The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

andrewsavikas writes "Starting in July, O'Reilly Media will pilot select books as DRM-free ebook bundles (PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) priced at or below the cover price of the book. David Pogue comments on the pilot in the wake of his own recent dustup about ebooks and piracy, covered previously on Slashdot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peer-to-peer traffic management was a hot topic at this year's NXTcomm convention in Las Vegas, as keynote speakers and telecom industry panelists highlighted new methods for handling P2P traffic crunches.

The DRBD packages in Debian have been a bit outdated until yesterday, neither the package in unstable (8.0 branch) nor the package in experimental (8.2 branch) could be built against Linux 2.6.25. Three bugs have been filed against the DRBD packages because of that problem, which was fixed in newer upstream releases already.

After Philipp Hug accepted my offer to co-maintain the DRBD packages in Debian, I uploaded DRBD 8.0.12 to unstable and 8.2.6 to experimental. Both packages are working fine with Linux 2.6.25 and newer.

I've put together a new Top 10 list featuring the Top 10 free tools that should be in every VMware administrator's toolkit. Check it out!

Online storage is back. Last September, EMC bought online storage startup Mozy for $76 million. Last week, Symantec signed a deal brewing since February to buy SwapDrive. A source close to the company says that Symantec paid $123 million.

According to my source, the company made $13 million in profits last year, on revenues of $22 million. That’s up from $5 million in revenues the year before, and the company is projecting $40 million in revenues this year. Those numbers put the acquisition at roughly 10X profits and 5.6X revenues (most likely those are operating profits, but my source couldn’t say for sure).

Neither Symantec nor SwapDrive issued a press release, but if you go to SwapDrive or Backup.com (the other site it operates) they are both identified as now being operated by Symantec. And Symantec’s PR firm confirms that the acquisition took place and offers the following statement from the company:

Symantec has signed a definitive agreement to purchase SwapDrive, a privately-held online storage company to strengthen the services offerings in the Norton consumer portfolio and to help consumers manage data across their devices. This is a small, targeted acquisition and is a very natural move for us because of our close two-year OEM relationship and existing product partnership on Norton 360. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the June 2008 quarter.

Backup.com alone claims to have 2 million users. In an era where you can get 5 GB of storage for free (from Microsoft’s SkyDrive or AOL’s XDrive, for instance), both SwapDrive and Backup manage to charge $50 a year for 2GB of storage ($100 a year for 5GB). Yeah, I was scratching my head too.

It turns out the real growth-driver for the business is as a white-label online backup and storage service. The company, which was founded in 1998 and is based in Washington, D.C., powers the online backup services sold by more than 60 partners, including Iomega, Dell, Intuit, Best Buy, and Symantec. All told, the company is adding 13,000 new customers a day, and has 50 employees. The company raised $2.65 million in a series A round in 2001 from Core Capital Partners and some angels. It raised another round later from Contour Ventures and ASAP Ventures. We are still trying to find out the total amount raised, but it is fair to assume that the investors made a very decent return.

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The Linux kernel is one of most complex open source projects. Even though there are a lot of books on the Linux kernel, it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The Interactive Linux kernel map gives you a top-down view of the kernel. You can see the most important layers, functionalities, modules, functions, and calls. Each function on the map is a link to its source code. The map is interactive. You can zoom in and drag around to see details.

There is a new version of Mail for Exchange available - Mail for Exchange 2.5. Mail for Exchange is the name of Nokia's email client built on Microsoft's ActiveSync technonology. Mail for Exchange provides push synchronization of email and other data between Microsoft Exchange and Nokia devices. The new version of Mail for Exchange is not an [...]