If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today

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Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.

via If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today | PCWorld.

The key punch isn’t the only massive accessory in Sparkler’s arsenal. The 402 also links to an IBM 514 Reproducing Punch, which has been broken for three years. When it works properly, the 514 spits out punched “summary cards,” which typically contain the output of the 402’s operation (such as sum totals) for later reuse. Sparkler stores all of its punched data cards–thousands and thousands of them–in stacks of boxes.

Inside Google’s Software-Defined Network

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The concept of software-defined networking has captured the attention of network engineers and the trade press, but very few examples of a live SDN implementation exist. One of those few is Google. The search giant presented details about its SDN network at the 2013 Open Networking Summit. Let’s take a look.

via Inside Google’s Software-Defined Network – Network Computing.

Newegg nukes “corporate troll” Alcatel in third patent appeal win this year

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At trial in East Texas Cheng took the stand to tell Newegg’s story. Alcatel-Lucent’s corporate representative, at the heart of its massive licensing campaign, couldn’t even name the technology or the patents it was suing Newegg over.

via Newegg nukes “corporate troll” Alcatel in third patent appeal win this year | Ars Technica.

This is big win #2 in recent times for Newegg.  Here’s their win against the shopping cart patent.

How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon

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Borg is a way of efficiently parceling work across Google’s vast fleet of computer servers, and according to Wilkes, the system is so effective, it has probably saved Google the cost of building an extra data center. Yes, an entire data center. That may seem like something from another world — and in a way, it is — but the new-age hardware and software that Google builds to run its enormous online empire usually trickles down to the rest of the web. And Borg is no exception.

via Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

At Twitter, a small team of engineers has built a similar system using a software platform originally developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. Known as Mesos, this software platform is open source — meaning it’s freely available to anyone — and it’s gradually spreading to other operations as well.

New Skype malware spreading at 2,000 clicks per hour makes money by using victims’ machines to mine Bitcoins

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To avoid this threat and others like it, don’t click on random links you receive on Skype. You’ll be doing yourself a favor, helping stop the spread of malware, and ensuring criminals get a smaller pay day.

via New Skype malware spreading at 2,000 clicks per hour makes money by using victims’ machines to mine Bitcoins – The Next Web.

At least it’s just bitcoin mining and not stealing credentials.  This is why I always have three performance monitors on my dashboard; CPU usage, bandwidth, and memory.  With this piece of malware you would immediately see a problem because the CPU monitor shouldn’t be full of color.  Then simply take the PC offline and do some investigation or bring it to someone.  On Windows machines there’s Perfmon to look at these performance monitors.  Just like a car has its fuel and temperature guages, computer users would be far more secure getting used to performance monitor guages.  I often wonder why distributors don’t display these somewhere as a default option much like they have for the clock.

Intel’s Haswell Takes A Major Step Forward; Integrates Voltage Regulator

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Haswell incorporates a refined VRM on-die that allows for multiple voltage rails and controls voltage for the CPU, on-die GPU, system I/O, integrated memory controller, as well as several other functions. Intel refers to this as a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), and it apparently eliminates voltage ripple and is significantly more efficient than your traditional motherboard VRM. Added bonus? It’s 1/50th the size.

via Intel’s Haswell Takes A Major Step Forward; Integrates Voltage Regulator – HotHardware.

How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop

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Basically, as far as we can surmise, Hansen took a series of photos — and then later, realizing that his most dramatically situated photo was too dark and shadowy, decided to splice a bunch of images together and apply a liberal amount of dodging (brightening) to the shadowy regions. For what it’s worth, Hansen claims that the light in the alley was natural — and to be fair, sometimes magical lighting does occur. I think most of you will agree, though, that the photo simply feels fake — there’s just something about the lighting that sets off a warning alarm in your brain. As for why World Press Photo didn’t forensically analyze the photo using freely available, advanced, accurate analysis tools such as FourMatch or FotoForensics… who knows.

via ExtremeTech » How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop.

Open Compute to open source high-end network switches

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That said, many high-speed switches today use BSD Unix as their basis. While many say that the OCP is starting with a “clean sheet of paper”, the ultimate goal of the project seems to be to give datacenter administrators a “bare metal network switch”. I think it’s likely that BSD will lie at its heart. After all, why reinvent the wheel?

via Open Compute to open source high-end network switches | ZDNet.

Vyatta.org Community

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The free community Vyatta Core software(VC) is an award-winning open source network operating system providing advanced IPv4 and IPv6 routing, stateful firewalling, IPSec and SSL OpenVPN, and more. When you add Vyatta to a standard x86 hardware system, you can create an enterprise grade network appliance that easily scales from DSL to 10Gbps. Vyatta is also optimized to run in VMware, Citrix XenServer, Xen, KVM, and Hyper V, providing networking and security services to virtual machines and cloud computing environments. Vyatta has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times, has a community of hundreds of thousands of registered users and counts dozens of fortune 500 businesses among its commercial customers.

via Welcome to Vyatta.org | Vyatta.org Community.

On this site, you’ll find all the downloads, tools, documentation, and community resources to help you get up and running with your own Vyatta-based system. Ask questions in the Forums. Propose new features and vote on existing proposals. Participate and have fun. We have been working together with our community for over five years to continue to enhance the world’s leading software-based network OS.

The British ‘Atlantis’ is mapped in detail

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The camera uses high frequency sound and acoustic lenses to refract sound waves and create film footage without light. The technology is usually reserved for creating a fly-by of sunken ships, but it has now picked up the wreckage of the former trading hub in astonishing detail. In addition, old naval navigation charts helped in the tracking and mapping of where the former coastline stood.

via The British ‘Atlantis’ is mapped in detail | Ars Technica.

Meanwhile in Brazil, the discovery of a large lump of granite rock 1,500km (932 miles) off the coast of Rio de Janeiro has led to claims that the real Atlantis has been discovered.