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ZFS open source project abruptly shuts down, Snow Leopard weeps icy tears

by Darren Murph posted Oct 24th 2009 at 2:09PM

The on-again / off-again love affair between Apple and ZFS seems to be all but over, with a brief but potent message on the Mac OS Forge project site stating the following: "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly." If you'll recall, the implementation of the ZFS file system within Snow Leopard server was so close to happening that Apple actually published it as a feature of the forthcoming OS back in June of 2008. Now, however, all hope has presumably been lost. We'd bother explaining the rumors behind why all of this has suddenly crumbled, but honestly, will knowing the reasons really help the pain? No, no it won't.

[Via TUAW]

Sun FlashFire's record-breaking storage performance will make network admins giddy

by Tim Stevens posted Oct 14th 2009 at 8:33AM

Sun's FlashFire's record-breaking storage performance will make network admins giddy

Most businesses look for a good mix between value and performance for the hardware they lock in the server closet, the majority of those leaning toward the "value" side of the equation. However, for those companies that dodged the economic downturn entirely and want only the best, there's the FlashFire storage array from Sun. It's 2TB of rackmountable bits able to perform 1.6 million read and 1.2 million write operations per second, with a sustained throughput of 12.8GB/sec. Sun says these are records, and we can't find anything to refute them, the closest being the RamSan-440 from Texas Memory Systems, offering an (until very recently) impressive 600,000 I/O operations per second with a 4.5GB/sec throughput. TMS, it's been brought.

Australian power grid attacked by virus, Linux saves the day

by Joseph L. Flatley posted Oct 8th 2009 at 4:46PM

This isn't the first time we've heard of an institutional virus outbreak -- even the crew of the International Space Station had a neat little scare not too long ago -- and now various outlets in Australia are reporting that Integral Energy, which supplies energy to homes and businesses in New South Wales and Queensland, has suffered a particularly nasty visit by the W32.Virut.CF virus. When all was said and done, the company had to repair all 1000 of the facility's desktops. Furthermore, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the company's anti-virus software hadn't been updated since at least February. Between the lack of anti-virus updates and the fact that segregation between the company's main network and the grid was "typically none at all" this story has all the makings of a disaster. Luckily, the grid itself runs on Sun Solaris -- and when control systems became infected, how did they fix the mess? That's right: by replacing them with Linux machines. A word to the wise: they do make anti-virus auto-updates for a reason.

[Via The PC Report]

Oracle just might produce a netbook after acquiring Sun

by Darren Murph posted Jun 2nd 2009 at 5:47PM

Oracle sure has come a long way since its cardboard laptop days, but is it really ready to take on the likes of Acer, ASUS, HP and Dell in the netbook area? During a brief appearance at Sun's JavaOne conference today, Oracle's main man Larry Ellison proclaimed that his firm "might build a variety of devices as a result of its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, including netbooks." Sadly, there was absolutely no elaboration beyond that, but it's certainly interesting to think of what a netbook would look / feel like with a Sun flair to it. Who knows, maybe we won't even have to wonder in a few months.

75-megawatt solar plant to power "first solar city" in Florida

by Darren Murph posted Apr 11th 2009 at 4:11AM

Given that Florida has accurately been coined The Sunshine State, it's not at all shocking to hear that America's first "solar city" will be built in the state's southwest corner. Or, at least that's the plan. According to a new report, West Palm Beach-based Kitson & Partners is currently developing a new city near Charlotte County, which will get juiced by a massive 75-megawatt solar plant. Said plant will cost around $300 million to build and will be installed by Florida Power & Light; if all goes well, homes will begin construction on a sizable plot of land dubbed Babcock Ranch by 2011. If things don't go so well, we're told that the actual power plant will still be erected and fed into the larger grid. In other words, Florida's gettin' some solar power, with or without this newfangled concrete jungle.

[Via Fark]

Recession roundup: Monday morning edition

by Tim Stevens posted Jan 26th 2009 at 9:57AM

It wasn't that long ago that Monday mornings in the office were a depressing time -- another cheerful weekend gone; another long week of work ahead. But, these days, being in the office on a Monday is a good thing, because if your login still works you've survived another scary layoff Friday. Spare a thought, then, for those whose system access has been cut off, including 1,300 from Sun (the first wave of a total of 6,000 planned job cuts), 8,000 workers at Sprint who are due to receive pink slips, 6,000 from Philips, and an unannounced number of IBM workers (rumored to be 16,000) who have also found themselves to be on the wrong side of the cost-cutting ax. In one final bit of cheery news, AMD has reported a $1.4 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2008 and, after shedding its handheld graphics unit, is now selling its manufacturing operations to Advanced Technology Investment. Oh, sorry, you were hoping for some genuinely good news? How about this: that loss is smaller than AMD's $1.8 billion loss from the same time last year. Now have a great day!

Read - Sun confirms 1,300 layoffs
Read - Sprint Nextel Plans to Cut 8,000 Jobs in Quarter
Read - Philips to Release 6000 Employees into Wild
Read - Several IBM employees report being laid off on Alliance@IBM
Read - IBM Confirms Layoffs
Read - AMD Reports $1.4 Billion Loss

Video: Shouting at disk drive causes high latency, low morale

by Ross Miller posted Jan 2nd 2009 at 12:01PM

Here's a tip for everyone who hasn't made the jump to solid state: try to be nice to your disk drive. Brendan Gregg from Sun's Fishworks team wanted to see the effects of vibrations on his disk array, so he proceeded to shout at it. On video. Yeah, we bet that's pretty embarrassing for the drive in question, and what results is a sharp spike the number of I/O operations that take over 5ms to complete. Moral of the story? Yelling at your computer isn't going to make it run any faster. How about next time we see how it reacts to Ozzy, Mozart and warm, gentle nuzzles? We've placed video of Gregg's sadistic hardware taunts after the break.

[Via Slashdot]

Continue reading Video: Shouting at disk drive causes high latency, low morale

Vista, OS X updates could bring significant SSD speed gains

by Paul Miller posted Aug 10th 2008 at 7:10AM

It's been a real roller coaster ride of emotions with SSD. The once lauded (at least in our hearts) savior of all things computing has, in real life, provided us with lackluster and even controversial performance gains, while battery improvements haven't been revolutionary and the prices still aren't exactly wallet-friendly. Most of that is unlikely to change in the next couple of years, but there's still plenty to be fixed in the short term. Samsung is working with Microsoft to define optimum packet sizes and best practices for reading and writing files to SSD as a potential update for Windows Vista, which is particularly optimized to work best with traditional hard drives. Sun is also working to improve SSD support with its next-gen ZFS file system, which in addition to powering its Solaris OS should be making an appearance in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, at least in the server version. There's clearly still plenty of untapped potential in SSD, let's just hope the powers that be figure this stuff out sooner rather than later.

[Via Mac Rumors]

Crystals hold promise of affordable solar energy, may have been purchased on eBay

by Darren Murph posted May 28th 2008 at 7:41PM

We have no real way of verifying whether or not these so-calls crystals were purchased alongside some bizarre time machine on eBay, but we'll take this guy's word for it and assume not for the time being. Reportedly, University of Queensland professor Max Lu has teamed up with researchers in order to grow "the world's first titanium oxide single crystals with large amounts of reactive surfaces." Put simply, these very crystals can "absorb sunlight and convert it into electricity." It's said that Lu has been working on the project for some 15 years, and even now, he doesn't expect the creation to be commercially viable for another decade. Aside from morphing into fairies and making dreams come true, the things could also be used to "purify air and water." Pair this up with an invisibility cloak and we'll really be in business.

[Thanks, Brendan]

Interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Engadget Mobile

by Ryan Block posted May 2nd 2008 at 2:09PM

We recently got a chance to briefly sit down with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who definitely ranks among the geekier and more sincere CEOs we've had the privilege to meet. We discussed the long-missing JavaFX Mobile platform Sun promised a while back, as well as Java on the iPhone, and doing battle with Microsoft as an open source software vendor. Check it out over on Engadget Mobile!

Sun aims to speed up data by swapping wires for frickin' laser beams

by Donald Melanson posted Mar 24th 2008 at 11:26AM

It's far from the first time we've seen lasers touted as a means of boosting data speeds exponentially, but Sun seems to think it has a better chance than most of making it a reality, thanks in no small part to $44 million in funding from DARPA. As The New York Times reports, that cash haul will be put to use to "explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams," which would not only allow for computers to be smaller, but as much as a thousand times faster as well. Needless to say, however, there's quite a few significant hurdles to overcome before that happens, and even Sun itself admits that there's a "50 percent chance of failure." They also say, of course, that the potential benefits are worth the risks, with them even going so far as to boast that the technology would be a way of "breaking Moore's Law."

Sun prepping Java for iPhone: your craplet investment is safe

by Paul Miller posted Mar 8th 2008 at 6:54PM

We're sure there have been some really great Java Micro Edition apps developed over the years, we just haven't been fortunate enough to ~~find any that aren't a Bejeweled variant~~ run into many of them. But that could very well change with the news that Sun is using that fancy new SDK to develop a Java Virtual Machine for the iPhone, which it expects to have ready "some time after June," and which will allow iPhone users access to the vast libraries of existing JME apps. We suppose the real conundrum now is which Java ME app we'll grab first: Harry Potter, or MapQuest Mobile. These choices, they overwhelm us.

[Via Mac Rumors]

Intel's 6-core Xeon and Nehalem CPU info leaked

by Joshua Topolsky posted Feb 25th 2008 at 12:02PM

Intel's had its new processor plans slipped out to the public thanks to Sun, according to DailyTech. Details on the 6-core (!) Xeon Dunnington, as well as the kinda-sorta hush-hush Nehalem were apparently leaked out onto Sun's public web server over the weekend, including plans for the new Xeons to overtake the company's Tigerton CPU line. The Dunnington processors will have a 16MB L3 cache shared by all six cores, and will be pin-compatible with the Tigertons, thus making integration with your Clarksboro chipset slightly less painful... by being possible. The Nehalem also got the spy treatment, with news that it will not only replace the Penryn line in Q4 '08, but will also be the first time in 18 years that Intel includes on-die memory controllers. If this sort of thing is important to you (and we think it may be) hit the read link and get all the juicy details.

Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, others sued by Implicit Networks in patent brouhaha

by Donald Melanson posted Feb 20th 2008 at 2:26PM

Implicit Networks isn't exactly a household name, but it sure looks like its trying to make itself known with its latest lawsuit, which takes aim at no less than Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Sun and Real Networks (plus semiconductor company Raza Microelectronics). As you've no doubt surmised, the cause of all that litigiousness is some alleged patent infringement by those big name companies, and specifically a violation of Implicit's patent for "Methods and System for Demultiplexing a First Sequence of Packet Components to Identify Specific Components Wherein Subsequent Components are Processed without Re-identifying Components." Exactly what that is, we're not sure, but Implicit claims that each of the aforementioned companies violated it in their own particular way, and it's now demanding an unspecified amount of cash in return.

The LapDome: tent-shaped sunscreen for your laptop

by Joshua Topolsky posted Jan 16th 2008 at 9:06PM

Friends, are you sick and tired of the constant struggle to use your laptop while sunbathing? Do you find yourself battling the life-giving rays of our closest star, desperately trying to finish that presentation... pool side? Well toil in vain no more -- the LapDome is here. That's right, instead of going inside like a normal person, now you can cover up your laptop with the most ludicrous and embarrassing product since the Pocket Fisherman. You'll get the idea real quick -- it's a mini-tent used to shield your computer from the sun, and the glare which it causes. The company's ad campaign asks "Does this look familiar?" next to the depiction of a woman covering her laptop with a beach towel, then suggests covering your laptop with a small tent might look better. We suggest stopping the madness, ASAP.

[Via Pocket-lint]