In a study released Monday, researchers found a strong correlation between the percentage of votes candidates received in 2010 and 2012 House races and the percentage of tweets that mentioned the candidates’ names — whether or not those tweets were complimentary.
via Researchers Find Tweets and Votes Line Up – Washington Wire – WSJ.
For example, in its bid to seed homes with smart meters, it has found partners in utilities.
“In the end, the utility becomes a client with service providing,” Arndt said. “But, if we want that to happen, we have to partner and understand [the market] together first.”
The Hyperloop or something similar is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart. Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper. With a high enough altitude and the right geometry, the sonic boom noise on the ground would be no louder than current airliners, so that isn’t a showstopper. Also, a quiet supersonic plane immediately solves every long distance city pair without the need for a vast new worldwide infrastructure.
Microsoft Corp. plans to raise the price of the Datacenter edition of the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2012 by 28 percent, adding to what analysts call a record number of price increases for enterprise software products from Redmond.
According to licensing data sheets available for download from the Windows Server 2012 R2 Website (PDF), the price of a single license of Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter will be $6,155, compared to $4,809 today—plus the cost of a Client Access Licenses (CAL) for every user or device connecting to the server.
via Microsoft to Squeeze Datacenters on Price of WinServer 2012 R2.
In the current generation of Narus’ system, the processing systems run on commodity Linux servers and re-assemble network sessions as they’re captured, mining them for metadata, file attachments, and other application data and then indexing and dumping that information to a searchable database.
via Building a panopticon: The evolution of the NSA’s XKeyscore | Ars Technica.
However, we have reconsidered this position. We’ve been thinking about this for some time, whether it was a good idea at all. Today, another secure email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system lest they “be complicit in crimes against the American people.” We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.
The study essentially proves that, at least in the workplace, any amount of NAND memory larger than 10GB would have a limited impact on performance. Of course, data-intensive tasks like analytics or video rendering, where fresh data is being accessed all the time, would benefit from larger amounts of faster memory, but an average user is unlikely to notice the difference between SSD and SSHD.
via Seagate: Hybrid Drives Don’t Need More Than 8GB Of NAND.
Like any other new entrant into the highly competitive solar-panel market, perovskites will have difficulty taking on silicon solar cells. The costs of silicon solar cells are falling, and some analysts think they could eventually fall as low as 25 cents per watt, which would eliminate most of the cost advantage of perovskites and lessen the incentive for investing in the new technology. The manufacturing process for perovskite solar cells—which can be as simple as spreading a liquid over a surface or can involve vapor deposition, another large-scale manufacturing process—is expected to be easy. But historically, it has taken over a decade to scale up novel solar-cell technologies, and a decade from now silicon solar cells could be too far ahead to catch.
via A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap” | MIT Technology Review.
“The number of weak passwords is not surprising, as this campaign is clearly a target of opportunity and not focused on a specific target,” Bing says. “This is interesting as it marks a sea change in the tactics of attackers. In addition to drive-by exploits of unpatched Windows machines being the low-hanging fruit, attackers are learning that these blog and content management systems are often vulnerable to trivial attacks.”
via ‘Fort Disco’ Botnet Behind Attack Campaign Against Thousands Of Sites.
Last July 1, that scenario became real as the “Leap Second” bug caused many Linux servers to get stuck in a loop, endlessly checking the date and time. At the Internet’s busiest data centers, power usage almost instantly spiked by megawatts, stress-testing the facility’s power load and the user’s capacity planning.
via A Storm of Servers: How the Leap Second Led Facebook to DCIM.
What was happening? The additional second caused particular problems for Linux systems that use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their systems with atomic clocks. The leap second caused these systems to believe that time had “expired,” triggering a loop condition in which the system endlessly sought to check the date, spiking CPU usage and power draw.