BNSC - Industry News

TonidoPlug - Versatile Tiny Linux Server

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:04:51 -0600

TonidoPlug is a tiny, low power, low cost home server based on 1.2 GHz Sheeva processor that allows you to access your applications, files, photos, music and media from anywhere via a web browser (Powered by Tonido � software). This device is no bigger than some power adapters ( 4"x 2.5"x2") and plugs directly into a wall outlet. Under the hood is a full-featured Linux server with a 1.2 GHz Sheeva processor, 512 MB of DDR2 memory, and 512 MB of Flash memory storage. On the outside is a USB port and an RJ45 Ethernet jack. Hook up a network cable and an external hard drive or Flash drive to the USB port and TonidoPlug converts it to a NAS storage accessible from Windows/Mac/Linux computers.

Pre-installed software includes the Tonido Applications Torrent, Photos, Jukebox, Webshare, Workspace, Thots, Search and Explorer - all running on top of embedded Ubuntu Jaunty Linux OS.

The unit lists for just under $100,

Visit the TonidoPlug Web Page for more details.

The Healing Power Of Linux

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:08:20 -0500

California Medical Center offers Linux-based thin clients in patient's rooms

Glendale Adventist Medical Center in Glendale, CA with help from IBM, Novell, and NoMachine, have installed personal computing stations in 65 patient rooms. This allows the recovering patient to communicate with friends and family via email or the web. Or they can access the web to find information on their medical situation. Patients have responded enthusiastically.

The use of thin-clients is estimated to save 60% in electricity cost, and an estimated 98% savings in IT maintenance costs compared to full stand-alone PC's.
NoMachine NX desktops, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop Operating System, and an IBM System x3650 server comprise the system.
GAMC plans to extend the thin-client deployment to employee and clinical use in the future.

Sprint-Nextel Severs It's Internet Connection To Cogent Communications

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:25:44 -0500

WASHINGTON, D.C. October 30, 2008

On October 30 at 4:30 pm Sprint-Nextel severed its Internet connection to Cogent thereby partitioning the Internet. It is no longer possible for many Sprint customers and Cogent customers to directly communicate across the Internet.

Sprint did so in violation of a contractual obligation to exchange Internet traffic with Cogent on a settlement free peering basis. Sprint and Cogent are engaged in litigation over this matter. Cogent regrets that Sprint chose to take this unilateral action rather than await a determination by the court as to the rights of the parties. Cogent remains ready to reestablish, on the same settlement free basis as previously existed, the connections that Sprint has severed. In the over 1300 on-net locations worldwide where Cogent provides service, Cogent is offering every Sprint-Nextel wireline customer that is unable to connect to Cogent’s customers a free 100 megabit per second connection to the Internet for as long as Sprint continues to keep this partitioning of the Internet in place. Unfortunately, there is no way that Cogent can do the same for the wireless customers of Sprint-Nextel. All other major wireless carriers have full connectivity to Cogent and are unaffected by this event.

Microsoft Study Confirms 'Kevin Bacon' Theory

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:39:00 -0500

Original Article by: Peter Whoriskey
Publication: WashingtonPost.com

WASHINGTON - Turns out, it is a small world.

The "small world theory," embodied in the old saw that there are just "six degrees of separation" between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.

With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances.

The database covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, or roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time, researchers said.

"To me, it was pretty shocking. What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who conducted the study with colleague Jure Leskovec. "People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore."

In recent years, the massive databases yielded by cell phone records have been exploited by researchers to better understand human movements and social networks. Stripped of text messages and personally identifiable information, the records indicate users' location and patterns of contact.

Read Complete Article at MSNBC.com

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:11:00 -0500

In 2007, for the first time, the amount of digital data created, copied, or captured, exceeded the amount of storage space for it. In an update to a 2007 report by the research firm, IDC, information management expert, EMC, says that things such as the advent of higher resolution digital cameras, Ipods with bigger hard drives, and giant video clips available on the Internet are pushing the limits of places to store all the data.

In 2006, the firm said 161 billion gigabytes of data was created, representing �about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.�

In 2007, the digital universe was said to be 281 billion gigabytes, or about 45 gigabytes for every person on Earth.

By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.

"The diversity of the digital universe can be seen in the variability of file sizes, from 6 gigabyte movies on DVD to 128-bit signals from RFID tags. Because of the growth of VoIP, sensors, and RFID, the number of electronic information containers -- files, images, packets, tag contents -- is growing 50% faster than the number of gigabytes."

PDF Document: EMC White Paper, "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe"

EMC Online Data Ticker

Basically, DNA is a computing problem

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:29:00 -0600

Publication: The Guardian
Author: Andrew Brown

Think of it as the biggest Linux swap partition in the world, since the whole system is running on Debian Linux. The genome project uses open source software as much as possible, and one of its major databases is run on MySQL, although others rely on Oracle. The computing resources of the Sanger Institute at Hinxton, near Cambridge, are almost unfathomable. Three rooms are filled with walls of blade servers and drives, and there is a fourth that is kept fallow, and for the moment full of every sort of debris: old Sun workstations, keyboards, cases and cases of backup tapes - even a dishwasher. But the fallow room is an important part of the centre's preparations. Things are changing so fast that they can have no idea what they will be required to do in a year's time.

Read Full Story.

France's gendarmerie switches to Linux

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:42:00 -0600

France's gendarmerie has apparently taken quite a liking to such open source software as Firefox and OpenOffice. Now, there are plans to migrate 70,000 workstations in the country's largest administrative complex to Linux according to a report in the French daily L'Express on Solutions Linux, which is currently taking place in Paris. The computers, which are currently running on Windows XP, are to switch to Ubuntu Linux -- much to the chagrin of French distributor Mandriva.

Full Story at heise online

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:45:00 -0600

Another Open Source Company Get�s Gobbled Up Trolltech is the developer of the QT libraries, used by the KDE Desktop Environment.
Announcement at the Trolltech site can be viewed here: Nokia to aquire Trolltech