This is the NZXT Sentry 2 fan controller. It installs into any 5.25-inch bay, and you can use its touch screen interface to set the speed of up to five fans. Note: Leather pants are not included. [NZXT via BBG]

Wow, a LEGO combination safe!

On Tuesday, the US Department of the Interior announced plans that should radically streamline the process of building utility-scale solar facilities in the US Southwest. After having surveyed terrain administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the DOI has identified the best sites for solar facilities. It will now withdraw these areas from consideration for other uses and undertake a single environmental review for all of them. Assuming their use for solar power production is approved, the land may be able to produce roughly 30 percent of current US residential energy use.

The program, which was published in the Federal Register in order to solicit public comment, was jointly announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Senate leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, one of the states included in the program; the rest are Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. The move follows a general solicitation for comments on solar production using BLM lands that was initiated last year. Participants obviously thought it was a good idea, and the stimulus bill provided the DOI with $41 million specifically to promote the production of renewable energy on public land.

Mozilla officially released Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday. The new version of the popular open source web browser has attracted considerable attention and is already seeing rapid adoption. It was downloaded over 5 million times during the first 24 hours. This falls short of the record-setting 8 million downloads that Firefox 3 had during its first day, but it still reflects the intense enthusiasm of the browser's fans.

Firefoxr's popularity has rapidly climbed over the past few years, bringing it up to between 20-30 percent of the global browser market, according to various Web analytics firms. Based on data collected from 850,000 web sites, tracking firm whos.amung.us says that Firefox 3.5 by itself now accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of the browser market, more than the total marketshare of rival Opera.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a very unexpected move, the Chinese authorities have indefinitely postponed their order that all PCs sold in the country must come with software, called Green Dam Youth Escort, that blocks certain websites.

According to Reuters, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who had previously organized a protest against the Green Dam initiative, has also called the people of China to celebrate its demise. About 200 Beijing residents, dressed in t-shirts mocking Green Dam, have arrived at a trendy art zone cafe to party all day in celebration of this victory in a war against censorship.

The Chinese authorities were under a great deal of pressure from various trade groups, American, European and Japanese chambers of commerce, and the U.S. National Association of Manufacturers, which send a letter of protest against the measure, claiming it “raises significant questions of security, privacy, system reliability, the free flow of information and user choice.”

The combination of a huge public outcry against Green Dam and the reluctance of PC sellers to comply probably wouldn’t have been enough to convince the Chinese government to give up on Green Dam, but the fact that this measure was obviously undertaken in haste, with Green Dam itself having some serious issues (it doesn’t, for example, support 64-bit operating systems), was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a word, Green Dam was not only unpopular; it was nearly impossible to implement.

Unfortunately, however important, this victory is a minor one. The Green Dam initiative was only postponed by the The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; it could be reinstated at a later date. Even more importantly, Chinese internet users are still behind the iron veil of the Great Firewall of China, which blocks them from visiting certain websites, with the blockade often spreading to the most popular internet destinations. I hope that the Chinese authorities have really softened up when it comes to censorship, but I fear that this might only be a minor drawback in their quest for total control the Chinese internet.

Tags: censorship, china, Green Dam

A lot of time and words are spent bashing Comcast by many a pundit, but you can't ignore the fact that as a company they clearly have a strategy and a very defined one that says "we want to be you communications company."

In Portland Oregon, a market they serve in competition with iLec Qwest much in the same manner that Cablevision competes mostly with Verizon in the metro New York region, the cable giant is showcasing just why the invested in ClearWire after Sprint proved once again they can innovate but not market Xoom, their mobile WiMax play backed now by a consortium of cable operators and technology players including Google and Motorola, as well as Intel, who always plays the role of the Insider.

Rethink Wireless points out that:

Comcast is offering a 12-month introductory rate. For $50 a month, a subscriber gets 12Mbps home cable broadband and WiMAX, which is only a $7 premium over the cost of cable broadband alone (and includes a free Wi-Fi router). A national 3G add-on is an extra $20 a month and roaming to other Clearwire WiMAX markets is free. After the one-year trial the tariff goes up to $73 a month ($93 with 3G). There will be a $99 charge for a dongle (and other devices to follow in future), though people who commit to a two-year deal get the gadget for free.

To me, the $20 a month national mobile calling plan is a new low in pricing, and while the number of minutes weren't revealed, at the end of the day for $73 a month to have mobile WiMax, voice and cable broadband is a sweet deal. All they're missing is a WiFi roaming deal and this would make the WiMax bundle direction to really consider if you lived in the covered area.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. That’s because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report that we’ve obtained explains.

While Rackspace has backup systems in place, a series of events apparently caused those backups to fail, resulting in the servers going down. Here’s the key nugget:

The breaker on the primary utility feeder tripped, initiating a sequence of events that ultimately caused a power interruption in Phase I and Phase II of the data center. All systems initially came up on generator power without customer impact. The ‘A’ bank of generators, which support UPS clusters A and B in Phase I and UPS cluster E in Phase II, then experienced excitation failure which escalated to the point where the generators were no longer able to maintain the electrical load. Rackspace then attempted to switch to our secondary utility feeder, but was unable to do so due to an issue in the Pad Mounted Switch (PMS). At approximately 3:15pm CDT, power supply through UPS clusters A, B and E was lost when the batteries in those clusters discharged, and equipment receiving power through those clusters experienced an interruption in service.

The service says only one of its nine data centers were affected by this failure, but many high profile sites collapsed as a result, including EventBrite, Justin Timberlake’s site and Michelle Malkin’s popular political blog. As Rackspace noted yesterday that “We owe better, and will deliver.”

Below, find the full incident report.

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablet PCs

Windows 7 Beta automatic shutdowns begin today, RC users safe until March 1st originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.