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Clinton Calls for ?Orderly Transition? in Egypt

Mrs. Clinton, making a round of Sunday talk shows, insisted that Mr. Mubarak?s future was up to the Egyptian people. But she said on ?State of the Union? on CNN that the United States stood ?ready to help with the kind of transition that will lead to greater political and economic freedom.? And she emphasized that elections scheduled for this fall must be free and fair.

President Obama reinforced that message in phone calls on Saturday and Sunday to other leaders in the region, including King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, as the administration tried to contain the regional reverberations.

Mrs. Clinton confronted one such ripple effect when she said on the ABC News program ?This Week? that the United States did not intend to cut military aid to Egypt, despite the White House announcement Friday that the nearly $1.5 billion in annual assistance was under review.

The prospect of a cutoff of aid alarmed the Israeli government, an Israeli official said, because it is linked to the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and could alienate the Egyptian military, which Israel views as a stabilizing force in an otherwise deteriorating situation.

Israel has conveyed its concerns to the United States about the risk of a sudden collapse of the Egyptian government, this official said. It worries about who would replace Mr. Mubarak, viewing the ascendant opposition leader, Mohamed ElBaradei, with some wariness.

In Mr. Obama?s phone calls, which also included the leaders of Turkey and Britain, he ?reiterated his focus on opposing violence and calling for restraint,? a White House statement said.

The administration has walked a fine line in recent days, balancing its alliance with Mr. Mubarak, a crucial partner in Middle East peace talks, with its desire not to be on the wrong side of history.

Still, Mrs. Clinton?s comments suggested that the administration was running out of patience with the Egyptian leader.

Mr. Mubarak?s appointment on Saturday of a vice president, she said, was only the ?bare beginning? of a process that must include a national dialogue with the protesters and ?free, fair and credible? elections, scheduled for September. She described the elections for a ?next president? as an ?action-enforcing event that is already on the calendar.?

?We have been very clear that we want to see a transition to democracy,? Mrs. Clinton said on ?Fox News Sunday.? ?And we want to see the kind of steps taken to bring that about. We want to see an orderly transition.?

She noted that for nearly three decades the United States had been imploring Mr. Mubarak to appoint a vice president. She offered no endorsement of the man he named, Omar Suleiman, the chief of Egyptian intelligence, whom she has met several times in Cairo and Washington.

?There are some new people taking responsibility,? Mrs. Clinton said on CBS?s ?Face the Nation.? ?We hope they can contribute to the kind of economic and democratic reforms that the people of Egypt deserve.?

The administration?s caution is drawing criticism from some in Egypt, including Dr. ElBaradei. Speaking on ?Face the Nation,? he said, ?The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years will be the one to implement democracy.?

The White House has refrained from calling publicly for Mr. Mubarak to step down, officials have said, because it worries about losing leverage and contributing to a political vacuum in Egypt, which could be filled by extremist, anti-American forces.

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton reaffirmed the ties between the United States and Egypt. She said the army appeared to be acting with restraint, differentiating between peaceful protesters and looters. But she warned Egypt not to make changes that resulted in a democracy for ?six months or a year, evolving into a military dictatorship.?

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, spoke on Sunday with the chief of staff of the Egyptian Army, Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan. Admiral Mullen expressed his appreciation for the ?continued professionalism of the Egyptian military,? said his spokesman, Capt. John Kirby.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates spoke over the weekend about the crisis to two of his counterparts ? Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the Egyptian defense minister, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister ? but no details were given.

Mrs. Clinton taped her interviews before leaving on a day trip to Haiti. There, she confronted another country in political upheaval, with recent presidential elections mired in charges of vote-rigging and fraud, as well as the surprise return of a former dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Yet for all its misery, Haiti poses much less of a problem to the administration than does Egypt, given Egypt?s role as the fulcrum of one of the world?s most volatile regions. With the revolt in Tunisia, and protests in Yemen and Jordan, the United States faces an arc of instability in the Arab world.

?This is the Obama administration?s first foreign policy crisis in real time,? said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. ?Their response is marked by bad options, precarious outcomes and limited influence to shape ? let alone direct ? events.?

Its handling of the question of aid to Egypt illustrates the perils the administration faces in making any comments.

The announcement by the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, that the United States was rethinking aid ?surely could have been interpreted as interrupting the continuity of the relationship,? said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Egypt and Israel.

?Washington understood immediately that it had to recalibrate,? Mr. Kurtzer said, adding that, under the circumstances, it had performed well. ?One can?t minimize how difficult this is,? he said.

For all the dangers, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, envisioned more promising events on ?State of the Union? on CNN, provided certain conditions were met: Mr. Mubarak agrees not to seek re-election; turns over his government to a caretaker; and ensures ?a free, open, transparent election in September.?

?But this is a narrow window of opportunity,? Mr. McCain said. ?The longer unrest exists, the more likely it is to become extreme.?

Elisabeth Bumiller, Brian Knowlton and Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

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Capturing More Light with a Single Solar Cell

The most efficient solar cells typically have several layers of semiconductor materials, each tuned to convert different colors of light into electricity. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have now made a single semiconductor that performs almost the same job. More importantly, they made the material using a common manufacturing technique, suggesting it could be made relatively inexpensively.

Several research groups are developing semiconductor materials that harness more of the energy in sunlight, based on an idea that dates back to 1960 for changing how semiconductor materials in solar cells interact with light. But the materials used in that research tend to be very difficult to make.

Much work remains before the Lawrence Berkeley lab material could be used in a practical solar cell, but in theory it could convert nearly half of the energy in sunlight into electricity?three times as much as most single-layer (or single-junction) solar cells. Such a solar cell could also cost less than the layered (or multi-junction) solar cells currently needed to achieve high efficiencies, since it would require only one semiconductor material.

In a conventional semiconductor material, it takes a certain amount of energy to free an electron and generate electricity.  Photons that have less energy?say, the photons in infrared light?don't generate electricity. And if a photon has more than the minimum?for instance a photon in energetic ultraviolet light?the extra energy is wasted as heat.

The new semiconductor material is based on gallium arsenide. Normally, this material requires high-energy photons to generate electricity. But the researchers modified it so that the energy from more than one photon is used to free an electron?energy adds up until an electron is freed. Replacing some of the arsenic atoms in the material with nitrogen atoms creates regions that act as stepping stones for electrons that have absorbed some energy from low-energy photons, where they can wait to receive energy from more photons, says Wladek Walukiewicz, who leads the Solar Energy Materials Research Group at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, and also led the project.

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App Turns iPhone into a Smarter Camera

The cameras in most mobile phones are an afterthought. This has left an opening for programmers to step in and develop software to make the images produced by smart phones much better.

One roadblock to this effort has been the cameras themselves?their very design imposes limits on what a photographer can reasonably capture. Now Stanford professor Marc Levoy has created an app that changes what the iPhone's camera is capable of.

Called SynthCam, Levoy's software lets the iPhone 4 take pictures that look like they were taken with a larger, more expensive camera.

Most standalone cameras have an adjustable aperture?the opening through which light travels into the camera?that can be used to produce various photographic effects. A large aperture creates a shallow depth of field, so an object of interest remains crisp while the rest of the scene is blurred. The iPhone has a small aperture, meaning all parts of an image are equally in focus. SynthCam overcomes this limitation by capturing multiple scenes and combining them to make a single image.

Levoy's app is based on his research in computational photography, which uses software to enable digital cameras to capture new types of photographs, such as those that exploit careful timing of the flash and shutter, and to help improve images taken with less sophisticated cameras. Computational photography can also be applied to smart phones, especially since the devices have lots of processing power, and developer tools provide access to a phone's hardware.

"This combination of camera and computational platforms opens up so many things that you can do," says Kari Pulli, Nokia Fellow at the Company's Palo Alto research center in Palo Alto, California. Pulli was not involved in developing the app.

Other apps that use principles from computational photography are already available through Apple's App Store. Some apps, like HDR Camera and TrueHDR, create photos with a higher range of luminance and colors by capturing different exposures in succession and then combining them in a single image. Apps like 360 Panorama and AutoStich Panorama let a person take panoramic photos by automatically stitching together multiple images from a moving camera. There are also many apps, such as Hipstamatic, Instagram, and 100 Cameras in 1, that let people apply filters to their pictures, making them look as if they were taken with a different type of camera.

When a person uses SynthCam, she selects a still point of interest, like a statue, and taps its location on the phone's screen. Then she moves the phone in a small circle around the fixed point for about 10 seconds. The app tracks the point of interest, searching for it in all frames. Realigning all of the images produces the composite one?showing the item of interest in sharp focus and the background out of focus.

In addition to simulating a shallow depth of field, SynthCam collects more light, producing better pictures in low-light conditions. It also removes moving objects from the background, since the composite is captured over 10 seconds or more.

Levoy says he developed the app, which costs 99 cents from the App Store, to let people see what's possible on phone cameras. He expects an explosion of apps that use computational photography techniques over the next few years. "I'm not going to get rich over this," he says. "But if it encourages other people to do the same, then that's a good thing."

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A Quicker Way to Identify Skin Cancer

Detecting melanoma?the most lethal form of skin cancer?still relies on dermatologists eyeballing moles and deciding which ones warrant a biopsy. A new handheld device developed by scientists at the British Columbia Cancer Agency (BCCA) and licensed to Verisante Technology could provide instant information about the molecular makeup of moles.

The device, called the Verisante Aura, is held above a mole, and uses Raman spectroscopy, a technique that distinguishes molecules using their vibrational states, to scan for those whose relative concentrations are characteristic of melanoma. The device returns a verdict within seconds. Following a successful small clinical trial, Verisante is now analyzing the results of another trial with 1,000 moles. The company plans to seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Canada Health later this year.

For patients whose melanoma isn't caught early, the life expectancy is less than a year. And rates of the disease are skyrocketing: the current estimate is that one in 58 Americans will get melanoma in their lifetime, up from one in 1,500 in 1935.

Work on the new device began in 2000, when dermatologists at BCCA were studying whether certain skin diseases could be identified by their unique spectral characteristics. In Raman spectroscopy, laser light changes the vibrational state of the bonds within molecules, which in turn causes a shift in the light that is reflected back to a sensor. The magnitude and direction of that shift reveal what molecules are in the sample, and at what concentration.

"We thought that because the Raman spectrum shift was a direct reflection of the molecules targeted, and because different skin lesions would have different molecules in differing concentrations, it should produce a diagnostic signature," says co-inventor David McLean, a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia. Even if the melanoma looks benign to the naked eye, the Raman spectrum signature will identify it.

The device compares a mole's spectral signature to those in a database containing examples of melanoma and other skin diseases. It will help dermatologists decide whether to biopsy or not. And it could eventually be used by nondermatologists in areas where dermatologists are scarce, such as rural Canada, says McLean.

A danger that regulatory bodies will likely consider, however, is the chance for false negatives in such situations?that is, whether the device might dismiss a mole that turns out to be melanoma. Another concern is whether some dermatologists might use the device as a way to diagnose melanoma instead of using it to help them determine whether or not to do a biopsy. Other companies seeking to commercialize melanoma detection technology, including U.S.-based MelaSciences, which uses infrared scanning, are already facing such scrutiny at the regulatory level.

Whatever U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies decide, there is a need for devices that can help identify melanoma, says Darrell Rigel, a professor of dermatology at NYU's Langone Medical Center, and former president of the American Academy of Dermatology. "It's a challenge to diagnose melanoma clinically. It's subjective," Rigel says. "And while it's not so difficult with one spot, many people have lots of spots?how do you decide what to biopsy?" 

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Political Blogs Are Ready to Flood Campaign Trail

What Mr. Pawlenty does have is a beat reporter from Politico chronicling every utterance and movement of his noncampaign: a 25-year-old named Kendra Marr, who followed him through subzero temperatures last week equipped with a salt-coated Chevrolet Malibu rental, a laptop and a hand-held video camera.

The New Hampshire primary is over a year away, and the first major candidate has yet to formally declare. Just don?t tell that to outlets like Politico, Talking Points Memo and RealClearPolitics, which are already planning to smother the 2012 campaign trail in a way they could never have imagined four years ago when they had far smaller staffs of bloggers and shoestring budgets.

With an eye toward earning greater respectability, this crop of political Web sites is hoping for more than just page views and traffic-driving links from the Drudge Report. They want to establish themselves as the Blogs on the Bus.

?We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly,? said Jim VandeHei, Politico?s executive editor and co-founder. ?Now we?re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan.?

Politico will host, with NBC News and Telemundo, the first debate of the campaign season on May 2, getting a head start on a season of face-offs that is already remarkably busy. (Politico edged ahead of Fox News, which scheduled a debate for May 5.)

Politico has nearly tripled its staff since 2008, when it was already a formidable if somewhat overextended presence on the campaign trail.

It will start a Web site, 2012 Live, this weekend that will serve as a home for what Mr. VandeHei described as ?tons and tons of stories? in addition to the kind of minutiae that Politico believes political enthusiasts can never get enough of ? politicians? daily schedules, county-by-county demographic data in key primary states and historical voting trends.

There will be biographies in micro-detail, right down to midlevel state campaign consultants and unelected local political leaders. If you do not know who Rich Ashooh is, you will after reading Politico?s new site. (Hint: he is a lobbyist in New Hampshire who reportedly has ?an impressive Rolodex.?)

Politico has also developed an interactive map that tracks where candidates have traveled as far back as 2008 and how many visits they have made to a particular state ? a feature resembling the Santa Tracker for children on Christmas Eve.

If all this sounds as if the question ?How much is too much?? has never occurred to Politico, that is because it hasn?t.

?There probably is in theory a point where there?s too much,? Mr. VandeHei said. ?But we certainly haven?t discovered it.?

Politico?s mission in 2012, Mr. VandeHei said, is to carve out an even bigger place in the news media landscape. ?We?re trying to take a leap forward in front of everyone else.?

Talking Points Memo, a political site that has been around since 2000 but only became a force outside Washington in the last few years, plans to expand its reporting staff to 15 people. In 2008, it had only one full-time reporter and an intern assigned to the campaign. According to the site?s founder, editor and publisher, Josh Marshall, the goal is to create a bigger name for the blog by competing with newcomers like Politico and more traditional news outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times.

In the 2004 campaign, Mr. Marshall said, ?We were sort of a player.? By 2008, the site had become ?a small but significant player,? he said.

But now, he said with a sense of pride, ?We?ve already got reporters assigned to different campaigns.?

?It?s an entirely different game for us.?

RealClearPolitics plans to more than double the number of reporters covering the 2012 campaign to at least six and possibly eight, according to John McIntyre, the Web site?s chief executive and co-founder.

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Calling for Restraint, Pentagon Faces Test of Influence With Ally

The relationship between the Egyptian and American militaries is, in fact, so close that it was no surprise on Friday to find two dozen senior Egyptian military officials at the Pentagon, halfway through an annual week of meetings, lunches and dinners with their American counterparts.

By the afternoon, the Egyptians had cut short the talks to return to Cairo, but not before a top Defense Department official, Alexander Vershbow, had urged them to exercise ?restraint,? the Pentagon said.

It remained unclear on Saturday, as the Egyptian Army was deployed on the streets of Cairo for the first time in decades, to what degree the military would remain loyal to the embattled president, Hosni Mubarak.

The crisis has left the Obama administration to try to navigate a peaceful outcome and remain close to an important ally, and the military relationship could be crucial in that effort.

One fear was the possibility that, despite the Egyptian Army?s seemingly passive stance on Saturday, the soldiers would begin firing on the protesters ? an action that would probably be seen as leading to an end to the army?s legitimacy.

?If they shoot on the crowd, they could win tomorrow, and then there will be a revolt that will sweep them away,? said Bruce O. Riedel, an expert on the Middle East and Asia at the Brookings Institution, who predicted that in any event Mr. Mubarak would step down.

A possible successor ? and a sign of how closely the military is intertwined with the ruling party ? is Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief and a former general, who was sworn in as the new vice president. Mr. Suleiman is considered Mr. Mubarak?s closest confidant and a hard-liner, although Obama administration officials say they consider him someone they can work with. In meetings with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, they say, he has shown substance and an ability to deliver on promises.

Mr. Riedel, who was an Egypt analyst at the C.I.A. when President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and has since tracked the rise of Islamic extremism in that country, said that the Egyptian military would be a critical player in any deal to remove Mr. Mubarak from power.

Unlike the feared Egyptian police forces, which had mostly withdrawn from central Cairo on Saturday, the army is considered professional and a stable force in the country?s politics. Egyptian men all serve in the army, which for the most part enjoys popular support.

Mr. Obama met Saturday afternoon with his national security team at the White House about the uprising, but the officials would not say what, if any, decisions had been reached or whether the administration was trying to negotiate a safe exit for Mr. Mubarak.

One former United States official who is close to the Obama administration, Martin S. Indyk, said that it was time for Mr. Mubarak to go, and that the Egyptian military could serve as a crucial transition power.

?What we have to focus on now is getting the military into a position where they can hold the ring for a moderate and legitimate political leadership to emerge,? said Mr. Indyk, a Middle East peace negotiator in the Clinton administration.

Mr. Suleiman could announce that he would take control as president and hold elections within six months, Mr. Indyk said.

At the Pentagon on Saturday morning, American military officials said that the Egyptian Army was acting professionally and that they had no indications that it was swinging over en masse to the side of the uprising. At the same time, the officials noted, the army had not cracked down on the protests.

?They certainly haven?t inflicted any harm on protesters,? said Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ?They?re focused mainly on protecting the institutions of government, as they should be.?

United States military officials said there was no formal line of communication between the Joint Chiefs and the Egyptian military, although they held out that possibility if the crisis deepened. Admiral Mullen had been scheduled to meet on Monday with Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, who is Egypt?s defense chief and chief of staff of the Egyptian Army. But General Enan was the leader of the delegation of senior Egyptian officials that left abruptly for Cairo on Friday night.

For the Pentagon, the question is how much a military that the United States in large part pays for will be receptive to American influence. Since the 1978 Camp David accords, the United States has given Egypt $35 billion in military aid, making it the largest recipient of conventional American military and economic aid after Israel.

?Is it a force that will listen to us if there is a military takeover and we want them to move to a democratically elected government as soon as possible?? said Anthony H. Cordesman, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ?They will listen. But this is a very proud group of people. The fact that they will listen doesn?t mean we can in any way leverage them.?

American military officials said on Friday that they had had no formal discussions with their Egyptian counterparts at the Pentagon about how to handle the uprising. ?In other words,? said Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ?we didn?t say anything to them about how they should handle it, and they didn?t tell us about how they were going to handle it.?

But, General Cartwright said, ?hallway? discussions did take place, and American military officials said contingency plans had been made should the American Embassy have to be evacuated.

Mark Landler contributed reporting.

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Bit-Gamer Competition #5

Bit-Gamer Competition #5

Posted on 28th Jan 2011 at 11:38 by Joe Martin with 3 comments

In the hustle of visiting Paradox Interactive in New York, we sadly forgot to post the winners for our last competition. On the plus side, we've now remembered and can reasonably claim that we're just being fashionably late.

Before we announce the winners of the last competition though, it's time to lay the rules for the new competition.

We've got two sets of prizes on offer this week, one for those who want to enter via Twitter and one for those who enter via Facebook. What we want you to do is tell us what you think of Sony's new NGP handheld, which was announced yesterday.

You can enter the competition via Twitter by sending a tweet to @bit_gamer or through Facebook by writing a message on the wall of Bit-Gamer's fan page. You can, of course, enter both.


We'll choose one winner for each next Friday, February 4th. If you enter through Twitter then we have a trio of PC strategy games on offer - Lionheart: The Kings Crusade, Commander: Conquest of the Americas and Great Battle Medieval. If you enter through Facebook then you can win Majesty 2, King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame and Mount and Blade: Warband.

Now, as for the winners of the previous competition...Earlier this January we asked you to use the Videogame Name Generator to come up with random video game names and send them to us. We selected three different winners, one from the forums, Facebook and Twitter respectively. The winning entries are below!

Forum Winner: Bloody Manlove Crisis - Fu Manchu
Facebook Winner: Tactical Nudist Vengence - Colin Tye
Twitter Winner: Flamboyant Bible III - @jushodge

We'll be in touch with all the winners shortly!

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Could Cows Make Biofuels Better?

A study of the microbes that allow cows to digest grass could lead to better ways of making cellulosic biofuels.

Biofuels made from agricultural waste, sawdust, and prairie grass promise to be more economical than biofuels derived from corn, sugarcane, and other food crops.

The first step in cellulosic biofuels is converting tough plant materials made of cellulose and lignin into sugars that can then be fermented to make fuels. But this is expensive and currently requires a large quantity of enzymes to break down cellulose. "We're talking truckloads," says Frances Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech who was not involved with the cow research. "We need a two- to fivefold reduction in the cost of enzymes," she says.

In contrast, the microbes that live in the part of the bovine digestive tract called the rumen have been turning cellulose into sugar efficiently for millions of years. Researchers hope a new database of  28,000 genes sequenced from microbes involved in bovine digestion will help engineers come up with new enzymes, and bring down the cost of making cellulosic biofuels.

So far, manufacturers have brought down the costs of making cellulolytic enzymes mostly by changing processing methods. Another approach would be to make enzymes that work faster or work under different conditions, such as extreme temperatures, that might facilitate the breakdown of plant matter. "To begin to lower the costs of making cellulosic biofuels, we need new enzymes that do more," says Eddy Rubin, director of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Rubin led the cow-microbe study.

The trouble is that an estimated 99.9 percent of all microbes on earth, including those in cow rumen, cannot be grown in culture in the lab. So bioprospectors looking for natural microbial enzymes with industrial promise have had a very limited pool of material to work with. Fortunately, new gene-sequencing technologies are changing that, allowing researchers to discover microbial enzymes by looking in their genes. Without having to grow microbes in the lab, researchers can sequence all the genetic material present in an entire ecosystem, then screen this data for genes of interest. This type of research is called metagenomics.

Rubin's group started their search for better cellulolytic enzymes by studying termites in 2007. Microbes living in termite guts ferment woody roughage into sugars. The trouble with termites, Rubin says, was that "it was hard to get much material to work with" because termite guts are small. The studies didn't generate many of the full-length genes needed to make working enzymes.

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Amazon S3 Now Stores More Than 262 Billion Objects In Its Cloud

Amazon S3 Now Stores More Than 262 Billion Objects In Its Cloud

Amazon?s Simple Storage Service (S3) plays host to some of the most important services we use today. Dropbox, Ubuntu and popular game Minecraft all make use of Amazon?s web service to serve and host files at a cost that can be significantly lower than deploying a company?s own servers.

Focusing solely on Dropbox, an infinitely useful web-based file hosting service that has 4 million users, Amazon?s S3 service facilitates the download and upload of millions of individual files ? which is a small drop in the ocean when compared to the 262 billion other objects stored on the US retailers? server infrastructure.

Posting to the Amazon Web Services Blog Jeff Barr, Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions at Amazon details just how quickly Amazon?s S3 service continues to grow. In just one year, Amazon S3 added 160 billion objects to its Cloud servers, more than doubling in size in that period.

The service shows no sign of slowing its growth either, Barr noting that Amazon?s peak request rate for its S3 service is now above 200,000 requests a second.

Put simply, Amazon is transmitting and receiving a staggering amount of data ? and it still guarantees 99.9% uptime.

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