Health, Science and Technology

The processors are slower, but they use much less energy—a huge boon for those who run massive data centers.

It’s no secret that the demands placed on data centers are growing rapidly—all those 800 million Facebook profiles have to be stored somewhere. Not surprisingly, the companies that operate these vast warehouses are concerned about the costs of using all that energy. In September, Google said that its global operations continuously draw 260 million megawatts of power, roughly a quarter of the energy generated by a nuclear power plant.

Last week, Hewlett-Packard announced it would partner with a Texas-based processor startup, Calxeda, to use extremely low-power ARM chips in a new generation of data-center servers. These chips are similar to the ones found in iPhones, iPads, and other mobile devices, and use significantly less energy than Intel’s traditional server chips.

“Every watt that you use on a CPU, you spend one more watt to cool it down,” says Sergis Mushell, an analyst with Gartner Research. “If you reduce the box’s [energy demands] by one watt, you save yourself two watts of power.”

As the cloud becomes more pervasive—driving everything from social networking to mobile apps—the computers that power it must guzzle more and more energy. Today, startup company SeaMicro, chip maker Intel, and electronics giant Samsung unveiled a new computer design that could make the data centers that power cloud services dramatically more efficient.

The new server design uses half the energy and takes up a third of the space of servers that do the hard work in most data centers today.

Mozilla, the nonprofit browser maker, and CompSec, which builds cloud computing infrastructure for federal intelligence agencies, are already using the new designs.

By Mathew McCurley

These days, the computer is so much more than a productivity machine. Frankly, I watch most of my television and movies on my computer screen through Netflix, iTunes, DVDs, and every streaming site the Internet has to offer. The best part about the computer as a television is that you can still have a great home theater experience on the LCD and not spend a fortune to do it. Here are a few tips on getting that home theater experience right on your PC.

Get the content
Content is plentiful these days, and that’s awesome. Remember when we actually had to be at home to watch the shows we wanted to when they were going to air? How did we live without streaming television or DVRs?

We’re on a strict budget here, so let’s throw cable out the window for a moment. That’s not to say get rid of your cable — but with a few of these suggestions, you might be tempted.

From the latest news, it turns out the hard drive technology is still far from the end of his life. In fact it seems, in the near future will see an increase in capacity of up to six times higher than the maximum capacity hard drive currently available.

According to some researchers from Singapore, they managed to find a formula to multiply the capacity of the hard drive. The trick was very simple. Simply use salt, or sodium chloride alone.

Researchers from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, and National University of Singapore and Data Storage Institute, using the latest hard drive technology and perform one additional step in the process of e-beam lithography while producing the hard drive.

Google is making another design tweak to many of its services. The small tweak gets rid of the black bar across the top of the page and puts it in a drop down found just below the Google logo as pictured below. The bar is now hidden and only made visible when rolling over the Google logo.

It isn’t clear when Google will roll out the design tweak although it could be any day now. Take a look at the video below to see the reasons behind it and what else Google has slightly changed with the designs of its websites.