Author: Serkadis

I’m not sure any potential Nexus 4 buyers have been waiting for the handset in a new color, but on Tuesday, one was launched. LG announced the Nexus 4 White, which has one single difference from the original Nexus 4: it’s white. Instead of an all-black case and cover, the new Android 4.2 phone has a white back and side. That’s it. There’s no change to the front face of the device.

I’m a bit stymied as to why LG even bothered, to be honest. It could have just sold a white case back to accomplish much of the same customization. And I doubt people aren’t buying the original Nexus, which debuted in October of last year, because it doesn’t come in white. Then again, I didn’t think millions would go berserk when Apple first added a white iPhone to its lineup either, so who knows?

My color blindness aside, the Nexus 4 is still an exceptional value at $299 (8 GB) or $349 (16 GB), fully unlocked and contract free. The phone doesn’t (officially) support speedy LTE networks; instead it works on HSPA+ 42, which I found plenty fast enough for most uses when reviewing the phone.

From a hardware perspective, it may not compete against the latest Android flagships from Samsung, HTC, and LG but it’s not a slouch either with a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, 8 megapixel camera, 4.7-inch 1280 x 768 IPS touchscreen, and 2 GB of memory.

Whether you opt for black or white, I’d recommend spending the extra $50 for the 16 GB model as there is no memory expansion slot. And if you buy the Nexus 4 in White, consider passing on the bumper that Google sells: It’s just going to cover up that white sidewall!

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On Monday, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller shared a screen cap of a comment Google’s Matt Cutts posted on his blog earlier this month about the Link Disavow tool. The comment is as follows:

“Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the ‘domain:’ operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.”

The more you know.

Mueller underlined the word “machete” in red, indicating that this is a point many webmasters are likely missing.

Google launched the Link Disavow tool back in October, enabling webmasters to tell Google specific links they want it to ignore, as to avoid potential penalties. If you’ve never used it, and haven’t learned much about it by now, you should start with this video from Cutts:

Hat tip to Search Engine Roundtable

Image: Friday the 13th Part 3 (Paramount)

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), home to the Stampede supercomputer, is preparing to accelerate its Internet2 connectivity to 100 Gbps this summer, and NASA Ames selects a SGI system to support research.

TACC Upgrades to 100 Gbps

TACC at the University of Texas at Austin announced that it will be upgrading from 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to 100 Gbps in Internet connectivity with the help of Internet2.  The upgrade will empower scientists to reach TACC using Internet2′s new 100 Gigabit-Ethernet and 8.8-terabit-per-second optical network, platform, services and technologies. It will also enable the University of Texas Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC) to have 100 Gbps connectivity between UT System institutions and other research universities throughout Texas.

“TACC’s world-class computational, visualization and storage systems enable users to create and manipulate petabytes of data, and we’ll add new systems focusing on data intensive computing starting this summer,” said TACC Director Jay Boisseau. “This Internet2 bandwidth upgrade will enable researchers to achieve a tenfold increase in moving data to/from TACC’s supercomputing, visualization and data storage systems, greatly increasing their productivity and their ability to make new discoveries.”

Internet2 is comprised of over 220 U.S. universities, 60 corporations, 70 government agencies, and more than 100 research and education partners. Internet2 recently established direct peering with Microsoft Cloud Services, enabling improved access to infrastructure and application services that support virtual learning environments and large-scale data intensive research projects.

“The 100 Gbps Internet2 Innovation Platform serves as an accelerator to scientific research and provides increased access to the most advanced computational resources for faculty members at institutions around the country,” said Jim Bottum, Internet2 Inaugural Presidential Fellow and chief information officer at Clemson University. “By streamlining access to the latest advanced national cyberinfrastructure systems like Stampede at TACC, researchers are afforded a lightweight avenue for conducting transformational research.”

SGI selected by NASA

SGI announced that NASA’s Ames Research Center has selected an SGI UV 2000 shared memory system to support more than a thousand active users around the country who are doing research for earth, space and aeronautics missions. The new Endeavour system, named in honor fo the Space Shuttle Endeavour,  is based on the latest Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product family and has a total of 1536 cores and 6TB of global shared memory. It will provide large, shared memory capability and will enable solutions for many NASA science and engineering applications, including simulation and modeling of global ocean circulation, galaxy and planet formation, and aerodynamic design for air and space vehicles.

“A portion of our current code base requires either large memory within a node or utilizes Open MP as the communication software between tens to hundreds of processors,” said William Thigpen, high-end computing project manager at the NAS facility. “The largest portion of Endeavour is able to meet the large shared memory requirement with 4 terabytes of addressable memory and can apply over 1,000 cores against an Open MP application.”

Google has sent an email around to Google Buzz users about their data from the service, which the company announced would be shutting down back in October 2011.

If you’re like me, you were probably surprised to get an email about a service you haven’t thought about in a long time, but Google may still have your data from Buzz, and you have until July 17th to get it out. This is the date, the email informs, that Google will take the last step in shutting down Buzz for good.

Google suggests users save a copy of their Buzz posts to Google Drive, assuming you really care what happens to your Buzz posts. Google says it will store two types of files to Drive. One type is private, and contains a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts you authored. The second type contains a copy of only your public Buzz posts, and by default, will be viewable by anyone with the link, which may appear in search results on your Google Profile (if you’ve linked to your Buzz posts).

Neither file type will count against your storage limits, Google says.

“Any comments you made on other users’ posts will only be saved to those users’ files and not to yours,” Google explains. “Once the change described in this email is final, only that user will be able to change the sharing settings of those files. This means that if you have commented on another author’s private post, that author could choose to make that post and its comments public. If you would like to avoid that possibility, delete all your Buzz content now.”

The new files will only contain comments from users that previously enabled Buzz, and they won’t contain comments that were deleted before moving the data to Drive. When the files are created, they will be treated just like any other Drive file, in that you can do whatever you want to with them.

If you want to take a look at your old Buzz posts, you can do so at http://profiles.google.com/me/buzz.

The writing is on the wall: The infrastructure that supported the web in its early days is no longer up to the job. As we depend more on the internet — let’s just give in and call it the cloud — the companies that are providing the underlying computing power to support services like Facebook, Google and Amazon Web Services are remaking the hardware and software on which those services depend. In doing so, they have changed the culture inside IT organizations, disrupted old-line businesses and made it easier than ever to build a web-based business.

We’ve documented those shifts for the last six years at our GigaOM Structure conference and in our reporting on the site, but this year we’re looking ahead. We’ve found ten up-and-coming people who are already planning the next generation of infrastructure. These men and women are solving problems most companies aren’t even anticipating yet.

We’re talking about problems like how to apply data to healthcare outcomes using high performance computing, or writing a new type of programming framework for making real-time web pages. Some are taking their programming skills and thinking about embedding privacy settings in the programming framework instead of something people code by hand. Others are tackling the issue of next-generation databases and storage.

Today, we’re pushing infrastructure to the limits with our demands for real-time information and connections between users and services that can number in the thousands. We just assume that someone, somewhere is doing the hard work to make all this possible.

The Cloud Trailblazers are those people. Read on to meet them and check out the videos of them epxlaining their technologies that we’ve embedded in their stories. Also, come to our Structure conference on June 19 and 20th in San Francisco to see them speak and meet them face to face. The IT world is changing, these people will help you keep up.

—Stacey Higginbotham

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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Shipments of Apple’s iPad line may soon see a year-over-year decline for the first time since Apple debuted the iPad in 2010. With Apple’s cheaper iPad mini just 6 months old, demand for Apple’s tablets is already taking a hit from increasingly competitive Android tablets, which now offer user vastly improved user experiences compared to the early days of the media tablet market. Apple is also being undercut on price by a number of 7-inch Android tablets and KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that as a result, combined shipments of Apple’s iPad and iPad mini will decline by between 10% and 15% in Q2 2013. AppleInsider reports that Kuo sees Apple selling between 14 million and 15 million tablets to end users during the quarter, and he expects both sales and shipments to pick up in the third quarter once Apple launches its completely redesigned fifth-generation iPad.

Reports emerged on Monday suggesting consumer electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn intended to build and launch its own devices as Apple’s growth begins to slow. Now, Reuters follows the report with details on what may be Foxconn parent company Hon Hai’s first new mobile device to launch as part of this effort. Reuters was only able to confirm with its unnamed sources that Hon Hai and Mozilla plan to team up to unveil a device running Firefox OS on June 3rd, but a separate report from Focus Taiwan suggests the device in question will in fact be the first tablet powered by Mozilla’s mobile operating system. No other details about the device are known at this time.

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