Mobilink Offers 85% Discount on International Roaming During Hajj

During the blessed event of Hajj, Mobilink is offering all its customers travelling to Saudi Arabia a special discount of 85 percent on international roaming on Zain Network in Saudi Arabia.

This discount is available Jazz, Indigo and Jazba customers. Offer includes:

Tariff:

So if you have Mobilink Indigo, Jazz or Jazba connection – following are the rates that you may enjoy while during the Hajj this time.

How to Subscribe Mobilink’s Hajj Roaming Offer

Jazz, Indigo and Jazba customers can have international roaming activated by visiting their nearest Mobilink Customer Care Centre, Franchise or simply calling 111.

Once international roaming is active, Mobilink’s Hajj Roaming Offer is pre-activated for all Jazz, Indigo, andJazba customers.

Balance Recharge for Jazz and Jazba Roamers

Jazz Load, Jazz Share, Balance Inquiry (*111#) and Balance Charging through USSD (*123*14DigitCode# and press SEND) all work while on roaming. Still Jazz roamers are advised to carry sufficient balance in order to enjoy unmatched convenience (recommended balance is Rs. 1,500).

Jazz roamers can also recharge balance via International Jazz Load available at EZETOP outlets in Saudi Arabia or via credit card by visiting EZETOP website (www.ezetop.com).

Rocket-launched hypersonic bomber falls into the sea

DARPA, the Pentagon's research branch, has done it again. It has lost another uncrewed hypersonic bomber in a test flight over the Pacific Ocean.

At issue is the fate of DARPA's "Falcon" Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV2), which, like the now-retired space shuttle and the nascent uncrewed X-37 spaceplane, is a rocket-launched glider.

Its aim is to deliver a bomb from anywhere in the continental US to any other point on the planet in an hour or less. Launched on a Minotaur rocket, it is released at great (though suborbital) altitude to glide at Mach 20 (21,000 kilometres per hour) to a target.

The trouble is that even in the ultra-thin atmosphere at such altitudes the tremendous speed heats the aircraft's skin to around 2000 °C. That creates unknown problems with aerodynamic, electrical and guidance systems - so a programme of incrementally more ambitious flight tests has to be undertaken to understand them.

Space apps: smartphone at heart of satellite mission

In space, no-one can hear you scream, right? Everyone who knows some physics, or who's seen Alien, knows it. But is it always true? A smartphone app that's headed for low Earth orbit will soon tell all. Kind of.

Called Scream In Space, the app is one of four that have won a place on a super-cheap (£70,000) satellite called Strand-1 that aims to use an Android-based smartphone's accelerometers and GPS receivers as the heart of its guidance system - but which will also allow the phone's camera, speaker, mic and touchscreen display to run some interesting orbital apps. The phone, by the way, is a Google Nexus One.

After a competition run on Facebook, mission planners at the UK's Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) and the Surrey Space Centre today announced which apps will fly on the phone.

(Image: Surrey Space Centre & Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd)

Scream In Space, from a UK student ensemble, called Cambridge University Spaceflight, will run videos of people screaming on the phone's display, and these will be recorded by a minicam pointing at the phone. They will then check if the vibration from the phone's loudspeaker is picked up through its chassis by the mic - effectively making the scream in space audible, despite the vacuum in the unpressurised spacecraft.

That app, of course, is just a bit of science-related fun. Those who can scream the most "creatively" - in yet another Facebook competition - stand the best chance of being uploaded to orbit, which will be somewhere between 350 and 500 kilometres high - in other words, properly in orbit at ISS levels, unlike the sub-100-kilometre efforts some have managed with phones on balloons.

The more serious apps include 'Postcards from Space' and '360' which SSTL says count as one app because they will both take pictures of the earth using the phone's camera to work out exactly where the satellite is. Hopefully, says SSTL, schoolchildren will be able to order a satellite picture of the Earth that the Nexus One's 5-megapixel camera will shoot for them.

More earnest still is an app called iTesa which will use the satellite's onboard magnetometer to measure variations of the Earth's magnetic field. And finally, telemetry data on the satellite's progress through space will be visible on the phone's screen thanks to an app called Strand Data, developed by the people behind the educational Funcube satellite.

Android's reprogrammability and open-source nature made the system an obvious choice for the spacecraft over Apple's iOS, says Kenyon. Google donated the flight phone, he says, and his colleagues have been "throwing it around a bit" to ensure it is rugged enough for launch.

The Strand-1 mission is seeking a rocket launch to piggyback on sometime between January and April 2012. It's orbit will be designed, as international space debris rules stipulate, to bring it back down to Earth within 25 years.

Let's hope the phone has enough credit on it.

Wireless network can watch your breathing

It's not easy sleeping with tubes up your nose, but when doctors want to monitor a person's breathing they have few other choices. A new wireless system promises to do away with intrusive medical technology – but instead it might end up being used as a surveillance tool to track people's movements and activities behind closed doors.

While testing some new equipment, Neal Patwari of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues noticed variations in wireless signal strength triggered by a person's breathing, but only at certain locations around the room. So they set up an experiment to test whether a wireless network could reliably measure breathing rate.

In the test, Patwari lay in a hospital bed surrounded by 20 inexpensive, off-the-shelf wireless units. These were arrayed so that they sent 2.4 gigahertz radio waves across the bed – the same frequency as Wi-Fi – but with one-thousandth the power of a laptop's wireless card. The units measured the signal strength four times a second – fast enough to measure fluctuations caused by individual breaths.

After collecting 30 seconds of data, the network was able to accurately estimate a person's breathing rate to within 0.4 breaths per minute.

Patwari concludes that the wireless signals bent around his chest as it rose with each inhalation, causing them to travel a longer distance and decrease slightly in power.

Unmasking

The technology could allow people to rest more comfortably during sleep studies, Patwari says, without being connected to machines by wires and tubes. He contends that the system could be used to augment current medical tests for lung capacity, too.

But current medical breathing monitoring methods are more than adequate, says Salvatore Morgera at the University of South Florida in Tampa. These methods also measure the amount of carbon dioxide in exhaled gases, collected in a mask or a tiny tube in each nostril, whereas wireless monitoring would just increase the clutter of radio waves in a modern hospital.

If it doesn't find a use in medicine, the device may still interest snoopers. In a previous study, Patwari and a colleague showed that because radio signals at Wi-Fi frequencies can penetrate walls, a wireless network set up outside a home could track people as they move from room to room. With this new level of precision, a system tailored for surveillance could spy on people as they move around a hotel room, for example, or even discern whether they are resting on a couch or in bed.

Report: Global data center energy use will rise nearly 20% next year By Chris Nerney

Data centers around the globe are likely to consume 19% more energy next year than in 2011, according to a report from DatacenterDynamics.

The largest increases in energy use should come in markets where facility growth is expected to be robust, the report said. This includes major markets in the U.S. and Europe.

"In these markets a high adoption of efficiency strategies, IT architecture and per-rack consumption that are already the highest in the world indicate a market situation where increased IT capacity can be achieved with minimum of increase in the energy requirement," DatacenterDynamics reports.

Data center operators cite energy costs and availability as top concerns, with more than 40% of survey participants saying that rising energy costs will have a major impact on their data center operations.

These increasing costs likely will force data center pros to strive to make their power and cooling systems more efficient. Power and cooling units often are poorly designed and energy-wasteful, leading to hidden and avoidable expenses.

DatacenterDynamics is a content provider and consultant for data center professionals. Its 2011 Data Center Industry Census collected information from industry owners, operators, suppliers and vendors.

Those surveyed included 3,800 data center owners and operators and 1,600 suppliers/vendors spread throughout 70 countries.

The countries and regions expected to see the most growth in data center power consumption are:

1. Turkey - 85%

2. Colombia - 50%

3. Brazil - 48%

4. China - 46%

5. Argentina - 41%

However, in terms of total projected increase in megawatts, the top countries/regions are China and Germany (500 MW each), central United States (400 MW), eastern U.S. (320 MW), France (300 MW) and Brazil (280 MW).

IBM Acquires Q1 Labs to Round Out Its Security Portfolio

Enterprise security offerings and vision just got a lot stronger

Security management is hot again. Just as I was blogging about McAfee/Nitro Security, IBM announced that it had acquired Waltham, MA-based Q1 Labs.

From a corporate perspective, IBM deserves a lot of credit. IBM had its own Tivoli security platform back in the early 2000s which was replaced by GuardedNet when IBM bought Micromuse. Neither of these security management tools caught on in the market. Rather than throw good money after bad, IBM decided to replace its security management software with a market leader in Q1 Labs. It takes guts to make a decision like this.

Q1 Labs is an old-fashioned IT startup success story. Unlike the flash-in-the-pan 1990s firms, Q1 Labs raised money, built a team, and then steadily enhanced its software annually. Early on the company was considered a Network Behavior Anomaly Detection (NBAD) also-ran, competing with Arbor Networks, Intrusic, Lancope, and Mazu. It then added SIM capabilities, targeted network security, and positioned itself as an alternative to Cisco MARS. Q1 Labs then partnered with networking leaders like Enterasys, Juniper, and Nortel for distribution. While Q1 Labs made incremental progress, many of its competitors faded away and over the last few years, it gained a leadership position. Q1 Labs is the ultimate Horatio Alger meets IT story.

A few additional thoughts on what IBM and Q1 Labs means:

1. While IBM's security story isn't garnering a lot of headlines, the company has built a very strong portfolio of professional services, managed services, hardware appliances, and software. IBM can also take an identity-based approach to security using its Tivoli Access Manager (TAM) and Tivoli Identity Manager (TIM) suites. IBM may have the broadest portfolio around.

2. IBM understands that next-generation enterprise security must be based upon a software architecture. This means individual security applications connected via application services based upon secure SOA, message oriented middleware, web services, etc. Yes, IBM is fully capabile of building this architecture and opening it to all security applications, but the real business opportunity is offering the security software architecture AND the applications. By purchasing Q1 Labs, it is poised to accomplish this.

3. Next-generation security management will require much more adept analytics then SIEM event filtering and correlation. IBM will combine Q1 Labs with its deep analytics from acquired companies like Cognos, i2, and SPSS. Watson can win and Jeopardy but IBM believes that analyzing application flows, URL connections, and user behavior for security forensics will lead to a bigger payoff.

A few years ago I attended IBM's management show (IBM Pulse) in Las Vegas. I had the pleasure of meeting then head of IBM Tivoli, Al Zollar, at one of the receptions. When Mr. Zollar asked me what I thought of the event, I mentioned that I liked IBM's "smarter planet" push, but as a security professional it scared the heck out of me. I went on to say that initiatives like "smart grid" make economic sense but they also create much bigger vulnerabilities and potential targets. I thought that IBM should balance its "smarter planet" momentum with a "secure smarter planet" initiative. Mr. Zollar agreed and actually pointed me toward a number of existing IBM resources that reinforced IBM's commitment to security. I suddenly came to the realization, 'IBM gets it.'

Since this cocktail hour conversation many years ago, IBM has really demonstrated its willingness to commit people, money, and time to security and is now poised to capitalize on this investment. Q1 Labs is simply the icing on the cake.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011