All polar bears descended from one Irish grizzly
‘THE ARCTIC’S DWINDLING POPULATION of polar bears all descend from a single mamma brown bear which lived 20,000 to 50,000 years ago in present-day Ireland, new research suggests. DNA samples from the great white carnivores – taken from across their entire range in Russia, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Alaska – revealed that every individual’s lineage could be traced back to this Irish forebear.’ More than the average bear, I guess
(tags: animals biology science dna history ireland bears polar-bears grizzly-bears via:ben)
Basho | Alert Logic Relies on Riak to Support Rapid Growth
‘The new [Riak-based] analytics infrastructure performs statistical and correlation processing on all data […] approximately 5 TB/day. All of this data is processed in real-time as it streams in. […] Alert Logic’s analytics infrastructure, powered by Riak, achieves performance results of up to 35k operations/second across each node in the cluster – performance that eclipses the existing MySQL deployment by a large margin on single node performance. In real business terms, the initial deployment of the combination of Riak and the analytic infrastructure has allowed Alert Logic to process in real-time 7,500 reports, which previously took 12 hours of dedicated processing every night.’ Twitter discussion here: https://twitter.com/fisherpk/status/294984960849367040 , which notes ‘heavily cached SAN storage, 12 core blades and 90% get to put ops’, and ‘3 riak nodes, 12-cores, 30k get heavy riak ops/sec. 8 nodes driving ops to that cluster’. Apparently the use of SAN storage on all nodes is historic, but certainly seems to have produced good iops numbers as an (expensive) side-effect…
(tags: iops riak basho ops systems alert-logic storage nosql databases)
Turn a Raspberry Pi Into an AirPlay Receiver for Streaming Music in Your Living Room
hooray, a viable domestic Raspberry Pi use case at last ;)
Antigua Government Set to Launch “Pirate” Website To Punish United States
oh the lulz.
The Government of Antigua is planning to launch a website selling movies, music and software, without paying U.S. copyright holders. The Caribbean island is taking the unprecedented step because the United States refuses to lift a trade “blockade” preventing the island from offering Internet gambling services, despite several WTO decisions in Antigua’s favor. The country now hopes to recoup some of the lost income through a WTO approved “warez” site.
(tags: us-politics antigua piracy filesharing pirate gambling wto ip blockades)