News desk

Amazon floats new cloud service

Amazon Web Services has officially released its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted computing service.
The company said today that the service would no longer be considered a beta product and would be supported by a service level agreement. The SLA will serve as a commitment from Amazon to keep the service up at rate of at least 99.95 per cent or allow customers to claim a refund on purchased service credits for the system.
EC2 allows businesses to run traditional server deployments on a hosted ‘cloud’ system. Customers pay for the service on a sliding scale according to the amount of server resources used.
In addition to the SLA, the company has unveiled the first public beta of the EC2 Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server services. Both offerings allow users to run deployments of the Microsoft server systems within the EC2 cloud computing platform.

Scientists build world’s smallest storage devic

Scientists are claiming a major breakthrough in quantum computing after managing to store information inside the nucleus of an atom.
The team from Princeton University, Oxford University and the U.S. Department of Energy used both the electron and nucleus of a phosphorous atom embedded in a silicon crystal. Both the electron and nucleus behaved as tiny quantum magnets capable of storing quantum information.
“The electron acts as a middle-man between the nucleus and the outside world, “ said John Morton, a research fellow at Oxford’s St. John’s College.
“It gives us a way to have our cake and eat it—fast processing speeds from the electron, and long memory times from the nucleus.”
While memory has been stored in a nucleus for just one tenth of a second the team managed to keep the information accessible for nearly two seconds. Researchers studying quantum computing recently calculated that if a quantum system could store information for at least one second, error correction techniques could then protect that data for an indefinite period of time

Google adds offline support to mobile Gmail

Google has introduced a new version of its Gmail client for mobile phones, making the application more responsive and providing offline support in case the user moves out of mobile coverage.
Gmail for Mobile 2.0 (available at m.google.com/mail) runs on handsets supporting Java J2ME, which includes BlackBerry devices, giving mobile access to Gmail accounts for users with a wider variety of handsets.
Google said in its mobile blog that it has improved performance by pushing all processing into the background, improving caching and addressing bottlenecks in the client code.
Basic offline support means that users can now compose and read their most recent emails even when they cannot get a mobile network signal.
Any outgoing messages are saved in the Gmail outbox on the phone and delivered when a connection is re-established, according to Google.