causeur - Slashdot User

Could a Category 5 Hurricane Take Down East Coast Data Centers? 214

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @01:49PM from the cloud-versus-real-cloud dept.

TheNextCorner writes "With more data moving into the cloud, there is an increasing danger of data loss when one of these cloud computing data centers fails. Hurricanes pose a real threat to infrastructure located in Virginia and North Carolina, where Google, Apple & Facebook have opened large data centers. 'Where would the most damaging hit be? It's debatable, but the most detrimental hit may be in Virginia. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has one of their major centers in Northern Virginia. ... In a study involving millions of people, a third of those surveyed reported visiting a website every day that used Amazon's infrastructure. In 2011, Amazon's S3 cloud stored 762 billion objects. It's possible that Amazon's cloud alone holds an entire 1% of the Internet.' Could a category 5 Hurricane become a problem for these cloud data centers and take down parts the Internet?"

Comment Re:Yes, it does matter. (Score 1) 878

by causeur on Monday July 09, 2012 @10:32AM (#40591577) Attached to: Does Grammar Matter Anymore?

... "Butcher's sign: Try our sausages. None like them." .

"Butcher's sign: Try our sausages. None likes them." There, one fixed.

Comment General Chemistry, Linus Pauling, Dover (Score 1) 166

by causeur on Monday June 04, 2012 @01:19PM (#40210621) Attached to: Ask Slashdot. Best Online Science Course?

worked for me. $20 new.

Comment My head is spinning (Score 1) 148

by causeur on Wednesday February 08, 2012 @11:36AM (#38967191) Attached to: New Technique Promises Much Faster Hard Drive Write Speeds

or the platter is spinning 1000 times faster to achieve this throughput?

Comment Re:So how do they know if they actually wrote it (Score 1) 148

by causeur on Wednesday February 08, 2012 @11:27AM (#38967057) Attached to: New Technique Promises Much Faster Hard Drive Write Speeds

Sounds like a good fit for updating a warehouse database. Our loads are supposed to occur at night but with increased volumes they often spill over well into daytime.

Creating Electric Power From Light Using Gold Nanoparticles 77

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @12:16PM from the nanite-power-supply dept.

cyberfringe writes "Professor of Materials Science Dawn Bonnell and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered a way to turn optical radiation into electrical current that could lead to self-powering molecular circuits and efficient data storage. They create surface plasmons that ride the surface of gold nanoparticles on a glass substrate. Surface plasmons were found to increase the efficiency of current production by a factor of four to 20, and with many independent parameters to optimize, enhancement factors could reach into the thousands. 'If the efficiency of the system could be scaled up without any additional, unforeseen limitations, we could conceivably manufacture a 1A, 1V sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long,' Prof. Bonnell explained. The academic paper was published in the current issue of ACS Nano. (Abstract available for free.) The significance? This may allow the creation of nano-sized circuits that can power themselves through sunlight (or another directed light source). Delivery of power to nanodevices is one of the big challenges in the field."

Mars Images Reveal Evidence of Ancient Lakes 128

Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @11:39AM from the older-I-get-the-wetter-mars-was dept.

Matt_dk writes "Spectacular satellite images suggest that Mars was warm enough to sustain lakes three billion years ago, a period that was previously thought to be too cold and arid to sustain water on the surface, according to research published today in the journal Geology. Earlier research had suggested that Mars had a warm and wet early history but that between 4 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, before the Hesperian Epoch, the planet lost most of its atmosphere and became cold and dry. In the new study, the researchers analysed detailed images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently circling the red planet, and concluded that there were later episodes where Mars experienced warm and wet periods."

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