scale

The billions of dollars being plowed into electric vehicle battery manufacturing around the world is helping jump-start another clean-energy industry: storage on the electric grid.

Earlier this week, A123 Systems opened a plant in Livonia, Mich., to make lithium ion battery components and packs for hybrid and electric vehicles. Among the government officials at the event were state governor Jennifer Granholm and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who called it a key step to restarting manufacturing in the U.S..

Ramping up lithium ion battery manufacturing by A123 Systems and other companies is projected to drive down the cost of batteries … Read more

Chances are, if you've had your computer for any amount of time, you've burned a CD or DVD and needed a cover for it. UnderCoverXP makes it easy to create covers for a variety of types of digital media. It's not a design program, exactly; it's more of a utility for scaling images to the right size and printing them so that they'll fit in whatever type of case you're using. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of making covers; UnderCoverXP gets the dimensions right every time.

The program's interface is … Read more

Last year, storage vendors were all about cloud. They saw major-league opportunities in the private, public, hybrid, and federated versions. No cloud was too big or too small. In fact, because clouds were "infinitely scalable," there was no limit to the number of yotta bytes they could sell.

Storage users and data center storage administrators in particular were decidedly more sanguine. You say cloud is a new services delivery model? Hey storage vendors, where have you been lately? We've been all about services delivery for some time now. Tell us something about cloud we don't know. … Read more

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will develop an exascale supercomputer, as Moore's Law and conventional computing designs begin hitting a wall, the government agency said Friday.

DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program seeks "to create an innovative, revolutionary new generation of computing systems that overcomes the limitations of current evolutionary approach," the agency said in a statement. Companies involved in the project include Intel and Nvidia.

The UHPC program addresses priorities set out by President Obama's "Strategy for American Innovation" to achieve "exascale" and energy-efficient computing, DARPA said. One … Read more

Kitchen appliances are generally manufactured with convenience in mind--not surprising as all cooks appreciate some form of convenience. As convenient as some appliances are, however, some simply are not convenient enough. Or thoughtful enough. They may have all the bells and whistles meant to enhance the cooking experience, but sometimes, for some at least, they don't have the feature that matters.

The Terraillon 8776 Linear Vocal Kitchen Scale takes an easy-to-use popular kitchen appliance and adds the convenience of voice. Speaking in three languages (English, French and German), the talking scale may be a convenient feature for some, but … Read more

The massive amounts of data being created on the Web and the rise of cloud computing together make an ideal environment for alternative database technologies to thrive. And the Web is often proving to be just an entry point for bleeding-edge technology to be tested out before it starts heading into the enterprise.

NoSQL databases and associated operational-data technologies based on nonrelational approaches to data management and manipulation continue to be top of mind for big Web shops and are slowly starting to make their way into enterprise IT infrastructure.

I've spoken with a number of vendors roaming the NoSQL space over the last few months and there seems to be one common thread that they push: traditional relational databases are expensive, bulky, and simply not ideal for this new era of Web technology.

On Wednesday, a new NoSQL database joins the fray: Membase. Launched as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license and co-sponsored by NorthScale, Zynga, and NHN (Korea's top online gaming portal), Membase is optimized for storing the data behind interactive Web applications.

Membase says it is 100 percent compatible with Memcached, the de facto standard for distributed object caching behind Web applications. Basically, Membase is as easy to use as Memcached but also stores data.

According to James Phillips, NorthScale co-founder and senior vice president of products, the thousands of organizations that use Memcached (18 of the top 20 most visited Web sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Google) have a demand for a solution that looks like Memcached but acts like a distributed, highly available, high-performance, elastic database technology. … Read more

While it is often cited that cloud computing will change the economics of IT operations, it is rare to find definitive sources of information about the subject. However, the influence of economies of scale on the cost and quality of computing infrastructure is a critical reason why cloud computing promises to be so disruptive.

James Hamilton, a vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon.com, and one of the true gurus of large-scale data center practices, recently gave a presentation at Mix 10 that may be one of the most informative--and influential--overviews of data center economies of scale to date. … Read more

The Withings scale, already breaking waves as the first Wi-Fi body scale that uploads weight and body mass data to personal online accounts, announces this week a new partnership with Gym Technik, enabling much easier tracking via pretty much any smartphone on the market.

Via Gym Technik, users can set up workout routines online, track daily progress via their smartphones, peruse an exercise library for workout tips, and upload before/after photos. Synching this with the Withings scale now allows users to instantly track their weight, body fat percentage, and BMI stats just by standing on it.

This is probably … Read more

Kitchen clutter is the enemy. But as far as enemies go, jam-packed kitchen countertops are a pretty OK one to have. If you're always in a fight to free up your kitchen counters, it (usually) means you have a nice assortment of gadgets; if you're reading this blog, you probably even like kitchen gadgets and appliances. However, it's still nice to have a clean kitchen where everything has its place. Sometimes you just have to look in the right place to find a way to store everything.

The Terraillon Book-Shaped Digital Kitchen Scale doesn't just blend … Read more