Inside One Of The World's Largest Data Centers

From CNET:

CHICAGO--On the outside, Microsoft's massive new data center resembles the other buildings in the industrial area.

Even the inside of the building doesn't look like that much. The ground floor looks like a large indoor parking lot filled with a few parked trailers.

It's what's inside those trailers, though, that is the key to Microsoft's cloud-computing efforts. Each of the shipping containers in the Chicago data center houses anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers, each of which can be serving up e-mail, managing instant messages, or running applications for Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched cloud-based operating system--Windows Azure.

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Bye, Tech: Dealing With Data Rot

Image: Audio recordings of 40-year-old interviews with rock stars were transferred to new tape to preserve them, but the newer tapes are disintegrating. (CBS)

From CBS News:

As Storage Media And Software Applications Advance Or Die Out, Years Of Precious Memories Are Threatened

(CBS) Sooner or later, it affects every audio recording, video recording and computer file. Contributor David Pogue looks at what happens when technological progress leaves your most precious memories and recordings behind.
Lydia Robertson is a filmmaker. But you've probably never seen her first movie, the one she made in high school.

"It's called 'The Chicken Lady,' a horror-comedy," she said. "It's the most ridiculous film ever made. It might be one of the worst films ever made! But we learned a lot, and that was the point."

Trouble is, she hasn't seen it, either.

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New Ways To Sift Data

Above shows occurrences of names in the New Testament.

Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways
to Sift Data -- New York Times

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

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