Week in Review: No Quick Convalescence for Stock Markets

This post is a guest contribution by Prieur du Plessis, writer of the Investment Postcards from Cape Town blog. Financial markets witnessed another roller-coaster week as renewed concerns about the global...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 2:22 pm

Opening Quantum Computing To the Public

director_mr writes "Tom's Hardware is running a story with an interesting description of a 28-qubit quantum computer that was developed by D-Wave Systems. They intend to open up use of their quantum computer to the public. It is particularly good at pattern recognition, it operates at 10 milliKelvin, and it is shielded to limit electromagnetic interference to one nanotesla in three dimensions across the whole chip. Could this be the first successful commercial quantum computer?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Jul 2008 | 1:15 pm

Typhoon nears Taiwan, markets to close Monday

TAIPEI (Reuters) - A typhoon in the Pacific Ocean with wind gusts of 173 kph was on course to hit Taiwan late on Sunday, prompting local governments, including Taipei, to cancel work and...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 12:24 pm

VIA Releases 800 Pages of Documentation For Linux

billybob2 writes "VIA has published three programming guides that total 800 pages in length and cover their PadLock, CX700, and VX800/820 technologies. The VIA PadLock provides a random number generator, an advanced cryptography engine, and RSA algorithm computations. The VX800 chipset was VIA's first Integrated Graphics Processor, while the CX700 is a System Media Processor designed for the mobile market. This is another step in VIA's strategy to support the development of Free and Open Source drivers under Linux, which comes pre-installed on VIA products such as the Sylvania NetBook, HP Mini-Note, 15.4" gBook, gPC, CloudBook, Zonbu, and VIA OpenBook. Earlier this week, VIA hired Linux kernel developer and GPL-Violations.org founder Harald Welte to be VIA's liason to the Open Source community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Jul 2008 | 12:13 pm

Whitfield Hopes for Piece of Volkswagen Pie

By Charles Oliver, The Daily Citizen, Dalton, Ga. Jul. 27--Tennessee reportedly provided some $500 million in tax breaks and other incentives to Volkswagen to build its only U.S. assembly plant and manufacturing headquarters in Chattanooga.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

OPINION: Yard Shirk: Soaring Gas Prices Could Make Laxness a Virtue, Liberate Americans From Their Lawns

By Linda Brinson, Winston-Salem Journal, N.C. Jul. 27--When we set out to build our house in the Stokes County woods, we didn't intend to have a lawn. That was the 1970s. We wanted to live a simpler life, closer to nature.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

EDITORIAL: Drill, Don't Tap

By The Lima News, Ohio Jul. 27--Gas fell to a "reasonable" $3.58 a gallon last week. Still, few consumers expect any sort of long-term relief from prices that recently topped $4 a gallon. The U.S.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

Preserving Deer Creek Valley: Thousands of Acres Marked for Protection From Development

By Mary Gail Hare, The Baltimore Sun Jul. 27--On the wall maps in the county's land preservation office, the color green marks the nearly 45,000 acres that are permanently safeguarded from development. "I want to make my map greener," said William D.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

Black Drum a Rare July Find

By Sue Cocking, The Miami Herald Jul. 27--TITUSVILLE -- A strange thing happened this summer in the Indian River north of Titusville. And when the word got out, lots of people sought to take advantage of it -- including me.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

Pair Wanted for Questioning Found in SLC

By Melinda Rogers, The Salt Lake Tribune Jul. 27--A California woman who disappeared under suspicious circumstances last week was found alive in Salt Lake City and now faces extradition in connection with the possible murder of her husband.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

Historic Burial Ground Gets Cleanup

By Tim Donnelly, The Island Packet, Hilton Head Island, S.C. Jul. 27--HARDEEVILLE --At 120, Geneva Simmons must have kept herself in pretty good condition until her death in 1925. Her burial site at Purrysburg Cemetery, however, wasn't so lucky.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan., Boomer Girl Diary Column: Trendy Beauty Treatment Sounds Fishy

By Cathy Hamilton, Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan. Jul. 27--No matter how hard I try, I can't get the visual of feet-eating fish out of my head.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

County Unit to Monitor Shoreline: Police, Fire to Share Security Duty on Boat

By Justin Fenton, The Baltimore Sun Jul. 27--The county Police Department has announced the creation of a marine operations unit that will help monitor Anne Arundel's more than 500 miles of shoreline and assist with water rescues and water-related emergencies.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

Sandy Looks to Give a Lift to Its Skyline: First Phase of Planned Development Includes 40-Story Condo, Office Tower

By Rosemary Winters, The Salt Lake Tribune Jul. 27--Sandy could grow to new heights.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 27 Jul 2008 | 11:00 am

Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment" Teaser Site Goes Live

MojoKid writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft was reported to be arranging a kind of 'blind taste test' to get die-hard Windows XP users to try Vista. They were told that they were trying a new OS, called Mojave. The report went on to suggest that users liked the OS, though they were actually running Vista. Now it appears Microsoft has put up a teaser site, with plans to show the actual video footage next week. Though the footage should at least have some entertainment value, it would be a bit of a reach to expect that the test methodologies were real-world enough such that users had to deal with things like user account control, driver updates, and broad application compatibility."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Jul 2008 | 10:53 am

Bikers, pedestrians seeking better Web maps (AP)

AP - With the old gas-guzzler in the garage, you've got your bicycle ready and your sneakers laced up. Now all you need is a map of the quickest, safest routes for riding around town. Well, not so fast.

Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jul 2008 | 10:37 am

New space race heats up with unveiling of aircraft (AP)

AP - Aerospace engineers have been holed up in a Mojave Desert hangar for four years, fashioning a commercial spaceship to loft rich tourists some 62 miles above Earth. Now the wraps come partially off the top-secret project.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jul 2008 | 10:36 am

Jordan set to launch huge water project

Thirsty Jordan announced on Sunday that a Turkish firm will begin work next week on a near-billion-dollar project to supply the capital with water from an ancient southern aquifer.
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 10:31 am

Girls Do As Good As Boys In Math, Study Says - eFluxMedia

eFluxMedia

Girls Do As Good As Boys In Math, Study Says eFluxMedia - 4 hours ago By Raoul Railey A study that was carried out by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found out that girls and boys have similar scores at math tests, contrary to common belief. Math Scores Show No Gap for Girls, Study Finds New York Times Girls Bridge Gender Divide in Math ABC News ZDNet Blogs - Reuters - United Press International - Los Angeles Times all 510 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 27 Jul 2008 | 9:26 am

Mixed Messages in The Blogging Landscape

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the changing face of the blogging landscape. On one hand many bloggers have turned to the likes of FriendFeed and Twitter to express themselves, instead...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 9:03 am

Mars lander has trouble getting sample in oven

Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:18 am

If Scrabulous goes from Facebook, will you miss it? - Product Reviews

MTV.com

If Scrabulous goes from Facebook, will you miss it? Product Reviews - 5 hours ago Most people that use Facebook are doing so to keep in contact with friends and family from all around the world. But some also go to the social networking site to play games regularly. Scrabble-Scrabulous standoff spells LAWSUIT ZDNet Hasbro Threatens Facebook's Scrabulous BusinessWeek PC Magazine - New York Times - CNET News - ABC News all 509 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:13 am

Metalink Unveils Strategic Plan

- Evaluates Range of Strategic Alternatives and Financial Options, including Possible Sale - - Implements a Cost Reduction Plan - YAKUM, Israel, July 27...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:07 am

MIT Artificial Vision Researchers Assemble 16-GPU Machine

lindik writes "As part of their research efforts aimed at building real-time human-level artificial vision systems inspired by the brain, MIT graduate student Nicolas Pinto and principal investigators David Cox (Rowland Institute at Harvard) and James DiCarlo (McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT) recently assembled an impressive 16-GPU 'monster' composed of 8x9800gx2s donated by NVIDIA. The high-throughput method they promote can also use other ubiquitous technologies like IBM's Cell Broadband Engine processor (included in Sony's Playstation 3) or Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing services. Interestingly, the team is also involved in the PetaVision project on the Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:01 am

Respect the Artists, and You Can Have Their Masterpieces for a Song

By Ross Raihala, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn. Jul. 27--It's no secret that the ease of downloading MP3s from the Internet has shaken the music industry to the core, and the business is still trying to figure out how it'll survive.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

Churches Extend Religious Tax Exemptions to Additional Properties

By Sally Kestin and John Maines, South Florida Sun-Sentinel Jul. 27--It's a remarkable home, even in an upscale Coral Springs neighborhood: 12,000 square feet, manicured grounds, a guest house, five-car garage and a pair of lion statues gracing the entrance. It's also tax-free.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

Microsoft Selects VeriSign to Provide Security for HealthVault Users

VeriSign, a provider of internet infrastructure services, has been selected by Microsoft as an OpenID provider for users of HealthVault, a free service that enables consumers to store and manage their health information online.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

Editorial

By Lacovara, Jane E When Searching for the Evidence, Stop Using Wikipedia! In our search for scientific evidence to guide our nursing practice and promote the science of nursing, we must be able to evaluate the quality of the evidence.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

Beware of Disaster Phishing Scams

By Anonymous TECHNOLOGY As the hurricane season gets into full swing, it's time to remain vigilant for phishing scams that try to take advantage of natural disasters. A common technique is an e-mail that appears to be a request for donations.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

Web Sites on Fire*

By Anonymous The Tea Kettle Ecosystem Experiment! TA critical question in the Sierra Nevada forests of California is how to use disturbances effectively to restore ecosystems following a century of fire suppression.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

EDITORIAL: Sunday Pops

By The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Jul. 27--Here's a reality check for the Barack Obama-loving mainstream media: Political guru Michael Barone says demographic trends could make the Illinois senator's coronation as president difficult. "Demography, modestly, favors Republicans," Mr.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

IRS Reminds Churches Of Tax-Law Prohibition On Partisan Politicking

By Anonymous The Internal Revenue Service has once again warned houses of worship that federal tax law bans partisan politicking.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 8:00 am

NASA prepares for Hubble telescope's final upgrade

The $900-million mission will enable the instrument to study dark energy and the structure of the universe, and extend its life a few more years. ...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am

Scammers exploit online trust factor

Buyers should be wary, even on reputable websites, and know how to respond if they become victims. When Pierre...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am

House hunting online? Here are real estate sites worth checking out

Broaden your search: A wealth of websites offer efficiently organized and accessible data. Second of two parts.
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 7:00 am

Delicious 2.0 Imminent Again

Yahoo’s inability to launch Delicious 2.0, which was feature complete and in private beta back in September 2007, has become a bit of a joke around Silicon Valley. Last month we called on Yahoo...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 6:20 am

Taiwan accuses Chinese fishermen of wrecking coral reefs

Chinese fishermen have been accused of poaching in Taiwan's first marine national park where authorities here say their destructive methods are endangering the area's ecology.
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 6:00 am

Taiwan battens down against oncoming typhoon

Workers mounted sandbag barriers and fishing boats returned to port as Taiwan braced for a pounding from Typhoon Fung-wong, which forecasters said was picking up momentum. ...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:12 am

FreeCulture TV and Yes We're Open: Two new free and open Internet TV channels

Parker sez, I'm a summer intern at the Participatory Culture Foundation, who make Miro, and I just launched two new channels that Boing Boing readers might enjoy: Free Culture TV is all videos about...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:09 am

FreeCulture TV and Yes We're Open: Two new free and open Internet TV channels

Parker sez,

I'm a summer intern at the Participatory Culture Foundation, who make Miro, and I just launched two new channels that Boing Boing readers might enjoy:

Free Culture TV is all videos about free culture and the copyfight. Check out cool documentaries, videos of lectures or CC Salon discussions, that kind of thing.

Yes, We're Open! Free Movies, Music Videos, and TV (catchy title, eh?) is all openly licensed entertainment... Movies, shorts, music videos, all kinds of fun stuff.

You can subscribe to either or both of these channels in any RSS reader that can handle video and torrent attachments, but they're built for Miro.

New Channels: Free Culture TV and Yes, We’re Open! (Thanks, Parker!)

(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer for Miro's board of directors)

Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:09 am

Michael Moorcock's biography of Mervyn Peake -- excerpt

Matt sez, "Michael Moorcock agreed to let me post the introduction to his work in progress, a memoir of Mervyn Peake, author of the "Gormenghast" books and his wife Maeve. It's going to be called "Lovers:...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:06 am

Michael Moorcock's biography of Mervyn Peake -- excerpt

Matt sez, "Michael Moorcock agreed to let me post the introduction to his work in progress, a memoir of Mervyn Peake, author of the "Gormenghast" books and his wife Maeve. It's going to be called "Lovers: Mervyn and Maeve Peake. A Personal Memoir." As a fan of both Moorcock and Peake, this is a big thing for me, as I suspect it will be for many other readers." Peake completely torqued my head around backwards when I was about 14.

The Peake parties were lush and rich but never self-conscious. The PreRaphaelite enthusiasms of the 60s, which brought Melvyn Bragg into a room dressed as if for the set of Isodora, which he was then writing, in black velvet, with silver rings, married well with the dark Fitrovian colours of Mervyn’s canvasses, though Peake had no particular enthusiasm for the previous century. His preference was for the present, for Soho and the post-war world of eccentric Londoners whose portraits he collected in what he called his head-hunting sessions. At this stage of his life, however, because it reflected the concerns of his generation, his painting was somewhat out of fashion. England had entered one of her uncertain, self-examining periods of nostalgia, looking back to the fin-de-siecle and Edwardian social certainties.

Mervyn was dramatically handsome and his wife Maeve was dramatically beautiful. They had been a remarkable couple for years, though they had not mixed a great deal with the fashionable bohemians of their day. They had spent quite a lot of time away from London, in Sark in particular. They had come to prefer each other’s company. Although an accomplished painter, she had put aside her own work for the most part, concentrating on her children. He drew her and painted her a lot. She is there in everything he did. He wrote her poems when he was taken into the army during the second world war, he produced fictional versions of her in his Titus Groan, which he wrote when he was drafted into the army. On leave, he would draw her and the children. He was an inexpert soldier. He had a mild breakdown, which kept him away from overseas conflict. Eventually, he was commissioned as a war artist. His pictures of Maeve are not exaggerated any more than the poems for and about her, of which he wrote so many

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:06 am

Earliest campaign commercials: Disney for Eisenhower

From the Sociological Images blog: "Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to use television commercials. Below is one of his commercials, made by Disney, from 1952. Eisenhower was skeptical about using television and his opponent, Stevenson, wouldn’t appear on television because he thought it demeaning to a man ascending to the presidency. Eisenhower won." Link

Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:02 am

Earliest campaign commercials: Disney for Eisenhower

From the Sociological Images blog: "Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to use television commercials. Below is one of his commercials, made by Disney, from 1952. Eisenhower was...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:02 am

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith

***1/2  (139m | PG-13) This may well be the best of all six "Star Wars" movies -- with the caveat that you need to have seen the other five films to truly grasp its significance.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:00 am

Davidson's Illicit Career Irked Net Companies

By Jeff Smith Edward "Eddie" Davidson's career as a spammer dated back to the late 1990s when he was in his mid-20s.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Jul 2008 | 5:00 am

Johnny Depp in sausage form

Tokyo Disneyland offers many charms, but none so, um, suggestive, as this Johnny Depp branded sausage. Link (Thanks, Tavie!)
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 4:56 am

Johnny Depp in sausage form

Tokyo Disneyland offers many charms, but none so, um, suggestive, as this Johnny Depp branded sausage. Link (Thanks, Tavie!)

Source: Boing Boing | 27 Jul 2008 | 4:56 am

LG Display to cut output by 10 pct in downturn

SEOUL (Reuters) - LG Display Co Ltd , the world's No. 2 maker of liquid crystal display (LCD) screens, said on Sunday it would cut its panel output by around 10 percent until August because
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 4:53 am

EU and Russia Show Off New Lunar Spacecraft Design

schliz writes "Space flight planners have unveiled a new spaceship design for a joint EU/Russian trip to the Moon. The EU will be building the crew capsule, using technology developed for the automatic cargo system used to supply the International Space Station." First one to link to decent pics (the article has none) wins undying gratitude and a warm feeling inside.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Jul 2008 | 4:52 am

Obama in China Olympic Broadcasts - Sen. Spends $5 Million on NBC Ads (VIDEO)

(TrendHunter.com) Barack Obama is shelling out $5 million to appear in advertisements throughout the duration of the Beijing Olympics. The China games are an opportune moment to bask in the media...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 4:40 am

China Tourism Music Videos - Beijing Welcomes You (VIDEO)

(TrendHunter.com) If youre planning to head to China for the Beijing Olympics, these videos will give youand all other touristsa taste of what to expect. The Beijing Welcomes You video series is...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 4:00 am

Obama in China Olympic Broadcasts - Sen. Spends $5 Million in NBC Ads (VIDEO)

(TrendHunter.com) Barack Obama is shelling out $5 million to appear in advertisements throughout the duration of the Beijing Olympics. The China games are an opportune moment to bask in the media...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 27 Jul 2008 | 3:40 am

HP-EDS merger gets OK in Europe (CNET)

CNET - A proposed acquisition by Hewlett-Packard of computer services company EDS has won approval from the European Commission.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Jul 2008 | 2:29 am

Second Mac Clone Maker Set To Sell, With a Twist

CWmike writes "Another company is preparing to sell Intel-based computers that can run Apple's Mac OS X. But unlike Psystar, a Florida clone maker that's been sued by Apple, Open Tech won't pre-install the operating system on its machines. Open Tech's Home (equipped with an Intel dual-core Pentium processor, 3GB of memory, an nVidia GeForce 8600 CT video card and a 500GB hard drive) and XT (which includes an Intel Core 2 quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 8800 video card and a 640GB drive) machines will sell for $620 and $1,200, respectively. Open Tech is prepared to do battle with Apple if it comes after Open Tech. 'We definitely would defend this,' said [Open Tech spokesman] Tom. 'The only possible case that Apple can make, the only one that has any chance, would be based on the end-user licensing agreement.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Jul 2008 | 2:27 am

How the Personal Genome Project Could Unlock the Mysteries of Life

George Church is dyslexic, narcoleptic, and a vegan. He is married with one daughter, weighs about 210 pounds, and has worn a pioneer-style bushy beard for decades. He has elevated levels of creatine kinase in his blood, the consequence of a heart attack. He enjoys waterskiing, photography, rock climbing, and singing in his church choir. His mother's maiden name is Strong. He was born on August 28, 1954.

If this all seems like too much information, well, blame Church himself. As the director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, he has a thing about openness, and this information (and plenty more, down to his signature) is posted online at arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/pers.html. By putting it out there for everyone to see, Church isn't just baiting identity thieves. He's hoping to demonstrate that all this personal information — even though we consider it private and somehow sacred — is actually fairly meaningless, little more than trivia. "The average person shouldn't be interested in this stuff," he says. "It's a philosophical exercise in what identity is and why we should care about that."

As Church sees it, the only real utility to his personal information is as data that reflects his phenotype — his physical traits and characteristics. If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across 6 billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data — genotype and phenotype — for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality.

Church has done more than imagine such an undertaking; he has launched it: The Personal Genome Project, an effort to make those correlations on an unprecedented scale, began last year with 10 volunteers and will soon expand to 100,000 participants. It will generate a massive database of genomes, phenomes, and even some omes in between. The first step is to sequence 1 percent of each volunteer's genome, focusing on the so-called exome — the protein-coding regions that, Church suspects, do 90 percent of the work in our DNA. It's a long way from sequencing all 6 billion nucleotides — the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs — of the human genome, but even so, cataloging 60 million bits multiplied by 100,000 individuals is an audacious goal.

The PGP stands as the tent pole of what Church calls his "year of convergence," the moment when his 30 years as a geneticist, a technologist, and a synthetic biologist all come together. The project is a proof of concept for the Polonator G.007, the genetic-sequencing instrument developed in Church's lab that hit the market this spring. And the PGP will also put Church's expertise in synthetic biology to use, reverse engineering volunteers' skin cells into stem cells that could help diagnose and treat disease. If the convergence comes off as planned, the PGP will bring personal genomics to fruition and our genomes will unfold before us like road maps: We will peruse our DNA like we plan a trip, scanning it for possible detours (a predisposition for disease) or historical markers (a compelling ancestry).

Bringing the genome into the light, Church says, is the great project of our day. "We need to inspire our current youth in a way that outer space exploration inspired us in 1960," he says. "We're seeing signs that knowing about our inner space is very compelling."

To Church, who built his first computer at age 9 and taught himself three programming languages by 15, all of this is unfolding according to the same laws of exponential progress that have propelled digital technologies, from computer memory to the Internet itself, over the past 40 years: Moore's law for circuits and Metcalfe's law for networks. These principles are now at play in genetics, he argues, particularly in DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis.

Exponentials don't just happen. In Church's work, they proceed from two axioms. The first is automation, the idea that by automating human tasks, letting a computer or a machine replicate a manual process, technology becomes faster, easier to use, and more popular. The second is openness, the notion that sharing technologies by distributing them as widely as possible with minimal restrictions on use encourages both the adoption and the impact of a technology.

1. Entrance Exam Volunteers take a quiz to show genetic literacy. One question: How many chromosomes do unfertilized human egg cells contain? a) 11, b) 22, c) 23, d) 46, or e) 92? (Answer: c.) Only those with a perfect score proceed, but retests are allowed.	2. Data Collection Volunteers sign an "open consent" form acknowledging that their information, though anonymized, will be accessible by others. They fill out their phenotype traits, listing everything from waist size to diet habits. Suitable respondents go on to the next step.	3. Sample Collection Volunteers hit the medical center, where they are interviewed by an MD. Then a technician draws some blood, gathers a saliva sample, and takes a punch of skin. Don't worry: It hurts about as much as a bee sting.
4. Lab Work The tissues are sent to a biobank, where DNA is extracted from the blood. One percent of it — the exome — is sequenced. Meanwhile, bacteria DNA is extracted from the saliva and sequenced to reveal the volunteer's microbiome.	5. Research Now the fun part: Crunching the numbers. PGP scientists and other researchers start working with the data assembled from 100,000 individuals to investigate potential links between phenotypes and genotypes. The team will look for patterns and statistically significant anomalies.	6. Sharing The volunteers get access to not only the raw data from their genome, but anything the research team gleans from their information. Insights — a newly discovered cancer risk, for example — are posted in a volunteer's file, which they'll be free to share with other PGP participants.

"I always tell people, your biggest problem in life is not going to be hiding your stuff so nobody steals it," Church says. "It's going to be getting anybody to ever use it. Start hiding it and that decreases the probability to almost zero."

For most of his career, Church has been known as a brilliant technologist, more behind-the-scenes tinkerer than scientific visionary. Though he was part of the group that kicked off the Human Genome Project, he's far less known than scientists like Francis Collins or J. Craig Venter, who took the stage at the end. His obscurity is due partly to his style. He talks about his accomplishments with a certain detachment that one might mistake for ambivalence. "He's not without ego; it's just a different sort of ego," says entrepreneur Esther Dyson, a friend and one of the first 10 PGP volunteers. "Everything is a subject of his intellectual curiosity, including himself."

His low profile may be the result of his tendency to get too far ahead of the curve, working a decade or two ahead of his field — so far that even the experts don't always get what he's talking about. "Lots of George's work is so advanced it's not ready to become standard," says Drew Endy, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford and cofounder with Church of Codon Devices, a synthetic-biology startup. "He's perfectly happy to spin out tons of ideas and see what might stick. It's high-throughput screening for technology and science. That's not the way most people work."

But thanks to the PGP, the Polonator, and the fact that the rest of the world is finally starting to understand what he's been talking about, Church's obscurity is coming to an end. He sits on the advisory board of more than 14 biotech companies, including personal genomics startup 23andMe and genetic testing pioneer DNA Direct. He has also cofounded four companies in the past four years: Codon Devices, Knome, LS9, and Joule Biosciences, which makes biofuels from engineered algae. Newsweek recently tagged him as one of the 10 Hottest Nerds ("whatever that means," Church laughs).

For someone who has spent his whole career ahead of his time, he is suddenly very much a man of the moment.

Most historians would cite Prague or Paris or Berkeley as the intellectual hub of the 1960s, but for people interested in computers, there was no place so significant as Hanover, New Hampshire. There, at Dartmouth College, an experiment in time-share computing was flourishing. Developed by professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System let students remotely access the power of a mainframe computer to do calculations for mathematics or science assignments or to play a simulated game of college football. It ran on an easy-to-learn, intuitive program that Kemeny and Kurtz called Basic.

In 1967, the DTSS transitioned to a more-powerful GE-635 machine and offered remote terminals to 33 secondary schools and colleges, including Phillips Academy, a prep school in nearby Andover, Massachusetts. The terminal — not much more than a teletype machine, really — sat in the basement of the school's math building, forgotten until the next fall, when a young George Church showed up for his freshman year and began asking whether there was a computer on campus. Someone pointed Church to the basement. "There wasn't even a chair in the room. I had used a typewriter before, but never a teletype. And so I just started pressing keys," Church recalls. "Eventually I hit Return, and it came back with 'What?' And so I started typing in stuff like crazy and hitting Return. And it kept coming back with 'What?' At that point, I was pretty convinced it wasn't a human, but it was actually talking in words. So I just hadn't asked the right question or given the right answer."

Soon, Church found a book on Basic. "I was just sailing," he says. He spent endless hours in that basement — he eventually borrowed a chair — and taught himself the intricacies of coding, learning to program in Basic, Lisp, and Fortran. Indeed, thinking in code came so naturally to Church that he stopped going to his classes (a habit that would later get him kicked out of graduate school at Duke) and taught the computer linear algebra instead.

It turns out that learning how to write code — change it, hit Return, see what it will do — was ideal training for Church's eventual career in computational biology. "That's how we reverse engineer things like E. coli — you change something, and you see how it behaves," he says. "Little did I know that 30 years later, we would use almost exactly the same operations to optimize metabolic networks."

Church first hit on the power of computation to automate biology in the mid-'70s when he was in graduate school at Harvard. At the time, he was working on recombinant DNA, a then-new technique to splice a gene from one organism into another. Identifying a sequence of 80 or so base pairs of genetic code was a slow, tedious process. "You had to literally read off the bases and write them on a piece of paper, one by one," Church says. "So I wrote a sequence-reading program that would crunch it out. When the senior graduate student heard I had automated that, he said, 'What do you want to do that for? That's the only fun part.'"

By 1980, when Church's adviser, Wally Gilbert, won the Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing techniques, the process was still slow and expensive, executing one DNA strand at a time. So Church began working on one of his earlier targets for automation. His idea was to sequence several strands together by combining them into a single sample mixture. He called it multiplexing, drawing an analogy to signal multiplexing in electronics, in which more than one signal flows through a current at the same time. Church thought most of the work could even be integrated into one device rather than numerous machines.

It was a provocative idea, not just because he was substituting several human tasks for machine-driven ones, but also because he didn't make the usual false promise that technology would simplify the process. On the contrary, multiplexing would be complicated, Church maintained. But technology was up to the task.

Four years later, Church was invited to present his work on multiplexing at a small meeting in Alta, Utah. The Department of Energy had gathered about 20 scientists to mull over one question for five days: How might recent advances in genetics be used to measure an increase in genetic mutations arising from radiation exposure, as in Hiroshima? The group quickly reached the conclusion that technology circa 1984 couldn't answer that question. Meanwhile, they still had several more days in the mountains. "There were a bunch of us there who could talk about genomics as if it were an engineering exercise. And then we said, well, as a kind of booby prize, we could think of other things you could do," Church recalls, "like, say, sequencing the human genome."

Though Church was almost entirely unknown before the meeting, his presentation on multiplex sequencing methods stole the show. When he fell into a huge snow drift during a break one afternoon, one participant worried that the future of sequencing had disappeared with him.

That Alta brainstorm would become the Human Genome Project — the effort, adopted by the National Institutes of Health, to sequence one human genome for $3 billion within 15 years. However audacious the HGP seemed, Church was disappointed by it almost from the start. "We could have said our goal was to get everybody's genome for some affordable price," he says, "and one genome would be a milestone" on the way toward that goal.

The HGP also played it safe with its choice of technology. Despite the promise of Church's multiplexing system, the HGP instead used a more established instrument manufactured by Applied Biosystems, based on a technique developed by biochemist Frederick Sanger. As Church saw it, this meant that the project had failed to put its $3 billion toward improving the state of the art. Even worse, the HGP consumed so many of the resources available to the field of genetics that it effectively locked that state of the art into 1980s technology.

The result was nearly two decades of inertia. It wasn't until 2005, when the Human Genome Project was complete and new goals were put forth, that Church finally perfected the multiplexing approach he had presented 20 years earlier at Alta. In a paper published in Science, Church demonstrated a technique that could analyze millions of sequences in one run (Sanger's method could handle just 96 strands of DNA at a time). And Church's method not only accelerated the process, it made it far cheaper, too, elegantly demonstrating the power of automation to drive exponential advances and bring down costs. Church's approach, and a competing innovation developed by 454 Life Sciences that same year, inaugurated the second generation of sequencing, now in full swing.

In the past three years, more companies have joined the marketplace with their own instruments, all of them driving toward the same goal: speeding up the process of sequencing DNA and cutting the cost. Most of the second-generation machines are priced at around $500,000. This spring, Church's lab undercut them all with the Polonator G.007 — offered at the low, low price of $150,000. The instrument, designed and fine-tuned by Church and his team, is manufactured and sold by Danaher, an $11 billion scientific-equipment company. The Polonator is already sequencing DNA from the first 10 PGP volunteers. What's more, both the software and hardware in the Polonator are open source. In other words, any competitor is free to buy a Polonator for $150,000 and copy it. The result, Church hopes, will be akin to how IBM's open-architecture approach in the early '80s fueled the PC revolution.

In the sequencing game, though, the cost of the machine is only half the equation. The more telling expense is the operating cost, particularly the cost of sequencing entire human genomes. Executives at 454 estimate that their latest machine can pull off a whole genome sequence for $200,000. Applied Biosystems claims its instrument has completed a genome for just $60,000. Church maintains that, while the Polonator isn't up to whole-genome reads, it is clocking in at about one-third the cost of Applied Biosystems' estimate. A whole sequence from Knome, the retail genomics firm cofounded by Church, goes for $350,000. (It's worth noting that these figures are only roughly comparable, since each company uses slightly different quality measures and specifications.)

As these numbers continue to drop, the mythical $1,000 genome comes ever closer. Sequencing a human genome for $1,000 is the somewhat arbitrary benchmark for true personalized genomics — when the science could become a component of standard medical care. An important catalyst in achieving that point is the Archon X Prize for Genomics, which is offering $10 million to the team that can sequence 100 complete genomes in 10 days for less than $10,000 each. As of June, seven teams, including Church's lab, had entered the competition. Church, who served for a time on the advisory board of the contest, says that the prize will drive costs down further and help publicize the potential of personalized whole-genome sequencing.

That's important because Church hopes the Polonator and other next-generation instruments will inspire a new generation of smaller labs to begin work in personal genomics, as well as other genetic sciences. Already, the onslaught of technology has jump-started new projects, like sequencing part of the Neanderthal genome, examining extremophile microbes in old California iron mines, and studying the regenerative properties of the salamander. In medicine, cheaper sequencing has enabled research into drug-resistant tuberculosis; the genetics of breast, lung, and other cancers; and the DNA architecture of schizophrenics.

But if the Polonator is going to lead that charge, it has to work — and work on a massive scale. And that means passing a major test: successfully sequencing the 100,000 exomes in the PGP.

All of us know our height, weight, and eye color. Fewer of us know our arm span or resting blood pressure. But who among us knows the direction of our hair whorls or the Gell-Coombs type of our allergies? This is the level of detail that the PGP requires the 100,000 volunteers to reveal about themselves, a list staggering in its exhaustiveness. The PGP will tally head circumferences, injuries, chin clefts and cheek dimples, whether volunteers can roll their tongues or hyperflex their joints, whether they dislike hot climates or are hot tempered, if they've often been exposed to power lines or wood dust or diesel exhaust or textile fibers. The project questionnaire asks how many meals they eat a day and whether they prefer their food fried, broiled, or barbecued. It even demands to know how much television they watch. And, of course, PGP volunteers will hand over most aspects of their medical history, from vaccines to prescriptions.

This phenotype data will be integrated with a volunteer's genomic information, then combined with statistics from all the other subjects to create a potent database ripe for interrogation. In contrast to the heavy lifting that genetic research requires now — each study starts from scratch with a new hypothesis and a fresh crop of subjects, consent forms, and tissue samples — the PGP will automate the research process. Scientists will simply choose a category of phenotype and a possible genetic correlation, and statistically significant associations should flow out of the data like honey from a hive. A genetic predisposition for colon cancer, for instance, might be found to lead to disease only in connection with a diet high in barbecued foods, or a certain form of heart disease might be associated with a particular gene and exposure to a particular virus. Genomic discovery won't be a research problem anymore. It'll be a search function. (This helps explain why Google, among others, has donated to the project).

The process began last year, and each of the first 10 volunteers has a background in medicine or genetics. They include John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and a physician; Rosalynn Gill, chief science officer at Sciona (a personalized genetics nutrition company); and Steven Pinker, the noted psychologist and author. The other 99,990 participants won't be expected to be so elite, though they will have to pass a genetics-literacy quiz to demonstrate informed consent. The general selection process, which starts with registration at personalgenomes.org, is scheduled to begin later this year.

Besides offering up their genomes, subjects will have to part with some spit and a bit of skin. The saliva contains their microbiome — the trillions of microbes that exist, mostly symbiotically, on and in our bodies. If phenotype is a combination of genotype plus environment, the microbiome is the first wash of that environment over our bodies. By measuring some fraction of it, the PGP should offer a first look at how the genome-to-microbiome-to-phenome chain plays out.

The skin sample goes into storage, creating what would be one of the world's largest biobanks. Members of Church's lab have devised a way to automate turning the skin cells into stem cells, and they hope to publish the technique later this year. (Similar work has been done at the University of Wisconsin and Kyoto University.) By reprogramming the skin cells using synthetically engineered adenoviruses, Church's team can transform the skin cells into many sorts of tissue — lungs, liver, heart. These tissues could be used as a diagnostic baseline to detect predisposition for various diseases. What's more, the reprogrammed cells could be used to treat disease, replacing damaged or failing tissue. It's an intriguing hint of how Church's work with synthetic biology complements genomic sequencing.

If the PGP were simply an exercise in breaking down 100,000 individuals into data streams, it would be ambitious enough. But the project takes one further, truly radical step: In accordance with Church's principle of openness, all the material will be accessible to any researcher (or lurker) who wants to plunder thousands of details from people's lives. Even the tissue banks will be largely accessible. After Church's lab transforms the skin into stem cells, those new cell lines — which have been in notoriously short supply despite their scientific promise — will be open to outside researchers. This is a significant divergence from most biobanks, which typically guard their materials like holy relics and severely restrict access.

For the PGP volunteers, this means they will have to sign on to a principle Church calls open consent, which acknowledges that, even though subjects' names will be removed to make the data anonymous, there's no promise of absolute confidentiality. As Church sees it, any guarantee of privacy is false; there is no way to ensure that a bad actor won't tap into a system and, once there, manage to extract bits of personal information. After all, even de-identified data is subject to misuse: Latanya Sweeney, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, demonstrated the ease of "re-identification" by cross-referencing anonymized health-insurance records with voter registration rolls. (She found former Massachusetts governor William Weld's medical files by cross-referencing his birth date, zip code, and sex.)

To Church, open consent isn't just a philosophical consideration; it's also a practical one. If the PGP were locked down, it would be far less valuable as a data source for research — and the pace of research would accordingly be much slower. By making the information open and available, Church hopes to draw curious scientists to the data to pursue their own questions and reach their own insights. The potential fields of inquiry range from medicine to genealogy, forensics, and general biology.

And the openness doesn't serve just researchers alone. PGP members will be seen as not only subjects, but as participants. So, for instance, if a researcher uses a volunteer's information to establish a link between some genetic sequence and a risk of disease, the volunteer would have that information communicated to them.

This is precisely what makes the PGP controversial in genetics circles. Though Church talks about it as the logical successor to the Human Genome Project, other geneticists see it as a risky proposition, not for its privacy policy but for its presumption that the emerging science of genomics already has implications for individual cases. The National Human Genome Research Institute, for example, has cautioned that the burgeoning personal-genomics industry, which includes research-oriented projects like the PGP as well as straight-to-consumer companies like Navigenics and 23andMe and whole-genome-sequencing shops like Knome, puts the sales pitch ahead of the science. "A lot of people would like to rapidly capitalize on this science," says Gregory Feero, a senior adviser at the NHGRI. "But for an individual venturing into this now, it's a risk to start making any judgments or decisions based on current knowledge. At some point, we'll cross over into a time when that's more sensible."

Church cautions, however, that keeping clinicians and patients in the dark about specific genetic information — essentially pretending the data or the technology behind it don't exist — is a farce. Even worse, it violates the principle of openness that leads to the fastest progress. "The ground is changing right underneath them," he says of the medical establishment. "Right now, there's a wall between clinical research and clinical practice. The science isn't jumping over. The PGP is what clinical practice would be like if the research actually made it to the patient."

In the not-too-distant future, Church says, hospitals and clinics could be outfitted with a genome sequencer much the way they now have x-ray machines or microscopes. "In the old books," Church says, "almost every scientist was sitting there with a microscope on their table. Whether they're a physical scientist or a biological scientist, they've got that microscope there. And that inspires me."

Wired deputy editor Thomas Goetz (thomas@wired.com) wrote about personal genomics in issue 15.12.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 27 Jul 2008 | 1:00 am

Happy Birthday, Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick would have celebrated his 80th birthday on Sunday, if he had lived to witness the musical evolution of the form he fast-forwarded. His films irrevocably changed the relationship between film and music, from the juxtaposition of spaceship ballets and "The Blue Danube" to the destabilizing pairing of rape and "Singin' in the Rain."

Source: Wired Top Stories | 27 Jul 2008 | 12:56 am

Comparison of Windows XP and Linux/Sugar On the OLPC XO

griffjon writes "OLPCNews has a comparison of Windows XP to the Sugar/Linux OS on the One Laptop Per Child XO-1, based on the Microsoft Unlimited Potential video, touching on video recording, power usage, boot times, and mesh networking. An interesting, if saddening, read."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Jul 2008 | 12:53 am

It's Not Easy Being a Restaurant Guide, Jukebox, Game Console and ... - Washington Post

Sify

It's Not Easy Being a Restaurant Guide, Jukebox, Game Console and ... Washington Post - 13 hours ago By Mike Musgrove Among all the new applications I've downloaded to my iPhone this month, it seems that there's something else new tucked in that I wasn't counting on: bugs. Bugs & Fixes: Dealing with iPhone app bugs and crashes Macworld Lightening the Load for the iPhone's Wimpy Battery TechNewsWorld CRN - Mac Rumors - Wired News all 206 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 27 Jul 2008 | 12:40 am

SourceForge Award Winners Announced (PC World)

PC World - Open source software projects took center stage at a ceremony to honor the best and brightest of free software.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:35 pm

Are There Any Smart E-mail Retention Policies?

An anonymous reader writes "In an age of litigation and costly discovery obligations, many organizations are embracing policies which call for the forced purging of e-mail in an attempt to limit the organization's exposure to legal risk. I work for a large organization which is about to begin destroying all e-mail older than 180 days. Normally, I would just duck the house-cleaning by archiving my own e-mail to hard-drive or a network folder, but we are a Microsoft shop and the Exchange e-mail server is configured to deny all attempts to copy data to an off-line personal folder (.PST file). The organization's policy unhelpfully recommends that 'really important' e-mails be saved as Word documents. Is anybody doing this right? What do Slashdot readers suggest for a large company that needs to balance legal risks against the daily information and communication needs of its staff?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:30 pm

Unveiling of Aircraft Heats Up Space Race

After four years in a Mojave Desert hangar, British billionaire Sir Richard Branson and American aerospace designer Burt Rutan are due Monday to show off their top-secret aircraft, which is designed to air launch a passenger-toting spaceship out of the atmosphere.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:13 pm

UK scientists hit out at new coal station plans

Power plants to be built without technology to cut emissions will accelerate global warming, experts claim
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:03 pm

Robin McKie: Actions speak louder than a lot of government hot air

Robin McKie: Melt our ice-caps and you release forces you cannot control
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:03 pm

Global warming: is this the answer?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology can in theory reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power stations by up to 90 per cent. The gases are 'captured' and then stored underground rather than released...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:03 pm

Talk of Apple's new box of tricks has the analysts purring

It is a sad reflection on our society that all it takes to distract Wall Street's attention from economic Armageddon is the barest whisper of a new gadget from Apple. We don't even really know if Steve...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:02 pm

Phil Hogan finds out what the truth is behind memory loss and if you can avoid it

Phil Hogan asks leading academics and medics what the truth is behind memory loss and, crucially, can you avoid it?
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:00 pm

Laughter: the secret of love

Self-deprecating humour is key to English art of seduction, psychological study reveals
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:00 pm

Why smiles are better than Prozac

Government scientist claims lifestyle changes can be as effective as drugs for depression
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 11:00 pm

Mexico finds dozens of dead sea turtles

Environmental officials in Mexico say dozens of dead sea turtles apparently killed in fishing nets have washed up on beaches in recent days. Authorities say 59 Olive Ridley turtles have...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 10:55 pm

FCC set to punish Comcast on P2P blocking - CNET News

CNET News

FCC set to punish Comcast on P2P blocking CNET News - 15 hours ago The five FCC commissioners grill Comcast representatives at a public hearing held in Cambridge, Mass., earlier this year. Three of the five FCC commissioners have voted in favor of an item saying Comcast violated federal policy by dialing down ... FCC Nears Finding On Policy Violation Wall Street Journal FCC to fine Comcast for blocking Bit Torrent Dallas Morning News The Associated Press - Ars Technica - Hard OCP - eFluxMedia all 296 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 Jul 2008 | 10:45 pm

Atheros Releases Free Linux Driver For Its 802.11n Devices

mcgrof writes "Atheros has released a shiny new Atheros driver for all their 11n devices aimed for inclusion in the Linux kernel. This new driver has no proprietary HAL and is licensed under the ISC license, so the BSD community should be able to benefit as well. Note: no firmware required!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 Jul 2008 | 10:29 pm

Journals week in review: news from One Microsoft Way - Ars Technica

dBTechno

Journals week in review: news from One Microsoft Way Ars Technica - 15 hours ago By Emil Protalinski | Published: July 26, 2008 - 04:45PM CT As is its custom, Microsoft generated a lot of headlines this week. The software giant may be the world's largest software manufacturer, but sometimes it seems to us like it has more people ... Apple restores partial access to MobileMe e-mail, admits messages lost Computerworld Apple now posting near-daily MobileMe outage updates Apple Insider Macworld - Arizona Daily Star - MacNN - Wired News all 179 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 Jul 2008 | 9:54 pm

Amazon Explains Why S3 Went Down

Angostura writes "Amazon has provided a decent write-up of the problems that caused its S3 storage service to fail for around 8 hours last Sunday. It providers a timeline of events, the immediate action take to fix it (they pulled the big red switch) and what the company is doing to prevent re-occurrence. In summary: A random bit got flipped in one of the server state messages that the S3 machines continuously pass back and forth. There was no checksum on these messages, and the erroneous information was propagated across the cloud, causing so much inter-server chatter that no customer work got done."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 Jul 2008 | 9:33 pm

Italy prepares to charge Google execs - Reuters

eFluxMedia

Italy prepares to charge Google execs Reuters - 16 hours ago By Silvia Molteni MILAN (Reuters) - Italian prosecutors are preparing to file charges against four current or former Google Inc executives over a 2006 video on the Internet provider's Italian-language site, court sources said on Friday. Italy to charge Google over taunting video CNET News Italy Wants to Prosecute Google over Down Syndrome Video eFluxMedia The Associated Press - Search Engine Land - Wall Street Journal - Washington Post all 107 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 Jul 2008 | 9:12 pm

Google's Misleading Blog Post: The Size Of The Web And The Size Of ... - Washington Post

eFluxMedia

Google's Misleading Blog Post: The Size Of The Web And The Size Of ... Washington Post - 17 hours ago In a blog post today Google says they've identified 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. It's actually more, they say, but some web pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Microsoft's Answer To Google's PageRank Algorithm: Less Privacy? InformationWeek Google Says It Now Counts 1 Trillion Web Pages CRN Slashdot - eFluxMedia - ReadWriteWeb - CNET News all 49 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 Jul 2008 | 8:17 pm

Apple CEO Jobs' life not in danger: report

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs, who has been dogged by investor concerns about his health, does not have recurrent cancer or a life-threatening health issue, The New York...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 8:05 pm

Nokia to reimburse German state to end plant closure row (AFP)

AFP - Nokia will reimburse a German state over 1.3 million euros (two million dollars) to resolve a plant closure dispute that has cost the mobile phone giant tens of millions already, officials said Saturday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 Jul 2008 | 7:20 pm

Comics, Superhero Flicks Whip Up a Cultural Superstorm

Think this summer was overloaded with superhero movies? You ain't seen nothing yet. In the next few years, Tinseltown will be cranking out more movies featuring men in tights than ever before. In turn, successful flicks like Iron Man are driving blockbuster comic sales: Comics and movies are tighter than Batman and Robin ever were.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 Jul 2008 | 6:45 pm

Software industry prepared to sue eBay over pirates - Afterdawn.com

eFluxMedia

Software industry prepared to sue eBay over pirates Afterdawn.com - 20 hours ago The Software & Information Industry Association announced yesterday it is prepared to sue the auction giant eBay "for failing to do enough to prevent the sale of pirated software" on its site. Software Group Contemplates Suing eBay InformationWeek Software Group Weighs Piracy Lawsuit Against EBay PC World CRN - Ars Technica - CNET News - PC Magazine all 64 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 Jul 2008 | 5:32 pm

EMI Loses Stones, Scores Humiliation Hat Trick

Major label EMI, owned by Hedge fund Terra Firma Capital Partners, isn't doing so hot. Last year, Radiohead and Paul McCartney walked away from EMI the minute they could, and on Friday the Rolling Stones defected to Universal Vivendi.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 Jul 2008 | 3:48 pm

New DNS exploit now in the wild and having a blast - Ars Technica

Canada.com

New DNS exploit now in the wild and having a blast Ars Technica - 22 hours ago By Joel Hruska | Published: July 26, 2008 - 09:55AM CT About two weeks ago, we covered the release of a DNS security fix meant to patch a vulnerability in the system that matches domain names with IP addresses. Details of major Internet flaw posted by accident Computerworld World's biggest ISPs drag feet on critical DNS patch Register Blogcritics.org - eFluxMedia - Mashable - TechNewsWorld all 299 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 Jul 2008 | 3:05 pm

Artificial pancreas just years away, experts agree

BETHESDA, Maryland (Reuters) - Researchers working on an artificial pancreas believe they are just a few years away from a nearly carefree way for people with diabetes to monitor blood and...
Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 26 Jul 2008 | 2:25 pm

Wi-Fi TV Entering China as China becomes world's largest Internet ... - FOXBusiness

CTV.ca

Wi-Fi TV Entering China as China becomes world's largest Internet ... FOXBusiness - 23 hours ago NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., Jul 25, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) ----Wi-Fi TV Inc. (Pink Sheets:WIFT) outlines its plans for China in a series of webcasts filmed in Beijing and Los Angeles and now playing (both in a 24/7 loop and individual on-demand videos) at www ... Web Video and the Net's Creaking Backbone TechNewsWorld China Overtakes US In Worldwide Web Population AHN Ars Technica - CRN - eFluxMedia - BetaNews all 347 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 Jul 2008 | 1:58 pm