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Comment Re:First to file is very bad for academia. (Score 1) 243

Can you please elaborate on the problem you see?
I failed to see it (must be daft).

What is preventing you from sending in a patent application and then go talk to you colleagues / send papers to the academia press?
Wouldn't it be a good thing to be able to just "fire and forget" a patent application and then go on with your life and do all the academic stuff you enjoy, without having to worry about who might next emerge from under the bushes and make your life miserable?

Comment Two appartment buildings worth of homes (Score 1) 62

Equates to my building and one of our neighboring ones. With 1 Gbps per apartment I fail to see the awe aspiring in the "accomplishment" from that perspective.
Assuming it wasn't my neighbors who got hacked and that the world's 500 million connected households have an average of 1Mbit/s uplink capacity, the feat might be interesting from another perspective than the consumed bandwidth; being able to orchestrate 100k drones without being traced. That's pretty cool since there must have been quite a couple of decoy routers and mechanisms in place to prevent tracing the origin of an orchestration like that. "Secret" command and control center of modern warfare, cloak and a 100k daggers.

Perhaps the USG should track these people down and recruit them in order to bolster the forces for their War On Internet (their goals seem aligned after all).

Comment Re:Browser on a VM then? (Score 1) 332

Unless you also use a proxy such as Tor or Relakks, Google et'al will typically be able to piece together that you're you by looking at your IP address or network. A VM by itself won't do squat for your privacy.

If you have a dynamic IP which changes all the time, then it will take a bit longer (more clicks) through the web before "Google" can associate your current surfing session to the "file" they have on you.

So Tor/Relakks + short surfing sessions - logging into any site should hopefully keep your surfing somewhat private.

Comment Re:Not true (Score 1) 221

I put more faith in the article they referenced than the one in context.

From the first grade to 5th, I was a bit of the timid type that "played well with others" and tried to keep a somewhat low profile.

At 6th grade and through the rest of the school years I developed a "I don't give a rats *ss what anyone things"-attitude and I always said what was on my mind since I'd come to hate double speak and "political intrigue". The rationale was that it would be better if people knew that what I said was what I meant and thus know me based on that, rather than having to guess hidden agendas and conjecture their own ideas of who I was or what my intentions may had been.
    Or as I would have then thought of it "Why would anyone say something they don't mean? That just makes stuff unnecessarily complex and it is therefore a stupid thing to do."
I also had the impression that most people were fools because they couldn't see the obviousness and patterns in situations that I could (rather arrogant I admit) and said so when "stupid things" were said and done. Not appreciated by some, why, I didn't understand then.

The first four years after graduation, I came to realize that this "open and frank" attitude didn't really work too well in the corporate world and I tried hard to suppress my outer voice and instead try to find different angles to what people were saying and how they were saying it. This provided a new realization that there probably were less fools around than I had previously thought. After yet a couple of years, it had turned my view of the world and people in general completely 180 and since then I believe that most people have a lot of valuable ideas and valuable which I could learn and benefit from. My personality had returned to the personality which "plays well with others".

Now this evolvement from one type to another and the return to the original shows that personalities can indeed change with or without effort, as postulated by the article I linked. However the outcome of my little anecdote, if used in the study under discussion, would have supported that theory as well, which would obviously have been a false positive.

I don't know if it is common that people change personalities during their youth and then regress to an initial personality or if my example was just a fluke, but since the article in question claims that personalities would remain the same into adult life, I simply felt obliged to provide a counter example to negate that theory.

Comment Re:An Opportunity (Score 1) 436

Why bother with trying to link a MAC to a public IP address and how would you even do that? Provided the GP uses some NAT box, like take-your-pick model of a home router/wifi-AP combo at Best Buy, all the MAC will tell the storm troopers is that some machine with a MAC got an internal IP address from the router. It does not tell the troopers that this NATed IP actually downloaded a given torrent.

However, if the troopers find a file with the same message digest on one of the drives confiscated from the GP's home, then it'd be pretty darn hard to sell the court the tale that "John Doe with his MadWiFi skillz passed by the window and is the culprit you should be looking for". MAC addresses have nothing to do with it.

Comment Re:Not everyone wants more pixels, but better aspe (Score 1) 952

I'd appreciate a 3:4 display such as my first monochrome monitor for my Atari ST, since my region's defacto document format is A4, a format with more height than width.

A high-res 4:3 screen which can be rotated 90 degrees would be perfect for reading documents and a "killer device" for our corporate laptops.

I really don't need a "cinema display" at work since like most people, I'm not in the movie or television industry.

Comment Re:Sun Ultrasparc T2 has 8 cores... and 64 threads (Score 1) 186

What the T-series really needs is a boost to per-thread performance since it will otherwise remain a specialty processor only suitable for certain workloads.

The T2 core has more than enough parallelism for most apps out there. What isn't appreciated though is that it pushes the server *implementation details* all the way up to the app-developers, which causes them grief when they need to target different hardware or when they utilize "junior" developers. It also causes a lot longer performance tuning phases than on our previous platforms (SPARC and Intel).

This situation is fine for A-list developers but causes major grief for the multitude of companies whose developers don't have experience in massively parallelized systems. Companies in that situation unfortunately are most out there.

Our local SUN.. I mean Oracle drones always point out that our servers are able to handle so much in parallel, but that means squat if we can't meet our SLAs.

If I have a response time SLA of 1 second, then it does me little good if I can service 10 times the number of requests of a competitor's server if each request takes 3 seconds and the competitor's hardware actually allows me to reach the SLA!

Also, if there is any kind of locking going on, the server will more or less halt and whopty doo there goes the parallelism.

We won't be buying another T2 since event the PHBs can read the productivity charts and risk reports handed to them by external consultants. The cost of performance tuning of apps has climbed a lot and cost us a small fortune and continue to do so. Hardest to cope with in this space are legacy and third party apps where hardly anyone dare update the decayed code (or receive funding to do so) or in the latter case can.

However, we're seriously contemplating buying a bunch of Nehalem-EX servers and would perhaps have bought the Power7 if we were an IBM-shop since both those companies "Get It", get what customers as us need in contrast to Oracle.

Advice to Oracle: Add a bunch of cache and allow for higher clock speed in the T3 to really start competing with Intel and IBM. I don't care if you add a thousand more threads if each thread still incur a latency three to four times longer than your competition.

Finally, yes I realize I come across as a sour grape but the amount of time and cost *wasted* as a result of our PHB buying these servers (based on spec-mark figures) without contemplating the intended workload has really put a dent in my department's work atmosphere.

Oracle

DOJ Gives Oracle Approval To Buy Sun 162

k33l0r writes "The BBC is reporting that the US Justice Department has approved Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. The acquisition gives Oracle control over (or a leading role in), among other things, Java, MySQL, (Open)Solaris, ZFS, OpenOffice, and the NetBeans IDE. 'The European Commission has still to rule on the deal, a step that will be required before it can close. That body has indicated it will issue an initial opinion on Sept. 3, according to the Wall Street Journal. It may OK the deal at that time or launch a four-month probe of it. ... The Justice Department ruling came earlier than expected, a possible response to Sun's declining revenues and precarious business position in a steep recession, as the required reviews proceeded.' We first discussed the deal back when it was announced in April."
IBM

IBM, Other Multinationals "Detaching" From the US 812

theodp writes "If you're brilliant, work really hard, and earn a world-class doctorate from a US university, IBM has a job for you at one of its US research sites — as a 'complementary worker' (as this 1996 piece defined the then-emerging term). But be prepared to ship out to India or China after you've soaked up knowledge for 13 months as a 'long-term supplemental worker.' Newsweek sketches some of the bigger picture, reporting that IBM, HP, Accenture, and others are finding it profitable to detach from the United States (even patenting the process). 'IBM is one of the multinationals that propelled America to the apex of its power, and it is now emblematic of the process of creative destruction pushing America to a new, less dominant, and less comfortable position.'"
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Richard Stallman - A Real Hypocrite

chris_7d0h writes: The self appointed development guru and reporter of one of IDG's international magazines sought an interview with RMS but was baffled by the audacity of the subject to have opinions regarding the article's use of RMS' coined acronym; GNU and have an opinion of tiny details of wording such as using Free Software instead of Open Source. This of course was unacceptable and the paper refused to have the interview and topped it off by publicly decrying RMS boldness, with the same headline as this submission in an article posted on the front-page of the paper's on-line edition.

The article is in Swedish but a translation is provided for those not trained in this arcane language.

" Richard Stallman is amongst other things known as the author of the program license gpl. On his home page he criticizes Google because he feels the company is affecting the freedom of speech in Thailand in a negative way.

He also praises al Jazeera which he deems is acting for the betterment of the freedom of the press.

Given this, it was rather odd that Richard Stallman in preparation for a planned interview this week required of us at Computer Sweden to write GNU/Linux instead of Linux and to avoid using the term open source.

The latter because he wanted it to be clear that he works with Free Software and not with Open Source.

These are very unusual requirements I'd say, especially since they come from someone who claims to fight for the freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

In comparison, I'd like to say that Microsoft has never ever required something similar of me. The "worst" thing Microsoft has done to me as a journalist was to record a conversation I had with Bill Gates. That felt totally OK on my part.

But representatives of Microsoft have never before an interview wanted me to promise to write Microsoft Word instead of Word.

So be it that Stallman thinks it should be called GNU/Linux instead of Linux, I'd gladly cite him regarding that.

But to try getting a journalist to use a non-common term in order to serve his own interest is nothing other than an attempt at manipulation.

It all ended with Computer Sweden declining the interview. We didn't think it would have been in the best interest for the freedom of the press in the world.

There are by the way a lot of interesting things to read on Stallman's home page.

Amongst other things there is a call for donations to a campaign for legalizing marijuana in the US state of Nevada. "

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