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China UnionPay and Intel join forces for secure mobile payment
At IDF's second-day keynote in Beijing today, Intel announced its collaboration with bank card giant China UnionPay for secure mobile payment, with the latter utilizing Intel's Identity Protection Technology and also its distribution of the Hadoop software framework for datacenters. With UnionPay being China's top bank card organization boasting a total of 3.5 billion cards to date, this is obviously a big deal for Intel both locally and around the world -- at least in the 141 countries and regions where UnionPay is accepted, according to Executive Vice President Chai Hongfeng. Chai also used his stage time to show off UnionPay Quick Pass, China's very own NFC payment service with over 1.1 million local POS terminals as of December 2012. The exec used none other than Intel's developer device to buy its Corporate Vice President Doug Fisher a can of "Mountain Doug" (we would've preferred "Chai Tea" instead), but of course, HTC beat Intel to it with the joint launch of mobile Quick Pass back in August 2011. Anyhow, there's a press release after the break.
Dell begins test deployment of ARM-based Copper servers
Back in February, Dell revealed its intentions to enter the ARM server field. Today, the company announced that it is shipping ARM-based Copper servers to a limited number of customers. Copper is lower power than x86 servers, and Dell thinks this makes it a good fit for energy-intensive platforms such as Hadoop. In that same vein, the company views Copper as a cost-effective option that can be used for light workloads and for testing performance. In addition to deploying its new servers to select clients, Dell will be looking to the open source community for help in further developing its ARM system (the platform currently runs Linux). No word on when Copper will move beyond the testing phase.
Simulated monkey typing project is the best, blurst of times
Like many great things, Jesse Anderson's latest project was inspired by a classic Simpsons line. Of course, the cartoon didn't come up with the idea of a lot of monkeys sitting around, banging out some of the great works of Western literature. The concept of infinite primates being able to generate Shakespeare predates even The Simpsons' Tracey Ullman days, believe it or not. Anderson used Ubuntu, Hadoop and Amazon EC2, with his simulated monkey creating random data sets. Millions of virtual monkeys (not quite infinite, but still something) are participating in the project. Their outputs were mapped and are checked against all of Shakespeare's work. Not surprisingly, they've still got a ways to go. Looks like the project, like The Simpsons, may have to go on forever.
