shogarth - Slashdot User

Tennesee Man Charged In "Virtual Pornography" Case 639

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 25, 2009 @06:13PM from the bad-taste-in-one's-mouth dept.

mcgrew writes "CNN reports that 'A Tennessee man is facing charges of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor for what authorities say are three pictures — none of them featuring an actual child's body. Instead, according to testimony presented at Michael Wayne Campbell's preliminary hearing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Wednesday, the photos feature the faces of three young girls placed on the nude bodies of adult females, CNN affiliate WDEF reported.'"

Stuck Knob Causes Serious Window Damage To Atlantis 291

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 25, 2009 @05:22PM from the for-want-of-a-nail dept.

FTL writes "While in orbit a metal knob floated between a window and the dashboard of Atlantis. Once back on Earth, the shuttle contracted, wedging the knob firmly in place and damaging the window. Initial attempts to free the knob have failed and engineers may need six months to disassemble that section of the orbiter. Given that the shuttle program will probably end next year anyway, such a delay might mean scrapping Atlantis early rather than repairing it. Efforts to remove the knob using less invasive techniques continue."

Middle-School Strip Search Ruled Unconstitutional 528

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 25, 2009 @04:34PM from the moment-of-claritin dept.

yuna49 writes "The US Supreme Court today ruled 8-1 that the strip search of a 13-year-old girl by officials in an Arizona middle school was unconstitutional. However, by a vote of 7-2, the Court also ruled that the individual school officials could not be held personally liable. A suit for damages against the school district itself is still going forward. We discussed this case at length back in March when the Court decided to hear the case on appeal."

Comcast Intercepts and Redirects Port 53 Traffic 527

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @02:11PM from the why-we-need-ipv6 dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An interesting (and profane) writeup of one frustrated user's discovery that Comcast is actually intercepting DNS requests bound for non-Comcast DNS servers and redirecting them to their own servers. I had obviously heard of the DNS hijacking for nonexistent domains, but I had no idea they'd actually prevent people from directly contacting their own DNS servers." If true, this is a pretty serious escalation in the Net Neutrality wars. Someone using Comcast, please replicate the simple experiment spelled out in the article and confirm or deny the truth of it. Also, it would be useful if someone using Comcast ran the ICSI Netalyzr and posted the resulting permalink in the comments.

Direct-To-Consumer Genetics Testing Makes a Splash In Boston 78

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:33PM from the what's-under-my-shell? dept.

eldavojohn writes "MIT's Technology Review has the scoop on the first annual Consumer Genetics Show starting today in Boston and it looks like the rage these days is genetic testing sans the middle-man physician. And it's getting more prevalent and more available: 'A number of companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic testing have cropped up in the past two years to capitalize on these advances, from 23andMe and Navigenics, which offer genome-wide scans to identify specific disease-linked genetic variations, to Knome, which offers whole-genome sequencing to the wealthy. Any doubts that personal genomics is making its way into the mainstream can be assuaged with a look at Interleukin genetics, a startup that sells genetic tests for heart-disease risk, B vitamin metabolism, and other factors through Amway, the direct-sales company.' Over-the-counter genetic tests may be much closer than you think. The article raises concerns that this information will be misused/misinterpreted or even provide a false sense of security. We've discussed some states prohibiting this last year."

Submission + - TSA to begin body-imaging in NY/NJ 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:07PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Port Authority of NY/NJ will begin screening PATH train passengers using "passive" body-imaging technology this month. Announcement by the Port Authority of NY/NJ: http://www.panynj.gov/CommutingTravel/path/html/tsa_screening.html — More about the technology from the TSA: http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/millimeter_wave.shtm

Fedora 11 Is Now Available 195

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @12:01PM from the one-louder dept.

rexx mainframe writes "Fedora 11 is now available on BitTorrent. Fedora 11 offers ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3's latest pre-releases are available as well. Fedora 11 features Presto, a yum plugin that reduces bandwidth consumption drastically by downloading only binary differences between updates. It also features Openchange for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. There are new security enhancements, improved and upgraded development tools, and cutting-edge features in areas such as virtualization."

One Fifth of World's Population Can't See Milky Way At Night 612

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @11:40AM from the 80-20-rule dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos Magazine: "Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world's population — mostly in Europe, Britain and the US — to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky. 'The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage,' said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Yet 'more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the US population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way.'"

Security Flaw Hits VAserv; Head of LxLabs Found Hanged 413

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @10:49AM from the jerks-with-computers-elaborately-shrug dept.

Keldrin_1 writes "The discovery of 24 security vulnerabilities may have contributed to the death of the chief of LxLabs. A flaw in the company's HyperVM software allowed data on 100,000 sites, all hosted by VAserv, to be destroyed. The HyperVM solution is popular with cheap web hosting services and the attacks are easy to reproduce, which could lead to further incidents."

Adobe Gets Regular On Security Patches 38

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @09:28AM from the can-of-prunes-every-three-months dept.

dasButcher writes "Adobe joins Microsoft and Oracle on regularly scheduled security patch releases. The first set of patches for Acrobat and Reader are scheduled for today, and Adobe will release future patch batches quarterly."

Comment VMWare Server 1.x is a dog (Score 1) 361

by shogarth on Tuesday June 02, 2009 @12:05PM (#28183613) Attached to: When VMware Performance Fails, Try BSD Jails

Ever since the launch over a year ago we used VMware Server 1 for instantiating the YippieMove back-end software.

This says it all in one sentence. VMWare Server (as opposed to ESX or ESXi) is a dog. It barely ran with two WinXP installs and one RHEL5 on a 4-core server with 8 GB of RAM. Life was a little better after upgrading to VMWare Server 2, but running it on top of an OS instead of using a hypervisor kills performance. I switched the same box over to ESXi 3.5 and all three installs scream. Additionally, the memory page deduplication driver means that I have capacity for probably another five to seven lightly loaded systems without worrying about the occasional load spike.

As far as some jobs just not being well suited to virtualization, that's an obvious truth. However, most work in that class is CPU bound compute work. If you are not buying storage on a shoestring budget (i.e. you can run VMFS3 on a FC or trunked Gb SAN rather than fiddle with NFS) then you should have reasonable IO performance. The OP doesn't give any detail on storage performance (either in bandwidth or IOPS) so there's no way to tell what it requires. Having looked at his YippieMove service web page there doesn't seem to be a lot that is required. It seems like they picked the low performance, free VMWare tool and when it didn't work did something completely different. This says less about VMWare than it does about the OP's design/testing process.

IBM Doubles Rewards For Ditching Sun 207

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 04, 2009 @01:11PM from the go-for-the-jugular dept.

Taking advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Oracle's acquisition of Sun, IBM has doubled the monetary incentives they are offering to ditch Sun gear. Offering $8,000 in software or services for every Sun Sparc processor ditched for an IBM Power server, the program seems to be paying off. IBM has helped 1,640 customers migrate from other manufacturers' hardware over the last year. "The program applies to Sparc-based Sun hardware, such as the Sparc, UltraSparc, and Sparc 64 servers, and also to Fujitsu systems that run on Sparc chips. A customer that moves off a Sparc-powered system running, say, eight processors would be eligible for up to $64,000 worth of rewards."

Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters 504

Posted by Soulskill on Monday May 04, 2009 @12:18PM from the how-many-characters-do-you-really-need dept.

The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In particular, he worked out the 160 character limit for text messages. "Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number ... Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. ... Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Office 2007SP2 ODF Interoperability Very Bad 627

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday May 04, 2009 @08:55AM from the are-you-really-surprised dept.

David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won't read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."

Pirate Party Banned From Social Networking Site 354

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday May 01, 2009 @04:26PM from the you-can't-buy-publicity-like-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that as the European Parliament elections loom, StudiVZ, Germany's largest social networking site, has opened up to political parties for election campaigning. That is, if you aren't the Pirate Party. "The other political parties were allowed to have a special account to show they are an organization and not an individual. The Pirate Party, however, was not allowed to have one and instead operated on a standard user account registered by an individual. StudiVZ noticed that the Pirate Party account was not a "real person" and despite it having a thriving network with hundreds of followers, it was summarily deleted. This means that it is impossible for the Pirate Party to have a presence at all on the largest social networking site in Germany." Update: 05/02 19:17 GMT by T : Reader riot notes: "FYI: I just translated the press release to English."

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