A Look At the Workings of Google’s Data Centers
Original post provide by Slashdot: ITDoofus brings us a CNet story about a discussion from Google’s Jeff Dean spotlighting some of the inner workings of the search giant’s massive data centers. Quoting: “‘Our view is it’s better to have twice as much hardware that’s not as reliable than half as much that’s more reliable,’ Dean said. ‘You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you’re running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day.’ Bringing a new cluster online shows just how fallible hardware is, Dean said. In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bank Of NY Loses Tapes With 4.5 Million Clients' Data
has admitted they lost a box of unencrypted data storage tapes. The tapes contained personal information for over 4.5 million people. From Computerworld: "The bank informed the Connecticut State Attorney General's Office that the tapes ... were lost in transport by off-site storage firm Archive America on Feb.
Ajax Security Tools
You'll take a look at tools and utilities that ensure that linked Web sites in applications are not on the blocked lists and which prevent hackers from altering browser functionality, defacing Web applications, and achieving malicious results. You'll find these utilities divided into three types within the article: hardening tools, Firefox tools, and Firefox add-ons."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Persian Calendar With Navigation In Month And Year
Package: Persian Calendar With Navigation In Month And Year Summary: Display Persian month calendars Groups: HTML, Time and Date Author: S.Mohammad Salehi Description: This class can be used to display Persian month calendars. It can display an HTML table with the current month of the Persian calendar.
Gartner Reveals Top 10 Technologies For Next Four Years
Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm's apps. With no need to touch a box, there will be no need to have the IT staff co-located with the boxes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When Yahoo! Says Cloud, It Means A Freakin' Big Cloud
Financial terms were not disclosed. What CRL brings to the party is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, a beast that Yahoo figures has 'substantially more processors than any other supercomputer currently available for cloud research' - 14,400 of them to be precise along with 28TB of memory, 140TB of disk space, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations a second and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops.
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Microsoft Urges Windows Users To Shun Safari
benjymouse writes "The Register has picked up on a recent Microsoft security bulletin which urges Windows users to "restrict use of Safari as a web browser until an appropriate update is available from Microsoft and/or Apple". This controversy comes after Apple has officially refused to promise to do anything about the carpet bombing vulnerability in the Safari browser.
Full Disclosure And Why Vendors Hate It
He argues that vendor-only disclosure protects the vendors and not the consumer, and that vendors easily abuse this to downplay privacy concerns while continuing to sell insecure products. In contrast, he paints full disclosure as a capitalist means to keep the vendor accountable, and describes how public outcry can be one of the best motivating factors to get a vulnerability addressed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Is UML Really Dead, Or Only Cataleptic?
The author suggests UML was killed by, among other causes, greed, heavy process, and design-by-committee. Is UML really a fading technology? Is it useful beyond a whiteboard notation for designers? Is there any value in code generation?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
China's Cyber-Militia
The news in this report is the suggestion that Chinese cyber-attakers may have been involved in major power outages in the US. "Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of US companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to US government officials and computer-security experts..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Havok Releases Free Version For PC Developers
An anonymous reader writes "Havok has released the free version of its widely-used physics and animation engine (but without source code), including tools that integrate with Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya. Developers may use Havok for free for non-commercial games, middleware, and academic projects.