JetLib News

Lucas123 writes “After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies’ websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop’s $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia’s government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns.”

Source: Northrop Grumman Says ‘I’m Sorry’ For Virginia IT Outage

neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world’s second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC:
“HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP’s demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. … Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are ‘much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don’t have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,’ he told BBC News. ‘Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don’t think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.’”

Source: HP Backs Memristor Mass Production

aarondubrow writes “Three years ago, researchers from Caltech and The University of Texas at Austin came together to create a computational tool that could model the Earth and answer the most pressing questions in geophysics: What controls the speed of plates? How do microplates interact? How much energy do the plates generate and how does it dissipate? Using a new geodynamics software package they developed, the researchers have modeled plate motion with greater accuracy than ever before. The project is also a finalist for the Gordon Bell Prize — high performance computing’s Oscar — at this year’s SC10 conference.”

Source: Solving an Earth-Sized Jigsaw Puzzle

angry tapir writes “Late last week an Australian court issued an injunction against a handful of retailers selling or importing hardware — commonly known as ‘mod chips’ — that allows unauthorized software to run on Sony’s PlayStation 3. The court also required that the four parties that were the subject of the injunction actually hand over to Sony any PlayStation modchips they have. Sony’s PlayStation 3 mod chip lawsuit could be just the first of many such cases in Australia, according to a lawyer who defended a client against Nintendo in a similar case earlier this year.”

Source: Australian Crackdown On Console Modchips Likely To Continue

snydeq writes “InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman reports on the future of mobile security — one that will see a significant rise in exploits as valuable information increasingly migrates to mobile devices. To date, sandboxing and code-signing have helped make mobile OSes relatively secure, when compared with their desktop brethren. But as devices store more valuable information than email, they will become more enticing to hackers currently breaking into Windows PCs. And the biggest bulls-eye appears to be on Android, in large part because its architecture is most like that of the desktop PC but also because there are so many variants in use — too many for Google or the carriers to patch securely. And as the PDF-jailbreak vulnerability showed, sandboxing has its limits when it comes to securing the browser — the most likely point of entry for exploits not due to the rise of extensions, helper objects, and plug-ins on the mobile Web.”

Source: Your Smartphone Is Safer Than Your PC — For Now

jason-za writes with this quote from a Google announcement:
“People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean — here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day — mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta) — an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.”

Source: GMail Introduces Priority Inbox

webmink writes “The MPEG LA seem unwilling to explain why they have extended their ‘free’ H.264 streaming video policy now. This article unpacks the history of MPEG LA and then suggests the obvious — it’s all because of WebM — and the worrying — maybe it’s preparing the ground for opening a third front in the patent war against Google.”

Source: ‘Free’ H.264 a Precursor To WebM Patent War?

An anonymous reader writes “Much fanfare has been made about manned missions to moons and planets, but little has been done about travel to the asteroids — until now. NASA is working on plans for a trip to the asteroids by 2025. This type of mission has great potential for positive economic return based on the fact that no effort has to be spent on getting in and out of a distant planet’s gravity well. Yes, we should go to the planets, but we should master mining the asteroid belt for resources first because it is easiest. What do you think?”

Source: The Best Near-Term Future of Space Exploration?

adeelarshad82 writes “The bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say HP sniped the auction at the last minute — to the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR. HP’s not-so-subtle efforts to pull the company away from a preliminary merger agreement with Dell — a $1.15-billion arrangement announced August 16 — took three successive bids to reach an ultimate conclusion. The final acquisition cost of $2 billion, confirmed by 3PAR late Friday, represents a price of $30 per share of 3PAR stock. That’s triple the closing price of the company’s stock before Dell’s initial offer was made public, and more than double after.”

Source: HP Snaps Up 3PAR For $2 Billion

sciencehabit writes “Responding to a court order issued a week ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Friday ordered intramural researchers studying human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to shut down their experiments. NIH’s action — probably unprecedented in its history — is a response to a preliminary injunction on 23 August from US District Judge Royce Lamberth. The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos.”

Source: NIH Orders Halt To Embryonic Stem Cell Research