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OCAU News |
Friday Morning
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Friday, 1-October-2010 03:57:34 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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The United Nations have named their first official alien spacecraft greeter, thanks mpot. At the upcoming conference in Britain, Othman is expected to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before -- and that means the United Nations must be ready to coordinate humanity's response to any "first contact." Update: shift notes this has been denied and the job doesn't actually exist. Which means I can still send my resume in for when it does!
The Large Hadron Collider is generating petabytes of data, report ArsTechnica. The filtering reduces the flow of data from a petabyte (PB) a second to a gigabyte per second, which is then transferred from the detectors to the main compute facility via a dedicated 10Gbps connection. Once there, it needs to be stored, and von Rueden told us that the initial plan had been to use tape for that; right now, they have about 50PB of tape storage, handled by a set of robotic storage hardware. Still, they've been finding that disk storage is working well, and have scaled that up to 20PB worth of storage.
Not quite at the same level, but jjo sends word of a $23,000 PC now available in Australia. This tweaking process is known as overclocking and is often performed by geeks looking to wring maximum power out of their equipment. Overclocking generates significantly more heat and, to combat that, the entire machine is cooled by a liquid cooling system as opposed to fans. Wow! :) Discussion here.
Anandtech have taken a detailed look at some new fast SSD technology from OCZ. Instead of relying on a SATA controller on your motherboard, HSDL SSDs feature a 4-lane PCIe SATA controller on the drive itself. HSDL is essentially a PCIe cable standard that uses a standard SAS cable to carry a 4 PCIe lanes between a SSD and your motherboard. On the system side you’ll just need a dumb card with some amount of logic to grab the cable and fan the signals out to a PCIe slot.
Internet censorship is a hot issue in the USA now - dasuperham sent in this page opposing it, with more info. A new bill being debated this week would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block. This is the kind of heavy-handed censorship you'd expect from a dictatorship, where one man can decide what web sites you're not allowed to visit. But the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the bill this week -- and Senators say they haven't heard much in the way of objections!
XbitLabs have a 140mm fan roundup. The fans of this size are currently pretty popular. It is not only because processor air-coolers more and more often use 140 mm fans these days, but also because they gradually replace the common 120 mm fans inside contemporary system cases, which is exactly what happened back in the days with the 92x92x25 mm fans. ... Well, today we are proud to introduce to you 13 fan models from nine cooling solutions manufacturers, such as: Deep Cool, Evercool, Nanoxia, Noctua, Noiseblocker, Revoltec, Scythe, Thermalright and Xigmatek.
Australia is contributing to the space race in the best way we know, by making beer for easy drinking in space. Astronauts4Hire, a non-profit space research corporation, will conduct the tests on an Australian beer that has been brewed specifically for easy drinking in both microgravity environments, as well as here on Earth. The beer was produced as a joint venture between Saber Astronautics Australia, a new space engineering firm, and the Australian 4 Pines Brewing Company, located in Manly, a suburb of northern Sydney.
Bern and glasnt both sent in today's timewaster, which lets you play Asteroids on your favourite websites. It works well on our homepage. :)
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