The world is still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop, but in 2003 it looked as if that goal was within reach. Back then, the city of Munich announced plans to switch from Microsoft technology to Linux on 14,000 PCs belonging to the city's municipal government. While the scheme suffered delays, it was completed in December 2013. There's only been one small problem: users aren't happy with the software, and the government isn't happy with the price.

The switch was motivated by a desire to reduce licensing costs and end the city's dependence on a single company. City of Munich PCs were running Windows NT 4, and the end of support for that operating system meant that it was going to incur significant licensing costs to upgrade. In response, the plan was to migrate to OpenOffice and Debian Linux. Later, the plan was updated to use LibreOffice and Ubuntu.

German media is reporting that the city is now considering a switch back to Microsoft in response to these complaints. The city is putting together an independent expert group to look at the problem, and if that group recommends using Microsoft software, Deputy Mayor Josef Schmid of the CSU party says that a switch back isn't impossible.

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Anyone paying vague attention to the PC games market has long known that it's a space dominated by downloadable titles. Still, it's a bit astounding to hear a report estimating that a full 92 percent of PC game sales in 2013 came from digital downloads, as DFC Intelligence recently told British tech site PCR.

That may sound high, even to people who haven't bought a PC game on a disc for years, but it lines up with other numbers reported throughout the industry. Last year, Payday 2 publisher Starbreeze announced that 80 percent of its 1.58 million first-month sales came from downloads, for instance. And let's not forget the scores of PC games that are totally ignoring retail sales for 100 percent downloadable releases these days, from Dota 2 to Day Z.

Download-dominated PC gaming is a newer phenomenon than some gamers might realize. As recently as 2010, analyst firm NPD was estimating that downloads made up only 48 percent of all PC game sales.

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Tim Redpath

Delaware has become the first state in the US to enact a law that ensures families’ rights to access the digital assets of loved ones during incapacitation or after death.

Last week, Gov. Jack Markell signed House Bill (HB) 345, “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act,” which gives heirs and executors the same authority to take legal control of a digital account or device, just as they would take control of a physical asset or document.

Earlier this year, the Uniform Law Commission, a non-profit group that lobbies to enact model legislations across all jurisdictions in the United States, adopted its Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA). Delaware is the first state to take the UFADAA and turn it into a bona fide law.

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Ansible is an open-source automation tool developed and released by Michael DeHaan and others in 2012. DeHaan calls it a "general-purpose automation pipeline" (see Resources for a link to the article "Ansible's Architecture: Beyond Configuration Management"). more>>

Rightscorp

Internet copyright enforcer Rightscorp has told investors some revelatory details about its strategy in its second-quarter earnings call, as reported by TorrentFreak.

Rightscorp was founded to be a kind of RIAA-lite, getting online pirates to pay record companies and other rights-holders without the need to resort to high-stakes litigation. Instead, it creates e-mail notices demanding $20 per song from users it deems "repeat infringers" and insists that ISPs forward those notices.

The company is growing fast, but is still way, way in the red. Last year it earned $324,000 in revenue, while spending more than $2.1 million to run its operations. This year it's earning more revenue: $440,414 in the first six months of the year. However, operating costs during the same period have already hit $1.8 million.

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Mayo Clinic Gene Expression Core Gene expression is the process by which the DNA of genes is used to produce proteins that perform essential roles as enzymes, hormones, antibodies, and more. However, this complex process is not fully understood because it varies dramatically due to environmental factors, developmental stages, and diseases. We’d like a better understanding of gene expression, but finding a system that allows it to be studied free of extraneous influences has been difficult.

Researchers may have overcome this obstacle with the development of a biochip that contains an array of artificial “cells” that enable the precise study of how gene expression changes with time. This system could be used to investigate how different cells change their activity as development proceeds or in response to environmental changes.

The biochip was constructed by assembling bundles of DNA on the surface of circular silicon compartments (50 μm radius and 1-3 μm height). Thin capillaries were used to connect DNA compartments to a channel that provided nutrients and energy. Researchers were able to observe stable gene expression and expression patterns that changed over time by tracking the presence of green fluorescent protein (GFP) expressed from the DNA.

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The @peoriamayor Twitter account.

The Illinois city that arrested a local man for parodying its mayor on Twitter said Monday that the prankster's detainment wasn't "unreasonable."

The arrest of Jonathan Daniel by Peoria authorities in April made national headlines, and the 29-year-old cook sued in federal court, claiming civil rights violations.

In its first response to the lawsuit, the city of Peoria's and Mayor Jim Ardis' attorney told Ars that the mayor and city officials believed Daniel was breaching an Illinois law making it illegal to impersonate a public official. The mayor's attorney said city officials got a judge to issue warrants from Twitter and Comcast to track down Daniel. In short, they were just following the law.

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Levi's Stadium crowd on August 17, 2014. Jim Bahn

The San Francisco 49ers' massive Wi-Fi network delivered to its first NFL crowd yesterday when the home team took on the Denver Broncos in a preseason game at the just-opened Levi's Stadium.

Mobile Sports Report Editor Paul Kapustka tested the network in person during the game and detailed his findings extensively.

"In its first 'real' test with an almost-full house on Sunday the Levi’s Wi-Fi and cellular networks seemed to work well throughout the game, delivering solid speed test results from almost every part of the new 68,500-seat facility," Kapustka wrote. In an outside concourse, Kapustka got speeds of 57.92Mbps down and 41Mbps up. He still got more than 20Mbps in both directions inside near the concession stands, while Mbps dropped to the teens in the seats, still plenty fast enough to qualify as broadband.

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Droid Life

Over the weekend, Best Buy posted the product page for the Moto 360 a bit early, revealing specs and pricing for Motorola's long-awaited smartwatch. The most noteworthy part of the listing is the price, a surprisingly low $249. That's only slightly more than the less-fashionable square watches from Samsung ($199) and LG ($229).

Best Buy showed specs that claim the device is equipped with 802.11N Wi-Fi hardware, which a tiny watch battery surely can't handle. Because smartwatches use smartphone SoCs, most have a Wi-Fi hardware that's kept switched off, so unless Motorola has worked some serious battery magic, we doubt the 360's will be active.

The other surprise is the mention of a Texas Instruments SoC. The company had worked with Motorola before on devices like the Droid, but it decided to quit making smartphone chips after the high-end smartphone market was dominated by Qualcomm. If the Best Buy listing is right, that decision apparently left the door open for low-powered devices like smartwatches.

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Damage following the tsunami from the April 2014 earthquake. Juan González-Carrasco (Universidad Catolica del Norte, Chile)

Sometimes it seems like the Internet holds as many ridiculous claims about predicting earthquakes as it does cat memes. While it’s very clear that neither seismologists nor anyone else can fully predict earthquakes, that doesn’t mean the scientists know nothing.

The basic process behind an earthquake is pretty simple. Friction between two blocks of rock trying to slide past each other along a fault holds them in place until the sliding force is too great, and then BOOM!—an earthquake. We can measure that sliding very precisely, so as the strain on the fault mounts, we know an earthquake will happen; it’s just a question of when. And the greater the strain that has accumulated since the last earthquake, the larger the potential magnitude of the next one.

Along a long subduction zone, where an oceanic plate slides beneath a continental plate, faults slip one section at a time. Sections that haven’t slipped in a while but sit between sites of recent major earthquakes are known as “seismic gaps.” Those sections are likely to host the next major earthquake in the region.

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Virtualization has been around since the 1960s, but it has emerged as a hot topic over the last decade or so. Despite the rising popularity, its applications have been mostly restricted to enterprise use. Hardware-assisted virtualization features (AMD-V, VT-x and VT-d, for example) have been slowly making their way into the lower end x86 parts, thereby enabling low-cost virtualization platforms. QNAP is, to our knowledge, the only NAS vendor to offer a virtualization platform (using the Virtualization Station package for QTS) with some of their units. Read on to find out how it works and the impact it has on regular performance.

EVGA recently sent us their new Torq X10, a gaming mouse that also marks EVGA's first foray into the gaming peripheral market. On paper, it boasts excellent features and specifications. We are going to find out if it can live up to the high expectations of both the company and the consumers in this review.

Two people are still missing after a tourist boat sank off the Indonesian coast on Saturday night.

Continuing with our Flash Memory Summit coverage, HGST announced their FlashMAX III enterprise SSD, which is the first fruit of HGST's Virident acquistion and continues Virident's FlashMAX brand. The FlashMAX III will come in half-height, half-length form factor and will be available in capacities of 1100GB, 1650GB and 2200GB. The controller is an FPGA-based 32-channel design with a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, but there is no NVMe support since the FlashMAX III builds on the same architecture as the previous generation FlashMAX II. 

HGST FlashMAX III Specifications Capacity 1100GB 1650GB 2200GB Form Factor Half-Height, Half-Length (HH-HL) Interface PCIe 3.0 x8 Controller 32-channel FPGA based NAND Micron 20nm 64Gbit MLC Sequential Read 2.7GB/s 2.0GB/s 2.7GB/s Sequential Write 1.4GB/s 1.0GB/s 1.4GB/s 4KB Random Read 549K IOPS 409K IOPS 531K IOPS 4KB Random Write 53K IOPS 30K IOPS 59K IOPS 4KB 70/30 Random Read/Write 195K IOPS 145K IOPS 200K IOPS Write Latency < 30 µsec Max Power 25 watts Endurance 2 DWPD Warranty Five years

The maximum throughput seems a bit low for a design that uses up eight PCIe 3.0 lanes since 2.7GB/s should be achievable with just four PCIe 3.0 lanes. Obviously performance scaling is not that simple but for example Samsung's XS1715 (which we will be reviewing soon!) is rated at up to 3.0GB/s while only consuming four PCIe 3.0 lanes. Using less PCIe lanes allows for more drives to be delpoyed as the amount of PCIe lanes is always rather limited.

The 1650GB model is even slower due to the fact that it utilizes less NAND channels because it is a middle capacity. Basically, the 1100GB and 2200GB models have the same number of NAND packages, with the 2200GB model having twice as much NAND per package; the 1650GB model uses the higher capacity packages but doesn't fully populate the board. HGST told us that they are just testing the water to see if there is demand for something in between 1100GB and 2200GB.

The FlashMAX III also supports Virident Flash-management with Adaptive Shceduling (vFAS), which is a fancy name for Virident's storage driver. vFAS presents the FlashMAX as a single volume block device to the OS, meaning that no additional storage protocols or controllers are needed, whereas some drives just use a RAID controller or need software RAID solutions to be configured into an array. Additionally vFAS handles NAND management by doing wear-leveling, garbage collection, data path protection, NAND-level parity, ECC, and more. 

The FlashMAX III is currently being qualified by select OEMs and will ship later in this quarter. 

The BBC's Paul Wood says it is too early to say whether Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Iraqi troops have recaptured Mosul dam from Islamic State (IS) militants.

Khat - a plant used as a stimulant - was banned as a class C drug in the UK earlier this year. This has meant that its mainly Kenyan producers and exporters have been forced to direct their supplies closer to home, to Somalia.

Non EU member Switzerland has not imposed sanctions on Russia - a situation that does not please its biggest trading partner, the European Union.

We are running a bit late with our Flash Memory Summit coverage as I did not get back from the US until last Friday, but I still wanted to cover the most interesting tidbits of the show. ULLtraDIMM (Ultra Low Latency DIMM) was initially launched by SMART Storage a year ago but SanDisk acquired the company shortly after, which made ULLtraDIMM a part of SanDisk's product portfolio.

The ULLtraDIMM was developed in partnership with Diablo Technologies and it is an enterprise SSD that connects to the DDR3 interface instead of the traditional SATA/SAS and PCIe interfaces. IBM was the first to partner with the two to ship the ULLtraDIMM in servers, but at this year's show SanDisk announced that Supermicro will be joining as the second partner to use ULLtraDIMM SSDs. More specifically Supermicro will be shipping ULLtraDIMM in its Green SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms and availability is scheduled for Q4 this year. 

SanDisk ULLtraDIMM Specifications Capacities 200GB & 400GB Controller 2x Marvell 88SS9187 NAND SanDisk 19nm MLC Sequential Read 1,000MB/s Sequential Write 760MB/s 4KB Random Read 150K IOPS 4KB Random Write 65K IOPS Read Latency 150 µsec Write Latency < 5 µsec Endurance 10/25 DWPD (random/sequential) Warranty Five years

We have not covered the ULLtraDIMM before, so I figured I would provide a quick overview of the product as well. Hardware wise the ULLtraDIMM consists of two Marvell 88SS9187 SATA 6Gbps controllers, which are configured in an array using a custom chip with a Diablo Technologies label, which I presume is also the secret behind DDR3 compatibility. ULLtraDIMM supports F.R.A.M.E. (Flexible Redundant Array of Memory Elements) that utilizes parity to protect against page/block/die level failures, which is SanDisk's answer to SandForce's RAISE and Micron's RAIN. Power loss protection is supported as well and is provided by an array of capacitors. 

The benefit of using a DDR3 interface instead of SATA/SAS or PCIe is lower latency because the SSDs sit closer to the CPU. The memory interface has also been designed with parallelism in mind and can thus take greater advantage of multiple drives without sacrificing performance or latency. SanDisk claims write latency of less then five microseconds, which is lower than what even PCIe SSDs offer (e.g. Intel SSD DC P3700 is rated at 20µs).

Unfortunately there are no third party benchmarks for the ULLtraDIMM (update: there actually are benchmarks) so it is hard to say how it really stacks up against PCIe SSDs, but the concept is definitely intriguing. In the end, NAND flash is memory and putting it on the DDR3 interface is logical, even though NAND is not as fast as DRAM. NVMe is designed to make PCIe more flash friendly but there are still some intensive workloads that should benefit from the lower latency of the DDR3 interface. Hopefully we will be able to get a review sample soon, so we can put ULLtraDIMM through our own tests and see how it really compares with the competition.

The two brightest planets, Jupiter and Venus, are currently aligned in the sky, forming a spectacular "double star" in their closest conjunction since 2000.

A fast-moving wildfire sweeps across the Angeles National Forest in southern California in the United States.