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Comment Re:Won't touch the cloud now. (Score 1) 117

Cloud computing is a marketing architecture, not a technical architecture.


Cloud computing is a form of shared hosting, just with more encapsulation; Clouds fall over the same way a server can fall over. It's hard to blame "The Cloud" when the reality is the people that were suckered in by obtuse, non-specific marketing are the ones at fault. The argument can even be made that Clouds are worse becuase instead of many discreet isolated servers you start sharing more single points of failure, which lead to IO bottlenecks, etc.
Hardware Hacking

DIY Laser Pistol Shoot 1MW Blasts 284

An anonymous reader writes "It doesn't get cooler than this — a German hacker put together a 1MW laser pistol capable of shooting straight through a razor blade with a single pulse. Quoting: 'Fitted with a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser, it fires off a 1 MW blast of infrared light once the capacitors have fully charged. The duration of the laser pulse is somewhere near 100ns, so he was unable to catch it on camera, but its effects are easily visible in whatever medium he has fired upon.'" Update: 03/17 18:22 GMT by T : Too bad; turns out it's "only" 1KW, rather than 1MW. I still want one.

Comment Re:In a free country (Score 1) 586

To be the devil's advocate - gathering evidence IS the attempt of proving guilt.

That makes no sense. You can't break-into someone's house to gather evidence just because you feel like it. There are rules that must be followed, and yes, the law applies to the govt. too. Even if they have the means to skirt the law via warrants, etc, they must follow procedure. TBH, I'm glad the judicial branch is starting to get a backbone.

IBM

Watch IBM's Watson On Jeopardy Tonight 293

JohnMurtari notes that the media hype machines are massively promoting tonight's battle between Jeopardy champions and a super computer. Yes it's a PR stunt. But I imagine the actual research probably had a lot of interesting problems to address. Anyway, you can learn about IBM Watson if you're interested. I'm sure the most amusing bits will be on YouTube about 30 seconds after air time.
AI

RoboEarth Teaches Robots to Learn From Peers 97

mikejuk writes "A world wide web for robots? It sounds like a crazy idea, but it could mean that once a task is learned, any robot can find out how to do it just by asking RoboEarth. From the article: 'It's not quite war-ready, but a new Skynet-like initiative called RoboEarth could have you reaching for your guide to automaton Armageddon sooner than you think. The network, which is dubbed the "World Wide Web for robots," was designed by a team of European scientists and engineers to allow robots to learn from the experience of their peers, thus enabling them to take on tasks that they weren't necessarily programmed to perform. Using a database with intranet and internet functionality, the system collects and stores information about object recognition, navigation, and tasks and transmits the data to robots linked to the network. Basically, it teaches machines to learn without human intervention.'"

Comment continue the support yourself (Score 1) 140

'However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE. " Remember Netbeans is just Forte - the whole thing is just a collection of modules. Fork the ruby module.

Submission + - DNF (srs) (youtube.com)

teknopurge writes: It's happened — 5.6.2011: Duke Nukem Forever will be released. We're still waiting to hear back on the cold-front blowing through hell. Satan is rumored to be displeased.

Comment Re:And Oracle supports EXABYTE sized databases (Score 1) 235

Try to deploy Postgres on a 5000 machine cluster, with replication and failover and then get back to me. And by "failover" here I mean the entire racks or ever network segments going away with nary a hiccup in serving, no manual intervention (except for bringing up replacement nodes), and no data loss.

See this is the problem: redundancy isn't the job of the DB: it's the job of the infrastructure. Tell you what, I'll deploy my 5000 postgres nodes and have everything vmotion and swing luns like a stripper working for her tuition and we'll see exactly why NoSQL DBs are exactly that. Replication? The SANs are mirrored over MPLS. Checkmate.

And if you think RDBMS are "suboptimal for straightfoward user profile storage.." there's a problem with your data model, not the system. A poor workman blames his tools.

My intention is not to come-off as vicious, though it may seem that way. I'm just really tired of people doing shit and thinking it's innovation, only becuase they are too ignorant to understand the problems they created their solutions for; either that or they forgot that something older then 15 years is available to do the same thing, only better.

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