You Can Now Text 911 in an Emergency

If you're deaf or in an emergency where you can't speak, getting a hold of 911 is problematic. In just a few hours, the nation's leading mobile providers will start the support of texting to 911 for emergencies in certain areas.P

The providers supporting the service include AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. For the time being, only certain states and counties have call centers that support 911 texting, but the goal is to get this service rolled out nationwide as soon as possible. If you're located in an area that will allow the service, make sure you provide your location when texting 911. Call centers will not have the ability to triangulate your location the same way they can with a phone call.

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SOURCE: LIFEHACKER

New Firefox version delivers Chrome-clone UI redesign to World+Dog

Firefox 29 has left beta to become the latest stable release for desktop PCs and Android devices, bringing with it a long-promised UI overhaul, new customization options, and an improved data sync feature.

Mozilla senior user experience designer Jennifer Morrow compared the old Firefox UI to a sinking ship and said one could think of the redesign as "a new hull."

"It's not an interface adjustment or tweak," Morrow wrote. "It's not a bug fix. It's a complete re-envisioning of Firefox's user experience, and it's been brewing for the past five years."
Long story short, the Mozilla browser's "Australis" redesign means it is now virtually a dead ringer for Google's Chrome, although it does offer a few unique features if you look past the surface.
Gone is the familiar orange Firefox menu in the upper left of the desktop browser window. In its place is a new menu to the right of the URL bar (just like Chrome) that's activated by clicking an icon of three lines stacked on top of each other (just like Chrome).

Firefox 29 also marks the official debut of the improved Sync feature, which is powered by Mozilla's new Firefox Accounts – yet another Chrome-ish concept. The new service is now included in both the desktop and Android versions of the browser.
Overall, if you were pleased with the design decisions Google made with Chrome, you'll be happy with Firefox's new direction, which Mozilla say was designed "to reflect how you use the Web today." If, on the other hand, you preferred how you used the web yesterday, you might be disappointed.
One thing Firefox prides itself on, however, is its high degree of customizability. If you don't like the new defaults, Firefox 29 still supports over 300,000 available Appearance Add-Ons, including so-called Complete Themes that can change the look and feel of the browser radically.

Firefox 29 is available for download now from Mozilla's homepage and from the Google Play store for Android devices, and it will begin rolling out to current users via the browser's built-in update feature over the coming days. ®

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Facebook uses 10,000 Blu-ray Discs to create 1 Petabyte cold storage

At last year’s Open Compute Summit, Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikhsuggested the company might consider Blu-ray discs as a medium for improving durability and cutting costs for its long-term cold storage efforts. Now, Parikh said Tuesday during a keynote at this year’s event, the company is actually doing it.

Facebook has built a prototype Blu-ray system capable of storing 10,000 discs and 1 petabyte of data in a single cabinet, with plans to scale it to 5 petabytes per cabinet. Blu-ray storage would save the company 50 percent in costs and 80 percent in energy usage over its existing hard-disk-based cold storage methods, Parikh said, and will provide 50 years worth of durability for data stored on the discs.

That’s not the only tidbits Parikh shared about the company’s cold storage efforts, though. He said that the first site is now in production and storing 30 petabytes of data, but a second will be coming online soon. Within a couple months, Facebook expects to have 150 petabytes of data in cold storage, which is just a fraction of the 3 exabytes each facility is designed to house.

One other nugget worth noting from the morning as it relates to Facebook’s innovation on the storage front: In order to save money over data center-grade SSDs but still speed up the process, Facebook is now booting web servers using netbook-grade SSDs, hardware executive Matt Corddry said.

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