Tame the gas monster with sensors, suckers and a spiffy new fan
Part 3 I’m pleased to state that what with the relatively warm 2011 and our conservation efforts we had the lowest consumption of electricity and gas at home of any year yet, a bit over 1,500kWh (‘units’) of electricity and under 4,000kWh of gas. (A typical UK household is nearer 3,300kWh ‘leccy and 18,000kWh gas.) With our solar PV exports we were just carbon-negative for power by my calculations. Even allowing for the warmer year with Heating Degree Days (about ...
Facebook post-IPO: Free not fee will make Zuck a buck
Open … and Shut No sooner did Facebook file its S-1 in preparation for an IPO than speculation kicked into high gear on how Facebook could possibly sustain its $75bn to $100bn valuation. After all, despite its hugely impressive revenue and profit numbers, key components of its revenue model – like advertising revenue – are decelerating. So should we anticipate Facebook to impose a paywall on some or all of its users, as MyLife.com chief executive Jeff Tinsley suggests it ...
PHP 5.3.10 repairs critical remote code execution vulnerability
By Lucian Constantin | IDG News Service The PHP Group released PHP 5.3.10 on Thursday in order to address a critical security flaw that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on servers running an older version of the Web development platform. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2012-0830 and was discovered by Stefan Esser, an independent security consultant and creator of the popular Suhosin security extension for PHP. [ The Web browser is your portal to the world -- as ...
Andreessen Horowitz raises $US1.5b
High profile VC firm Andreessen Horowitz has secured $US1.5 billion in new funding. The new cash brings the total funding under its management to $US2.7 billion. The company has been boasting that the serious chunk of change took a mere three weeks to raise the funding, and another six weeks to complete the formalities. The in-trend VC firm has had its hand in investing, in various stages, a bunch of hot young digital darlings about town including Facebook, Airbnb, Foursquare, ...
Verisign admits 2010 hack attack, mum on what was nicked
Verisign has admitted in an SEC filing that it suffered numerous data breaches in 2010, but that management wasn’t informed by staff for almost a year after they occurred. In the 10-Q filing, the company stated that it suffered multiple data breaches during 2010, and that data was stolen. Exactly what is missing the company isn’t saying, even though it believes it was unrelated to the company’s DNS servers. Senior management weren’t told of the attacks until September 2011, the ...
Internet Explorer takes unexpected jump in market share
Just when you thought Internet Explorer was on a years-long losing streak, about to drop below 50 percent of all browsing activity worldwide, the January figures from Net Applications showed a substantial, remarkable 1.19 percent jump in IE use in January. Just as surprisingly, there are concomitant decreases in market share for all three of IE’s primary competitors: Firefox (down nearly 1 percent from December), Chrome (down nearly 0.2 percent) and Safari (down nearly 0.1 percent).
Cray shrinks XE6m supers down to a rack
Cray tried to sell Fords and Chevies when it launched the CX1000 entry supercomputer clusters launched back in March 2010. But to make its life easier, and to help bolster sales of its XE6 and XE6m supers that are based on Cray’s own high-speed interconnect and software stack, the company has figured out how to shrink a Lexus down so it fits into the Ford and Chevy budget. The CX1000 blended Xeon-based blade servers and InfiniBand networking get a lower ...
Oracle reels off one exabyte in tape storage
Object storage a rival? Not even close. At least, not yet Oracle has been boasting about its dominance in tape, saying it has now shipped more than an exabyte’s worth of media for StorageTek T10000C tape drives in the nine months after its release – a faster ramp than for any other StorageTek product. Oracle also shipped more enterprise tape drives than any other vendor in the first half of 2011, according to an IDC report, which also declared: Oracle ...
VMTurbo upgrade supports all three major virtualization platforms
VMTurbo has upgraded its operations management suite to support the three major virtual environments and to improve its capacity-planning tool. With the new 3.0 version of Operations Manager, the software can now manage Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware’s vSphere individually or in multi-hypervisor deployments, the company says. This version adds XenServer to its capabilities. [ Doing server virtualization right is not so simple.
Obama washes hands of O’Dwyer piracy extradition case
President Obama has stated he has nothing to do with the decision by US authorities to extradite British student Richard O’Dwyer on copyright charges for linking to pirated content. On Tuesday, Obama took part in a Google+ hangout and answered questions submitted and voted on by the public. The top-ranked question, given the thumbs up by 2,073 people in the debate, concerned the O’Dwyer case, and came from the delightfully named Michael Mozart in Connecticut: “Why are you personally supporting ...
