Comment Re:File system? (Score 1) 45
Not a particularly useful use of the inode table. The filesystem is great for a few hundred or even a few thousand records, but when you're dealing with billions of records, that adds up to a lot of wasted space.
Comment I'm not pro-paperless for the environment (Score 1) 446
I'm pro-paperless because it's a blasted mess.
Comment ...someone's sarcasm detector is off today. (Score 1) 161
Burning my karma kandle at both ends.
Comment Obviously more evidence (Score 5, Funny) 161
that our government is sliding towards communism!
Novell Wins vs. SCO 380
Aim Here writes "According to Novell's website, and the Salt Lake Tribune, the jury in the SCO v. Novell trial has returned a verdict: Novell owns the Unix copyrights. This also means that SCO's case against IBM must surely collapse too, and likely the now bankrupt SCO group itself. It's taken 7 years, but the US court system has eventually done the right thing ..." No doubt this is the last we will ever hear of any of this.
High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats 542
krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, 'Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that 'When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.'"
Study Shows People In Power Make Better Liars 265
oDDmON oUT writes "MSNBC is reporting that a Columbia Business School study shows those who hold power over others make better liars. According to one of the study's coauthors, 'It just doesn't hurt them as much to do it.' For the average liar, she said, the act of lying elicits negative emotions, physiological stress and the fear of getting caught in a lie. As a result, she added, liars will often send out cues that they are lying by doing things like fidgeting in a chair or changing the rate of their speech. But for the powerful, the impact is very different: 'Power, it seems, enhances the same emotional, cognitive, and physiological systems that lie-telling depletes. People with power enjoy positive emotions, increases in cognitive function, and physiological resilience such as lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Thus, holding power over others might make it easier for people to tell lies.'"
"Mythical Man-Month" Supposedly Busted By MIT Startup 231
An anonymous reader writes "We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done and quadrupling its productivity."
Comment Re:Micropayments again (Score 1) 198
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Pray tell, what level of vigilante justice would you consider to be slow and painful enough?
Comment Re:Logic? (Score 1) 198
Right. They are ignoring the huge volume of legitimate mail that hotmail/msn silently deletes in violation of the RFCs.
Hotmail doesn't represent the majority of e-mail accounts, and usually it seems to be down solely to the incompetence of whoever is administering hotmail, rather than intentionally violating RFC. Same difference, I suppose, but it's certainly not a majority of the legitimate e-mail they get to them, anyway.
Submission + - Simple Machine Forum Co-Founder Speaks Out (lewisonline.ca) 1
SMF Friend writes: It seems there's something going down at SimpleMachines.org, home of the Simple Machines Forum. Within the past week, a new website has cropped up with dozens of former developers and project management in heated discussions over events that transpired last Saturday. A statement has been released by former Developer and Co-Founder Jeff Lewis, which chronicles the life and hardships of SMF and includes a letter from 30 current and former SMF Team Members asking for the removal of three of SMF's Managers.
"Over seven years ago my friend Joseph Fung and I decided the web needed an alternative to the leading PHP forum package out there. We created a PHP fork of perl based YaBB and after working with what we called YaBB SE for a bit, we re-branded as SMF, or Simple Machines Forums, along with a new core of code written by a developer who called himself [Unknown]. After seven years its crumbling but why?"
Other former SMF contributors are already picking up the story (Original German version).
As of writing this, the SMF community has begun banning members who link to blog post on their official forums, including Co-Founder Jeff Lewis.
"Over seven years ago my friend Joseph Fung and I decided the web needed an alternative to the leading PHP forum package out there. We created a PHP fork of perl based YaBB and after working with what we called YaBB SE for a bit, we re-branded as SMF, or Simple Machines Forums, along with a new core of code written by a developer who called himself [Unknown]. After seven years its crumbling but why?"
Other former SMF contributors are already picking up the story (Original German version).
As of writing this, the SMF community has begun banning members who link to blog post on their official forums, including Co-Founder Jeff Lewis.
Comment Re:Auto-update feature in Drupal 7 (Score 1) 55
Wrong - the auto-update feature is new to 7.x, so actual sites running 6.x (or earlier) doesn't benefit from it. Also, the new feature will only install and update modules and themes, not 'core', so I'm guessing updating core from 7.0 to 7.1 is probably going to require about as many manipulation steps as you need to go from 6.14 to 6.15. I don't have a lot of experience, but I would not say it's "extremely easy": the stable 6.x version requires you to do a lot of file and configuration manipulation just to go from 6.14 to 6.15 (if you follow all the recommended steps, which I did for my test site recently). It's not hard, it's just not automated.
If you set everything up properly, you just overwrite everything not in the sites directory with the new files, and then possibly run the database update script. Quite trivial.
I actually set up Drupal sites by symlinking to a main drupal installation for files and common modules. All the benefit of the
FCC Wants More Time To Craft Broadband Plan 140
adeelarshad82 writes "Julius Genachowski, Federal Communications Commission Chairman, has sent out a letter to Congress requesting more time for the commission to deliver its national broadband plan. According to the stimulus bill passed in early 2009, the FCC was to come up with a plan to provide all citizens with access to broadband services and deliver it to the committee by February 17, 2010. Even though an outline of the plan was released last month, FCC is requesting till March 17, 2010 to finalize the plan."
Ocean-Crossing Dragonflies Discovered 95
grrlscientist writes "While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the Globe Skimmer, Pantala flavescens, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."
Comment Over three quarters of web spam attacks (Score 1) 422
...on my servers come from hijacked IE6 machines or bots claiming to be IE6.
Nail cannot come too soon.
