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Software

BitTorrent For Enterprise File Distribution? 291

Posted by Soulskill from the make-it-so dept.
HotTuna writes "I'm responsible for a closed, private network of retail stores connected to our corporate office (and to each other) with IPsec over DSL, and no access to the public internet. We have about 4GB of disaster recovery files that need to be replicated at each site, and updated monthly. The challenge is that all the enterprise file replication tools out there seem to be client/server and not peer-to-peer. This crushes our bandwidth at the corporate office and leaves hundreds of 7Mb DSL connections (at the stores) virtually idle. I am dreaming of a tool which can 'seed' different parts of a file to different peers, and then have those peers exchange those parts, rapidly replicating the file across the entire network. Sounds like BitTorrent you say? Sure, except I would need to 'push' the files out, and not rely on users to click a torrent file at each site. I could imagine a homebrew tracker, with uTorrent and an RSS feed at each site, but that sounds a little too patchwork to fly by the CIO. What do you think? Is BitTorrent an appropriate protocol for file distribution in the business sector? If not, why not? If so, how would you implement it?"
Education

Twenty Years of Dijkstra's Cruelty 727

Posted by timothy from the pleasant-legacy dept.
WatersOfOblivion writes "Twenty years ago today, Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest computer scientist to never own a computer, hand wrote and distributed 'On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science' (PDF), discussing the then-current state of Computer Science education. Twenty years later, does what he said still hold true? I know it is not the case where I went to school, but have most schools corrected course and are now being necessarily cruel to their Computer Science students?" Bonus: Dijkstra's handwriting.
Robotics

Clarinet Wins Robotic Orchestra Competition 94

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the long-ways-from-virtuoso-still dept.
Sasha writes "The Australian designed robotic clarinet beat out Dutch and Finnish entries this year at the robotic orchestra competition. The researchers don't expect to replace human musicians, but are instead interested in what makes the difference between playing music well and playing music poorly. There is also a video available of the performance."
Security

WarGames and the Great Hacking Scare of 1983 331

Posted by timothy from the next-up-dead-code dept.
James W writes "Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of WarGames and Christopher Knight has written a retrospective about the film and its impact on popular culture. In addition to discussing how the movie has held up over time, WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers. I even heard one pundit proclaim that there was no need for regular people to be able to log in to a remote system: that if you need to access your bank account, a friendly teller was just a short drive away. And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too.'" 2008 is also 25 years after the real-life prevention of a WarGames-style nuclear incident.
Moon

NASA to Demonstrate Moon Rover 98

Posted by CmdrTaco from the 0-to-60-in-never dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA will this week demonstrate its lunar robot rover equipped with a drill designed to find water and oxygen-rich soil on the moon. NASA said the engineering challenge of building such as drilling system was daunting because a robot rover designed for prospecting within lunar craters has to operate in continual darkness at extremely cold temperatures with little power. The moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, so a lightweight rover will have a difficult job resisting drilling forces and remaining stable.The project is just one demonstration of the collaboration NASA is utilizing to bring together its next moon shot. For example, Carnegie Mellon was responsible for the robot's design and testing, and the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology built the drilling system. NASA's Glenn Research Center contributed the rover's power management system. NASA's Ames Research Center built a system that navigates the rover in the dark. The Canadian Space Agency funded a Neptec camera that builds three-dimensional images of terrain using laser light, NASA said."
Power

U of MI Produces Strongest Laser Ever 244

Posted by Zonk from the now-we-just-need-a-really-big-shark-and-we're-set dept.
eldavojohn writes "Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, the University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. It's about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds — some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. 'If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory ... To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M's Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.'" And ... cue the evil chortling.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Copyright advocacy group violates copyright (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
word munger
word munger writes: "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermark and all — without paying for their use! Clearly their agenda is simply to make using copyrighted materials inconvenient and expensive for everyone but THEMSELVES."
Windows

Submission + - Mark Russinovich about Vista network slowdown 1

Submitted by koro666
koro666 writes: In his latest blog post, Mark Russinovich analyzes the network slowdown experienced by some users when playing multimedia content. "Tests of MMCSS during Vista development showed that [...] heavy network traffic can cause enough long-running DPCs to prevent playback threads from keeping up with their media streaming requirements, resulting in glitching. MMCSS' glitch-resistant mechanisms were therefore extended to include throttling of network activity. It does so by issuing a command to the NDIS device driver [...] [to] pass along, at most 10 packets per millisecond (10,000 packets per second)."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Want American Tech Support from Dell? Pay $100 (dell.com)

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "I was looking for a new PC from Dell today and noticed the following choices:

Standard Celeron
Dual-Core Package
Productivity Package with 19" Flat Panel Monitor
North American Based Phone Tech Support Package

So, for an additional $100 or so and no monitor, you can get American tech support. Great."
Communications

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Lenovo Customer Service Tragedy (ripoffreport.com)

Submitted by
L Collins
L Collins writes: "I have been through the most nerve wracking and hellish experience with Lenovo over the purchase of a shiny new T60 Thinkpad Laptop. My initial experience was that Lenovo sent me out a laptop sans battery and power cord, and when I tried to return said laptop to them in favor of purchasing one locally at a retail store, I was given incorrect information as to how to go about returning said laptop. This ended up leaving me without a tracking number and lo & behold, Lenovo claims they never received the laptop back. Lenovo blames UPS, UPS blames the UPS store that it was dropped off at and the UPS store it was dropped off blames Lenovo. (Further details can be had at: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/269/RipOff02 69581.htm)

At this point, Lenovo has told me that I'm simply out my laptop AND the money used to purchase said laptop, leaving me with a $1600 credit card bill with nothing to show for it.

I guess my question to Slashdot, is: Has anyone else out there had any similar experiences with the customer service, and how have they been able to get them resolved? I've already tried the BBB, filing a dispute with my credit card company, Executive Customer Relations @ Lenovo and contacting the VP of Sales & Marketing @ Lenovo, all with no success. Does anyone have any insight as to what can be done past this point to recoup my money or my laptop?"
Businesses

Submission + - Buy.com overcharges thousands after making mistake

Submitted by matt
matt writes: On August, 7, 2007, Buy.com made a price mistake on a recent promotion that offered customers $15 off any item on their website. Many customers often collaborate and share "hot deals" with each other on websites, chat rooms, and forums. As a result, Buy.com was flooded with orders on August 7-9, 2007 from opportunistic customers ready to take advantage of this coupon. While Buy.com tried to stop many of the orders from shipping, they could not stop thousands of orders from leaving the warehouse. Many customers received their products, but they also received unauthorized charges on their credit cards for an additional $15. I personally, would not have purchased anything from Buy.com if I knew I would be paying $22.00 for an item instead of $7.00. Even though I only authorized a credit card transaction for $7.00, I was charged $22.00. Many internet forums and chat rooms are buzzing about Buy.com's unethical practices after they made an internet boo boo.

Feed Engadget: Systemax turns to VIA for new energy efficient PCs (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops

VIA's already helped Everex pump out what they claim to be the "world's most energy efficient notebook," and it now looks to be trying to do the same for Systemax, with VIA's low-power processors finding a home in the company's latest desktop PC. While they aren't going so far as to claim that they're the "world's most energy efficient," they are promising a significant cut in your power bills, thanks largely to the VIA pc2500G motherboard at the heart of the system and the low-power 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor attached to it. Otherwise, for $300 you'll get a barely adequate 512MB of RAM, an 80GB SATA hard drive, and a plain old DVD-ROM drive, with Windows XP Home serving as the OS. If that's not quite enough for you, an extra $100 will get you a combo optical drive and Windows XP Professional.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Businesses

Submission + - Dell begins their largest layoff ever. 3

Submitted by cyphercell
cyphercell writes: Dell has begun their largest series of layoffs ever. This morning at about 10:00am more than two hundred employees at Dell's Roseburg Oregon Call center found out that they no longer had jobs. Sparking what appears to be the beginning of year long run of layoffs for the company. http://www.newsreview.info/article/20070802/NEWS/7 0802014

Refuting local suspicions of malice Dell spokesman David Frink states:

... the closure has nothing to do with a lawsuit filed by employees of the Roseburg center in February, claiming Dell violated federal and state wage and hour laws.
http://www.newsreview.info/article/20070213/NEWS/7 0213020

and later says

...plans to reduce employment worldwide by 10 percent at the end of May.


Their plans to reduce employment can be found here:
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business /stories/technology/06/01/1dell.html

Here are some highlights:

Dell set to shed 8,800 workers...

Dell has 82,200 permanent workers, including 18,000 in Central Texas, and 5,300 temporary workers worldwide. The layoffs are expected to affect both groups...

In its last large-scale layoffs, Dell cut more than 5,000 jobs in Austin after the high-tech bust in 2001.

...many of the layoffs could come in Central Texas, where Dell is headquartered. In a March 29 report to clients, Goldman Sachs analysts said Dell might reduce the work force at its test and assembly facilities in the U.S. and Malaysia.

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