This is a wonderful, inspiring and intimidating video all at the same time.
Did you know that China is on its way to being the largest English speaking country in the world. While we struggle with teaching English in this country all other countries are moving to English to better COMPETE with us.
Sun is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM’s Blue Gene courtesy of a US$59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design.
The design provides 21 million floating point operations per second, potentially reaching 2 petaflops. IBM already has a 3-petaflop version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the number two spot.
Sun’s Constellation will be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, alongside other supercomputers, and is a Linux cluster system, to be known as Ranger. It will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD’s forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores.
The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB/sec and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire.
The benefit of a big switch is that inter-switch cables –needed if smaller switches were used — can be dispensed with, saving a lot of money as it’s cheaper to build one big switch than link several smaller switches. Six times fewer cables are needed, in fact. Sun also says that the processors get a standard latency for data access this way.
It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores.
Using a credit card at a gas station could pose more of a risk for data theft than shopping online. Point-of-sale terminals have emerged as a weak link in the security chain, according to a Gartner Inc. analyst.
When a card is swiped, point-of-sale (POS) terminals often collect and store the data held in the magnetic stripe on the back of a credit card, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst. Retailers are often unaware that their POS applications collect so much information.
In the hands of sophisticated hackers and counterfeiters, the data collected from the magnetic stripe is enough to create a replica card. “It’s almost more dangerous to go to the gas station than it is online,” Litan said at Gartner’s Identity and Access Management Summit in London on Monday. “The data is just sitting there. No one even thought about what data is on a POS controller.”
Retailers’ network configurations are partly to blame. Many are using the Internet to transmit data in place of dial-up networks, and many have incorporated wireless access points into their networks using WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), Litan said, which is not considered a strong form of encryption.
Hackers lurk in parking lots looking for weak networks to penetrate. Since the POS terminals are linked via IP, once a hacker has accessed a network they can try out neighboring IP addresses until they locate a store of data, Litan said.
Data breaches that occur offline are common. Of 160 breaches investigated for one major credit card brand, 128 took place in the brick and mortar world where the card was physically present for the transaction, rather than being used online or over the telephone, according to Gartner.
Can you engrave a blank aluminum panel with a black finish in order to end up with silver letters on a black background?
Brad Laverne II, Toyota Motor Sales USA
Brad:
You definitely can engrave the BL/HBL series panels. The black anodized finish on the aluminum is the best choice for this application. The BL series is the flanged panel made of 16 gauge aluminum, while the HBL series is the flat panel made from 11 gauge aluminum. Both have the same anodized finish.
Example of panels that will work can be found here:
Just one day after the management shake-up at Yahoo, the company’s board was called on to make a decision that had nothing to do with the resignation of Terry S. Semel as chief executive or the appointment of the co-founder Jerry Yang to succeed him.
The board voted Tuesday to approve the acquisition of Rivals.com, an online network focused on college and high school sports, a deal the company plans to announce today.
The move is intended to bolster Yahoo’s position as an online destination for sports fans, where it competes with ESPN.com, Foxsports. com and others.
It is not a major acquisition. But Yahoo executives said buying another content provider underscores the company’s commitment to its media group, based in Santa Monica, Calif., whose strategy has shifted over time and whose future has been a subject of speculation since its chief, Lloyd Braun, left in December.
“We are very serious about leading in the media space,” said Scott Moore, senior vice president for news and information at Yahoo. “This deal will help us connect with the college and high school sports fan.”
Yahoo executives would not disclose the price of the acquisition, but individuals close to the company put it at around $100 million.
Hewlett-Packard Co. is developing new storage hardware that will make it easier for administrators to assign the right amount of storage to different departments in an organization, the company said.
HP yesterday announced plans for new models in its midrange EVA series of disk storage arrays at its HP Technology Forum in Las Vegas. The EVA 4100, 6100 and 8100, due later this year, feature what HP calls Dynamic Capacity Management (DCM).
Typically, when a company buys new storage capacity, it apportions it to different programs or different business functions in the organization. That can lead to the false impression that the company has used up all its storage capacity. DCM allows the storage manager to assign capacity to various departments or functions as needed and allows the system to reduce capacity assigned to departments if they’re not using it up at the rate they thought they would, HP said.
This saves companies the cost of buying more storage capacity they may not need, according to Mark Gonzalez, vice president of enterprise server and storage sales at HP.
“Perhaps you don’t have to buy as much storage as you had to before, and because of that, you use less power, use less cooling and can delay your purchases,” Gonzalez said. “What’s the most expensive storage that you’ll buy? The storage that you have to buy today.”
Gonzalez said the EVAs may carry a list price in the $35,000 to $40,000 range.
In an effort to join the movement to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions, many industry Giants have bound together for the common good.
The ambitious plan sets out an industry-wide target to cut the amount of energy computers consume by 2010. The scheme is expected to cut emissions by 54 million tonnes a year - equal to 11 million cars or 20 coal-fired power plants, company officials say.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft have all signed up to the campaign. Computers and other IT equipment have been blamed for causing as much global warming as the airline industry.
“We think we can have huge savings in terms of carbon footprint and energy costs,” said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president for Intel’s digital enterprise group.
He estimated that using energy-efficient technology would make computers about $20 (£10) more expensive and servers about $30 pricier, but these costs would be offset by lower electricity bills.
Utilities will be encouraged to offer rebates to consumers who buy the ‘green PCs’.
Google cash standing and share price should allow the Giant to continue on it’s buying spree. But when will it’s acquisitions prove that Google’s strategy is the correct one?
For years, Cisco has been the king of acquisitions in Silicon Valley, as its valuable stock and enviable market position has allowed it to feast on a steady diet of tech startups, whose products could be plugged into Cisco’s broader line of offerings.
The company was particularly prolific during the bubble, but even post-bubble, the company has made a lot of deals. So far this year, however, Google has been the number one acquirer of venture-backed startups, slightly edging out Cisco (five vs. four). The gap isn’t very big, but it definitely looks like Google is set to continue this pace and remain a major (if not the biggest) acquirer for some time.
Obviously, any company with Google’s cash and share price can afford to do a lot of deals, but the test will be whether Google proves adept at integrating these startups into its broader business.
Over the years, Cisco made integration of startups a key competency (it had to), so it could extract value out of deals that other companies couldn’t. Google’s record on this measure has heretofore been spotty. Some acquired companies have found little support inside the Google behemoth, while its most visible acquisition, YouTube, has brought about unwanted change at the company. As long as the company shows mind-boggling profits, nobody is going to question all of its purchases. But eventually, the company will have to show that it’s good at selecting and profiting from acquisitions, if it’s to continue this strategy.
Circuit City will be the next in a long past and future line of companies seeking to reduce I.T. expenditures by outsourcing certain operations. Although big savings can be expected, what is to become of its internal Information Technology employees.
Circuit City Stores Inc. CIO Bill McCorey said last week that the company moved to outsource its IT operation to IBM last year to cut costs and allow internal staff to focus on better supporting workers in the company’s retail stores.
In a keynote address at the ERIeXchange retail show here last week, McCorey said the consumer electronics retailer is still in the process of transitioning its IT operation to IBM under the $775 million outsourcing pact announced in April. The company expects to shave IT costs by 15% over the life of the seven-year pact.
In his speech, McCorey said he had to convince corporate management of the long-term benefits of outsourcing. “You’ve got to have a real understanding at the top that IT investments are not short payback, but necessary investments, especially if you’re looking to grow the business,” he said.
He said that managers concluded that the outsourcing effort would allow the company to better align the IT operation with the company’s business needs. In the long run, he said, outsourcing the primary IT jobs to IBM would let the internal IT staff better focus on providing Circuit City associates working on the store floor with the “technology and tools to create the best experience for the customer.”
