Rob Dubbin of the Colbert Report went cold turkey for a day to mark Google’s 10th birthday. Here’s his report.
Daily Archives: September 10, 2008
No black holes — but a data tsunami
From CERN…
The Large Hadron Collider will produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually – enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year!
Thousands of scientists around the world want to access and analyse this data, so CERN is collaborating with institutions in 33 different countries to operate a distributed computing and data storage infrastructure: the LHC Computing Grid (LCG).
Data from the LHC experiments is distributed around the globe, with a primary backup recorded on tape at CERN. After initial processing, this data is distributed to eleven large computer centres – in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Spain, Taipei, the UK, and two sites in the USA – with sufficient storage capacity for a large fraction of the data, and with round-the-clock support for the computing grid.
These so-called “Tier-1” centres make the data available to over 120 “Tier-2” centres for specific analysis tasks. Individual scientists can then access the LHC data from their home country, using local computer clusters or even individual PCs…
Hopefully, all of this is not orchestrated by Windows servers.
Is the DoJ preparing an antitrust case over the Google-Yahoo ‘partnership’?
The NYT thinks that it might be
That was the question being debated from Washington to Silicon Valley on Tuesday, after the Justice Department, which has been reviewing the partnership for several weeks, hired Sanford M. Litvack, a veteran antitrust lawyer, to help assess the evidence gathered by its lawyers.
The hiring of an outside lawyer like Mr. Litvack is rare and represents the clearest indication that the Justice Department could be planning to mount a legal challenge to the deal, some analysts said. “They wouldn’t bring in a special counsel unless they were preparing to litigate,” said Sam Miller, a partner at Sidley Austin in San Francisco who acted as a special trial counsel in the department’s first antitrust case against Microsoft…
The End is Nigh?
Hmmm… From this morning’s Telegraph
At about 9.30 am local time, scientists will introduce a beam of protons into the 18-mile-long circular particle accelerator, buried some 300 feet in the earth and straddling the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva, beginning what should be a remarkable career. Some 300 journalists from around the world will be on hand to watch the switch being thrown, accompanied by the thousands of scientists who will make the LHC a good part of their life’s work. Last night, some 50 scientists were working late to iron out glitches and prevent an embarrassing failure in front of the world’s media…