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Government

Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability 248

Posted by timothy from the only-need-half-as-many dept.
PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.
Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."
Businesses

EA Shuts Down Pandemic Studios, Cuts 200 Jobs 161

Posted by Soulskill from the say-goodnight-folks dept.
lbalbalba writes "Electronic Arts is shutting down its Westwood-based game developer Pandemic Studios just two years after acquiring it, putting nearly 200 people out of work. 'The struggling video game publisher informed employees Tuesday morning that it was closing the studio as part of a recently announced plan to eliminate 1,500 jobs, or 16% of its global workforce. Pandemic has about 220 employees, but an EA spokesman said that a core team, estimated by two people close to the studio to be about 25, will be integrated into the publisher's other Los Angeles studio, in Playa Vista.' An ex-developer for Pandemic attributed the studio's struggles to poor decisions from the management."
Music

iPod Casualties Offer New-In-Box Bargains 324

Posted by kdawson from the new-old-stock-market dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For the last few years makers from Creative to Virgin have proclaimed their latest digital audio player to be an iPod Killer, only to watch those portables flame-out in the marketplace. This doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them, in fact some were pretty decent. They just couldn't compete under all the iPod hype. It turns out that this pattern has created a huge sub-market of new-in-the-box stock, sold for pennies on the dollar to overstock vendors who then pawn them off cheap to the public. For the price of a basic iPod Shuffle you can now acquire some well-equipped units from a few years back. Examples include the 40GB Toshiba Gigabeat F40 and AlienWare's CE-IV with external speaker system."
Biotech

Thin Water Acts Like a Solid 138

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the mash-downs dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."
Math

Six-Dimensional Space-Time Theory 330

Posted by kdawson from the let's-do-the-twistor dept.
eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is covering an interesting year-old paper that proposes an alternative six-dimensional theory of space and time. George Sparling's proposition, based on Einstein's general relativity and Elie Cartan's triality, is a twistor space (which I've only read of in Roger Penrose's latest work). The gist is that space-time is modeled not by four dimensions but by six, and that the extra two dimensions are time-like. Sparling is hoping that tests from the Large Hadron Collider will help prove his theory. The paper is heavy but the PhysOrg article summarizes it nicely."

A Sunshade In Space To Combat Global Warming 496

Posted by kdawson from the thinking-big dept.
ultracool writes, "While the only permanent solution for human-driven global warming is developing renewable energy, a temporary hack to counteract possible abrupt climate change is to build a giant sunshade in space. The sunshade would be launched in small pieces by electromagnetic launchers, conventional chemical rockets being far too expensive. The sunshade could be developed and deployed in 25 years, would last about 50 years, and would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by 2% — enough to balance heating due to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." From the article: "The [trillions of] spacecraft would form a long, cylindrical cloud with a diameter about half that of Earth, and about 10 times longer... Sunlight passing through the 60,000-mile length of the cloud, pointing lengthwise between the Earth and the sun [at L-1], would be diverted away from our planet... The sunshade could be deployed by a total 20 electromagnetic launchers [collectively] launching a stack of [a million] fliers every 5 minutes for 10 years."

Sony Reader Now Available 402

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the my-book-is-out-of-batteries dept.
Yaksha42 writes "The Sony Reader, which debuted at CES in January, is now available for purchase on the Sony website. The six inch screen uses E Ink, rather than an LCD, to display the text, reducing strain on the eye while reading. While you can buy books on Sony's Connect site, you can also load eBooks and other text onto the Reader in a variety of formats, including PDF and TXT files. It also comes with the ability to receive newsfeeds, display JPG images, and can play unsecured MP3 and AAC music files. Additional information can also be found on the Learning Center site."

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