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Networking

Yahoo IPv6 Upgrade Could Shut Out 1M Users 290

Posted by CmdrTaco from the trial-by-fire dept.
alphadogg writes "Yahoo is forging ahead with a move to IPv6 on its main Web site by year-end despite worries that up to 1 million Internet users may be unable to access it initially. Yahoo's massive engineering effort to support IPv6 — the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol — could at first shut out potential www.yahoo.com users due to what the company and others call 'IPv6 brokenness.'"
Facebook

How Facebook Ships Code 314

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wish-i-had-hundreds-of-engineers dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week 'Boot Camp' training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to the live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. 'All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to,' writes yeegay. 'It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.' What is interesting for a company this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day."
Businesses

The Fall of Wintel and the Rise of Armdroid 431

Posted by Soulskill from the upgrading-the-portmanteau dept.
hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running a very interesting article on how this year's CES marked the end of the Wintel platform's dominance. Their argument is that tablets are going to disrupt the PC, and these tablets are predominantly going to be running on Google's Android powered by ARM processors — 'Armdroid.' Quoting: 'Both Microsoft and Intel have suffered from the same problem that most successful companies face when dealing with disruption. They cannot find a way to profitably invest in low-end offerings. Think about it from Microsoft's point of view: now that Windows 7 has been developed, to sell another copy, they don't have to do a single thing. Because of this, it becomes very hard for any executive to advocate the complete development of a low cost OS that will run on tablets: not only would it cost Microsoft a lot to develop, but it would result in cannibalization of its core product sales. Intel has the exact same issue. Why focus on Atom, or an even lower-end chip, when there is so much more margin to be made by focusing on its multi-core desktop processors?'"
Science

DoE Develops Flexible Glass Stronger Than Steel 242

Posted by Soulskill from the whale-tested,-scotsman-approved dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Energy Office of Science recently collaborated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology to develop a resilient yet malleable new type of glass that is stronger than steel. The material can also be molded, and it bends when subjected to stress instead of shattering. The glass is actually a microalloy and features metallic elements such as palladium. This metal has a high 'bulk-to-shear' stiffness ratio that counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials. The team that developed the material believes that by changing various ratios, they could make it even stronger."
Crime

Man Tunnels Into GameStop, Steals Games 210

Posted by CmdrTaco from the digging-for-treasure dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Life imitates Minecraft: Computer game piracy is big business, but there are still those who prefer to get their games the old-fashioned way: by digging a tunnel into their local games shop and making off with as much stock as they can carry. At least, that's the slightly bizarre approach taken by a man from Greeneville, Tennessee, who was arrested late last week after being caught tunneling into his local GameStop store from an empty adjoining building." Note that the link is thin, and the sources are behind logins and subscription links, so please post better URLs if you can find them.
Privacy

Dating Site Creates Profiles From Public Records 257

Posted by timothy from the you-didn't-even-know-you-were-looking dept.
schliz writes "Online dating company Gotham Dating Partners has announced plans to create profiles for non-registered individuals based on publicly available information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites. Although the Australian Privacy Commissioner has warned that the automatic creation of identifiable profiles of individuals without their knowledge is 'not good privacy practice,' Gotham Dating Partners does not expect to face any privacy issues from the move, which is expected to boost its membership from 6.5 million to 340 million worldwide."
GUI

Xfce 4.8 Released 193

Posted by timothy from the when-snappy-matters dept.
PerlDudeXL writes "Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6. [..] Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions."
Software

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25

Posted by timothy from the under-the-hood dept.
conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."
Databases

Cassandra 0.7 Can Pack 2 Billion Columns Into a Row 235

Posted by timothy from the but-only-if-they're-really-thin dept.
angry tapir writes "The cadre of volunteer developers behind the Cassandra distributed database have released the latest version of their open source software, able to hold up to 2 billion columns per row. The newly installed Large Row Support feature of Cassandra version 0.7 allows the database to hold up to 2 billion columns per row. Previous versions had no set upper limit, though the maximum amount of material that could be held in a single row was approximately 2GB. This upper limit has been eliminated."
Facebook

Facebook Opens Up Home Addresses and Phone Numbers 459

Posted by timothy from the 1600-pennsylvania-avenue-should-do dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Do you really want third-party app developers on Facebook to be able to access your mobile phone number and home address? Facebook has announced that developers of Facebook apps can now gather the personal contact information from their users. Security firm Sophos describes it as 'a move that could herald a new level of danger for Facebook users' and advises users to remove their home address and phone numbers from the network immediately."
Linux

Embedded Linux 1-Second Cold Boot To QT 141

Posted by timothy from the why-does-my-phone-need-2-minutes? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The blog post shows an embedded device cold booting Linux to a QT application all in just one second. This post also includes a link which describes what modifications were made to achieve this."
Firefox

Mozilla To Release Firefox 4 Next Month 266

Posted by CmdrTaco from the battle-still-waging dept.
Neil writes "Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, has announced that the company is almost ready to ship Firefox 4. On its mailing list, Mozilla has revealed it has around 160 hard blockers to fix, before proceeding to Release Candidate stage. Both the RC and the final version would arrive in February, according to Sicore. Mozilla was originally planning on having Firefox 4 out by the end of last year, but it had to delay the release till 2011. Last month, Firefox 4 Beta 8 was released for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux 32-bit/64-bit, with support for 57 languages. Mozilla's roadmap says it still wants to release a Beta 9, a Beta 10, and at least one Release Candidate build before the final version."
Android

Dual-Core Chips Coming To All Smartphones In 2011 244

Posted by CmdrTaco from the waiting-for-the-triple dept.
An anonymous reader writes "All top of the range smartphones will be sporting dual-core chips this year. So is it time to ditch your current pocket rocket? Not necessarily — dual-core will give a bit of a boost to multitasking and media streaming but probably won't persuade iPhone owners to switch to Android, says the writer."

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