Comment Re:Uneducated Virtualization Suggestion (Score 1) 332
*slaps head* Yep. Java should do it, but you're also dead on with respect to the slowness.
Comment Uneducated Virtualization Suggestion (Score 4, Interesting) 332
Maybe this is how it already works - but if it isn't here's an avenue I would investigate:
Shouldn't it be possible for Steam to build a hypervisor type environment? If they have a common hypervisor they port the game once to run in that environment. Then all they need to do is get their hypervisor running on Windows, *NIX, MAC, whatever.
There's definitely some additional processing overhead on this, but it seems that it would be a very efficient model once you have the hypervisor built. I would think you could probably push the specs/API/etc to the game publishers and have the game developer team adopt their game to the platform.
I don't know anything about how Steam works under the covers so maybe they're already doing this. I'm curious, but not enough to do the legwork.
Comment Spice (Score 5, Funny) 878
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion
Comment Re:what could go wrong? (Score 2) 279
Or if you do have them fall into the wrong hands, you now have a credible threat that will justify legislation to force the civilian air fleet to install expensive countermeasures. At the same time you will also have justified research projects to develop the next generations of stealth and anti-air missile technology for the military. Finally since the technology will now be well understood by potential nation-state adversaries, you have also justified research projects for the next generation of anti-air portable missile systems.
Qui bono?
No, I don't really buy in to any of this as a motivator - but these reactions do seem to be plausible consequences of letting this type of technology out in to the wild.
Comment And this helps the consumer how? (Score 3, Insightful) 376
Seriously, +1 Internets to the first person who can put a positive spin on this one. Wow. Just wow.
Comment Re:Are you a human being? (Score 5, Informative) 527
How soon we forget:
-War of 1812
-Mexican American War
-First World Trade Center
-Oklahoma City
-More bombings, assassinations, and other acts of terrorism too numerous to list.
Comment Is anyone surprised by this? (Score 4, Interesting) 220
I know I'm not. They can't upgrade the infrastructure fast enough to keep up with the explosion in devices and bandwidth-hungry applications, so they rate-limit, restrict, and jack the rates on an increasingly over-subscribed (with corresponding decreases in performance) in the interest of keeping things just usable enough to not lose too many customers.
It's not like there are a lot of alternative providers out there who offer better service or more compelling pricing....
Comment You are worrying about the wrong stuff (Score 1) 386
An electro magnetic event (man-made or natural) that is sufficiently powerful enough to corrupt magnetically stored data is also more than likely going to be sufficiently powerful to really mess with everything that relies on microprocessors to work.
There has been some proposals around requiring the electric industry to harden their infrastructure and systems to deal with this type of event. Assume the utilities do manage to somehow fund this type of hardening (which would be a massive undertaking in both time and expense). You still need to ask yourself what is going to be left to consume this power. The event is likely to leave many if not most things inoperable on a very wide scale. This means cell phones, computers, televisions, air conditioners, refrigerators, stoves. Any car made after around 1980 is probably also a non-starter. So there's power available, but not much left to consume it. Even if you have protected your data and your data center and have power, what percentage of companies have not?
This would be a hugely disruptive event that would take massive effort and years to recover from for any modern society. Maybe when the dust settles it might be nice to know what you have in your 401(k) and how much back taxes you owe; but then again it's equally possible that all this stuff will be irrelevant in the "new normal."
I agree that this is not an "extinction event" but it could very easily be sufficient to significantly change the political and societal landscape.
Comment Re:Earth is seeking balance (Score 1) 214
Thank you for the sudden and entirely unwelcome steampunk-esque vision of some battered guy covered in soot shoveling coal in to a raging furnace with arcane pipes running to filthy server racks.
Comment Re:Your staff (Score 1) 432
See if you can get approval to for contracting with a uniform-supply company to furnish you and your staff with identical sets of snappy-looking jumpsuits. This will be met skeptically at first but eventually embraced by the group as they realize that:
1) They no longer have to pay for "work clothes"
2) When they are crawling around tracing cables they are not ruining their work attire
3) They no longer have to worry about finding a clean shirt to go to work (assuming you contract with a service that also provides laundering)
4) They no longer have to think about what they're wearing.
I've always thought this would be a great plan for those in the IT trenches, probably since the first time I ruined a tie or pair of new pants crawling under a desk or behind a server rack 20 years ago.
Comment Re:Good for the Judges (Score 1) 218
When deploying an 802.1x WLAN infrastructure, the way I provide more bandwidth for an increasing user population is to add access points to my topology. This allows for fewer users per access point, which provides the users with more effective bandwidth. An ancillary benefit is my topology tends to have more fault tolerance with lower degradation in the event of a node failure.
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but can you explain how this principle would not work for a cellular data provider's network? Would adding more cells not yield similar benefits?
If the principles are roughly the same, then I would contend that providers may address the challenges of serving more bandwidth over limited spectrum by adding more cells (which granted means they are making a substantial capital investment in their network infrastructure).
Submission + - Schneier on Security: Camera-Transparent Plastic (schneier.com)
Submission + - Watching a Botnet From the Inside (threatpost.com)
Trailrunner7 writes: When you hear about botnets such as Rustock, Mariposa or Grum being taken down, one of the tactics that's usually involved is sinkholing. The technique, which involves pointing the infected machines to a server controlled by good guys rather than attackers, often is used as one of the last steps to take the botnet offline. But some recent work done by researchers at Damballa took a slightly different tack and used the sinkhole as a way to study a recently discovered botnet in operation, and what they found in their traffic analysis was pretty interesting.
The Damballa researchers had come across the botnet, which they have not named, in recent weeks and were looking at the way that the network used a domain-generation algorithm to come up with new command-and-control domains for infected machines to contact. Many botnets use this same method, as it give them the ability to react quickly when one domain is taken down or blacklisted by a large number of security products. When that happens, the botmaster can simply send out an instruction for all of the bots to connect to the new domain. Or the bots can be programmed to connect to various new domains at regular intervals, based on the date or other variables.
In this case, the researchers saw that a lot of bots were trying to connect to some domains that had not been registered yet. So they did some quick statistical analysis and picked out some of the most frequently requested domains and registered the domains themselves. The Damballa researchers then pointed the domains to a sinkhole maintained by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and sat back and watched the action.
The Damballa researchers had come across the botnet, which they have not named, in recent weeks and were looking at the way that the network used a domain-generation algorithm to come up with new command-and-control domains for infected machines to contact. Many botnets use this same method, as it give them the ability to react quickly when one domain is taken down or blacklisted by a large number of security products. When that happens, the botmaster can simply send out an instruction for all of the bots to connect to the new domain. Or the bots can be programmed to connect to various new domains at regular intervals, based on the date or other variables.
In this case, the researchers saw that a lot of bots were trying to connect to some domains that had not been registered yet. So they did some quick statistical analysis and picked out some of the most frequently requested domains and registered the domains themselves. The Damballa researchers then pointed the domains to a sinkhole maintained by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and sat back and watched the action.
Submission + - What REALLY Makes a Password Secure? (carbonblack.com)
rmurphydigital writes: "We're so often told to create complex online passwords that are easily remembered, but security experts know there's actually very little security in that. In order for a password to be secure, it needs to be truly random and unique. Here's the math behind why."
Submission + - Man who protested TSA by stripping is acquitted by judge (oregonlive.com)
AbrasiveCat writes: In an update to an earlier Slashdot story http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/04/18/1637222/man-protests-tsa-with-nudity, the Portland Oregon man who was arrested after stripping naked at a TSA checkpoint at Portland Airport was acquitted of indecent exposure charges. He successfully argued that he was protesting TSA actions, and his actions were protected speech under the Oregon Constitution.
So our answer from Alice's Restaurant for everyone to strip for TSA.
"You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."
So our answer from Alice's Restaurant for everyone to strip for TSA.
"You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."
