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Comment And you download it from where? (Score 2) 181

by spacey (#35319960) Attached to: Firefox 4 Beta 12 Released; Fixes Over 650 Bugs

Firefox has always had the most frustrating UI for their info pages. They'll send you to pages and pages of info, but there's never a standard sidebar to actually download the available versions. The page this article links to has a link to the mobile beta of 4, which is exactly not the platform I'm browsing from. Fail.

Comment Re:Goldtouch (Score 1) 310

by spacey (#34024580) Attached to: Ergonomic Mechanical-Switch Keyboard?

I've used these for a number of years now, and they're more durable that e.g. the M$ keyboards (more than one accidental water spill on my goldtouches, and they work fine after drying out. The M$ ergo keyboards die. I'd rather not admit that this has happened so often, but sometimes it does).

My only complaint is that the hinge/ball-joint mechanism on the goldtouch seems to have gotten less sturdy in the last 3-4 years, and I've had 2 break on me. My older model, at home, has never broken.

They also have a smaller keyboard that may be the next one I buy, hoping that the ball-joint is better.

Here's the manufacturer's site for their keyboards: http://www.goldtouch.com/c-2-adjustable-keyboards-numeric-keypads.aspx

Comment Re:Great question (Score 3, Informative) 218

by spacey (#32104068) Attached to: Consumer Webcams With High-Quality Sensors?

From what I remember, the eye-fi doesn't delete content locally, it just uploads. so you'd have to play around with some way of having the modified firmware delete the oldest N photos or something.

Ahh... it seems that the newest cards will auto-delete: http://www.dpreview.com/news/1001/10010501eyefiprox2.asp

-Peter

Comment Re:Beware the key term there: (Score 2, Interesting) 252

by spacey (#31748078) Attached to: Memory Management Technique Speeds Apps By 20%

One of the goals was to *not* require a rewrite of applications, and they succeeded on that goal.

This is interesting stuff, but if the goal is to not have to change source, isn't this sub-par? Hasn't the Boehm collector been tested as faster than using malloc/free forever? See http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/184401632;jsessionid=IRGXEUGCDWGBJQE1GHOSKH4ATMY32JVN for a trivial example (a paper at ftp.cs.boulder.edu is offline, I guess with the server for now).

-Peter
Technology

Tracking Water Molecules Could Unlock Secrets 102

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the h-two-ohmygosh dept.
ScienceDaily is reporting that several new discoveries about the simple molecule of water have kicked off a surge in research that scientists believe could lead to solving some of the world's most tricky problems from agriculture to cancer. "Understanding how individual water molecules maneuver in a system to form fleeting tetrahedral structures and how changing physical conditions such as temperatures and pressures affect the amount of disorder each imparts on that system may help scientists understand why certain substances, like drugs used in chemotherapy, are soluble in water and why some are not. It could also help understand how this changing network of bonds and ordering of local tetrahedrality between water molecules changes the nature of protein folding and degradation. 'Understanding hydrophobicity, and how different conditions change it, is probably one of the most fundamental components in understanding how proteins fold in water and how different biomolecules remain stable in it,' says Kumar. 'And if we understand this, we will not only have a new way of thinking about physics and biology but also a new way to approach health and disease.'"
Games

Whatever Happened To Second Life? 209

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-ralph dept.
Barence writes "It's desolate, dirty, and sex is outcast to a separate island. In this article, PC Pro's Barry Collins returns to Second Life to find out what went wrong, and why it's raking in more cash than ever before. It's a follow-up to a feature written three years ago, in which Collins spent a week living inside Second Life to see what the huge fuss at the time was all about. The difference three years can make is eye-opening."
Hardware Hacking

Revisiting DIY HERF Guns 425

Posted by kdawson from the scrambled-not-fried dept.
An anonymous reader writes "HERF guns have previously been regarded as nothing more than an interesting project with uses ranging from at-home experiments to malicious pranks. But the deployment of 'morally gray' forms of high-tech crowd control, such as the recent use of a sound cannon against domestic protesters, along with the likely future unleashing of the pain gun on more than just 'foreign terrorists,' creates a new purpose for these relatively easily assembled devices. Could HERF guns become a new method to counter the silencing of protesters via these sophisticated attacks, or is there any other way to prevent such efficient, convenient crowd dispersal?"
Programming

The Duct Tape Programmer 551

Posted by kdawson from the coders-at-work dept.
theodp writes "Joel Spolsky sings the praises of The Duct Tape Programmer, who delivers programming teams from the evil of 'architecture astronauts' who might otherwise derail a project with their faddish programming craziness. The say-no-to-over-engineering attitude of the Duct Tape Programmer stems not from orneriness, but from the realization that even a 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it's in your lab where you're endlessly polishing the damn thing. Like Steve Jobs, Duct Tape Programmers firmly believe that Real Artists Ship."
Linux

Best Backup Server Option For University TV Station? 272

Posted by samzenpus from the saving-the-reruns dept.
idk07002 writes 'I have been tasked with building an offsite backup server for my university's television station to back up our Final Cut Pro Server and our in-office file server (a Drobo), in case the studio spontaneously combusts. Total capacity between these two systems is ~12TB. Not at all full yet, but we would like the system to have the same capacity so that we can get maximum life out of it. It looks like it would be possible to get rack space somewhere on campus with Gigabit Ethernet and possibly fiber coming into our office. Would a Linux box with rsync work? What is the sweet spot between value and longevity? What solution would you use?'
Data Storage

Build Your Own $2.8M Petabyte Disk Array For $117k 487

Posted by Soulskill from the we-know-exactly-what-you'd-do-with-that-much-storage dept.
Chris Pirazzi writes "Online backup startup BackBlaze, disgusted with the outrageously overpriced offerings from EMC, NetApp and the like, has released an open-source hardware design showing you how to build a 4U, RAID-capable, rack-mounted, Linux-based server using commodity parts that contains 67 terabytes of storage at a material cost of $7,867. This works out to roughly $117,000 per petabyte, which would cost you around $2.8 million from Amazon or EMC. They have a full parts list and diagrams showing how they put everything together. Their blog states: 'Our hope is that by sharing, others can benefit and, ultimately, refine this concept and send improvements back to us.'"
Education

US Colleges Say Hiring US Students a Bad Deal 490

Posted by CmdrTaco from the talking-to-you-cliff dept.
theodp writes "Many US colleges and universities have notices posted on their websites informing US companies that they're tax chumps if they hire students who are US citizens. 'In fact, a company may save money by hiring international students because the majority of them are exempt from Social Security (FICA) and Medicare tax requirements,' advises the taxpayer-supported University of Pittsburgh (pdf) as it makes the case against hiring its own US students. You'll find identical pitches made by the University of Delaware, the University of Cincinnati, Kansas State University, the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, Iowa State University, and other public colleges and universities. The same message is also echoed by private schools, such as John Hopkins University, Brown University, Rollins College and Loyola University Chicago."
Security

How Can I Tell If My Computer Is Part of a Botnet? 491

Posted by timothy from the check-if-you-are-running-windows dept.
ashraya writes "My father (not too computer literate) has a desktop and a laptop both running Windows in his network back in Hyderabad, India. I set up a Linksys router for him to use with his broadband service. For some reason, he reset the config on the Linksys, and connected it up without wireless security, and also with the default admin password for some time. As you would expect, both of the Windows computers got 'slow,' and the desktop stopped connecting to the internet completely for some reason. As I logged in remotely to 'fix' things, I noticed on the Linksys' log that the laptop was making seemingly random connections to high-numbered ports on various IPs. I did an nslookup on the IPs to see that they were all either in Canada or US, with Comcast and other ISP addresses. Is that a sign that the computers were in a botnet? Are the other hosts part of the botnet too? (I have since rebuilt the Windows hosts, and these connections are not happening now. I have also secured the Linksys.)"

Comment Re:Its not rocket surgery... (Score 2, Interesting) 865

by spacey (#28552513) Attached to: Staying In Shape vs. a Busy IT Job Schedule?

At my office we've been having some fun by trying to get to 100 pushups using the schedule at the site hundredpushups.com. I haven't gotten to 100, but I've gotten as far as 83, which from 35 6 weeks ago is still huge.

These sorts of programs work out much better with peers so that you can encourage each other. It's something you can do at your desk if you have 2 or 3 co-workers who want to join you and it's really invigorating. You get to see what kind of people you're working with, too.

-Peter

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