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"Dropbox is holding a promotion for students in which you can gain 3GB of extra Dropbox space for two years, plus more depending on how many people in your school sign up. To sign up for Dropbox's "Great Space Race," all you need to do is head to the link below and type in a valid .EDU email address (which you probably have even if you aren't a student anymore). After you confirm it, you should see 3 extra GB of space in your account. If you get others at your school to sign up too, you'll get even more space, going all the way up to 25GB. So sign up, tell your friends, and invite them if you haven't already for bigger bonuses!"

If you pay for web hosting in order to run any kind of web-based application-from your WordPress blog to a nameplate site to a file-sharing service to a social media data archive-you need to back up your web server's data the same way you back up your computer's data. On database-driven web sites, there are two kinds of data you want to preserve and restore in case of disaster: the files that make up your site (the PHP/Perl/Python, JavaScript, CSS files, etc), and the contents of your database. Further, any good backup system should make both a local copy and a remote copy of the backed-up data.

"Are more people doing wrong or are more people speaking up? Retractions of scientific papers have increased about tenfold during the past decade, with many studies crumbling in cases of high-profile research misconduct that ranges from plagiarism to image manipulation to outright data fabrication. When worries about somebody's work reach a critical point, it falls to a peer, supervisor, junior partner or uninvolved bystander to decide whether to keep mum or step up and blow the whistle. Doing the latter comes at significant risk, and the path is rarely simple. Some make their case and move on; others never give up. And in what seems to be a growing trend, anonymous watchdogs are airing their concerns through e-mail and public forums. Here, Nature profiles three markedly different stories of individuals who acted on their suspicions. Successful or otherwise, each case offers lessons for would-be tipsters."

I decided to make a side table for my desk so that I wouldn't have so much clutter around me and so that I had a side table that was exactly the right height and size for what I needed. The desk will hold the UPS on one side and the PC on the other, that will clean up 2 of the 3 major things around my desk (the last one being a subwoofer, but thats another project...). This is the desk it will be going next to and this is why it is such an odd shape.

As a serial entrepreneur and dotcom millionaire, Neil Patel can afford to be picky about his choice of luxury residence. But instead of a country mansion, penthouse apartment or gated community in the suburbs, the founder of internet start-ups KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg has set up home in a location he says best suits his hectic work schedule -- the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Seattle. "I bought a place in a hotel because its convenient for me," says the 27-year-old, who often finds himself working more than 70 hours a week.

Joey Hudy, a young "maker" from Phoenix went to the White House this week to show off his project, the "Extreme Marshmallow Cannon." When President Obama saw it, he told Joey: "Let's try it." Joey set up the air cannon, which uses a bicycle pump to build up air pressure, and put a marshmallow down the barrel. When he pressed the trigger, a single marshmallow was shot out across the room to the delight of everyone, but especially the president.

Let's say you have two hosts, somewhere out on the Internet: Maybe dedicated servers, maybe Amazon EC2 or Rackspace instances, maybe a mix of the above. Now assume it's your job to provide secure, encrypted connectivity between two services running on those hosts. If those services do not use an encrypted protocol by themselves - such as non-SSL capable SMTP mail servers - then the standard answer has always been: "Use stunnel or OpenVPN!". While both of those are good, cross-platform solutions which can forward unsecure traffic over an encrypted tunnel, I believe that they come not only with administrative overhead, but also introduce a significant performance hit. I believe that there are now solutions that are easier to use, more flexible and most importantly, deliver much better performance. In this article, I will compare stunnel performance  characteristics with vCider's virtual private network solution (sign up for use with up to 8 nodes is free). You will see that vCider not only offers more flexibility and is easier to use, but also provides significantly better network performance and reduced CPU load. For my test, I have created two Ubuntu instances on Rackspace. Please note that both stunnel as well as vCider can work across network and cloud provider boundaries.

You can dock just about any of those old drives into this simple device. Stick a USB transfer cable into one end along with the power-cable, and in one of the other ends, you can connect a 3.5" IDE hard drive, or a laptop 2.5" IDE drive, or even a miniscule 1.8" IDE hard drive! But, why stop there? You can connect a SATA drive, too! How about an optical disk drive? We've got it covered. Blu-Ray, DVD, CD, writeable, rewriteable... it doesn't matter! We're drive agnostic with our USB to SATA/IDE Combo Kit. Now your old drives have a brand new life. Or, if you're the handy type, you can keep this one device handy to recover data from a drive in a dead computer. You won't have to haul several different devices - just this one! Features Connect USB 2.0 ports to any IDE or SATA drive: 3.5" IDE 2.5" laptop IDE 1.8" micro IDE 3.5" SATA 2.5" SATA Optical drive that supports standard IDE or SATA connectors* AC Input: 100-240v/50-60hz DC output: 5v/12v Supports Windows (98se and up) or Mac OS (8.6 and up) Includes power supply, molex y-splitter, USB cable and drive dock * Some "slim-line" optical drives use a modified SATA connector that won't fit. Your mileage may vary.

Equal parts origami and electrical engineering, each robot "has 137 folding joints," PopSci explains. "The assembly scaffold, which has folds of its own, performs 22 origami-style folds, resulting in a fully formed robot you can pop out and turn on.

Each month Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects' studio gets a makeover and the latest installation to be unveiled is a tented experimental mushroom farm! Design team CityLab7 collaborated with the architects to create an educational and interactive space that displays 215 oyster mushroom growbags, giving an example of how small-scale urban farming really works. As an homage to a city renowned for its coffee culture, visitors to the space will also see how coffee grounds donated from local cafes can be recycled into compost, becoming an essential component of city agriculture. Read more: Urban Mushroom Farm Pops Up in Olson Kundig Architects' Seattle Storefront | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World 

When Jonathan Goldman arrived for work in June 2006 at LinkedIn, the business networking site, the place still felt like a start-up. The company had just under 8 million accounts, and the number was growing quickly as existing members invited their friends and colleagues to join. But users weren't seeking out connections with the people who were already on the site at the rate executives had expected. Something was apparently missing in the social experience. As one LinkedIn manager put it, "It was like arriving at a conference reception and realizing you don't know anyone. So you just stand in the corner sipping your drink-and you probably leave early."

Since his diagnosis with Alzheimer's in 2007, beloved fantasy author Terry Pratchett has kept up his rigorous writing and touring schedule, despite his growing health difficulties. These days, he writes entirely with the help of voice-activated software and his assistant Rob Wilkins. Now he's done an extensive interview with New Statesman's Laurie Penny, where he reveals what his life is like now, and what's coming next for Discworld.

"The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt, is today announcing its first international investment. The Omidyar Network, the investment firm co-founded by eBay's Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, is putting $750,000 towards the ODI. The money comes on top of the £10 million ($16 million) that the UK government, via the Technology Strategy Board, has already committed over the next five years for the project."

Imagine going to work every day and at the start of your day, with your first cup of coffee, you sit down to glance at beheadings, children in the process of being raped, human bodies in various stages of decomposition, the living and dead results of domestic violence, hanging bodies of 10 year old boys accused of being gay, real-life snuff films and bloody dog fighting rings and their subsequent results. Can you think up a human horror? I've probably seen it or a picture or video of something very similar.

"If you're running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords and to make sure your username is not "admin." According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find the password for the 'admin' account that every WordPress site sets up by default."

Well, it was only a matter of time: first, there were robot swarms on the ground. Then, there were robot swarms in the air. And now, we've got robot swarms taking over a swimming pool. Run for the hills! Or really, you'll probably be fine running for any sort of dry land if you want to escape this swarm of robotic boats. But why would you want to do that? It's not like they're part of some sort of DARPA project that will one day take over the world or something. Nope, definitely nothing like that.

"This system of burners, pipes, flasks and gauges looks like it came straight out of a laboratory. In fact, though, it's a prototype coffee machine-and it could satisfy the technical desires of even the biggest coffee nerd. The Laboratory Espresso Machine was dreamt up by israeli designers David Budzik and Adi Schlesinger. Its design aesthetic is clearly inspired by the contents of a chemistry lab, but it also uses science in the coffee-making process, too: it uses the Venturi effect to adjust pressures and relies on a bunch of complex thermodynamics to ensure water temperature and pressure are consistent."

It's been the case for every SQL database in practical use since E. F. Codd first came up with the concept: Records either exist or they don't. When you run a SELECT statement, you're querying the current state of the data. A state is either true or false.

At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanized looms in 1811, workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were eliminated. For over 200 years, the economists were right. Despite massive automation of millions of jobs, more Americans had jobs at the end of each decade up through the end of the 20th century. However, this empirical fact conceals a dirty secret. There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

Scaling College Composition by AUDREY WATTERS on 22 APR, 2012 I've been thinking a lot this week about two seemingly unrelated news items. The first, the research by David Shermis and Ben Hamner that found that automated essay grading software performs comparably to human graders. (See the Inside Higher Ed story.) The second, the official unveiling of Coursera, the latest online learning startup to spin out of Stanford, that promises to offer a full course catalog, including many classes in the humanities. (Here's my write-up of the news). The connection: scaling how we assess student writing.