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Operating Systems

First Look At VMware's vSphere "Cloud OS" 86

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the trusting-someone-else-with-your-data dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes VMware's purported 'cloud OS,' vSphere 4, for a test drive. The bottom line: 'VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments.' Among the features Venezia finds particularly worthwhile is vSphere's Fault Tolerance: 'In a nutshell, this allows you to run the same VM in tandem across two hardware nodes, but with only one instance actually visible to the network. You can think of it as OS-agnostic clustering. Should a hardware failure take out the primary instance, the secondary instance will assume normal operations instantly, without requiring a VMotion.'"

Comment Weighing the evidence (Score 2, Insightful) 1186

by Kaseijin (#28012701) Attached to: US To Require That New Cars Get 42 MPG By 2016

The principles on which America was founded were the ability to run a slave farm without having to pay taxes to Britain, and only allowing rich white men to vote.

Slavery was a source of contention between Northern and Southern states from the beginning. Every state north of Delaware abolished it by 1804. It remained legal in Britain until 1840.

Taxes in the colonies were relatively low.

Neither country guaranteed all women the right to vote until the 1920s. A large minority of British men were disenfranchised by property requirements until after World War I, and a significant number of landowners could vote in multiple districts until 1948.

Comment An accident of language and history (Score 1) 356

by Kaseijin (#27685107) Attached to: Copyright Lobby Targets "Pirate Bay For Books"

It seems to me that "copyright" refers, in the most straightforward way possible, to the "right to copy."

Etymologically, the 'copy' in 'copyright' refers to the original work. The earliest copyright statutes restricted printing specifically. When the laws were broadened much later, it was primarily to cover new technologies for publishing works, like the phonograph. Copyright includes an exclusive right to reproduction because technologies to reproduce information grew diverse before they grew cheap.
PC Games (Games)

Stardock, Microsoft Unveil Their Own New Anti-Piracy Methods 232

Posted by Soulskill from the rebranding-was-more-effective-before-the-internet dept.
Island Dog sends news that shortly after Valve showed off their new anti-piracy methods in Steamworks, Microsoft and Stardock were quick to demonstrate their new, similar technologies as well. All three companies are bending over backwards to say that this is not traditional DRM. Stardock (the company behind the Gamer's Bill of Rights) calls their system Game Object Obfuscation (Goo), "a tool that allows developers to encapsulate their game executable into a container that includes the original executable plus Impulse Reactor, Stardock's virtual platform, into a single encrypted file. When a player runs the game for the first time, the Goo'd program lets the user enter in their email address and serial number which associates their game to that person as opposed to a piece of hardware like most activation systems do. Once validated, the game never needs to connect to the Internet again." Microsoft's update to Games for Windows Live has similar protections. "You can sign in and play your game on as many systems as possible, but you have to have a license attached to your account. Of course, this only works for online games."
Sci-Fi

Michael Crichton Dead At 66 388

Posted by samzenpus from the velociraptors-confirm-it dept.
Many readers have submitted stories about the death of Michael Crichton. The 66-year-old author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain died unexpectedly Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," a press release said. In addition to writing, he also directed such sci-fi classics as Westworld and Runaway. Crichton was married five times and had one child.

Feed Wired: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: Fact or Fiction? (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
Dozens of public interest groups are urging the trade representatives from several nations, including the United States and European Union, to divulge the contents of a proposed treaty to strengthen intellectual property rights. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is said to criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, allow iPods to be searched at borders and require internet service companies to monitor customers' online activities.
The Courts

Indian Woman Convicted of Murder By Brain Scan 453

Posted by CmdrTaco from the 1984-came-a-few-years-late dept.
Kaseijin writes "Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan claims his Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test is so accurate, it can tell whether a person committed or only witnessed an act. In June, an Indian judge agreed, using BEOS to find a woman guilty of killing her former fiancé. Scientific experts are calling the decision 'ridiculous' and 'unconscionable,' protesting that Mukundan's work has not even been peer reviewed. How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible? Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?"
The Courts

Submission + - Indian Woman Convicted of Murder by Brain Scan (iht.com)

Submitted by
Kaseijin
Kaseijin writes: "Neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan claims his Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test is so accurate, it can tell whether a person committed or only witnessed an act. In June, an Indian judge agreed, using BEOS to find a woman guilty of killing her former fiancé. Scientific experts are calling the decision "ridiculous" and "unconscionable", protesting that Mukundan's work has not even been peer reviewed. How reliable should a test have to be, when eyewitnesses are notoriously fallible? Does a person have a right to privacy over their own memories, or should society's interest in holding criminals accountable come first?"

Feed Schneier: BlackBerry Giving Encryption Keys to Indian Government (schneier.com)

From feed by bsfeed
RIM encrypts e-mail between BlackBerry devices and the server the server with 236-bit AES encryption. The Indian government doesn't like this at all; they want to snoop on the data. RIM's response was basically: that's not possible. The Indian government's counter was: Then we'll ban BlackBerries. After months of threats, it looks like RIM is giving in to Indian demands...
Space

Submission + - Schoolboy Incorrect on Correcting NASA

Submitted by Aziabel
Aziabel writes: The Register reports: "Widespread media reports claim that a German schoolboy has recalculated the likelihood of a deadly planet-smasher asteroid hitting the Earth, and found the catastrophe is enormously more likely than NASA thought. The boy's sums were said to have been checked by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), and found to be correct.
There's only one problem with the story: the kid's sums are in fact wrong, NASA's are right, and the ESA swear blind they never said any different. An ESA spokesman in Germany told the Reg this morning: "A small boy did do these calculations, but he made a mistake... NASA's figures are correct."
And NASA says: [The asteroid will pass] within the distance of Earth's geosynchronous satellites. However, because Apophis will pass interior to the positions of these satellites at closest approach, in a plane inclined at 40 degrees to the Earth's equator and passing outside the equatorial geosynchronous zone when crossing the equatorial plane, it does not threaten the satellites in that heavily populated region."

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