Thursday, September 15, 2011

drag2share: Public Google+ Posts Have Fallen 41 Percent. What Does That Mean? [Google+]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5840583/public-google%252B-posts-have-fallen-41-percent-what-does-that-mean

Public Google+ Posts Have Fallen 41 Percent. What Does That Mean?Either Google+ is the North Korea of social media, or things aren't going quite as well as we'd hoped. Public posting on The Hermit Network has fallen 41 percent per user from August to September, from 0.68 to 0.40.

Yes, yes, the point of the network is that posts don't have to be public. But we also knew that going in, and clearly a 41 percent drop in anything over a given month is significant.

It could be more folks are finally catching on to the benefits of non-public posting. Or that the casual, hey-what's-this-thing-that's-not-Facebook users are falling away and taking a disproportionately high percent of public posts with them. Or yes, it could also just mean there's a more linear user exodus going on.

Without numbers for private posting, we can't be sure, but something's clearly going on here. What have you guys noticed in your Circles? [TechCrunch]

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drag2share: Why Google Needs to Peep at the World's Most Efficient Data Center [Video]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5840347/why-google-needs-to-peep-at-the-worlds-most-efficient-data-center

Why Google Needs to Peep at the World's Most Efficient Data Center114. That's how many HP EcoPOD server systems it would take to power all of Google.

The problem with traditional, brick-and-mortar data centers is that they require a huge up-front investment of both time and money; they're often under-utilized; and generally cost more money and energy in terms of overhead than actual computing. All horribly inefficient, even if you don't take into account that they cost more than $15 million a year to operate on average. Modular Data Centers, on the other hand, address many of these issues with increased efficiency via smaller footprints, faster deployment, better scalability (since you're only paying for the capacity you currently need, you can add and reduce capacity more easily) and lower operating costs than their brink-and-mortar brethren.

The HP Performance Optimized Data Center 240a, more commonly known as the HP EcoPOD, is the King Kong of Mobile Data Centers—if they were the height of Scrappy Doo. It provides an extremely energy-efficient, high-performance server center with a higher power density, lower operating cost, faster deployment time and a footprint 1/10th the size of the traditional data center.

First, the EcoPOD can be up and running within 12 weeks from the time of the order—up to 88 percent faster than the average 24-month lead times of traditional centers. The entire system is modular—including integrated power, cooling, security, fire suppression, management, and monitoring suites—and it all comes pre-assembled and pretested to the customer's specs directly from the factory. Much like a pre-fab home, it's built via assembly line, which decreases production time.

Built from two, 40-foot shipping containers, the EcoPOD measures just over 45 feet long, 23 feet wide, nearly 21 feet tall, and weighs 425,000 pounds. However, within this minimal space, you can cram as many as 44 industry-standard, 50-server racks—each weighing 3,500 pounds—for a total of 2,200 servers with more than 7,000 server nodes. It can also support up to 24,000 large form factor hard drives. The EcoPOD uses dual, flywheel-based power sources—known as the CleanSource UPS, created by Active Power in Texas and valued at nearly $2 million—that combine for a maximum total of 2.3MW.

They produce average rack power densities of around 44kW and as much as 69kW under the right conditions—versus traditional centers that produce roughly 6 to 8 kW per 42U rack. And because it's so much smaller than a traditional server farm and completely integrated within itself, it requires significantly less site prep and fewer external safety systems.

To keep all this equipment from overheating and melting itself, the EcoPOD employs an advanced cooling system—Adaptive Cooling—that automatically adjusts between three ventilation modes: Free air that uses ambient air pumped in from outside whenever possible, Direct Expansion (DX) assisted (part ambient air, part A/C), or Full DX, based on the server load and environmental conditions. In Direct Expansion systems, the evaporator coil sits in direct contact with the air flow and also acts as the cooling coil. With either mode, more than 3800 cubic feet of air circulate past the servers every minute.

What's more, the EcoPOD boasts an absolutely insane PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of between 1.05 to 1.3, depending on the server load and which cooling system is active. A data center's PUE measures how much of the electricity it uses actually goes toward computing, rather than cooling or monitoring. Ideally, a center's PUE should be 1.0—all the energy the center consumes goes towards the computers (PUE=total power/IT power). Normally, a Brick-and-Mortar data center averages about 2.4—double that of the EcoPOD! Altogether, the EcoPOD server system costs a paltry $500,000 a year to operate—31 times less than a similarly powered traditional data center.

[HP (.pdf) - HP (.pdf) - Marc Hamilton - DataCenterKnowledge - Trane - The Register]

Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.


You can keep up with Andrew Tarantola, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

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drag2share: Ricoh GR Digital IV: A Fast Camera Gets Faster [Cameras]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5840594/ricoh-gr-digital-iv-a-fast-camera-gets-faster/gallery/1

Ricoh GR Digital IV: A Fast Camera Gets FasterRicoh's new GR Digital IV is stocked with the same 28mm f/1.9 lens (fast) that made its predecessor awesome and a new .2 second autofocus. (Faster.)

How much faster? Twice as fast as the GR Digital III. The key to the blazing focus speed is the hybrid AF which combines the information from Ricoh's new external autofocus sensor with the internal one. Ricoh also added a continuous AF mode that shoots 1.54 fps.

What else is new? The high-resolution three-inch LCD has been upgraded to 1.23 million dots. The sensor's been equipped with a new stabilizer to help reduce blur. And unlike most things that get faster, the GR Digital IV also got a little fatter, growing 7mm to 32.5mm wide.

Like the GR Digital III and the brand new Canon S100 this camera is a serious photographer's pocket camera. But while the S100 got some refreshed hardware, the GR Digital IV is stuck with the same lens and 10 megapixel CCD sensor—very nice but not new. At least when its available sometime soon, the GR Digital IV will come in an eye-catching limited edition white. (Don't ask why a photographer wants to be eye-catching.) No word on price. [Ricoh]

Ricoh GR Digital IV: A Fast Camera Gets Faster


Ricoh GR Digital IV: A Fast Camera Gets Faster

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drag2share: Koomey's law heckles Moore's in the post-PC world

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/15/koomeys-law-heckles-moores-in-the-post-pc-world/

Around the same time most years, (2007, 2009, 2010), someone heralds the death of Moore's law. This time it's Stanford University's Dr. Jonathan Koomey, who has found that energy efficiency roughly doubles every two years. With the rise of mobile devices, we care less if our phones and tablets can outpace a desktop and more about if a full charge will last the duration of our commute -- reducing the importance of Moore's law. Historically, efficiency has been a secondary concern as manufacturers built ever faster CPUs, but Koomey believes there is enormous room for improvement. In 1985, Dr. Richard Feynman calculated an efficiency upper limit of Factor 100 Billion -- since then we've only managed to achieve Factor 40,000. Let's just hope Quantum Computing goes mainstream before next autumn so we can get on with more important things.

Koomey's law heckles Moore's in the post-PC world originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Perm! alink Technology Review  |  sourceIEEE Computer Society (Subscription required)  | Email this | Comments

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drag2share: West Virginia's 'Quiet Zone' becomes refuge for those on the run from wireless technology

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/15/west-virginias-quiet-zone-becomes-refuge-for-those-on-the-run/

There's a 13,000-square-mile section of West Virginia known as the Quiet Zone where there's no WiFi, no cell service, and strict regulations placed on any device that could pollute the airwaves. Those unique conditions are enforced (and aided by the surrounding mountains) to protect the radio telescopes in the area from interference, and it's hardly anything new -- as The Huffington Post notes, Wired did an extensive profile of the zone back in 2004 (the area itself was established in 1958). But as the BBC recently reported, the Quiet Zone is also now serving as something of a refuge for people who believe that wireless technology makes them sick -- a condition sometimes called Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (or EHS). Those claims are, of course, in dispute by most medical professionals, but that apparently hasn't stopped folks from calling the local real estate agent "every other week or so" to inquire about a place in the zone.

[Image courtesy NRAO]

West Virginia's 'Quiet Zone' becomes refuge for those on the run from wireless technology originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Huffington Post  |  sourceBBC News  | Email this | Comments

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