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The Internet

Amazon EC2 May Be Experiencing Growing Pains 93

Posted by kdawson from the hey-you-get-offa-my-cloud dept.
1sockchuck writes "Some developers using Amazon EC2 are wondering aloud whether the popularity of the cloud computing service is beginning to affect its performance. Amazon this week denied speculation that it was experiencing capacity problems after a veteran developer reported performance issues and suggested that EC2 might be oversubscribed. Meanwhile, a cloud monitoring service published charts showing increased latency on EC2 in recent weeks. The reports follow an incident over the holidays in which a DDoS on a DNS provider slowed Amazon's retail and cloud operations."
The Courts

Antitrust Case Against RIAA Reinstated 163

Posted by kdawson from the collusion-and-restraint dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "After Starr v. SONY BMG Music Entertainment was dismissed at the District Court level, the antitrust class action against the RIAA has been reinstated by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In its 25-page opinion (PDF), the Appeals court held the following allegations sufficiently allege antitrust violations: 'First, defendants agreed to launch MusicNet and pressplay, both of which charged unreasonably high prices and contained similar DRMs. Second, none of the defendants dramatically reduced their prices for Internet Music (as compared to CDs), despite the fact that all defendants experienced dramatic cost reductions in producing Internet Music. Third, when defendants began to sell Internet Music through entities they did not own or control, they maintained the same unreasonably high prices and DRMs as MusicNet itself. Fourth, defendants used MFNs [most favored nation clauses] in their licenses that had the effect of guaranteeing that the licensor who signed the MFN received terms no less favorable than terms offered to other licensors. For example, both EMI and UMG used MFN clauses in their licensing agreements with MusicNet. Fifth, defendants used the MFNs to enforce a wholesale price floor of about 70 cents per song. Sixth, all defendants refuse to do business with eMusic, the #2 Internet Music retailer. Seventh, in or about May 2005, all defendants raised wholesale prices from about $0.65 per song to $0.70 per song. This price increase was enforced by MFNs.'"
Communications

Dragging Telephone Numbers Into the Internet Age 239

Posted by timothy from the imagine-that dept.
azoblue writes with this teaser from Ars Technica, presenting a tempting suggestion for online consolidation: "E-mail, IM, Facebook, phones—what if all of these ways to reach you over a network could be condensed into a single, unique number? The ENUM proposal aims to do just that, by giving everyone a single phone number that maps to all of their identifiers. Here's how it works, and why it isn't already widely used."
Wii

Wii Hardware Upgrade Won't Happen Soon 325

Posted by Soulskill from the can't-show-ugly-mario-in-hd dept.
As high-definition graphics become more and more entrenched in this generation of game consoles, Nintendo has had to deal with constant speculation about a new version of the Wii that would increase its capabilities. Today, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime bluntly denied that a hardware revision was imminent, saying, "We are confident the Wii home entertainment console has a very long life in front of it." He added, "In terms of what the future holds, we've gone on record to say that the next step for Nintendo in home consoles will not be to simply make it HD, but to add more and more capability, and we'll do that when we've totally tapped out all of the experiences for the existing Wii. And we're nowhere near doing that yet."
Medicine

WHO To Investigate Handling of Swine Flu Information, Vaccine Orders 372

Posted by timothy from the here-little-piggy dept.
krou writes "With swine flu fading in the UK (projected winter deaths of 65,000 have been downgraded to 1,000, and new cases are decreasing) the UK government has been left with millions of unused vaccines, and (unlike its contract with Baxter) no clear break-clause to get out of its contract with GlaxoSmithKlein. Although the amount paid for vaccines has not been disclosed, it likely cost the UK government several hundred million pounds. Other governments are also in a similar position: the US ordered 251 million doses of the vaccine, and France and Germany are aiming to cut back on their orders considerably. To say that the case for the pandemic has been over-estimated appears to be an understatement. Now, the WHO has announced that it is to investigate whether or not it bowed to pressure from drugs companies to overplay the threat." (Continues, below.)

Comment misleading (Score 4, Insightful) 271

by bytor4232 (#26502089) Attached to: Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug Fixed

The title and article summary is misleading. It shortens the life of the hard drive, not the laptop itself. Hard drives are cheap, and on most laptops as easy to swap out as the battery with screwdriver in hand.

Its not like Ubuntu is killing the motherboard or screen, its the Hard Drive.

Comment Re:I seem to prefer GNOME (Score 1) 193

by bytor4232 (#26120735) Attached to: Samba's Jeremy Allison On Linux's Future

I prefer GNOME as well, I've found GNOME with Compiz, Emerald, and AWN to be the most productive and most beautiful environment I've ever worked with. Right now I'm using the Aurora Leopard theme off off gnome-look.org.

However, it is very resource intensive, and can't run it on everything I have in service in my home. I used to run XFCE on my old Athlon/256 meg Compaq Presario 700 Laptop, but the most recent releases of Xubuntu have been using almost as much resources as GNOME/Metacity.

I've recently turned to Fluxbox. Its takes a little kung fu to get it configured just right, but it uses next to no resources, has a system tray, and has a very nice set of themes, at least the Debian/Ubuntu packages do. I don't run it on my Acer Gemstone with 2 gigs of ram, or my desktops which all have 1 gig or more, but its a good alternative for those resource limited machines.

Comment Work Experience and Certs (Score 1) 1123

by bytor4232 (#25942807) Attached to: IT Job Without a Degree?

Unless you want a job with Google or Microsoft, get out there and get working. Do anything, cut deals, get to building pcs and servers. Then, once you get some knowledge, get some MCSE tests at http://www.vue.com/ . For Linux certs, hit the http://www.brainbench.com/ site, unless you want to pay for some of the higher end certs like RHCE or LPI. Brainbench is fairly cheap, and got me my current job five years ago, where I now make 40k/yr, which is decent for where I live. I have a friend who works an hour south of me, and makes 70k/yr and doesn't have a degree.

You have to get out there. A BS in CS is nice, but your really not going to make that much more having a degree. Its all in what you know, not what classes you took.

Comment Re:Oh, get over yourself (Score 1) 556

by bytor4232 (#25909621) Attached to: Computer For a Child?

Give the guy a break, his child might very well be a prodigy. My oldest daughter has had her own computer since she was two. Sure in the beginning it was a lot of banging the keyboard and watching the pretty pretty lights, but now she is a straight A student, model citizen, top athlete, critical thinker, and top conversationalist whom I spend many hours discussing life with. She is only 8. The only thing she wants under the tree is an Eee PC. I'm so proud of her.

That being said, you could try a umpc. I have my daughter's Eee right now, and they are fairly sturdy. That being said I would consider getting a USB keyboard and mouse/trackball until your sure he doesn't destroy the thing.
Science

Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded, Physics Soon To Follow 135

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the tis-the-season dept.
Nobel Prize season is here again, and the first award for Physiology or Medicine was split between two virologists who discovered HIV and one who demonstrated that a virus causes cervical cancer. Coming soon is the announcement for Physics. Look to the right for a chance to pit your selection wit against the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with a poll for which scientific achievement deserves the prize. Front runners, according to Reuters, are; Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, discovers of graphene, Vera Rubin, provider of the best evidence yet of dark matter, and Roger Penrose and Dan Shechtman, discoverers of Penrose tilings and quasicrystals.
Security

CSRF Flaws Found On Major Websites, Including a Bank 143

Posted by kdawson from the wherever-you-look dept.
An anonymous reader sends a link to DarkReading on the recent announcement by Princeton researchers of four major Web sites on which they found exploitable cross-site request forgery vulnerabilities. The sites are the NYTimes, YouTube, Metafilter, and INGDirect. All but the NYTimes site have patched the hole. "... four major Websites susceptible to the silent-but-deadly cross-site request forgery attack — including one on INGDirect.com's site that would let an attacker transfer money out of a victim's bank account ... Bill Zeller, a PhD candidate at Princeton, says the CSRF bug that he and fellow researcher Edward Felton found on INGDirect.com represents ... 'the first example of a CSRF attack that allows money to be transferred out of a bank account that [we're] aware of.' ... CSRF is little understood in the Web development community, and it is therefore a very common vulnerability on Websites. 'It's basically wherever you look,' says [a security researcher]." Here are Zeller's Freedom to Tinker post and the research paper (PDF).
Upgrades

Steam To Begin Hosting Game Mods 81

Posted by Soulskill from the upgrades dept.
Valve made a brief announcement on Friday that they will be allowing the download of user-created game mods directly from Steam. "Once installed, these MODs will appear in your 'My Games' list and will receive automatic updates just like other games on Steam. Also, these MODs now take advantage of Steamworks, which provides stat tracking and tighter integration with the Steam community." Mods will be available for five different games to start, and more in the future.
Science

Another Way the LHC Could Self-Destruct 367

Posted by kdawson from the no-physics-whatsoever dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Just when you thought it was safe to switch on the LHC (though it won't be for a while yet), another nightmare scenario has emerged that some critics worry could cause the particle accelerator to explode. The culprit this time is not an Earth-swallowing black hole but a 'Bose supernova' in the accelerator's superfluid helium bath. Physicists have been playing with Bose Einstein Condensate (BECs) for over 10 years now. But in 2001, one group discovered that placing them in a powerful magnetic field could cause the attractive forces between atoms to become repulsive. That caused their BEC to explode in a Bose supernova — which they called a 'Bosenova,' a name that fortunately did not catch on. This was little more than a curiosity when only a microscopic blob of cold matter was involved. But superfluid liquid helium is also BEC. And physicists have suddenly remembered that the LHC is swimming in 700,000 liters of the stuff while being zapped by some of the most powerful magnetic fields on the planet. So is the LHC a Bose supernova waiting to go off? Not according to the CERN theory division, which has published its calculations that show the LHC is safe (abstract). They also point out that no other superfluid helium handling facility has mysteriously blown itself to pieces."
Music

Guitar Hero World Tour Won't Allow Copyright Infringement 92

Posted by Soulskill from the to-be-expected dept.
1Up did an interview with two of the developers for Guitar Hero: World Tour about the process of creating the game. One of the interesting things they mention is that they won't be putting up with people who use the song creation tools to make covers of existing songs. "We'll be actively monitoring the site. And, obviously, if the copyright holder complains, Activision will pull it down immediately. We can't condone people putting up covers of music. It's really there for original content." We discussed the creation tools themselves recently. Since then, Activision has announced that they'll be including a MIDI sequencer to assist with making your own tunes.

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