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Comment Re:Ratios for overseeded torrents? (Score 2, Informative) 201

by Alsee (#28804751) Attached to: Researchers Outline Targeted Content Poisoning For P2P Data

I think he has used torrent before. His complaint about "overseeded" torrents was that *you* get squeezed out from offering any upload on a torrent that has a large ratio of seeders-to-downloaders. If you download some old massively-seeded-and-few-downloaders file, it becomes almost impossible to meet private tracker upload ratios. You could seed for a month and end up with a 0.1 upload ratio.

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Comment Re:Halfway Competent (Score 1) 665

by GameboyRMH (#28784293) Attached to: Undercover Cameras Catch PC Repair Scams, Privacy Violations
One time by dad's PC suddenly wouldn't POST - no beeps or anything. I figured it had to be the CPU, mobo, or PSU. I tried another PSU and got the same thing so it had to be the CPU or mobo. We didn't have any spare CPUs so I had to send it to a shop to get tested.

Turned out to be the video card :-\ It must have shorted itself to cause such a problem.

Comment Re:For the greater good (Score 0) 565

by Balial (#27854043) Attached to: Debian Switching From Glibc To Eglibc

That quote in the story is way out of context. Ulrich's words were:

Any change will negatively impact well designed architectures for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.

As the maintainer of GLIBC, he has to be the steward for the greater good of all users. And sometimes that means pissing off a vocal constituency.

Anyone claiming that x86 is a "well designed architecture" and, by comparison, ARM is "crap", is clearly wrong.

Comment Re:A better plan? (Score 1, Insightful) 830

by Balial (#27690847) Attached to: Mariners Develop High Tech Pirate Repellents

Is it more humane to flood those little pirate boats and let the pirates drown then just shooting them in the head?

If you give the merchant vessels guns, when the pirates do succeed, they will have more guns and it becomes a more deadly game for everyone. If you give the merchant vessels non-leathal, not so portable repellants then you don't risk them using those weapons against you.
Space

Space Litter To Hit Earth Tomorrow 443

Posted by kdawson from the leave-only-memories-take-only-footprints dept.
A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening. The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned — by hand — from the ISS's robot arm in July 2007. Since the time of re-entry is uncertain, so is the location. "NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). ... [T]he largest pieces could slam into the Earth's surface at about 100 mph (161 kph). ...'If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."
Operating Systems

Dell Considers Bundling Virtualization on Mobos 138

Posted by Zonk from the wave-of-the-future dept.
castrox writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Dell may be considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? 'Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this ... The big question is: which hypervisor will Dell bundle with its machines? Vance suggests hypervisors from XenSource and VMware as two options, but I think that VMware is the most likely candidate since it seems to be the x86 virtualization solution of choice for the moment. However, if Dell doesn't try too hard to lock it down, this system could easily be modified in an aftermarket fashion to include almost any hypervisor that could fit on the flash chip.'"
Math

Optical Solution For an NP-Complete Problem? 232

Posted by kdawson from the too-bad-about-the-noise dept.
6 writes to let us know that two optical researchers have proposed, as a thought experiment, a novel idea for solving the traveling salesman problem. From the abstract: We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment."
Google

Google News Allowing Story Participants To Comment 100

Posted by kdawson from the starting-at-web-1.0 dept.
Jamie found this analysis of Google News's foray into community commentary. They are starting it off by only allowing people involved with the story to comment — and participants must first be authenticated by email. The article rounds up other bloggers' views on the game-changing nature, and the possible dangers to Google, of this new feature. Here is a sample of comments to a Google News story.
Power

NASA Tests Hydrogen-Fueled BMW 420

Posted by kdawson from the hold-the-lox dept.
Rio sends us word that NASA has completed an 8-week test of a fleet of BMW luxury sedans powered by liquid hydrogen at Kennedy Space Center. The new BMW Hydrogen 7 sedan uses the same fuel that powers the space shuttle and reduces CO2 emissions by 90 percent, according to a news release. Its engine can burn gasoline or liquid hydrogen and can switch seamlessly between the two. From the article: "One hundred BMW Hydrogen 7s have been built, and 25 are used in test programs in the US. The cars have already covered more than 1.3 million miles in test programs around the globe."
Security

Cambridge Researcher Breaks OpenBSD Systrace 194

Posted by kdawson from the without-a-trace dept.
An anonymous reader writes "University of Cambridge researcher Robert Watson has published a paper at the First USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology in which he describes serious vulnerabilities in OpenBSD's Systrace, Sudo, Sysjail, the TIS GSWTK framework, and CerbNG. The technique is also effective against many commercially available anti-virus systems. His slides include sample exploit code that bypasses access control, virtualization, and intrusion detection in under 20 lines of C code consisting solely of memcpy() and fork(). Sysjail has now withdrawn their software, recommending against any use, and NetBSD has disabled Systrace by default in their upcoming release."
Graphics

Algorithm Seamlessly Patches Holes In Images 198

Posted by kdawson from the mind-the-gap dept.
Beetle B. writes in with research from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating a new way to replace arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner. From the abstract: "In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user."
Media

Blockbuster Throws Hat into Movie Download Business 72

Posted by samzenpus from the no-more-late-charges dept.
jtroutman writes "Stepping into the ring to compete with entities such as Amazon, CinemaNow and, of course, NetFlix, Blockbuster announced today the acquisition of Movielink, LLC. The deal had been scheduled to take place earlier this year, but was quashed amid trouble between the then CEO, John Antioco, and the Board of Directors."
Robotics

DARPATech Shows off Robot Doc and Cancer Breathalyzer 73

Posted by samzenpus from the cyborg-monkey-still-a-dream dept.
mattnyc99 writes "DARPATech, the Pentagon research arm's annual R&D free-for-all, has some pretty groundbreaking stuff on display this year: the first portable, self-contained robotic surgeon (which a Defense Dept. scientist said would be deployed by 2009), plus a breath-testing gadget that can scan for multiple diseases (including breast cancer) and three new autonomous 'bots that reflect the Pentagon's increasing need for autonomous machinery as the IED-filled Iraq war continues."

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