InitZero - Slashdot User

Comment Father Shot History That Looks More Than Current (Score 4, Interesting) 566

by InitZero on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @06:12PM (#38141774) Attached to: The Future of Protest In Panopticon Nation

My father was a college student and newspaper photographer in Ohio circa May 1970. His photos of student protest and civil disobedience remind me of what I'm seeing with the Occupy movement.

A year or more ago, I commented that I didn't think the Tea Party would have a long-term affect because they weren't motivated enough to burn down an ROTC building nor were the police scared enough of them to hit them with tear gas.

Agree with them or not. Understand them or not. The Occupy movement is going to leave a mark upon this country because they are willing to have skin in the game.

Cheers, Matt

Comment Drobo is Amazing and Exciting Technology (Score 1) 182

by InitZero on Thursday October 20, 2011 @01:33PM (#37778722) Attached to: Entry-Level NAS Storage Servers Compared

I'm entirely, completely in love with Drobo as a NAS device.

The ability to pop out a smaller drive and replace it with a larger drive is amazing - that is simply how technology is supposed to work. I have the Drobo FS at home and the DroboPro FS at work. Having used them for about a year and having tried to make them fail before I moved them into production, I'm very happy with their reliability and performance. (More on performance in a second.)

At the high end, I have used EMC and IBM solutions. At the low end, I've used every home-built and crappy RAID NAS solution you can name. Having used three of the five products reviewed by InfoWorld, I can say the Drobo is easily better than most of the units reviewed.

Performance on both the Drobo units I own isn't mind-blowing compared to some of the solutions that cost four or five times more. Ease of management, reliability, price point, expandability and overall functionality far offset the less than awesome performance. Still, as Lifix noted, there is more than enough performance to meet the needs of a home or small office. The only time I really notice the DroboPro FS slowing down is when we're running multiple rsync backups to it.

I have not been this excited and evangelical about a piece of technology since I got my TiVo.

Cheers,
Matt

(I'm not in any way compensated by Drobo but would be willing to entertain offers. Drobo? Are you listening? Send me free stuff.)

Comment Cookies Make it Easy to Go Over Calorie Cap (Score 1) 166

by InitZero on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @10:57AM (#37191380) Attached to: Verizon Makes It Easy To Go Over Your Data Cap

I don't see anything wrong with Verizon offering content that is so irrestable that they end up making more money. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is their sworn duty.

Grandmother's chocholate chip cookies make be deliciously irresistable but it is still my fault if I fall off my diet.

Cheers,
Matt

Comment NSA.gov is Only Worth 2,497 Points?!?! (Score 1) 106

by InitZero on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @02:56PM (#37121934) Attached to: Hackers Get Their Own Scoreboard and Rankings

Points are awarded based on the wrong algorithm. For example, NSA.gov is only worth 2,497 points but HomeDepot.com is worth 219,941? The Department of Homeland Security (dhs.gov) is worth 17,068 while facebook.com is 75,000,000? Really? Until the rankings better reflect the underlying difficulty and associated risk, I refuse to participate in this sham. Cheers, Matt

Comment Re:Circumventing our autopilot overlords (Score 1) 140

by InitZero on Friday June 24, 2011 @11:10AM (#36556118) Attached to: Volkswagon Shows Off Self-Driving Auto-Pilot For Cars

when vehicles without this technology are banned from motorways; similar to horse-drawn vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.

Point of order, at least in the United States, horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists are allowed to use public roads the same way they did before the invention of the automobile. Roads are very good about being backward compatible.

Cheers,
Matt

Comment Sound Like a Money Laundering Scheme? (Score 5, Interesting) 412

by InitZero on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @04:55PM (#36519564) Attached to: Paying Hacker Extortion

So you say a mid-sized company paid a $100,000 extortion? That money with 'poof', right? Untraceable, right? Call me the suspicious sort but are we sure this is extortion and not embezzlement?

Cheers,
Matt

Aussie City Braces For Worst Flood In 118 Years 214

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @10:03AM from the good-luck-down-there dept.

aesoteric writes "As parts of the Australian state of Queensland either experience or prepare for the worst floods to ravage the state in over 100 years, Australia's techies have taken it upon themselves to keep communications services on as the crisis unfolds. One man is mirroring flood information from a faltering Brisbane City Council website, and others have opened WiFi channels in their neighbourhood whilst mobile signal gets choked. But there is major damage to telco networks — at least one major fibre link has been severed by flood waters, telephone exchanges have been knocked offline and cell towers put on battery or generator back-up (or offline altogether). On a sombre note, the floods have claimed 10 lives, including children, and 78 people are still missing after facing a torrent of water up to 8 metres (26 feet) high."

Make-A-Wish Builds A Millennium Falcon Fort For Boy 94

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 23, 2010 @02:06PM from the it's-fast-enough-for-you-old-man dept.

Thanks to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and a production crew from Little Mountain Productions, a 9-year-old is getting the best fort ever. The crew is making him a Star Wars-themed fort with a gigantic Millennium Falcon with solar-powered LED interior and exterior lighting to sit on top. No word on how fast it can make the Kessel run, but lets hope the kid gets a long trip.

Comment Most Data Isn't Worth Encrypting (Score 1) 660

by InitZero on Monday January 18, 2010 @12:44PM (#30809178) Attached to: What's Holding Back Encryption?

Most data traveling in the clear has little value. What value it has may be momentary. A week from now, it is worthless.

Heck, most encrypted data has little value. The fact of the matter is most data is worthless junk.

I was the backup administrator for a Fortune 500 company's branch office of 1,500 users. I have a pretty good idea of what data existed because I was responsible for keeping it safe. Of the terabytes upon terabytes of data sitting in the archive, I could have put the worth-encrypting sensitive company information on a USB thumb-drive. There was really that little of it floating around.

So, the reason most data isn't encrypted is that there really is no reason for its encryption.

Cheers,
Matt

Wii Hardware Upgrade Won't Happen Soon 325

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 15, 2010 @03:52AM from the can't-show-ugly-mario-in-hd dept.

As high-definition graphics become more and more entrenched in this generation of game consoles, Nintendo has had to deal with constant speculation about a new version of the Wii that would increase its capabilities. Today, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime bluntly denied that a hardware revision was imminent, saying, "We are confident the Wii home entertainment console has a very long life in front of it." He added, "In terms of what the future holds, we've gone on record to say that the next step for Nintendo in home consoles will not be to simply make it HD, but to add more and more capability, and we'll do that when we've totally tapped out all of the experiences for the existing Wii. And we're nowhere near doing that yet."

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