elastic

The 404 1,086: Where we left our dreams in a cab (podcast)

Filling in for a Justin Yu who thinks his air conditioner got him sick is the wild card Joey Kaminksi, a man who can apparently talk about -- in painfully great detail -- tipping etiquette in and around New York City. We love Joey for his tangential speaking habits, but also because he lends us his unique skew on the important matters of the day -- that and the fact that he brought us a Google Nexus 7 tablet for us to play with.

Do you have a game plan if you ever left your phone behind in a cab? Our producer Ariel Nunez tells the tale of such a predicament. Does Ariel get the phone back? Or is he forced to plop down $500 on a new device in addition to non-defective shorts?

The 404 crew also dishes out the dirt that saw multiple Web sites and services go down over the weekend including enormous time-suckers Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest. How did planet Earth go 45 minutes without commenting on a sepia-filtered photo of your dessert? Find out inside!

Make sure you start your holiday week on the right foot by listening to these stories and so much more on today's show! … Read more

Skin-like sensor flexible enough for prosthetic limbs

Researchers at Stanford are developing new sensors so flexible and pressure-sensitive that they could be used to make touch-sensitive prosthetic limbs, pressure-sensitive badges, and more.

By incorporating a transparent film of carbon nano-springs, the sensor "can register pressure ranging from a firm pinch between your thumb and forefinger to twice the pressure exerted by an elephant standing on one foot," says postdoctoral researcher Darren Lipomi, co-author of a paper published October 23 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "None of it causes any permanent deformation."

The team built those nano-springs by airbrushing nanotubes (which are in liquid … Read more

Touch puzzler inspired by top apps

Contre Jour is an arcade puzzler that veteran gamers will see as a mashup of game mechanics and inspiration from several other popular titles. That said, Contre Jour is a well-executed melange, a fun and often challenging puzzle game with polished art and sound.

On each short level of Contre Jour, you're trying to get a charming little alien (essentially, a rolling eyeball) to the level's exit. The alien doesn't move on its own, so you need to use attached ropes (some elastic, some not, some with movable anchors), slingshots, malleable ground (which you can shape with … Read more

Amazon Web Services plants Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon Web Services today launched Elastic Beanstalk, which automates the management of various services at the cloud provider.

In a nutshell, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk handles all the deployment details when a Web developer launches an application. For instance, Elastic Beanstalk will deploy and manage services for storage, computing clusters, load balancing, and auto scaling.

Adam Selipsky, vice president of Web services at Amazon, said the Elastic Beanstalk effort is targeted at both small developers as well as enterprises that don't want to put a lot of manpower behind managing cloud-computing instances. "This is for customers building applications … Read more

'Elastic water,' but can you drink it?

Think Silly Putty, and you'll probably have a very good idea what the brains at Japan's Tokyo University have created. The new material, called "elastic water," retains its Flubber-like consistency by mixing a few grams of clay and organic matter to H20, essentially binding the whole into a jelly-like putty.

The aqua substance isn't headed for toy retail outlets, though we won't be surprised if it does spin off in that direction. For now, its intention is more visionary and intended to facilitate quick tissue attachment.

The Japanese scientists--who detail their findings in the … Read more

Amazon EC2 gets a spot market

Amazon on Monday rolled out spot pricing for cloud computing so customers can buy capacity at any price on the open market.

The concept is an interesting one since Amazon Web Services is making computing capacity available on the market just like any other commodity (see Amazon statement, Werner Vogels, and Amazon Web Services blog).

Dubbed Spot Instances, Amazon customers can bid on unused Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) capacity and run those instances as long as their bid exceeds the spot price. The rub is that you can be outbid.

Amazon introduces Virtual Private Cloud service

On the third anniversary of its Elastic Compute Cloud launch, Amazon Web Services late Tuesday announced a new service, the Virtual Private Cloud.

Targeted at customers with existing IT investments, the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service provides a way for companies to create a logically separated set of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and a secure VPN connection to their own networks.

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services strategist, said in a blog that the service requires three elements: a VPC instance, an IPSec VPN gateway, and a block of IP addresses provided by the customer. The VPC's address space … Read more

Lightning zaps Amazon cloud

Amazon.com is blaming the latest outage to hit its Elastic Compute Cloud service on a lightning strike at one of its data centers.

In a statement on the Amazon Web Services "health dashboard," the online retailer and cloud-computing provider addressed concerns from some U.S. customers whose EC2 service had been disrupted around 6:20 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday.

"A lightning storm caused damage to a single Power Distribution Unit (PDU) in a single Availability Zone. While most instances were unaffected, a set of racks does not currently have power, so the instances … Read more

Amazon launches Hadoop data-crunching service

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

A correction has been made to this story. See details below.

Amazon on Thursday announced a new cloud computing service that uses Hadoop, a free software framework, to crunch tons of data.

The service, called Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is designed for businesses, researchers and analysts trying to conduct data intensive number crunching (statement). Hadoop, which is used by companies like Yahoo, is trying to be pushed into the enterprise data center by start-ups like Cloudera.

Correction, 7:15 a.m. PDT: This story initially miscast Google's connection to Hadoop. … Read more

Public beta now open for Red Hat in the Cloud

Want to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a test drive without having to install anything? Today the public beta for RHEL on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud went live. It's not perfect, says Red Hat, but that's part of the plan:

We have certified and tested the released AMIs [Amazon Machine Images] within the Amazon EC2 environment and will be providing email-based support for the public beta. While the software is well-proven, we anticipate modifications to the deployment models and use-cases during the beta period and will refine the delivery of our services throughout the beta period. … Read more