1sockchuck writes "Want to save money on data center cooling? Tip your racks on their side, fill them with mineral oil, and submerge your servers. Austin startup Green Revoluton Cooling first profiled here) has a video demo of its immersion cooling solution, which it says can handle racks using up to 100kW of power. A photo gallery on the company web site shows some early installations."

syngularyx writes "Over at Microsoft's MIX Developer Conference in sunny Las Vegas, Microsoft has demoed a new preview build of Internet Explorer 10 (which you too can take for a spin, if you feel so inclined), and also dropped a little premature Easter egg – the build of IE10, and the underlying Windows OS, were both running on a 1GHz ARM chip. Sneaky."

darthcamaro writes "Remember the Flip? When Pure Digital Technology first came out with the device it was one of the hottest gadgets, providing users with an ultra-portable camcorder. Then Cisco came along and bought the Flip for $590 million in 2009. Now less than two years later, Cisco is throwing the money, 550 employees and the Flip out the door." Wired has an analysis of why Flip floundered. I hope this means I can find a AA-powered Flip UltraHD for $50 in a clearance bin.

RedEaredSlider writes "The hacker who settled with Sony after the company sued him for modifying his PlayStation 3 console is getting a lot of flak for not taking the fight further. 'Night Breed' [wrote], 'So basically you settled for a job and took people's money, giving them a false hope of settling for their rights? What do you plan to do with the money that was donated to you to provide a cushion for the legal battle? I hope you will be paying all those people back since you obviously didn't live up to your word.'"

johkir writes "The Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) research group has created an apparent 3D effect on the iPad 2. Called the Head-Coupled Perspective, it uses the front camera to track the relative changes in the position of the user's head."

darkonc writes "Early Tuesday in Japan, the government decided to raise the severity level of the accident to the maximum 7 on an international scale, up from the current 5 and matching that of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. The government declared the level 7 emergency because it is now estimated that the crippled plant was emitting over 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactivity for a number of hours at the height of the nuclear incident. Previously, on Monday, the government had expanded the evacuation zone around the plant to include at least 6 cities up to 60 km away from the plant. These cities, outside of the current 20-30 km evacuation area, are now expected to exceed the 20 millisieverts/year limit on residual radiation established by International Commission on Radiological Protection and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the case of an emergency."

IndigoDarkwolf writes "The sometimes confused media coverage around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant left me wanting for a good summary. Apparently the BBC felt the same way, and now delivers an overview starting from the earthquake and concluding with the current state of the troubled reactors."

schliz writes "From the itnews article: 'Bioengineers from the University of Auckland have developed cheap, lightweight rubber power generators that could harvest up to a Watt of power if embedded in shoes. The researchers built on "dielectric elastomer generator" technology that used the movements of a flexible, non-conductive material to build up charge in attached electrodes.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A University of Washington team has developed a piece of free software to help those with motor control problems do what most of us take for granted every day: use a computer mouse to get stuff done. The Pointing Magnifier combines an area cursor with visual and motor magnification, reducing need for fine, precise pointing. The UW team is actively seeking user feedback."

An anonymous reader writes "An awesome hardware hack which demonstrates how easily USB-based human interface devices (eg, Keyboards and Mice) can be created using the Arduino software environment." A very nice little project based on the Teensy USB Development Board. Reminds me of the breadboard electronics projects my Dad used to work on with me many years ago. "Great fun for young and old," you might say.

jamax writes "From TFA: 'A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer brought a broken 500GB USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.' Apparently, the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image). And it was a clever hack, too — if ever an attempt was made to write a file that's too large, it got cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"

0WaitState writes "Damaged reactors at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant may take three decades to decommission and cost operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. Relatedly, Japanese officials and power plant operators are now working on the problems involved with disposing of 55,000 tons of radioactive water. '... international law forbids Japan from dumping contaminated water into the ocean if there are viable technical solutions available later. So the plant operator is considering bringing in barges and tanks, including a so-called megafloat that can hold about 9.5 megalitres. Yet even using barges and tanks to handle the water temporarily creates a future problem of how to dispose of the contaminated vessels.'" Yesterday's 7.1 aftershock caused brief power losses at three other nuclear facilities, and small volumes of contaminated water spilled, but no significant radiation leakage occurred before the problems were resolved.

An anonymous reader writes "Dual-core smartphones have only just hit the market, but mobile chipmakers Nvidia and Qualcomm are already turning their attention to quad-core chips. While it looks certain that tablets will be the first quad-core mobile devices in the market, chipmakers reckon they'll land in smartphones too. But do smartphones need quad-core chips? There's surely only so much multitasking a smartphone user can do. I'm interested to hear what smartphone apps/features/functions — if any — Slashdot readers reckon quad-core chips would enable"

An anonymous reader writes "The president of Peru, Alan Garcia, decided to celebrate the 500,000th One Laptop Per Child XO laptop in that country in style, announcing orders for half a million more and 20,000 additional Lego education WeDo robot kits for public schools, bringing the total number of kits for distribution up to 92,000. The latest OLPC laptop, the XO-1.75, has the lowest power draw ever thanks to a Marvell Armada 600 ARM processor and runs Fedora GNU/Linux with dual desktops Sugar (in Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua) and GNOME. For the first time, the XOs will be manufactured locally; the previous 2 million, including the blue high school variant with grownup keyboard, were all made by Quanta Computer. Meanwhile, parallel development continues on the upcoming XO-3 tablet; OLPC's New Technologies director is exploring software paths including GTK3 for Sugar, Android and Chrome. I, for one, salute our new plastic Peruvian overlords."

ptorrone writes "From Bruce Wayne to Lex Luthor to Tony Stark — the most popular comic heroes are more than just beefy guys in skin tight suits, they're also business persons, titans of industry and brilliant engineers. While there will always be a lot of debate on who is the strongest or fastest, MAKE has an overview of their 14 top comic book engineers, scientists and hackers."

gnu let us know about Facebook releasing specifications for their data center infrastructure as an open hardware project. They've released detailed electrical and mechanical data for everything from the server motherboards to the data center power distribution system. Digging further reveals that the specifications are licensed under the new Open Web Foundation Agreement which appears to be an actual open license. The breadth of data released really is quite amazing.

RedEaredSlider writes "The hacker collective Anonymous has made good on its threat to attack Sony, having launched a distributed denial-of-service attack on Wednesday afternoon. The attack is revenge for the legal action taken against another hacker who modified a PlayStation 3. Sony Computer Entertainment America filed suit against George Hotz, also known as Geohot. Hotz had released a firmware modification that allowed a Sony PlayStation 3 to run other operating systems. Sony had removed that functionality some months before. The suit is still pending."

A reader writes "After releasing Monotouch for iPhone which allows c# development on iOS, Novell has announced the availability of Mono for Android. Will this give us the 'one language to rule them all' that Java failed to bring, or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?"

An anonymous reader writes "After nearly 30 years, the Commodore brand has taken on new management and is re-releasing its flagship computer, this time with all the amenities of a modern-day computer packed inside. From the article: 'The new Commodore 64, which will begin shipping at the end of the month, has been souped-up for the modern age. It comes with 1.8 gigahertz dual processors, an optional Blu-ray player and built-in ethernet and HDMI ports. The new Commodore is priced between $250 to $900.'"

CWmike writes "The Smithsonian Museum of American History on Tuesday added a number of robotic technologies to its collection, including what may have been one of the smallest robots in the world. The robot known as Marv, short for Mini Autonomous Robot Vehicle, is just one cubic inch in size. It was developed in 1996 and 1997 at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Lab. Its footprint is not much larger than a penny, and it was cobbled together from commercially available parts, including a microprocessor, that moved on wheels. Marv is one of about 100 robotic artifacts in the collection, which includes a large collection of other technology-related artifacts. Barry Spletzer, a retired engineer and scientist at Sandia, worked on Marv, an effort that began 'almost on a whim.' The robots merit a place at the museum because there are more than 1 million industrial robots in use today, said Carlene Stephens, a curator. While most of those robots perform rudimentary tasks, the sheer number is evidence that 'robots are now among us,' she said. For More info on the institute's National Robotics Week plans, see the Lemelson Center site."