Comment Re:They built a tuple store. (Score 2, Interesting) 178
If I understand the grand-parent post and this space in general correctly, think things like BigTable at google or open-source implementations like Hypertable or HBase.
Comment still waiting for the yes(1) screenshot ;( (Score 5, Funny) 72
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
Comment nyt article on caribbean black cake (rum & fru (Score 2, Informative) 307
I read this article in the Times a year ago and it still makes me hungry to think of it: A Fruitcake Soaked in Tropical Sun, covering the tradition of "black cake, a spicy, fragrant fruitcake steeped in dark rum and tradition that is a Christmas classic throughout the English-speaking Caribbean." I foresee a trip over to brooklyn sometime in my near future.
Comment Re:vi is for building emacs (Score 2, Informative) 412
Solaris, it's been said, has a great kernel and an utterly shit userland (i.e. the tools you actually interact with). I can almost guarantee you that at some point the admins of your system have gotten pissed off at the Sun-shipped utils (from hell's heart, sun tar, I stab at thee) and have installed some variety of 3rd-party-freeware utilities on the system (either Sun's freeware, Sun Freeware [different], or Blastwave freeware come to mind). You might try looking, if you haven't yet, in
Submission + - TiVoToGo for Mac Announced
An anonymous reader writes: After much anticipation, some back peddling, a bite of hope, and a delayed release date, TiVoToGo Mac Edition is here. While there have been some unofficial hacks, those solutions have not been ideal for everyone. With support for transferring shows and burning to DVD/iPod, TiVoToGo is bundled as a part of Roxio's Toast Titanium software that will be announced tomorrow at Macworld.
Submission + - A shadow lies upon all BSD distributions
Alan Trick writes: "Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected.
The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.
At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.
At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
Submission + - Principality of Sealand for Sale
glomph writes: "The little structure/sovereign nation on concrete pillars in the North Sea 7 miles east of Harwich, UK has been a recurring theme on Slashdot over the past few years. Now it can be yours!. Read the story for a quick synopsis of the history (kidnapping! piracy! international intrigue!) that goes along with this little piece of Heaven. Maybe someone will revive the 'ultra secure data centre' scheme which bounced around for a while."
Submission + - Sealand put up for sale
antic writes: The Principality of Sealand is up for sale. The 550 square metre steel platform boasts "uninterrupted sea views", complete privacy and has been mentioned on Slashdot in the past for its offers of hosting outside the jurisdiction of (some) traditional laws.
ABC News has more
ABC News has more
Submission + - Open Source GPU produced
Watson Ladd writes: The Open Graphics Project Open Graphics Project has made their first board. It is currently in testing. Verilog authors are welcome to contribute. Current wishlist includes hardware T&L and raytracing.
Submission + - Blocking countries available for shared servers
Mopar93 writes: "For almost a year now, I've had a very good country blocking package available for free downloading from http://fixingtheweb.com that works on dedicated servers, but now I've developed a very efficient method for blocking any number of countries from a website that runs on a shared server. A small amount of rewrite code in an .htaccess file calls up a php utility that performs all the work. It's fast, efficient, and free, and helps protect your website, including your forums, blogs, chatrooms, and bandwidth usage. You can block any and all the countries you wish."
Submission + - Daylight Saving Time change and datacenters
Cheeze writes: As I am sure some of you know, Daylight Saving Time is slated to change this year thanks to The Energy Policy Act of 2005. This means nothing to the large majority of the population except they will either sleep late one day or have to commute in the dark. To a select few, this is a crunch time akin to the y2k fiasco, only there has been almost zero publicity recently. These select few are the ones responsible for updating the millions of computers, both servers and workstations, with the new time zone information. For newer servers, this usually means just install a patch and reboot (which is slightly more than mildly inconvenient). For older servers, this is basically an "End of Life" declaration. Servers running software for which no patch is available will be unable to update their own clocks. This doesn't seem like such a big deal until you realize Microsoft is only offering patches for WindowsXP and newer and Sun is not supporting Solaris 7 and older. That should knock a large percentage of the computers 1 hour off for a few weeks this spring. What are you doing in your datacenter to prepare?
Submission + - Get RSS feeds for scientific literature
gmsieling writes: "After working to improve the quality of our code base at work, I thought it would be interesting to get alerts when people published papers on software engineering. I found a site that will create the feeds from search results automatically, or if you prefer, send you email alerts when new results appear. I wrote up a description of how to do this."
Submission + - 80% discount on mac software, unique?
jetuser writes: "Macheist.com has revealed their final bundle deal. For $49.99 , you can recieve these programs: Delicioius Library, FotoMagico, ShapeShifter, DEVONthink personal, Disco, RapidWeaver, iClip 4, One Pangea Game of choice, NewsFire, TextMate. NewsFire was locked until the goal of $50,000 for charity had been reached. TextMate will remain locked until $100,000 is reached. 25% of all purchases will go toward charities. You can choose to split your money between all 8 charities or send it to one of your choice."
' Naughty Bits' Decision Not So Nice 459
Many readers found stifling Judge Richard P. Matsch's decision yesterday that Cleanflix, a service selling versions of popular movies edited (some would say censored) to remove violence, nudity and other elements, was in violation of U.S. copyright law for selling these edited versions, while others welcomed the decision as appropriately respecting the intent of those who made the original movies. Read on for the Backslash summary of the conversation, with some of the best comments of the more than 1200 that readers contributed to the story.
