Archive for April 3rd, 2009
Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows
Posted by The Right Guy in Software on April 3rd, 2009
Windows only: Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive.
Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn’t bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.
Download it here: Portable Ubuntu (124)
Anti-piracy law scares Swedes
Posted by The Right Guy in Uncategorized on April 3rd, 2009
At least for five minutes
A law designed to make it easier for copyright holders to go after illicit file-sharers appears to have have led to a major drop in Internet traffic.
The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) law came into force yesterday and suddenly Internet traffic plummeted by 30 per cent according to figures from the Netnod Internet Exchange. It suggests that fileshareing has dropped even more.
Most experts think that after the initial scare effect, trafffic will pick up in a week or two. Swedish Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak, that the movie and music industry thrives on scaring the common citizen. Henrik Pontén from Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish anti-piracy office, claimed that the traffic drop as an indication that the new law is working.
Well not really, in the past 24 hours 384,657 Swedes were connected to the Pirate Bay tracker alone. That is close to 5% of the Swedish population, and no less than before.
It seems that most people are looking for ways to hide their identities online. Thousands of new customers have visited new anonymising service mullvad.net.
Google’s Data Center secrets revealed!
Posted by The Right Guy in Hardware on April 3rd, 2009
After years of secrecy (maybe because they thought no one was interested), Google held its “Data Center Efficiency Summit” Wednesday, where the company showed off one of its DCs and custom web servers — all in a bid to evangelize for energy efficiency. The green angle means that everything has been planned for optimum power use, from the 1AAA shipping containers (sporting over a thousand servers each) that make up the core of its operations, to the servers themselves — each containing its own 12-volt UPS. This design is said to boast a staggering 99.9 percent energy efficiency, as opposed to a standard centralized UPS setup which at best would only score 95 percent. According to CNet, these are efficiency levels that the EPA doesn’t envision as practical until at least 2011.