meter mirror blank was recently unveiled at the University of Arizona's Mirror Lab in Tucson."
Transportation

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Spawns Real-Life Car 93

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-i'm-sure-it-will-be-affordable dept.
Car Analogy Please writes to tell us that a new car unveiled at the Paris Auto Show was modeled after the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue car. GTbyCITROËN is the first car that has been designed in tandem with a video game to then spill out onto the actual pavement. "The GTbyCITROËN is the product of a partnership built up during the creation of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Takumi Yamamoto, from Citroen and Kazunori Yamauchi from Polyphony Digital Inc, the games developer were inspired by each others industries to design a concept car for the game that then flowed further into the real-world. The game version of the car mirrors the real-world performance of the concept."
The Media

Sound Bites of the 1908 Presidential Candidates 410

Posted by kdawson from the hundred-years-of-blah-blah-blah dept.
roncosmos writes "Science News has up a feature on the first use of sound recording in a presidential campaign. In 1908, for the first time, presidential candidates recorded their voices on wax cylinders. Their voices could be brought into the home for 35 cents, equivalent to about $8 now. In that pre-radio era, this was the only way, short of hearing a speech at a whistle stop, that you could hear the candidates. The story includes audio recordings from the 1908 candidates, William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft. Bryan's speech, on bank failures, seems sadly prescient now. Taft's, on the progress of the Negro, sounds condescending to modern ears but was progressive at the time. There are great images from the campaign; lots of fun."
Education

How Do I Talk To 4th Graders About IT? 531

Posted by kdawson from the just-promise-you-won't-introduce-them-to-basic dept.
Tsunayoshi writes "My son volunteered me to give a presentation on what I do for a living for career day at his elementary school. I need to come up with a roughly 20-minute presentation to be given to 4-5 different classrooms. I am a systems administrator, primarily Unix/Linux and enterprise NAS/SAN storage, working for an aerospace company. I was thinking something along the lines of explaining how some everyday things they experience (websites, telephone systems, etc.) all depend on servers, and those servers are maintained by systems administrators. I was also going to talk about what I do specifically, which is maintain the computer systems that allow the really smart rocket scientists to get things into space. Am I on the right track? Can anyone suggest some good (and cheap/easy to make) visual aids?"

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