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Comment Nope... but I can make a fire bomb for cheap (Score 1) 2416

by charnov (#40486539) Attached to: Supreme Court: Affordable Care Act Is Constitutional

As my former Special Night Squad grandpa used to tell me... "talk is cheap and so is a petrol bomb". The idea being that politicians should be reminded from time to time who is really in charge.

Not that I am advocating anything today (or hopefully for a long time if ever), but this nation has a pretty darn long history of getting violent when push comes to shove. There is a reason why personal weapons and ammo sales are through the roof right now and it isn't the coming zombie apocalypse.

Comment You'll get nailed by MS Sql server on price (Score 1) 284

by charnov (#40447301) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Low Cost Way To Maximize SQL Server Uptime?

Microsoft SQL server is a fine product but like Oracle gets real expensive real fast...

OpenBravo POS and LemonPOS are both great open source POS solutions that have commercial support available. Also, Xymon can be used to monitor windows and/or linux service or executables, notify on downtime and restart or perform other scripted operations.

http://www.openbravo.com/product/pos/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lemonpos/
http://xymon.sourceforge.net/

Comment All the responsibility and none of the control (Score 1) 241

by charnov (#40289357) Attached to: Adopt the Cloud, Kill Your IT Career

Most of the cloud (IaaS, SaaS, whatever) services out there boils down to this: you are outsourcing some or all of your infrastructure (losing control) and are still saddled with all of the responsibility to make it work.

It is yet another way to hack away at the internal IT cost center. Can "cloud" be a good idea? Sure, if you are delivering metered services (Netflix, SaaS), or are entirely office-less.

We outsourced our fax, CRM, and backup and it is "fine." Management thinks it's fantastic because it is so cheap... but I am sitting here right now waiting for a our fax system to come back online due to a cable outage in California (I'm in the midwest). That's the reality of this type of shift. I am completely responsible for this outage and I can do absolutely nothing to fix it or to prevent further outages (other than redundant services which management shot down due to cost).
Businesses

Ask Slashdot: How Best To Teach Programming To Salespeople? 211

Posted by samzenpus from the know-your-product dept.
First time accepted submitter greglaw writes "Our company makes development tools, meaning that all our customers are programmers. If you'll forgive the sweeping generalization, on the whole good programmers don't make good salespeople and vice versa. However, it's important that our salespeople understand at some level the customers' problems and how exactly we can help. The goal is not to turn the salespeople into engineers, but just to have them properly understand e.g. what the customer means when he uses the term 'function call.' Most of our customers use C/C++. Does anyone have any recommendations for how best to go about this? Online courses or text books that give an introduction to programming in C/C++ would be great, but also any more general advice on this would be much appreciated."
AMD

AMD/ATI Video Drivers: Unsafe At Any Speed 261

Posted by timothy from the hey-man-we've-all-got-problems dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CERT/CC has called out AMD for having insecure video drivers. AMD/ATI video drivers are incompatible with system-wide ASLR. 'Always On' DEP combined with 'Always On' ASLR are effective exploit mitigations. However, most people don't know about 'Always On' ASLR since Microsoft had to hide it from EMET with an 'EnableUnsafeSettings' registry key — because AMD/ATI video drivers will cause a BSOD on boot if 'Always On' ASLR is enabled."
Education

Cognitive Software Identifies America's Brainiest Cities 143

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-the-alaskans-are-just-bored dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "We are often told that the smartest cities and nations do the best and economists typically measure smart cities by education level, calculating the cities or metros with the largest percentage of college grads or the largest shares of adults with advanced degrees. Now Richard Florida writes that a new metric developed by Lumos Labs based on their cognitive training and tracking software Lumosity seeks to track "brain performance" or cognitive capacity of cities in a more direct way by measuring the cognitive performance of more than one million users in the United States who use their games against their location using IP geolocation software. Lumosity's website offers forty games designed to sharpen a wide range of cognitive skills. Individual scores were recorded in five key cognitive areas: memory, processing speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving.The data was normalized into a basic brain performance index controlling for age and gender. The results are shown on a map from Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute that shows the brainy metro index across US metro areas with the top five brainy clusters in Charlottesville Virginia, Lafayette Indiana, Anchorage Alaska, Madison Wisconsin, and the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area. The result is not driven principally by college students, according to Daniel Sternberg, the Lumosity data scientist who developed the metro brain performance measure. 'Since our analysis controlled for age, the reason they score well is not simply that they have a lot of young people,' says Sternberg. 'Instead, our analysis seems to show that users living in university communities tend to perform better than users of the same age in other locations.'"

Submission + - Hadoop Emerges as Application Development Platform (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "As a framework for processing massive amounts of unstructured data, Hadoop has a lot of fans. But for end-users to access that data, it still needs to be transferred across networks—which can become a prohibitively expensive proposition. So rather than transfer data across a network in order for applications to make use of it, a lot of folks are beginning to think in terms of bringing applications to the data."

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