An anonymous reader sent in a video clip showing Sun experimenting with shoving a data center through a simulated 6.7 Earthquake. Everything stays running, but some power cords came out and some screws worked loose. It's still kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid.

snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, US organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."

Lucas123 writes "The Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that scrapes the Web every two months in order to archive web page images, just cut the ribbon on a new 4.5 petabyte data center housed in a metal shipping container that sits outside. The data center supports the Wayback Machine, the Web site that offers the public a view of the 151 billion Web page images collected since 1997. The new data center houses 63 Sun Fire servers, each with 48 1TB hard drives running in parallel to support both the web crawling application and the 200,000 visitors to the site each day."

An anonymous reader writes "id Software has released a port of the classic Wolfenstein FPS to the iPhone. Some of the coding was done by John Carmack himself, who also used original code combined with new code from Wolf3D Redux. The original code was open sourced years ago, and enthusiasts have been updating it, which made the port considerably easier for id. It's available in the iTunes App Store, but the source is available for free at id's website." Carmack also posted a detailed writeup about the decision to bring Wolf3D to the iPhone, including design notes and a few snippets of code. At the end, he says, "I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone." Kotaku got a chance to try the game at GDC: "It's not just a good reproduction of the original, it seems better."

1sockchuck writes "Making changes to Google's search infrastructure is akin to 'changing the tires on a car while you're going at 60 down the freeway,' according to Urs Holzle, who oversees the company's massive data center operations. In a Q-and-A with Data Center Knowledge, Holzle discusses Google's infrastructure, how it has engineered its system to route around hardware failures, and how it responds when something goes awry. These updates usually go unnoticed, but during system maintenance last month a software bug triggered an outage for Gmail."

bigwophh writes "Advanced Micro Devices has just revealed to the public the first video and images demonstrating live migration across three generations of AMD Opteron processors on VMware ESX 3.5, including the six-core AMD Opteron processor, often referred to as 'Istanbul.' For those unaware of the strains in a server environment, live migration of virtual machines across physical servers is crucial to providing flexibility for managing data centers. AMD is also taking this opportunity to highlight its continued, cooperative development efforts with Microsoft as evidenced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, which just also happens to be available today in beta form, that adds support for AMD-V technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing."

Popsikle writes "A few days ago one of the Web's largest hosting discussion forums was supposedly hacked via their backup servers. From the story: 'We've since learned that this very deliberate, sophisticated and calculated hack against Web Hosting Talk was carried out by gaining access to our offsite backup servers. From our backup servers, the hacker gained access to the WHT db server. The malicious attacker deleted all backups from the backup servers within the infrastructure before deleting tables from our db server. We were alerted of the db exploitation and quickly shut down the site to prevent further damage.' What sort of security do you put on your backup infrastructure? Looking at your backup solution could you be completely taken down by either someone obtaining a backup or accessing your backup servers? What sort of recommendations does everyone have for this not to happen?"

New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again. This announcement is being taken a little more seriously than the original, although some might say it is just more available wishful thinking. "Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. 'In my view [it's] a cold fusion effect,' says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. 'Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice ... you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work,' he told New Scientist. Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorize the work as evidence of 'low-energy nuclear reactions,' and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion."

suraj.sun writes "A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe. Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week's CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods (PDF) for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts. The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player."

cayenne8 writes "I want to experiment at home with setting up multiple VMs and installing sofware such as Oracle's RAC. While I'm most interested at this time with trying things with Linux and Xen, I'd also like to experiment with things such as VMWare and other applications (Yes, even maybe a windows 'box' in a VM). My main question is, what to try to get for hardware? While I have some money to spend, I don't want to, or need to, be laying out serious bread on server room class hardware. Are there some used boxes, say on eBay to look for? Are there any good solutions for new consumer level hardware that would be strong enough from someone like Dell? I'd be interested in maybe getting some bare bones boxes from NewEgg or TigerDirect even. What kind of box(es) would I need? Would a quad core type processor in one box be enough? Are there cheap blade servers out there I could get and wire up? Is there a relatively cheap shared disk setup I could buy or put together? I'd like to have something big and strong enough to do at least a 3 node Oracle RAC for an example, running ASM, and OCFS."

Mike Chapman points out this InfoWorld article, according to which you shouldn't immediately expect much in the way of performance gains from Windows 7 (or Linux) from eight-core chips that come out from Intel this year. "For systems going beyond quad-core chips, the performance may actually drop beyond quad-core chips. Why? Windows and Linux aren't designed for PCs beyond quad-core chips, and programmers are to blame for that. Developers still write programs for single-core chips and need the tools necessary to break up tasks over multiple cores. Problem? The development tools aren't available and research is only starting."

narramissic writes "Researchers with security consultancy IOActive have created a worm that could quickly spread among Smart Grid devices, small computers connected to the power grid that give customers and power companies better control over the electricity they use. '[The worm] spread from one meter to another and then it changed the text in the LCD screen to say "pwned,"' said Travis Goodspeed, an independent security consultant who worked with the IOActive team. In the hands of a malicious hacker, this code could be used to cut power to Smart Grid devices that use a feature called 'remote disconnect,' which allows power companies to cut a customer's power via the network. The robustness of US power networks has been a hot-button issue after a technical glitch in 2003 caused a cascading power failure in the eastern United States and Canada that affected 55 million people."

Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"

MBCook writes "AppleInsider has an article discussing Dell's attempt to enter the smartphone market, as well as the news that the phone was rejected by carriers as too dull. The article doesn't pull punches: 'Dell's failure to successfully step from the commodity PC business into the mobile handset market should come as no surprise, as smartphones requires expertise in software platform development, consumer design savvy, and portable device engineering, all things Dell has never demonstrated any proficiency in.'"

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo's all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech's flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie's state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5" drives. LaCie's drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the $600 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

An anonymous reader writes "According to the Financial Times, scientists are building a shoal of robot fish to be let loose in the port [of Gijon, Spain] to check on the quality of the water. The fish are equipped with tiny chemical sensors capable of detecting pollutants in the water. These let them home in on the sources of hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or undersea pipelines. Modeled on carp and costing about £20,000 ($29,000) each to make, the fish are to be lifelike in appearance and swimming behavior so they will not alarm their fellow marine inhabitants."

Macworld is reporting that Apple and AT&T are being sued, again, for the lack of delivery on their 3G network. This follows a long line of other lawsuits in San Jose, San Diego, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and New York "The lawsuit charges the companies with Negligence, Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation, Violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and Other Similar State Statutes, and Breach of Contract. Dickerson is seeking to force Apple and AT&T to correct its labeling and advertising, as well as to recover compensatory, statutory and punitive damages."

An anonymous reader writes "We've all seen processor benchmarks, but how do today's enthusiast CPUs look when you account for performance per dollar? Using a smorgasbord of charts, scatter plots, and performance tests, The Tech Report attempted to single out the highest-value offerings out of 16 popular Intel and AMD processors. The results might surprise you: AMD's 45nm Phenom IIs (both triple- and quad-core) prove to be strikingly competitive with Intel's Core 2 Quads. And, on the high end, Intel's $266 Core i7-920 turns out to be a compelling step up despite the higher costs of Core i7 platforms in general."

jeroen8 writes "A Dutch guy was able to build his own solar panel in his garage using materials that were a third as expensive as the mass produced solar panels currently available on the European market. He bought his solar cells on eBay and used them to create his own panel. His output price is only 1.20 Euro per Watt Peak (Wp). This makes you wonder if we are paying too much for mass-produced solar panels, which should, in theory, be a lot less expensive than something you create in your garage."

An anonymous reader writes "Home directory encryption has been available on Linux for a while now, and it is definitely a smart, useful feature as it is not usually necessary to encrypt the entire drive, just the private documents and software profiles in the home directory. Windows is getting better about keeping everything that needs to be private in the user's home folder. Is there a similar solution for Windows to securely, and preferably transparently, encrypt the home directory only? (Preferably open source so that the code is available for peer review)."