In the end, cloud providers — many of which aim for 99.9 percent uptime, or “three nines” — are likely to offer individual companies a more reliable service than those companies attain for themselves, the CSA’s Howie says.
via Cloud Providers Work To Disperse Points Of Failure – Dark Reading.
Note that telecom typically operates under 5 nines uptime. The point of this article may be that end users need to implement their own backup plans to get higher than three 9s reliability.
Sound lasers work on a similar principle. For Mahboob and his team’s phaser, a mechanical oscillator jiggles and excites a bunch of phonons, which relax and release their energy back into the device. The confined energy causes the phaser to vibrate at its fundamental frequency but with at a very narrow wavelength. The sound laser produces phonons at 170 kilohertz, far above human hearing range, which peters out around 20 kilohertz. The entire device is etched onto an integrated circuit that’s about 1 cm by 0.5 cm.
via Pew Pew! Scientists Build Lasers Out of Sound, Call Them Phasers | Wired Science | Wired.com.
Developing an astronaut corps and conducting operations aboard a space station can dramatically transform a nation’s image both internally and externally. The creation of jobs and lucrative economic opportunities via microgravity research, development, and manufacturing can inspire a new cadre of domestic scientists and engineers while attracting the best and brightest minds from around the world to a country’s universities and companies.
via Bigelow Aerospace.
Per the information above, utilizing a Falcon 9 and Dragon, for only $51.25 million, a client can travel to the Alpha Station for two months and enjoy dominion over 110 cubic meters of volume for 60 days.
VirnetX sued Cisco, Apple, NEC and others back in 2010, and it won over $368 million from Apple earlier this year. It also has separate litigation pending against Apple and Mitel Networks.
via Cisco beats patent holder VirnetX, which sought $258 million over VPN patent | Ars Technica.
BigQuery is a cloud service that lets users analyze terabyte-sized data sets using SQL-like queries. It’s based on Google’s Dremel querying system, which can analyze data where it’s located (i.e., in the Google File System or BigTable) and which Google uses internally to analyze a variety of different data sets.
via Google BigQuery is now even bigger — Tech News and Analysis.
The idea behind the Internet Bad Neighborhood concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones).
via Internet bad neighborhoods – UTpublications.
This is a good start in developing some kind of IP blacklist.
According to the email, some suspicious activity was detected by NIST firewalls following which steps were taken “to block the unusual traffic from reaching the Internet.”
Its existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be.
via Physicists Say They Have Found a Higgs Boson – NYTimes.com.
Only one day after Dulles-based telecommunications company OpenBand filed a second lawsuit against two supervisors and the board’s of two of the Loudoun homeowners’ associations it serves in response to denial of its franchise agreement application, the Federal Communications Commission issued a statement claiming the company’s telecommunication contracts should not be upheld.
Optical chip-to-chip connections will definitely be a factor in Cisco’s next-generation ASICs, and the company already has the technology working in the lab, Ward told Light Reading.
via Light Reading – Cisco Goes Inside With Silicon Photonics.