Why You Might Consider Using an Alarm Clock Instead of Your Phone
Also, you can your throw an alarm clock across the room with much more force than your phone. [XKCD]
from ffffff http://gizmodo.com/why-you-might-consider-using-an-alarm-clock-instead-of-1700886887
via IFTTT
Paranoid about the NSA? The case for dumping cloud's Big 3
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may be the most important public cloud providers of the next decade. Hosting your data with an ISP has a number of advantages over choosing the dominant American cloud providers: advantages that run the gamut from technical to political.
ISPs have been in the co-location business practically since the internet began. Many have offered hosted services (typically e-mail and web server space) for at least as long as the World Wide Web (and the browsers required to interpret it) have been around.
The idea that ISPs might be interested in hosting cloud services is thus not particularly novel, nor is it particularly hard for them to stand a cloud service up today. HP will cheerfully sell you cloud servers, and all of the software to make it go, too.
Almost every start-up wants in on this too. Maxta is in bed with Mirantis to form a hyper-converged compute + storage "Openstack cloud in a can" offering. Yottabyte is building its own fully hybrid cloud unicorn thing... even newly out of stealth Springpath is planning a pre-canned cloud in a box via partnerships.
Companies that don't quite qualify as start-ups anymore like Nutanix are all over this, and the big boys are trying to buy in too. Look to Cisco's Metacloud purchase or the Dell-Microsoft franken-pesudo-Azure thing.
A quick web search shows that many ISPs already have their own public clouds. BT in the UK, Verizon in the US, Telus in Canada and Optus in Australia are all examples of ISPs in the four major Register reader countries that offer cloud services.
Chances are almost all of the majors (and most of the not-so-majors) either have a cloud offering today, or will within the next 18 months. So why are they doing this?
The technical argument
The technical argument for ISP-based clouds is actually pretty simple. If you are a business that is located only in one restricted geographic area, you can probably have all your business locations using the same ISP.
It's not particularly hard to get great deals on really high-speed data links to your ISP – what's hard is getting high-speed data links to the internet at large for cheap. If I want to slam a large amount of traffic back and forth between several locations, all within the same province and a data centre that is owned and operated by that ISP in that same province, there's a really good chance I'll be able to pay "on net" rates for my cloud traffic.
On net rates are cheap. I can then set up something with the ISP such that any of my traffic that does go out to the internet at large gets charged to me per gigabyte, but because that will probably be just some general browsing it's not going to cost much. The real bandwidth is between me and my data centre, and by staying within my ISP's network, that traffic won't break the bank.
If I maintain a back-up link through a second internet service provider, then whenever I failover to that connection, the traffic will have to go through "peering" and thus "over the internet" to get from me to my ISP's data centre. In this case, those data costs would be the same as if I were using one of the big American cloud providers, but I don't have to use the back-up link unless my main ISP's link has fallen over.
One of the other advantages to ISP-local clouds (or, really, any regional cloud provider located physically near you), is that physical proximity enables services that are otherwise difficult.
Take data recovery as an example. For those using cloud services simply as an offsite back-up repository there is always the problem of getting your data back when a restore is required. Downloading can take a long time. A local cloud provider can pop the data onto a drive and courier it over the same day. A cloud provider in another country takes longer, if they even offer that as a service.
Sponsored: Network DDoS protection
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/public_cloud_sovereignty/
via IFTTT
Inky STINK as rinky dink Apple Watch fails on TWO tattooed arms
Reg reader Michael Lovell has found a bug in the Apple Watch: it can't figure out if he has a pulse when worn on his tattooed wrist.
All is well on his un-inked left wrist, but when he switches to the right "The wrist detection is playing up," he tells us, as the watch "keeps asking for the passcode."
Michael made the video below to illustrate the issue.
Michael's not alone: Redditor guinne55fan has encountered the same problem.
“So I thought my shiny new 42mm SS watch had a bad wrist detector sensor,” guinne55fan wrote. “The watch would lock up every time the screen went dark and prompted me for my password. I wouldn't receive notifications. I couldn't figure out why especially since the watch was definitely not losing contact with my skin.”
guinne55fan then “decided to try holding it against my hand and it worked. My hand isn't tattooed and the Watch stayed unlocked. Once I put it back on the area that is tattooed with black ink the watch would automatically lock again ”
Apple explains that the Watch uses LEDs to detect how much blood is coursing through your veins, but that various factors can mean the device won't get a reading. Speculation suggests the pigments in the two chaps' tattoos might be preventing the Watch from being able to see inside their veins, leading the device to assume it's not being worn and therefore not issuing notifications. Natural pigments appear not to have any effect on the Watch.
As it happens, guinne55fan says the Watch is buggy in other ways, too.
“Overall I'm having other issues with it that are not tattoo related that I'm more upset about, spotty notifications with messages, no email notifications, I can receive calls on the watch but I can't make them, those issues are bothering me more,” he wrote in the comments following his initial post.
Apple support, he says, has been useful addressing all his issues.
Lovell's so keen on his watch he says he just wants to keep using it, rather than visit an Apple store to seek support. ®
Sponsored: Network DDoS protection
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/ink_stink_as_apple_watch_fails_on_tattooed_arm/
via IFTTT
How to set up a passcode on iOS and Android
There was a time when phones only contained text messages and contacts that the value of your device had been more important than what it stores. But that period is now long gone. In today’s age of smartphones, information has become more valuable than the device itself, which is why having a PIN on your smartphone has become more important than ever.
Tons of information -- such as your social media accounts, email messages and bank details -- can be accessed from your phone and we all know that security is not something to be ignored in this day and age. Setting up a passcode is an easy task on both Android and iOS smartphones and here’s how it’s done.
On Android
Android users have three lock options for their smartphones: the four-digit code, the unlock pattern and the alphanumeric password.
To set up any of these follow the steps below;
- Go to the Settings menu and locate the Lock Screen option.
- Choose which pass code style you want to have, then set the desired code or pattern.
- For the unlock pattern, you have to connect at least four dots for the pattern to be approved.
- Following your selection, the code or pattern will have to be entered twice for accuracy.
On iOS
Sorry iOS users, there’s no pattern option available for you so you’ll have to stick to the trusty code. Here’s how to set it up:
- Go to the Settings tab, click Passcode and select Turn Passcode On.
- Enter your 4-digit code (make sure it’s one you will remember)
- Along with setting up your passcode, it is also a good idea to set an autolock time for your device, which can be done in Settings > General > Auto-Lock.
Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved.
from ffffff http://feeds.betanews.com/~r/bn/~3/_m9QBJn81gg/
via IFTTT
American Airlines Planes Grounded Because of Pilot iPad Crashes
American Airlines has been using iPads in place of paper reference books for several years—but last night, a weakness showed. “Several dozen” of the airline’s planes were grounded as pilots’ iPads crashed.
In a slew of of tweets, it came to light that the iPads used by pilots instead of the piles of old-school reference books were crashing ahead of take-off, reports Quartz. The software and data that they use are provided by Jeppesen, a sub-division of Boeing Digital Aviation.
Speaking to Quartz, one passenger explained that “the pilot told us when they were getting ready to take off, the iPad screens went blank, both for the captain and copilot, so they didn’t have the flight plan.” One pilot is reported to have told a passenger that “the entire 737 fleet on American had experienced the same behavior.”
American Airlines took to Twitter to officially admit that the problems were due to iPad crashes:
@bjacaruso Some flights are experiencing an issue with a software application on pilot iPads. We'll have info about your departure soon.
April 29, 2015
Andrea Huguely, American Airlines director of corporate communications, told USA Today that “in some cases, the flight has had to return to the gate to access a Wi-Fi connection to fix the issue.” It remains to be seen whether the problem has been properly fixed, but we’ve reached out to American Airlines to find out. Until then, it may for pilots to pack some dead trees in their bag. [USA Today, Quartz]
Image by Kent Wien under Creative Commons license
from ffffff http://gizmodo.com/american-airlines-planes-grounded-because-of-pilot-ipad-1700886417
via IFTTT
Fanf--kingtastic And Edumacational: The Case Of English Infixation
Chi Luu is a peripatetic linguist who speaks Australian English and studies dead languages. Every two weeks, she’ll uncover curious stories about language from around the globe for Lingua Obscura.
Where some other languages may soberly cherish the sanctity of their word forms and vocabulary, English is notorious for being playful and expressive with its linguistic morphology or word-building. Well-known examples of the infixation phenomenon are the colorfully offensive expletive infixation, the so-called Homeric ma-infixation, the Flanderian diddly-infixation and hip hop’s ‘iz’/’izn’ infixation (shiznit and the like). But what exactly is infixation?
Most readers will already be familiar with more common word-building processes such as prefixation and suffixation, in which an affix is added to the beginning or end of a base word respectively. These morphological processes usually alter the meaning, case, or part of speech of the word and so have a grammatical purpose:
Prefix de-: de + activate ‘deactivate’ (the opposite of activate)
Suffix -hood: child + hood ‘childhood’ (the state of being a child).
Prefixes and suffixes of course can be enthusiastically layered on top of one another, like the long and short of semihemidemisemiquaver, yet can often still be meaningfully reconstructed and understood, or perhaps misunderstood, or even misunderestimated. Take note of the unwieldy pile of affixes in the case of one of the longest words in the English language, anti-dis-establish-ment-ari-an-ism.
Infixation is yet another morphological process which occurs internally in a base word, rather than at either end of the base. In other languages such as Tagalog, Leti and some dialects of Mandarin, infixation is used for Very Serious and Important grammatical functions, in similar ways to prefixation and suffixation in English, commonly changing the grammatical use of the word.
Instances of infixation in English, however, are mostly found in non-standard vernacular speech and usually add a playful, extra-grammatical sense to the word rather than changing its grammatical meaning. For example, the process of expletive infixation is used for added emotional emphasis, while ma-infixation, made famous by Homer Simpson, as described by Alan Yu, layers a nuance of pseudo-sophisti-ma-cation onto a word. Despite their use in slang rather than standard language, linguists have found that these infixes follow systematic phonological rules in the way they may be placed and these rules tell us a lot about prosodic structure and the internal linguistic knowledge of speakers of the language.
In expletive infixation, common obscene expletives or their milder variants, such as fucking/fuckin, freaking, flipping, effing, goddamn, damn (and bloody/blooming in British and Australian English contexts) are inserted productively into words to express a stronger vehemence.
- absolutely: abso-fucking-lutely, abso-bloody-lutely, abso-goddamn-lutely, abso-freaking-lutely
- Minnesota: Minne-fucking-sota
- fantastic: fan-bloody-tastic
We can see how different expletives can be inserted in exactly the same space in the word absolutely. English speakers can also quickly note that constructions such as *ab-fucking-solutely (infixed after the first syllable) and *fanta-bloody-stic (infixed after the second syllable) are technically possible yet do not sound right (linguistically indicated by an asterisk). This is the case even though the expletive happily appears after the first syllable in fan-tastic but the second syllable after abso-lutely. They somehow violate the unwritten rules of this infixation construction. Why is this so?
In his 1982 study on English prosodic structure and expletive infixation, John J. McCarthy outlines how this productive process can be described in terms of certain complex rules of word stress placement and metrical feet. To simplify matters, the expletive infix may be placed preceding a stressed foot of a word. The stress happens to occur on the third syllable of absolutely and the second in fantastic and so dictates where the expletive infix can be placed. This idea is discussed and developed further in Alan C. L. Yu’s 2004 paper Reduplication in English Homeric Infixation, in which he gives the following examples of the ma-infixation construction:
- saxophone: saxo-ma-phone
- secretary: secre-ma-tary
- Mississippi: Missi-ma-ssippi
- hippopotamus: hippo-ma-potamus
What’s interesting is that native English speakers will already have absorbed a knowledge and intuition of how to apply these infixation processes to new words and constructions without actually knowing any overt rules of metrical stress. Speakers will also know where not to apply the infix. For example, for a word that may not commonly appear with an expletive infix in slang, such as instantiate, in-fucking-stantiate will naturally sound right to an English speaker and not right as *inst-fuckin-antiate, as we can see in the following novel examples from McCarthy’s paper:
- amalga-bloody-mated
- emanci-motherfuckin-pator
- every-bloody-body
- handi-bloody-cap
- hypo-bloody-crite
- kinder-goddamn-garten
- Lauder-damn-dale
Similar processes such as Ned Flanders’ diddly-infixation (in words such as wel-diddly-elcome) and the iz/izn construction found in hip hop slang, in words like shiznit, hizouse, show further how regular morphological processes used grammatically in other languages can be employed playfully in English to extend a word’s expressive sense.
Though these non-standard slang forms may be fun and inventive, they still do follow rules of English word-building, which we happen to know already, though we may not be aware of it. So the more we play with these types of word constructions, the more evidence we’ll have to further edumacate ourselves about some of these hidden rules of language.
JSTOR Citations
Another Effing Euphemism
Michael Adams
American Speech, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 110-112
Published by: Duke University Press
Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation
John J. McCarthy
Language, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 1982), pp. 574-590
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
Infixing with a Vengeance: Pingding Mandarin Infixation
Alan C. L. Yu
Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 39-58
Published by: Springer
Untangling Leti Infixation
Juliette Blevins
Oceanic Linguistics, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Dec., 1999), pp. 383-403
Published by: University of Hawai’i Press
Photo credit: SIMPSONS
Homer Simpson
CREDIT: FOX/Courtesy Neal Peters Collection
from ffffff http://daily.jstor.org/fanfuckingtastic-and-edumacational-the-case-of-english-infixation/
via IFTTT
Chinese report loopy Facebook redirections
China appears to have neutered swathes of otherwise uncensored websites and redirected Facebook login attempts to external websites, according to local reports.
The gaffe, the cause of which some say is likely accidental, affects local users who do not access Facebook through virtual private networks.
Users report being bounced to seemingly benign sites wpkg.org or ptraveler.com when accessing the popular Facebook Login tool, or Google Analytics.
Reddit users suggest the bouncing will stop if advertising blockers are used to can the Java applet 'connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js'.
F-Secure malware bod Mikko Hypponen told Reuters the redirection is odd.
"It doesn't make sense, so it might be accidental," Hypponen says.
Wpkg operators say they do not know why they are receiving so much free traffic.
Other users speculate the redirection is part of an attack on internet providers redirecting users to various sites including porn pages.
"It is basically spoofing the google analytics DNS to load a malicious script which randomly redirects the user to this porn site" one Redditor sleuth suggested.
That user suggests the attack involves an invisible button that loads on certain websites which notifies attackers of the device a victim is using before redirecting them to a malicious site.
Consensus on just what's behind the bizarre internet activity appears to be a way off. ®
Sponsored: Network DDoS protection
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/china_facebook_logins_borked/
via IFTTT
Stop the war between privacy and security – EU data watchdog
Security and privacy are not mutually exclusive says Europe’s privacy watchdog – and people should stop saying they are.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), Giovanni Buttarelli, told a Brussels conference he was concerned that “the objective of cyber-security may be misused to justify measures which weaken protection of [data protection] rights.”
“Cyber-security must not become an excuse for disproportionate processing of personal data. Let's not forget that when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) last year found the Data Retention Directive to be invalid, one of the reasons was concern about the inadequacy of the data security provisions in the directive,” he continued.
Although some commentators interpreted the ECJ ruling to mean that data must be stored within national borders, Buttarelli disagreed.
“Physical location is not the determining factor in security. Rather, it is degree of control, accountability and responsibility which data controllers demonstrate when processing personal information. They must take full responsibility for all the measures they implement, regardless of the technology they use. Responsibility must not vanish in the clouds,” said the newly appointed EDPS.
Negotiations on a new Data Protection Regulation are currently underway and Buttarelli says that accountability should not be sacrificed in the inevitable compromise.
“One tool for reinforcing accountability is the introduction of a general data breach notification obligation, which will force controllers take the necessary organisational and procedural measures,” he said, pinning his colours to at least one legislative mast. ®
Sponsored: Network DDoS protection
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/stop_the_phoney_war_between_privacy_and_security_begs_eu_data_protection_watchdog/
via IFTTT
Fiesta exploit kits wakes from siesta
Brad Duncan says attackers are again slinging the Fiesta, this time using a complicated series of loops that researchers will find difficult to trace.
The Rackspace malware boffin says the kit, once one of the more popular on underground markets, is hitting victims through gates that push traffic from hacked sites to the malicious domain.
Duncan called the group the 'BizCN gate actor' because single IP gate domains are registered through Chinese registrar bizcn.
"Researchers may have a hard time generating infection traffic from compromised websites associated with this actor," Duncan says in a SANS post.
"Most often, HTTP GET requests to the gate domain return a 404 Not Found. In some cases, the gate domain might not appear in traffic at all. Other times, the HTTP GET request for the Fiesta EK landing page doesn't return anything.
"It's tough to get a full infection chain when you're trying to do it on purpose."
Duncan says the attacker would normally rarely change the IP addresses for the gate domains, each of which is matched to a unique compromised website but will be likely forced to since he published a list of some of the 100 domains he found so far.
But Duncan suggest that the attacker could be caught if they did not now change their tactics, techniques, and procedures.
The malware used in the attacks affected Windows boxes maintaining persistence in the AppData folder/local directory.
Fiesta was chalked up as dead last December by independent malware analysts.
It enjoyed some popularity with the decline of the infamous Black Hole exploit kit which fell to ruin after its source code was leaked and founder Dmitry Fedotov arrested. ®
Sponsored: Network DDoS protection
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/fiesta_ek_sans/
via IFTTT
Brit boffins BLOW UP Li-On batteries and film the MELTING COPPER
Video UK boffins have taken a close-up of what happens with Li-ion batteries when they get hot under the collar, and it's not pretty.
As Lenovo, Boeing, Tesla, Sony and others will attest, Li-ion battery fire-safety is worth researching.
However, the University College London boffins say most analysis of battery fires has focussed on working what happened after the fact, using X-ray CT scans to take static images and compare those to batteries operating normall.
It's surely much more fun to use a big science machine – in this case the European Synchrotron – to capture real-time images, and that's what the UCL team, the National Physical Laboratory and Imperial College London have done.
Their images capture the process of thermal runaway as-it-happens, the UCL release says.
The study combined high-energy synchrotron X-ray images and thermal images, explains doctoral student Donal Finegan of UCL Chemical Engineering, “to map changes to the internal structure and external temperature of two types of Li-ion batteries as we exposed them to extreme levels of heat”.
The quarry was the moment of thermal runaway, the moment when the battery goes from being “a bit warm” to “oh hell, my pants are on fire!”
Or, to be more scientific: when the batteries break down exothermically, they generate a lot of heat. Since that heat can't escape, the battery suffers a catastrophic failure.
What the boffins spotted included pockets of gas forming and venting inside the battery. They also found that with the right internal support, a battery can remain relatively intact in the runaway process – up until around 1,000°C when the copper melted.
“In contrast, the battery without an internal support exploded causing the entire cap of the battery to detach and its contents to eject. Prior to thermal runaway, the tightly packed core collapsed, increasing the risk of severe internal short circuits and damage to neighbouring objects”, the university says.
The work has been published in Nature Communications (in full here).
As Finegan explains in the video below, “we tried to simulate a range of abuse conditions, from moderate temperatures up to trying to simulate a fire”. And who wouldn't love to have the chance to try and reproduce that experiment? ®
Understanding how Lithium-ion batteries fail
Sponsored: A modern data architecture with Apache Hadoop
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/boffins_blow_up_batteries_so_you_dont_have_to/
via IFTTT
UK's annual PCB waste = 81 HMS Belfasts, says National Physical Lab
We're obliged to reader Simon Moore for flagging up a heavyweight improbable measurement unit, deployed by the National Physical Laboratory in an attempt to quantify the amount of printed circuit board waste dumped into UK landfills every year in terms of Royal Navy light cruisers.
According to this enlightening report into the ReUSE (Reuseable, Unzippable, Sustainable Electronics) project, 1,000,000 tons of PCB scrap is chucked annually, which is "equivalent to 81 x HMS Belfasts".
Simon suggested: "As this is from the National Physics Laboratory it must be regarded as a new standard, and perhaps could be adopted by The Register's Standards Soviet."
Well, it's a fair point, but a quick bit of research reveals that HMS Belfast tips the scales at 11,500 tons.
Accordingly, it's actually 86.96 HMS Belfasts – give or take the odd six-inch gun turret – which are consigned to Blighty's rubbish tips each year.
We'll leave it to readers to supply the equivalent figures in KiloJubs and giant octopuses. ®
Tonnote
Vulture Central's backroom gremlins thought the NPL's number-crunchers may have used the generic displacement figure (as built) for the Edinburgh sub-class of the Town class light cruiser, of which HMS Belfast is a member. A quick bit of research gives the design displacement under full load of the Edinburgh sub-class as 12,980 long tons, which would mean Blighty's annual wastage amounts to 77 RN light cruisers – clearly not the figure the NPL reached. Even using the sub-class's empty weight of 10,565 long tons, we couldn't make it add up to 81.
Any ideas? Tell us in the comments if you can reverse-engineer the NPL's shonky sums.
Sponsored: Network DDoS protection
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/uk_pcb_waste_equals_81_hms_belfasts/
via IFTTT
Our Best Look Yet At How Many People Are Watching Netflix’s Original Series
NETFLIX
Netflix’s book of secrets is only two chapters long. Chapter One: “The Ratings For All of Our Original Content.” Chapter Two: “The Number of Times You Have Paused Blue Is the Warmest Color.”
The book is kept in a vault below a pizza restaurant in Kentucky, and the only people allowed to look are Reed Hastings and Ricky Gervais, and certainly not the press and Native Americans. But San Diego-based Luth Research did some digging with Variety to discover “one of the media business’s best-kept secrets” by assembling “a sizable panel of Netflix subscribers in the U.S. [to determine] the most popular programs on the streaming service.”
What they found is that Kimmy Schmidt is strong as hell.
Daredevil, the first of multiple superhero dramas coming to Netflix as part of a deal with Marvel, premiered April 10, and is seeing strong sampling, with an estimated 10.7% of subscribers watching at least one episode in its first 11 days on the streaming service.
By way of comparison, the third season of House of Cards, which premiered Feb. 27, attracted 6.5% of subs over its first 30 days of availability. New comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt also bettered Cards in its first month (7.3%), while new drama Bloodline appears to be a slow starter (2.4%). (Via)
Things aren’t as grim for House of Cards as they may seem. Variety notes that the recently-released third season was binge-watched more than any of the other originals, “with nearly half of subs having watched at least three episodes in a single day in the first 30 days after release.”
None of those numbers are official — the data only came from “2,500 Netflix subscribers watching via computers, tablets, or smartphones,” and NOT televisions — but it’s the closest we’ve come to understanding how people watch Netflix. Expect more Marvel and peeno noir in the future.
Via: Variety
from ffffff http://uproxx.com/tv/2015/04/our-best-look-yet-at-how-many-people-are-watching-netflixs-original-series/
via IFTTT
Hulu To Pay $180 Million For 'Seinfeld'
In another sign that Hulu is stepping up its game, the digital video giant has landed the SVOD rights to “Seinfeld,” cutting a deal with Sony Pictures TV for all 180 episodes of the enduring NBC comedy.
The deal is said to be valued at just under $1 million an episode, which translates to a nearly $180 million windfall to be split by distributor Sony TV, Time Warner’s Castle Rock and “Seinfeld” profit participants, including star/co-creator Jerry Seinfeld and co-creator Larry David. The pact is expected to be announced at Hulu’s upfront presentation on Wednesday.
Sony TV, which has long controlled distribution rights to the series on behalf of original producer Castle Rock TV, has been shopping the property for its first SVOD licensing pact for the past few months. A limited number of “Seinfeld” reruns have been available online via Sony TV’s ad-supported Crackle video platform, but the Hulu pact marks the first time the series will be available in its entirety in the new era of binge-viewing.
“Seinfeld’s” move to Hulu follows Netflix’s purchase last year of the library rights to Warner Bros. TV’s “Friends,” another series from the heyday of “Must-See TV” NBC comedies. The show is believed to have performed well for Netflix.
The big bucks that Netflix paid for “Friends” and Hulu’s outlay for “Seinfeld” indicate that SVOD players are expanding their menus beyond the serialized off-network dramas that built Netflix and Hulu into Internet powerhouses. Hulu also cut a rich deal in February with CBS TV Distribution for more than 300 episodes and counting of the Eye’s “CSI,” the epitome of contemporary procedural dramas.
from ffffff http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/hulu-seinfeld-licensing-180-million-1201483537/
via IFTTT
Report: Hulu Just Paid Nearly $180 Million For Every Episode Of Seinfeld
If you ever thought Hulu was only half-heartedly committed to winning the streaming TV wars, think again: the online service just slapped down “just under $1 million per episode”, securing the rights to every minute of Seinfeld ever aired.
According to a report from Variety, Hulu cut a deal with Sony Pictures TV the rights to NBC’s enduring comedy, seemingly beating out competing offers from the likes of Amazon and Yahoo. An official announcement is expected on Wednesday.
All the talk with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video might be about original content and new-release movies, but if this deal — and Netflix’s deal to get Friends — is anything to go by, it seems that the hottest property in binge-watching is still ‘90s sitcoms. [Variety]
Contact the author at chris@gizmodo.com.
from ffffff http://gizmodo.com/hulu-just-paid-nearly-180-million-for-every-episode-of-1700869520
via IFTTT
Lake Mead Has Dropped To Its Lowest Level Ever
California isn't the only one having a water crisis. Yesterday, Lake Mead sank to its lowest level yet. The watery behemoth created by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s was reduced to a mere 1,080.07 feet above sea level, minimally smaller than the previous record of 1,080.19 set last August.
The difference of 1.44 inches might seem small, but it has a lot of people worried. With an incredibly dry summer anticipated out west, experts fear that the lake could sink to a water level of 1,073 feet. For comparison, the highest water level in the lake was 1225.85 feet, recorded back in 1983.
Millions of people in the region rely on Lake Mead for water and electricity generated at Hoover Dam. Unfortunately, as water levels fall, it gets more difficult for the dam's turbines to produce electricity. Engineers at the dam are installing turbines that could extend the ability of the dam to produce power, even if the water levels fall to 950 feet, but that's a worst case scenario.
To address the decreasing water supply to communities in the region, engineers are also working on a much deeper intake point, the Third Straw, ensuring that a thirsty Las Vegas will be able to suck water from the bottom of the lake even as the surface level falls.
Read our feature on how the fortunes of Las Vegas will rise and fall with Lake Mead from our 2014 Water Issue.
from ffffff http://www.popsci.com/lake-mead-just-hit-its-lowest-level-yet?dom=tw&src=SOC
via IFTTT
A Plea To Humanity: Do Not Back This Fart-Tracking Wearable
Kickstarter has brought us many wonderful things: the Pebble smartwatch; levitating light bulbs; RC pterodactyls. But one thing it absolutely does not need to bring to life is this fart-tracking wearable.
The premise of the CH4 (witty science joke alert) is pretty simple: clip the gaudy plastic box, approximately the size of one (1) Apple Watch to your butt, and it will detect when you fart, signalling that information to your smartphone. You then enter in what you’ve had to eat recently, and the app chews on the Big Data Dump to work out what food you should avoid:
The app comes with a dashboard that combines fart tracking with food habits. As you use the app longer, foods get correlated with gas production and the app identifies foods that you should avoid. Isn’t it awesome?!
[Emphasis entirely theirs]
At the time of writing, 8 people with access to an internet connection had decided that they are willing to part with $120 in return for having a small plastic box sniff their butt throughout the day. If you’d like to join them (and simultaneously prove that it’s time for this World Wide Web experiment to be shut the hell down), the Kickstarter link is right here.
from ffffff http://gizmodo.com/a-plea-to-humanity-do-not-back-this-fart-tracking-wear-1700862933
via IFTTT
Tattoos Rumored To Break The Apple Watch's Wrist Detection
Every new Apple product needs some form of scandal — whether real, or engineered by breaking an iPhone over bended knee — to call its own in the week after launch. And for those of us with tattooed wrists, the Apple Watch flaw has reared its gold-plated head.
According to a Reddit thread discovered by Cult of Mac, the Apple Watch’s wrist detection doesn’t work when placed on a tattooed wrist. That sucks for anyone with a wrist tattoo — and isn’t something Apple has warned prospective buyers about, either.
The wrist detection on the Apple Watch relies on a method known as photoplethysmography. What that staggerlingly long word really means is this: the sensor fires a combination of visible and infrared light at your skin, and measures the return. The flow of blood causes peaks and troughs in this signal, which lets the sensor work out your pulse — or, if it’s even sitting on your wrist at all. It’s the same system used in pulse oximeters, the things nurses attach to your fingers to measure your level of oxygen saturation.
It would seem, however, that black ink in the skin is messing with the sensors: the black ink absorbs the green or infrared light used by the sensor, apparently stopping it from working in a number of cases.
There’s hope for a fix, though: the same Redditor who noted the original problem also claims that the watch can detect his heart-rate just fine — possibly thanks to a higher-intensity light used for the heart-rate sensor, or different frequencies. Either way, it sounds like a problem that might be fixable in a firmware update. Until then, you’re probably just wearing it wrong. [Reddit via Cult of Mac]
from ffffff http://gizmodo.com/tattoos-rumored-to-break-the-apple-watchs-wrist-detecti-1700850539
via IFTTT
The Boxer And The Batterer
They say when you get hit and hurt bad you see black lights — the black lights of unconsciousness. But I don’t know nothing about that.
—Muhammad Ali
1.
It’s an old, simple distinction, so easy to slip into that it’s easy to dismiss: intellect or impulse, brains or brawn, calculation or passion, reason or emotion, the universal or the personal, boxing or fighting. But it’s hard not to see it when you’re watching Floyd Mayweather Jr.: He is a boxer, not a fighter. Fighting implies a struggle, overwhelming aggression — some desire, some wild need, to transfer a hurt from within onto something in the world. Boxing is different. It carries within it the first definition of the word. It suggests geometry — lines and angles — and containment.
Look at him. Watch him while he measures his opponents, taking their length and width and height. Once he has made his calculations, he gets to work. It’s said that the physics of boxing are simple: All other things being equal, the bigger body usually wins. But with Mayweather, equality is hard to come by. He’s not a mauler, not a bruiser; he is quicker and smarter. More complex physical laws come into play: the dynamic mechanics of motion, the thermodynamics of the mind.
He is always balanced, as comfortable and controlled in a clinch or the corner as in the center of the ring. You could see what kind of boxer he would be from the start, from the time he fought his first world title fight, against Genaro Hernandez in 1998. You could see it in the way he carried himself, in his preternatural patience, a floating stillness — even though he never stopped moving. He ducked and dipped, curled right and left, darted in and out, dropped his hands and raised them. Sometimes he’d stretch his right arm out with a kind of quiet intention, not jabbing so much as measuring the distance. By the end of the fight, he was in control; he could set his feet and throw. But what stands out now is what happened in the middle rounds, when Mayweather started holding himself the way a snake holds its head, at once coiling and recoiling, simultaneously defensive and ready to strike. He would throw that lethal lead right and simultaneously disappear from Hernandez’s line of sight.
2.
The first documented claim of domestic violence occurred in 2001. After Mayweather and Melissa Brim, the mother of his daughter Ayanna, got into an argument over child support, according to court documents, Mayweather swung open a car door that slammed her in the head, then he punched her three times in the face, leaving “fresh bruises.” Brim called the police from a convenience store. A few months after that, according to a lawsuit that Brim later filed, Brim and Mayweather were at a mall together with their daughter when Mayweather, after asking a friend to hold Ayanna, punched Brim in the neck. Brim dropped the lawsuit, but Mayweather would plead guilty to two counts of domestic battery against Brim, for which he would receive a suspended six-month jail sentence, a $3,000 fine, 48 hours of community service, and two days of house arrest.
It is no secret that Mayweather works with beautiful precision — that he is a sweet scientist. And it is no secret that Mayweather has been accused of seven separate assaults against five different women that led to citation or arrest.
It’s hard not to be a little cynical about the commonplace way stories refer to Mayweather as a very bad man — as greedy, arrogant, disrespectful toward women. It’s hard not to see it as a quick acknowledgment that lets them get back to the business at hand, as a way of bracketing the badness to marvel at the greatness — or at least the richness — of the man. And it’s also hard not to be a little cynical about the periodic waves of outrage, the stories that review the horrifying details of his alleged serial abuse of women and call for his fights to be boycotted or his license to be suspended. It’s hard not to think, We know this already. Welcome to sports in 2015. Welcome to the world.
Rarely does either kind of story about Mayweather involve the other. It’s the boxer or the batterer.
On Saturday, Mayweather will take on Manny Pacquiao in a fight that has quickly become the biggest, most important event in recent boxing history. What’s so striking to me isn’t the spectacle of it but the dissonance around it. A sport that is increasingly marginal is dominating SportsCenter. A fight in a stadium that holds only 16,800 and is available only on pay-per-view could generate $300 million. A boxer who wins like a dancer allegedly beats women like a pugilist.
What are you supposed to do with this?
3.
In the ring, Mayweather contradicts the image of the fighter as dangerous, unconstrained, communicating the promise of violence. Fighters are supposed to be the avatars of the atavistic in men’s nature. They are warriors, they are outlaws. They drive their savage fists through centuries of civilized restraint. Mayweather, on the other hand, seems less like a raw gladiator than a polished Greek statue, carved from the marble of antiquity, with all the classicism that implies. Wisdom, courage, moderation, justice: the four virtues of Plato, four qualities of Mayweather’s boxing.
He could be smart, he could take chances, he could exercise restraint, and he could win only because he could not be touched. From the start, he was elusive. Bruisers known for Picasso-ing faces found they could barely hit his. In 2001, a month before allegedly punching Brim, Mayweather faced Diego Corrales, a fierce brawler known for his knockout force. Corrales came into the ring as the favorite. He left it humiliated. For Corrales, it must have been like trying to make contact with a ghost.
Tom Hauck / Allsport
In no round did Corrales land even 10 punches. In the seventh, he connected on only three of five punches. Mayweather threw 50 and landed 39. Corrales was so totally beaten near the end that he barely pretended to box. His will was so broken that he almost gave up.
Corrales died young, in a motorcycle accident in 2007. He is remembered with adoration as a fighter with an aggressive, crowd-pleasing style, as a fighter who never gave up. But when he faced Mayweather, Corrales was about to serve a prison sentence for beating his pregnant wife. In a little show of gamesmanship, Mayweather declared that he was fighting for “every battered woman out there.”
4.
In 2003, Mayweather was at a nightclub at the Luxor in Las Vegas when he spotted Herneatha McGill and Karra Blackburn, two friends of Josie Harris, who was the mother of three of his children. According to the testimony of McGill and Blackburn, Mayweather hit them both and then followed them out of the club when they fled. Outside, he allegedly picked up and shook a female security guard; police issued him a citation. The security guards at the casino encouraged the women not to press charges and thus risk “paying for it in the streets,” but McGill and Blackburn eventually filed a complaint, and Mayweather went to trial. He was found guilty of two counts of battery and, for each, given suspended prison sentences and a $500 fine or 50 hours of community service. He was also ordered to receive “impulse control” counseling. According to a Deadspin story, the case was vacated two years later and the charges would ultimately be dismissed.
5.
On June 25, 2005, Mayweather faced Arturo Gatti in Las Vegas for the super-lightweight title. Gatti was the crowd favorite, a heart-bearing fighter who swung for a knockout with every punch. But Mayweather was the heavy favorite, acknowledged by many as the world’s best pound-for-pound boxer, and against Gatti he proved why. The ease with which Mayweather defeated Gatti was expected, but the sight of it was still shocking. The victory had a kind of inexorable quality. Mayweather was always in control, as cool and fluid as a steady stream and just as hard to hurt. If he was on the ropes, it was probably because he let himself be led there. Gatti flailed; Mayweather couldn’t miss. By the final round, he was using long combinations that Gatti didn’t even try to counter.
Ed Mulholland/WireImage
Gatti moved like the air was a little thick. He advertised his effort. He swung with a desperate kind of passion. The way Mayweather dismantled him was matter-of-fact. Mayweather’s punches were powerful and unrelenting, but there was no blunt brutality. They were almost pretty, they were so precise. Mayweather showed no palpable rage, hardly even a desire to inflict pain. The vicious force of his fists was obvious not as much in his actions as in the effects. Welts seemed to bloom on Gatti’s face almost of their own accord. Eventually, his eyes began to swell shut. It was like watching a bear be felled by a swarm of bees.
6.
A month after beating Gatti, Mayweather went to trial on a felony battery charge. The previous year, Josie Harris had angrily confronted Mayweather about another woman. In response, Harris told police, he repeatedly punched her, kicked her, and dragged her by her hair, cutting her face. “My babies’ father just beat me up,” she said when she called 911.
But at the trial, Harris backtracked. Yes, there had been a fight, but she claimed that she had provoked it. She had been jealous. She had been drunk and had taken half a pill of ecstasy. That facial laceration? Mayweather had been restraining her. She had been “pulling on him, punching on him, telling him he was wrong for what he did to me.” Mayweather, she said, wouldn’t try to beat her. He was found not guilty.
Mayweather’s relationship with Harris was on and off for years. Even when they were not together, she lived in one of his houses. For a time, she wore his 25-carat diamond ring.
7.
Over the next decade, Mayweather built his career carefully, choosing his opponents and picking his spots. He was forever self-contained, in control. Some people found his way of winning boring, and even contrary to the spirit of prizefighting. He chased points instead of knockouts. He wasn’t the only boxer who found success with a defensive style. Pernell Whitaker, Willie Pep, Andre Ward — there were other boxers who had won by not losing. But Mayweather was the best at it. He drained the blood from a fight. Instead of aggression, he offered mastery. Instead of the thrill of violence, banality. Instead of fighting, boxing.
He had opponents who roughed him up, of course. Jose Luis Castillo stifled him so well that the result of their first fight was in dispute. Shane Mosley knocked him so hard in the second round that Mayweather’s head snapped back and and his knees started to tremble. Miguel Cotto bloodied his nose. Marcos Maidana hammered him with wild, sloppy punches, desperately but effectively. But in every instance, whether by the end of the fight or in a rematch, Mayweather had so thoroughly mastered his opponents’ weaknesses that his dominance was never in doubt.
At some point, always, his opponents’ movements turned blurry. Their force became passion. They hammered and bludgeoned the air. But Mayweather had a javelin of a straight right. When he let it fly, it would shoot through the smallest of unguarded spaces. Even as it landed, he was already setting up another, or dropping and dipping and ducking away as he anticipated the counter. And it was brilliant, efficient, and unelectrifying. He boxed like his aim wasn’t to punch his opponent’s lights out, but simply to find the switch and flick it off.
8.
Boxing has always been riven with contradictions. It was, from the start, a gentleman’s sport and also a desperate man’s. It was a mark of nobility and also of scum. For more than 100 years, West Point cadets have had to learn boxing. And for more than 100 years, fights have been the place to find the high and low. They were occasions for glamour — for furs and tuxes, for Toots Shor’s and Muhammad Ali — and also for Mob ties, hush money, and a long string of sad stories about boxers whose lives were chewed up. Even in its heyday, boxing was a fun-house mirror for society, exaggerating the best and worst in men. Joe Louis, Ike Williams, Sonny Liston — the list of fighters who lived broken lives and broke others could go on and on. Even the beloved Gatti was arrested on domestic violence charges and died in strange and violent circumstances. Boxing offered a ritualistic release of violence in the ring, and it wasn’t a surprise when the blood splattered beyond it.
There were boxers with rap sheets who were loved — guys like Corrales and Gatti, celebrated for their heart and their grit. But Mayweather was suspect. His clinical style had a way of deadening the crowd. So he turned himself into an antihero to get attention. If he couldn’t be loved, at least he’d be rich.
George Napolitano/FilmMagic
Mayweather comes from a boxing family. His father was a welterweight who fought Sugar Ray Leonard. His uncle won two world championships. His father went to prison for selling drugs, and his mother was an addict. The convoluted drama in the Mayweather family — the accusations, betrayals, reconciliations, recriminations — is legendary, as messy as Mayweather’s fights are neat. Mayweather capitalized on it.
Before his 2007 fight against Oscar De La Hoya, De La Hoya and Mayweather did a promotional reality show, HBO’s 24/7. De La Hoya was the big draw back then, though not the favorite in the ring. Mayweather turned himself into the Golden Boy’s antithesis. He sold himself as brash, eccentric, antic, charming, irresponsible, irrepressible. And it worked, sort of. The fight, which Mayweather won by a split decision, generated a record-breaking $130 million–plus in revenue. Soon after, “Pretty Boy Floyd” became “Money Mayweather,” the inheritor of the legacies of Liston and Tyson. He bought cars. He kept winning. He kept making money. And pretty much everyone connected to boxing, directly or indirectly, kept making money off him.
9.
Early in the morning on September 9, 2010, Mayweather showed up at his ex-girlfriend Josie Harris’s home — a house that he owned — and confronted her about whether she was dating the NBA player C.J. Watson. (Mayweather, in fact, was living with his own girlfriend at the time, Shantel Jackson.) After Harris and Mayweather fought verbally, Harris called the police and said that while there had been no physical abuse, she wanted Mayweather to go. Mayweather agreed to leave, but he returned around 5 a.m. and was let inside by one of his kids.
Harris was awakened by the sound of Mayweather screaming at her about text messages from Watson that he had seen on her phone. When Harris admitted they were dating, Mayweather flew into a wild rage. According to Harris’s statement, to the handwritten testimony of his children, and to the subsequent doctor’s report, Mayweather punched her on the top of and in the back of the head. He allegedly kicked her, pulled her hair, and tried to break her left arm. “I’m going to get someone to pour acid on you,” he also said, according to the police report. Zion, their 9-year-old son, gave police a voluntary statement about what he saw: “He was punching her and kicking her. He was punching her in the head and he was stomping on her sholder [sic].” When Harris yelled for the children to call the police, Mayweather threatened them with violence if they did, and a friend who had come with him blocked the way, according to police. But Zion’s brother Koraun escaped, “jumped the fence,” and made his way to the main security gate, where he told the guard to call the police and an ambulance. A doctor’s examination of Harris afterward showed bruises and a concussion.
Mayweather pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault and harassment charges, and he spent two months in prison. The plea bargain let him avoid charges that could have led to up to 34 years in jail. Harris declined to testify against him in 2011, but she has begun to speak openly about the incident.
10.
The judge did give Mayweather one break: She agreed to delay his prison term so that he could fight Miguel Cotto, apparently swayed by arguments that the fight was a financial boon for Las Vegas. The contest looked close until Mayweather ran away with the victory in the final rounds, toying with his opponent as he dodged Cotto’s swings and landed, almost at will, those brilliant right-hand leads. The bigger victory for Mayweather, though, was already in the bank: With that fight, he broke the Nevada record for a guaranteed purse. Before he even stepped into the ring, Mayweather was assured to walk away with at least $32 million.
That number seems small now. The bout on Saturday is expected to shatter payday records. According to Pacquiao’s promoter, the live gate receipts will reach $74 million — $54 million more than the previous record. Pay-per-view buys are estimated to easily exceed the current high set by the Mayweather–De La Hoya fight. The New York Times estimated that the revenue may be around $300 million. With a 60-40 split, Mayweather could make well over $100 million.
And this is icing. He is already the highest-paid athlete in the world.
11.
Last September, Shantel Jackson sued Mayweather, alleging that he beat her. At one point, according to court documents obtained by ESPN’s Outside the Lines, when she threatened to leave him, he allegedly held a gun pointed at her foot and said, “Which toe do you want me to shoot?”
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Mayweather responded to Jackson’s allegations by posting pictures of a fetus on Facebook, which he claimed she aborted.
A few days after Jackson filed suit, Rachel Nichols asked Mayweather about the allegations of domestic violence; Mayweather half-denied everything. “No pictures,” he said. “Just hearsay and allegations. And I signed a plea bargain. Once again, not true.” After Nichols continued questioning him, he walked out of the interview and canceled his remaining press commitments. Katie Couric had a chance to ask him about the charges earlier this month. Instead, she mentioned the “reduced misdemeanor charges” and let him blame the victims. “I’m black. I’m rich. And I’m outspoken,” he told Couric. “Those are three strikes right there. So, you know, when someone says, ‘I got pushed or hit,’ I’m a fighter. So I may not really hit a person. But guess what. I got to fight the case because I’m already guilty. They don’t know if I really did it or not. But since I’m a fighter, they’re gonna say, ‘You know what? He did it.’” He added, “Did I restrain a woman that was on drugs? Yes, I did. So if they say that’s domestic violence, then, you know what? I’m guilty. I’m guilty of restraining someone.”
There were no pictures, he likes to say, and besides, only God can judge. When Outside the Lines pressed Mayweather about domestic violence while on the red carpet, he used it as a chance to promote his fight. “In your case, there’s been actual convictions and no governing body has ever suspended you or sanctioned you. What message do you think that sends victims of domestic violence?” John Barr asked him. “Honestly, I want everybody to tune in May second,” Mayweather answered. “Mayweather versus Pacquiao. This is the fight that you can’t miss.”
12.
I can’t, of course, say what’s behind Mayweather’s serial abuse — physical, verbal, or emotional — of women. Men who are rich beat women; men who are poor do, too. They do it in Alaska and South Carolina, in New York and Oslo and Dubai. They do it when they get away with it, and they do it when they don’t. Every day, an average of three women in the United States are killed by a current or former lover. But the more I watched Mayweather fight, and the more I read about his allegedly violent acts outside the ring, the more I began to see it as all of one piece. The circus that follows him. The bag filled with cash and gambling slips. The entourage. The houses and the women installed in them, the diamond rings as collars. The way he takes the measure of a situation in the ring, determining when it’s safe to punch and when to duck.
In stories about Mayweather, distinctions start to seem beside the point or even banal. Cars, women, greed, domestic violence, private jets, family drama — they’re all presented as part of the same lurid carnival. This, after all, is what Mayweather does: He treats everything like money, and a dollar is a dollar. The dollars drown so much else out.
There are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in this May 2 fight — and not only for Mayweather and Pacquiao. Money for the promoters, the sponsors, Las Vegas, Nevada, gamblers, TV. It is almost impossible to disentangle. The web includes, after all, ESPN, Grantland, and me — even this story. But it isn’t only the money that protects him. It’s the unsettling compromise of modern life.
What Mayweather does in the ring is special. He is the rare kind of athlete who, if you watch him closely enough, can help you see the human mind and body a little differently. And what Mayweather does outside the ring is reprehensible. What do you do with this? I don’t know. You can focus on the boxer or focus on the batterer. Or you can keep the two in stereo. With or without resolution, we can talk about it.
Maybe this is a good place to start: Nothing Mayweather has done has hurt him. “Floyd doesn’t put himself in a position where he can lose,” Josie Harris told Yahoo Sports. “You can take that how you want to.”
Perhaps Mayweather has just made the most basic calculation of all. Money Mayweather can beat women because it costs him very little. He hasn’t really been hit. The black lights of the unconscious? He’s never seen them.
from ffffff http://grantland.com/features/floyd-mayweather-pacquiao-domestic-violence-allegations/
via IFTTT
Competitive Eater Molly Schuyler Demolishes A Burger The Size Of A Small Child
The record for this contest was previously held by Furious Pete, but Molly demolishes his time, cutting the record down from 3:27 to a mere 2:12.
from ffffff http://digg.com/video/competitive-eater-molly-schuyler-demolishes-a-burger-the-size-of-a-small-child
via IFTTT
Lake Mead Is Now Lower Than Ever, But Vegas Has a Crazy Survival Plan
Yesterday, the surface of Lake Mead reached its lowest level since it was filled in 1937—1,080 feet above sea level. But engineers were prepared for this: A huge infrastructural project under the lake has been underway since 2008 to ensure that Vegas residents will still be able to get water, even as the drought continues.
The project, called the “Third Straw,” is one of three tunnels that have been dug beneath the lake to extract water—tunnels that have been dug deeper and deeper as lake levels drop. The First Straw is good down to 1050 feet above sea level, which the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation originally predicted the lake might reach by January of 2016. The Second Straw goes down to 1000 feet, and the Third Straw is currently being built to reach 860 feet. Now it looks like they might need that Third Straw even sooner then they planned. It’s expected to be completed this summer. [Review Journal]
Top photo: USGS
from ffffff http://gizmodo.com/this-giant-straw-will-suck-vegass-water-from-the-dese-1590135681/1700743879/+alissawalker
via IFTTT
How do you really know if a storage array will perform for you?
When you have an existing storage array infrastructure with a variety of server apps about to hit the array, how do you know if array technology upgrades or even a new array will work as well or better than the existing kit?
Do you trust your vendor and generalised performance data: It does 450,000 IOPS? This version is 1.3 times the performance of the previous model? Statements like these are not exactly tailored to your particular workload, are they?
The pressures of a limited budget could cause you to under-provision the array, leading to slowed applications. Or you could prioritise performance and over-provision, spending excessive cash.
Do you use Iometer and get involved in scripting and trying to somehow model your existing workload? It's inexact and complicated.
A start-up, Load DynamiX, has written storage array load-generating software that sits in an appliance, models your workload quite precisely and hammers a target array with it so that you can see if new tech or a new array will do what you need it to do.
It's notched up an impressive – and the word is used deliberately – set of storage array customers, who use the Load DynamiX Enterprise software to verify what their own products and technologies can do with the various permutations of accessing system, access protocol, metadata calls, queue depth, random read and writes, sequential reads and writes, read/write ratios, block size, file size, caching, data reduction, scaling to production levels and beyond, and so forth.
Here's a partial list: Alachritech, Avere, CacheIQ, Cisco, Citrix, Cleversafe, Dell, EMC, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Nexenta, Nexsan, Oracle, Panasas, Panzura, Pure Storage, RedHat, Riverbed, Scality, Skyera, Tegile and Toshiba.
End-user customers are many too, and include AT&T, BNY Mellon, Cisco (again), GoDaddy, PayPal, SoftLayer and others. All in all, it has some 50 customers.
Load DynamiX was set up in 2009 and has had $24 million in funding from two venture capital rounds. Its software runs in Performance Validation appliances:
- Virtual Series – 4 port – 1Gbit/s – for ESXi
- 10G Series – 2-8 ports of 10GbitE
- FC Series – 2-8 ports of 4/8/16Gbit/s Fibre Channel
- Unified Series – up to 4 x 10GbitE and 4 Fibre Channel ports
Supported access protocols include:
- NFS v2, 3, 4 and 4.1
- SMB 2, 3 and CUFS
- iSCSI
- FC/SCSI
- HTTP, HTTPS
- OpenStack Swift/Cinder
- CDMI, S3
The stages of a validation process start with workload modelling, to simulate a production environment's IO profile. Then an array with a particular set of technology has its performance profiled under a range of load parameters that encompass your workload using the appliances.
Put simply, you can use this system to find the performance limits of new storage systems before deploying them into production under a variety of worst-case loading scenarios, using workload modelling. The results can be viewed in tabular or graph form.
Example Load DynamiX performance chart.
GoDaddy is a Load DynamiX customer. It is the world's largest hosting provider with 11 million customers, 5 million hosting accounts and 54 million domain names under management. It has a 30PB storage estate with 30 per cent annual growth and was looking to verify and validate its storage product and technology choices so as to spend enough money, but not too much. And we're in the millions of dollars level here – the numbers are significant.
It started by using Iometer, but this failed. It couldn't emulate the full scale nor the metadata content of the production workload, so GoDaddy then turned to Load DynamiX and the results were potent.
Here's a chart showing the predicted results of it changing to either of two alternate vendors from the status quo or sticking with technology developments from its existing supplier:
GoDaddy cost-reduction graphic
The existing supplier, vendor A, with its developments showed a 62 per cent drop in costs over 2 years. Vendor B showed a 35 per cent fall – not good enough – while using vendor C would produce a 67 per cent cost drop.
That convinced GoDaddy and Nexenta – vendor C – won the business. Incidentally, it took a week to validate this in the lab instead of taking a gamble and experiencing months in production before the score was known.
Load DynamiX kit isn't cheap, with a starting price at $60,000, but it seems as if it has an unrivalled tool for validating the performance of enterprise storage arrays. Instead of putting a new array tech or new array into production and praying, you could use this start-up's kit to see how it will perform before you make a potentially unfortunate choice. ®
Sponsored: A modern data architecture with Apache Hadoop
from ffffff http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/28/how_do_you_know_really_if_a_storage_array_will_perform_for_you/
via IFTTT
When the FAA Blasted Oklahoma City with Sonic Booms For 6 Months
Have you ever experienced a sonic boom? A sonic boom so forceful that your dishes fell from the cupboards, your photos fell off the walls, and maybe your ceiling even started to crack? This was the reality that residents of Oklahoma City endured for six months in 1964 — eight times per day.
And they had absolutely no choice in the matter. Because it was all bought and paid for by the US government.
David Suisman, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware, has a new paper on the 1964 Oklahoma City sonic boom tests. And he paints a picture of an American city terrorized by what the government billed as “the sound of freedom.”
Operation Bongo Comes to Oklahoma
In February of 1964 the Air Force and FAA started a six month bombardment campaign against the residents of Oklahoma City. It was called Operation Bongo II, and it meant that eight times per day people were inundated with sonic booms — shock waves made by Air Force planes flying faster than the speed of sound. The good folks of Oklahoma City were effectively guinea pigs for what was being tested as the high-speed transportation alternative of the future: Supersonic transportation (SST).
“The boom is particularly terrifying because it is louder than a thunderclap and comes out of a clear sky without warning,” Popular Mechanics wrote in 1964, reporting from Oklahoma. “For that reason, the Air Force, in scheduling its obviously needed practice runs, makes every effort to forewarn citizens in areas where booms can be anticipated.”
Well, yes and no. Residents of Oklahoma City got a warning, but they essentially only got it once. “The residents had no say in the matter,” David Suisman tells me over the phone. Which is kind of hard to imagine for those of us here in the early 21st century.
Over those six months, 1,253 supersonic flights were conducted using F-101s and F-104s, taking off from nearby Tinker Air Force Base. And the only thing residents knew for certain was that they’d happen eight times a day.
FAA test equipment from the October 1964 issue of Popular Mechanics
The FAA rented eleven buildings in and around Oklahoma City, all outfitted with high-tech equipment for measuring the sonic booms. One home that was sitting directly under the flight path contained about $100,000 worth of recording instruments. Mobile van units were also on call and placed throughout the city.
Over the course of those six months the flights would become faster and faster, causing more damage and noise. Just as residents were getting used to the force and semi-regularity of getting blasted eight times per day, the Air Force would hit them with an even harder shock.
Why Oklahoma City?
The tests of the 1960s have to be understood within the context of the Cold War. The controversy surrounding sonic booms in America didn’t begin in Oklahoma City, nor did they start in 1964. Residents near Air Force bases of the 1950s filed numerous complaints about the noisy disturbances that had emerged around them following the second World War. Many Americans felt that “the war” was over and were unexcited about the prospect of some state of perpetual war readiness necessitated by an ideological battle with the Soviets.
In response to both noise complaints and skeptics of Cold War tactics, the government produced short films and participated in the production of major Hollywood movies. Many of these critics were veterans, like in Jimmy Stewart’s fictionalized 1955 movie Strategic Air Command. The films sought to explaining why America’s war planes (and their noise) were all important tools in keeping us safe. Though Stewart starts out as a skeptic, he comes to realize that those noisy planes really were the sound of freedom and safety.
Sometimes safety meant you had to break a few windows. Like in the Chicago window fronts below, in 1958 photos taken after a sonic boom shattered windows in the city.
Photos from 1958 showing damage of Chicago businesses in the Chicago Sun-Times, courtesy of David Suisman
By the early 1960s the likelihood of the government and private industry both getting involved in carrying civilians by supersonic transport was looking more and more likely. So the Kennedy administration tasked the FAA with devising real world tests to see how Americans on the ground might react.
There were other more limited tests done on the residents of Chicago and St. Louis in the 1960s. But none were quite as extensive as the Oklahoma tests, which lasted for half a year. It seems as though Oklahoma City was ultimately chosen for the tests because much of Oklahoma City’s population was employed by the aerospace industry.
“I think the fact that Oklahoma City was a big aerospace city mattered quite a bit,” Suisman told me. “The number of people who worked in the aerospace industry or knew somebody who worked in the aerospace industry was quite high. There was significant buy-in in the population already from the point of the FAA, which was hoping for favorable results.”
Damage and Public Reaction
The FAA hired a public polling research firm to determine how the city’s roughly 500,000 residents took to the tests. During the six months of the test, the Air Force and FAA received over 15,000 formal complaints from the residents of Oklahoma City. They also received 4,629 official damage claims.
The high number of damage claims likely came as no surprise to government officials. From 1956 until 1963 the Air Force had over 14,000 claims for damage leveled against it.
As Suisman points out, some of the public polling numbers from the time are actually surprising. While a full 40 percent of Oklahoma City resident polled felt that their homes had been damaged in some way, 73 percent said that they could live just fine with eight sonic booms per day. Again, the city’s reliance on the aerospace industry might have had something to do with this attitude.
The Oklahoma tests may have been the most long lasting, but they weren’t the first nor the last. In 1961-62, the FAA conducted 150 supersonic flights over St. Louis. Those tests yielded about 5,000 formal complaints and 1,624 damage claims. Chicago also saw sonic boom tests, with 49 flights rippling through Chicagoland in 1965. Those tests saw an even greater number of complaints per test, with 7,116 formal complaints filed with the FAA. The Chicago tests also saw a huge number of damage claims, with 2,964 filed during the short test period.
Test flight map from a 1965 report prepared for the FAA
Residents who took issue with the sonic boom tests of the 1960s had little in the way of recourse. What little they could do involved plenty of paperwork. The burden of proof was decidedly on the residents to demonstrate that the sonic boom had caused damage to their property.
One resident of Madison, Illinois filed an official damage report for a $6 vase. He had to fill out 18 pages of forms including a three-page explanation of how the government’s sonic boom was the cause of the damage, and not anything else. Witness testimony, certificate of ownership and insurance information were among the other documents that had to be filed. Many people probably didn’t think it was worth all the trouble.
Sound As a Weapon
While the stated purpose of the tests was to conduct experiments that would be helpful for civilian use of SST, there was certainly a military component. It was, after all, the military that conducted the tests.
“On the one hand, you have parts of the government like the FAA and the Air Force which were publicly saying that sonic booms were, in their language ‘the sound of freedom’ and they represented a part of the national defense that was vital to security of the country in the context of the cold war,” Suisman tells me. “However, they were also said to be harmless for the sake of the population who would be affected by sonic booms.”
How could the booms be both perfectly safe for Americans and a potential weapon in war? You’d have to ask the Air Force that one.
Dept of Defense anti-Castro planning document from 1962 describing Operation Invisible Bomb
“They were sort of couched in this language of being vital to the national defense, yet harmless,” Suisman says. “On the other hand, there was also at the same time movement in the government to do these tests to figure out whether or not sonic booms could be used as tactical weapons.”
The brainstorming sessions of the Defense Department in the early 1960s are a perfect example of the thinking around how sonic booms might be used against a foreign enemy.
“There were several tests conducted to this end, and one of them resulted in the proposal of Operation Invisible Bomb, which was an idea to use the sonic booms to foment chaos in Cuba.”
You read that right. American military planners wanted to inundate Cuba with sonic booms to make Cubans think that they were under attack. And even if the Air Force only used sonic booms, they very much would be. So would tomorrow’s use of sonic booms be used for war or peace? A bit of both, it would seem.
The Future is Inevitable?
Supersonic transportation was seen as the wave of the future. Or at the very least that’s how it was being sold to the American public. Imagine flying from New York to San Francisco in just a half hour!, government and industry boosters wondered aloud. Or New York to London in just two hours! By the 1950s the US military had developed the necessary high-speed technology. And by the late 1960s it was civilian carriers who were promising they’d soon shuttle Americans at supersonic speed all around the globe.
To be against the SST was to be against the arrival of The Future™. The President of the Air Transport Association of America, Stuart Tipton, painted opposition to the SST as silly, old fashioned romantics pining for an age that had long since passed.
“Who would give up Salk vaccine for the five-cent stein of beer?” Tipton wondered in a 1964 speech. “Who would turn back the X-ray machine for the old swimming hole?”
Illustration from an Air Force pamphlet explaining sonic booms
The future (and by extension the arrival of SST) was “inevitable.” Or at least that’s how the aerospace industry was selling it. John E. Stephen, again from the Air Transport Association, described SST as the “next inevitable advance in the technology of commercial air transportation.” And what good is it to fight the inevitable?
Our aerospace future was arriving, and every other field of technology would have to catch up. Beginning with architecture. For those people who complained that the sonic booms were harming their homes and businesses, pro-boom advocates pointed out that their buildings were old. The implication was that these people with old buildings should get with the times; that it was their own fault if their homes were falling apart from the shock waves that tore through the city.
Popular Mechanics even published the somewhat counterintuitive illustration below, showing what the boom-proof houses of the future should look like. Those circular buildings which had become all the rage as extremely modern, streamlined, and chic? Ironically, those would have to go.
Illustration from the October 1964 issue of Popular Mechanics
Silence or Something Close
The last day of the tests in Oklahoma was July 31, 1964. And even though the FAA had evidence that residents of Oklahoma City could at least tolerate sonic booms indefinitely, the tide was turning against noise. The broader American public was growing tired of what they saw as an increasingly noisy world.
“One of the things that emerges in the late 1960s is this language of noise pollution,” Suisman says. “And sonic booms are part of the argument against having uncontrolled noise as an environmental factor. And when the environmental movement gets going in the early 1970s, noise pollution is one of its concerns.”
By 1971, expansion of civilian supersonic transport was effectively killed in the United States. The Concorde would zip across the Atlantic Ocean at supersonic speed, but the American public simply had no patience for SST planes bouncing from city to city, leaving jolted people in their wake.
The 1964 Oklahoma City experiments were meant to be a proving ground for the transportation of tomorrow — proof that the future could be tolerated, if not adored. But if they proved anything, it was that the future actually isn’t inevitable. The future is what we make it. And for the time being, that future has far fewer supersonic aircraft than the people of the 1960s imagined.
from ffffff http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/when-the-faa-blasted-oklahoma-city-with-sonic-booms-for-1649589210/+kcampbelldollaghan
via IFTTT
Entradas
