patfla - Slashdot User

Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability 248

Posted by timothy on Friday February 26, 2010 @08:56PM from the only-need-half-as-many dept.

PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."

Leak Shows US Lead Opponent of ACTA Transparency 164

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 25, 2010 @04:31PM from the putting-on-an-acta dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the debate over ACTA transparency, the secret copyright treaty, many countries have taken public positions that they support release of the actual text, but that other countries do not. Since full transparency requires consensus of all the ACTA partners, the text simply can't be released until everyone is in agreement. A new leak from the Netherlands fingers who the chief opponents of transparency are: the United States, South Korea, Singapore, and Denmark lead the way, with Belgium, Germany, and Portugal not far behind as problem countries."

Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @05:23PM from the well-it-wouldn't-be-polite-to-patch-windows dept.

Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Comment Re:All makes perfect sense, until (Score 1) 317

by patfla on Friday March 14, 2008 @10:01PM (#22756968) Attached to: Samurai-Sword Maker May Cool Nuclear Revival

Also look up some less well-known names like Allengheny Technologies. You're trafficking in the usual truisms about what the US economy has evolved into. The reality (which I don't pretend to have a full handle on) is much more complex.

You may be aware of that business about how the US share of world manufacturing "value added" is still the highest and has in fact been quite stable since WWII.

As a start, for the US data alone, I found it, of all places, at http://www.census.gov/mcd/. I'm still trying to make sense of it all, but one thing I think I've determined is that the largest industry in the US in terms of 'value added' is ... Chemicals.

The industry classifications to be found in the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) are an international standard and so those are comparable.

The thing that makes me most uncomfortable is exchange rates. But recently, I've developed the theory that while PPP is all the rage, it, in fact, applies only to domestic economies and that Nominal values are in fact the best current way to measure international trade. And therefore, in some sense, comparative advantage.

Information on OLAP Databases? 34

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @11:45AM from the new-ways-to-look-at-your-data dept.

oh-lap asks: "One relatively new topic in computing that hasn't seen much mainstream press (yet) is OLAP or multidimensional databases. OLAP is based on the principle of organizing your data along a number of dimensions which can be pivoted and drilled into. OLAP sounds like a neat idea and represent an abstraction of several problems which I've seen tackled by custom coding jobs. The biggest problem with OLAP right now, seems to be a dire lack of expert knowledge in the area and no standardized API or query language for OLAP servers. But the lack of decent introductory reading material is particularly bothersome. If there are any experts (or even dabblers) in OLAP out there, what are the sources of information (books, websites, forums, webblogs, etc) that you go to for info about OLAP? The issues I'm interested in are wide ins scope and include everything from querying and data modeling to actual design of an OLAP server. Any pointers"

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