scales

Eight billion minutes spent on Facebook daily

SAN FRANCISCO--More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day, Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer said in a talk Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit here.

Some 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week, and 2 billion photos are uploaded each month--1.2 million served per second on a "peak day," he said. Five billion calls to Facebook's application program interface (API) were made on Tuesday. It's huge: Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering, was focused on talking about the challenges of scaling a social network to the more than 300 million active users … Read more

Gadgettes Podcast 157: The Recessionista Episode

We've heard that the recession is waning. But our gut tells us something different. Today we examine gadgets that appeal to our recession-warped minds.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 157

Downturn doll sleeps in a car - but costs $95

Dell banks its brand on artists, baseball and nail polish

Netbooks rise, notebooks fall

Sony’s new Vaio X: thinnest laptop ever, $1,300 and up

SanDisk on Sansa: Value is our top priority

Gilt on the Go iPhone app… Read more

MaxiScale and the emergence of software-defined storage

For the last two decades, RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) controllers have ruled the storage world. RAID has been required for data protection in disk arrays. RAID schemes (RAID 0,1,6 10, etc.) reside on RAID controllers baked into disk arrays with many billions sold to date. But perhaps more important from the standpoint of making money, the RAID controller has also delivered differentiated value for storage vendors. Data copy and migration, snap shot, deduplication, and the list of controller-based functions goes on--all have been loaded on to the RAID controller.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the … Read more

Gadgettes Podcast 156: The Gourmet Gadgette

It's hard to keep us out of the kitchen, for no other reason than we just really enjoy food! Today we offer up a dilectable assortment of gourmet gadgets.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 156 Cocoon Cooker Grows Meat In Your Kitchen (thanks Bill!)

Ultrasonic dishwasher cleans your plates with waves of sound (thanks Sam!)

Ravi cools wine at the very moment it is poured

Cosentino turns minerals and woods into truly unique surfaces

LED Grabbing Tool Picks Valuables From Where Fingers Fear To Tread

Taylor Digital Measuring Cup Scale… Read more

Cup measures weight, volume

Bakers tend to favor precision when they measure ingredients, citing that baking is simply chemistry in action. (Baking soda volcano, anyone?) As such, it is often recommended by the pros to weigh dry ingredients; when you consider the volume differences between packed flour versus sifted flour it is easy to see that having a scale is important to achieve consistent results.

The Taylor Digital Measuring Cup Scale is a convenient measuring cup that doubles as a scale. The measuring cup has a volumetric capacity of four cups and is able to weigh up to 6.6-pounds. The volume markings along … Read more

Business Intelligence moves to the cloud

One of the most difficult aspects of cloud computing is dealing with the integration of various applications that run between your enterprise and a cloud provider or data center. Application integration is arguably the biggest challenge to enterprises attempting to adopt cloud principles.

To that end, Jaspersoft, Talend, RightScale, and Vertica have teamed up to offer a joint solution stack that delivers complete Business Intelligence (BI) in the cloud.

Business intelligence has been the No. 1 technology spend for the last three years running, according to reseach firm Gartner. And, despite the the recession, Madan Sheina from Ovum has called BI … Read more

Hewlett-Packard to buy Ibrix

Hewlett-Packard announced Friday that it will acquire Ibrix, a maker of enterprise-scale file serving software.

Large companies running huge data-heavy applications often bump into bottlenecks with both storage and performance. HP says that Ibrix's software is designed to help such customers manage and store massive amounts of data, scaling to tens of petabytes. (A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.)

HP wants Ibrix to help strengthen its share of the burgeoning market for high-performance enterprise data storage, cloud storage, and file archiving. HP says this segment is growing 20 percent a year, faster than the markets for network-attached storage (NAS) … Read more

Intel toots its research horn for chips--and more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Much more than most companies, Intel's success depends on the technology that will arrive in its field years hence. As a result, the company has more than 1,000 researchers beavering away to gauge and develop that technology.

And the company wants everyone to know it.

At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum here Thursday, the company touted a wide range of projects that extend beyond the company's core business of making computer processors. On display were projects to improve the WiMax regional wireless network technology, improve mobile devices' processing power while … Read more

Kitchen scale weighs in on multitasking

I used to have an old mechanical kitchen scale. Rickety and imprecise, it served more as decoration than as an actual scale. While it served no needed purpose in my kitchen, it sure looked cool. It had small images of meats and vegetables printed or painted on its surface. Though it didn't do much actual measuring, it did make for a nice cookbook stand. While this Maya Kitchen Scale may not have little pictures of common food items on it, it makes up for its lack of kitsch by being actually useful in the modern kitchen.

I tend to … Read more

ParaScale software clusters servers into enterprise cloud storage

Cloud storage is getting a lot more feasible for the enterprise.

ParaScale, a start-up that develops cloud-storage solutions, announced Monday the availability of its ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software. The software, once installed on any standard Linux platform, enables the server to be linked with others to act as one massive file repository that offers high parallel throughput. … Read more