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Microsoft announced on June 9 that it will be shuttering its Office file-sharing site Docs.com. The company is making the move because its SlideShare service, which it obtained with its purchase of LinkedIn last year, makes the online public repository for Office files redundant.
"Following Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, SlideShare has joined the Microsoft family, and represents the ideal platform for publishing your Word, PowerPoint, and PDF content with its audience of 70 million professionals, and vast content library," a June 9 post from the company states.
Documents stored on Docs.com will be automatically backed up to OneDrive. Users can no longer create files on Docs.com, and come Dec. 15 the website will no longer be accessible.
With its acquisition of Yahoo’s core businesses, Verizon is switching focus to how it can leverage the $4.48 billion purchase to accelerate revenues in the digital advertising space. One of Verizon’s first actions after the deal is finalized will reportedly be to cut about 2,100 jobs across Yahoo and its current web pr...
"The similarities between the AOL and Yahoo properties mean there are a lot of redundant positions," Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT research, explained, adding that he expects "the marketing and sales organizations to take the brunt of the reductions, with Yahoo personnel suffering the most losses."
Docker hopes to improve Linux kernel security by incubating several nascent Linux security projects within its LinuxKit community.
The container vendor officially announced LinuxKit on April 18 as an open-source toolkit to build container-optimized Linux distributions.
Nathan McCauley, director of security at Docker Inc., told eWEEK that there are a number of incubated projects focused on security improvements within LinuxKit. Those projects include Wireguard, a new VPN for Linux that utilizes secure cryptography; the Kernel Self Protection Project, which provides additional security...
British Prime Minister Tony Blair will declare war on the Taliban today, warning Osama bin Laden’s protectors that their troops will be targets of military strikes.
In a speech at the Labor Party’s annual conference, Blair will tell the Afghan regime it must face the music for refusing to hand over the terror fugitive suspected of orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks on America, sources said last night.
At the same time, he will pledge that everything “humanly possible” will be done to avoid civilian casualties.
As Blair was putting the finishing touches on his speech, Pakistan’s president predicted the Taliban’s days are numbered.
“It appears that the United States will take action in Afghanistan. We have conveyed this to the Taliban,” Gen. Pervez Musharraf said.
Inside Afghanistan, desperate Taliban leaders are dragging young men off to the army, as food grows scarcer.
At Quetta, a border town in Pakistan, hungry refugees said more Afghans would flee their homes if they weren’t trapped by poverty, illness and age.
Some refugees told of sons and husbands shot without explanation by Taliban militia.
Much of the suffering is based on ethnicity. Hussain and his family were driven to flee partly because they belong to the Hazara ethnic group, a traditional enemy of the Taliban, which is mostly Pashtun.
In some cities, including Kabul and the Taliban capital of Jalalabad, conditions are less harsh, refugees in Quetta said.
* President Bush gave the green light to aid for anti-Taliban groups inside Afghanistan, shoring up the opposition Northern Alliance and tribal rebels in the south.
“The purpose of the mission is to eliminate those who harbor terrorists,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The Northern Alliance asked Washington for tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers and artillery, said the group’s Washington representative, Haron Amin.
* Afghanistan’s exiled former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, struck a deal with the Alliance to oust the Taliban.
Shah, 86, who lives in Italy, also spoke to a congressional delegation, which came away impressed. “We think that perhaps he is the person who can rally those against the Taliban most effectively,” said Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.).
Shah’s supporters said they are in touch with Taliban figures about a possible role in any new government.
“There are good Taliban, and we hope they would join us. There are bad ones, too, and we hope they would disappear,” said Hamid Karzai, an Afghan exile leader.
* A new report says Pakistan is secretly plotting a coup to kill or depose Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar and replace him with a moderate.
Citing highly placed sources in Iran, the Sydney Morning Herald said Islamabad wants to return the country to a milder form of Islam.
Bracing for an attack from U.S. forces, Taliban Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah tried to stir up his border troops.
Until the end of her life, Gruber remained convinced that the United States could have saved many more refugees.
When Ruth Gruber saw a report during World War II that 1,000 Jewish refugees were being brought to the United States, she rushed straight to her job with the secretary of the interior.
"I got rid of my breakfast and rushed to the office and said, 'I have to see the Secretary.' I told him, 'Somebody has to go over and hold their hands; they're going to be terrified,'" Gruber said in a 2010 interview in The Sunday Telegraph of London.
That somebody turned out to be her, and as she accompanied the refugees to the U.S., she interviewed them, which became the basis of "Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America," one of her many books but only one part of Gruber's long, trailblazing life.
The journalist and humanitarian died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan, according to her editor, Philip Turner. She was 105.
Gruber, who was born in Brooklyn, started college at New York University at age 15 and had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in Germany by the time she was 20. The New York Times reported at the time that she was the youngest German doctor of philosophy. Her dissertation was on Virginia Woolf, whom she late...
In 1944, Gruber got involved in a mission to bring 1,000 Jewish refugees from Italy to the United States. Despite the risk of sailing on waters patrolled by German submarines, then Interior Secretary Ickes appointed her to travel with the refugees.
Aboard the ship, the refugees, some of them too old to walk, called Gruber, then 32, “Mother Ruth,” according to the Post’s obituary of her. Fluent in German and Yiddish, she organized English lessons, cared for the seasick and taught at least one refugee her first English song — “You Are My Sunshine,” the Boston Globe...
Together they made the two-week journey without attack, and the refugees arrived in the United States “safe beyond their most roseate dreams,” according to a New York Times account at the time.
She lobbied fiercely for the refugees to be given American citizenship, which they eventually were granted.
In her 70s, she was the only foreign correspondent to observe Operation Moses, the airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel during famine.
"I thought that wherever there was injustice we should fight it, and what better tool than journalism? I always carried my little Hermes typewriter that weighed about two pounds and my two cameras," she said in the Sunday Telegraph interview.
She was honored with awards from organizations including the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance.
Pakistan's ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today returned home from London to face trial in the corruption cases spiralling from the Panama Papers scandal.
Pakistan’s ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today returned home from London to face trial in the corruption cases spiralling from the Panama Papers scandal. Sharif, 67, had to step down as the chief of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) after he was disqualified as the prime minister by the Supreme Court on Jul...
He was received by senior leaders of ruling PML-N and held a brief consultation with the party leaders at the VIP lounge of the airport. Later, he left in his private vehicle for Punjab House in Islamabad, where he was received by supporters and party workers. He is expected to hold extensive consultations throughout t...
The court would resume the hearing tomorrow. Sharif, his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Captain (retired) Mohmmad Safdar have been summoned. Maryam and Safdar have already been indicted in corruption cases filed against them by the country’s anti- corruption body National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on the Supreme Cour...
Three cases were registered by NAB on September 8 against Sharif, his children and son-in-law in the Accountability Court in Islamabad, following a verdict by the Supreme Court. He was indicted in absence in three cases. Maryam and Safdar have been indicted in one case with him, while the court is proceeding separately...
The Green Grid Consortium will release two free tools in the coming months to help companies measure and improve the energy efficiency of their data centers.
The new tools are both Web-based and will be available through the Green Grid's Web site by the end of March. The consortium is presenting them at its third annual conference on Thursday in San Jose, California.
The consortium, whose members are a mix of vendors and end-user companies, was set up three years ago to develop tools and recommendations for improving data center efficiency.
One of the tools is the Power Efficiency Estimator. It's intended mainly for companies building new data centers or doing retrofits, and allows them to compare the efficiency of different topographies and equipment to help design the most power-efficient layout.
"It's a tool that lets you specify the topology of your power distribution network at a high level, including how it is architected, what connects to what, and what type of equipment you are using," said John Pflueger, a Green Grid board member who is also the chairman of its technical group and a technology strategist...
"The tool will have statistics about all the various equipment. It then applies some math according to the topology and comes back with a curve for your power distribution network, to tell you what sort of efficiency you might expect for that network as a percentage of load," he said.
The other new tool is the PUE Calculator. PUE (power usage effectiveness) looks at the total amount of power being used by a data center, and compares it to the amount of power that actually reaches the IT equipment, as opposed to being used for cooling systems or wasted in inefficient power supplies.
It was the Green Grid Consortium that came up with the PUE metric, which is catching on as a way to measure the energy efficiency of data centers.
The calculator will take into account subsystems within data centers, which might have a different PUE number from the facility as a whole. In particular it is a response to the use of containerized data centers, or small, standalone data centers packed into customized shipping containers.
The online tool lets companies enter the PUEs of their various subsystems and come up with a result for the facility as a whole, said Mike Patterson, chairman of the Green Grid's technology and strategy working group, who is also a senior power and thermal architect at Intel.
PUE numbers have been used as a marketing tool by some Internet companies to show off the efficiency of their facilities. Patterson said a more suitable use is for comparing the efficiency of a single data center over time, as a way to gauge the success of energy-efficiency projects, for example.
The average data center has a PUE of approximately 2.0, meaning less than half the energy supplied to the data center actually reaches the IT equipment. The maximum PUE that the Green Grid will recognize is 1.0, meaning all the energy is reaching the IT equipment -- something that is very hard to achieve.
But some companies have reported PUE scores below 1.0, sometimes because they generate some of their own power on site. The Green Grid is working on a metric that will take on-site power generation into account and allow companies to have sub-1.0 scores, Patterson said.
The Green Grid has decided to focus on PUE as its preferred metric for simplification purposes. It originally came up with a second, very similar metric, Data Center infrastructure Efficiency (DCiE), that measures the same thing as PUE in a slightly different way.
"Everyone has sort of rallied around PUE," Patterson said.
The group is also presenting improvements to another tool Thursday, its Fresh Air Cooling calculator. It takes publically available temperature and humidity data and allows companies to calculate how many days of the year they could use fresh air to cool their data centers, as a supplement to standard cooling systems. ...
It also released a new white paper recently, on the impact of virtualization on data center physical infrastructure.
The consortium would like to get feedback about its new tools. Comments and questions can be sent to powerdata@lists.thegreengrid.org for the Power Efficiency Estimator, and puee-comments@lists.thegreengrid.org for the PUE Calculator.
There's been a sharp increase in focus in recent years on the amount of energy used by data centers, in part because they are becoming an increasingly costly component of many organizations' operations.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune will serve as the next majority whip.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune has been elected majority whip of the U.S. Senate, becoming the second-ranking Republican in the Senate leadership.
Thune was nominated by the former whip, Texas Senator John Cornyn.
Thune had served as the Republican Conference Chairman, the third-ranking position, since 2011.
The responsibilities of a whip include counting heads and rounding up members for votes and quorum calls. The term "whip" is a reference to the member of a British hunting team who would ensure the dogs did not stray from the rest of the group.
Thune acknowledged that keeping the narrow Republican majority together on controversial votes can be a challenge.
"When you've got a conference that has people on different ends of the spectrum like Ted Cruz and Susan Collins, it creates challenges," he said, noting the differences between the conservative Texan Cruz and the moderate Collins, who is from Maine.
The 57-year-old Murdo native has worked closely with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on GOP priorities such as tax cuts and health care reform, putting him in position to take a greater leadership role.
That leadership will be needed now that Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives, testing the ability of both parties to find some level of bipartisan agreement.
Thune's working relationship with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has grown over the years and might help in reaching across the aisle.
Thune's election to majority whip marks the highest point in Senate leadership reached by a South Dakota Republican.
Sen. Tom Daschle was majority leader for the Democrats from 2001 to 2003 and minority leader from 1995-2001 and 2003-2005.
Thune served as South Dakota's United States Representative from 1997-2003, and in 2004 successfully ran against Daschle for his Senate seat.
CORRECTION: The dates for Tom Daschle's minority and majority leadership tenure were incorrect in the original version of this story.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is demanding that a California high school change its mascot that depicts a caricature of an Arab person.
Coachella Valley High School will discuss the mascot at a board meeting on Nov. 21, reports mydesert.com.
The mascot was originally adopted in the 1920s because the area was sustained on date farming, a Middle Eastern fruit. Alumni disagree that it is a harmful stereotype.
Superintendent of the school district Darryl Adams said he was concerned about the mascot when first coming to the area, but quickly changed his mind.
Gee, this sounds oddly similar to a certain pro football team in our nation’s capitol. Wonder if the Oneida tribe wants to take up some vested interest in this high school, too.
Engineers have produced an alloy that springs back into shape even after it is bent more than 10 million times.
"Memory shape alloys" like this have many potential uses, but present incarnations are prone to wearing out.
The new material - made from nickel, titanium and copper - shatters previous records and is so resilient it could be useful in artificial heart valves, aircraft components or a new generation of solid-state refrigerators.
Memory alloys are already used in some situations, including surgical operations. A stent, for example, might be squashed into a small space and then spring into its designed shape to prop open a blood vessel.
But the alloys have never entirely fulfilled their promise and entered the world of "high cycle fatigue" applications.
"Usually shape memory alloys - like in minimally invasive surgery - they regain their shape once, or a few times, but not multiple times," explained Prof Manfred Wuttig, one of the new paper's senior authors, from the University of Maryland in the US.
"This is highly unusual. It's kind of a leap forward," he told the BBC.
Prof Wuttig developed the new alloy with colleagues at the University of Kiel, in Germany.
The key to its remarkable properties is the way it is crystallised. The nickel, titanium and copper atoms are arranged in such a way that they can switch between two different configurations - again and again and again.
This "phase transition" is what causes the alloy to snap back into shape after it is bent. It can be triggered by heat, or, in a different form of the alloy, it can happen as soon as the tension is released.
In particular, the team reported it was tiny particles of an impurity - a chemical formed by titanium and copper, Ti2Cu - that smoothed out the switching process.
"This particular precipitate is fully compatible with both crystal structures, so it sort of assures that they fully transform from A to B and back again," Prof Wuttig said.
The team made the alloy in tiny 1cm-square pieces, much less than 1mm thick, and tested it using both heat and stress.
To rack up 10 million cycles took some patience and some automation, Prof Wuttig said.
"With stress it's not so difficult. You can buy [or build] little stress-strain machines... So you can automate that and then it's not so difficult. But it takes in the order of weeks to generate the number of cycles.
"It's much more difficult with temperature."

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