Comment IPhone Nano ... (Score 2, Interesting) 231
Looking forward to teeny tiny iPhones
Comment Strategic Incompetence (Score 1) 495
You need to read Scott Adams' "The Joy of Work." If you really want to write articles and be in Marketing don't volunteer to do IT stuff. Clearly, your strategy of "quick and courteous service" (see page 40) is not working out for you.
Comment Adobe Crumbles (Score 1) 234
I find Adobe proprietary apps like pdf viewer and flash to be very annoying. I would love a nice rain to wash that mud away.
8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision 265
An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."
Quake 3 For Android 137
An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''
Owners Smash iPhones To Get Upgrades, Says Insurance Company 406
markass530 writes "An iPhone insurance carrier says that four in six claims are suspicious, and is worse when a new model appears on the market. 'Supercover Insurance is alleging that many iPhone owners are deliberately smashing their devices and filing false claims in order to upgrade to the latest model. The gadget insurance company told Sky News Sunday that it saw a 50-percent rise in claims during the month Apple launched the latest version, the iPhone 3GS.'"
Comment Re:No way. (Score 1) 979
I agree, have you ever read a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil book ? the guy can not write a decent paragraph. He should stick to synthesizers. I think that computers are instruments or tools like telescopes or microscopes. They allow us to peer into a universe of logic and math but, they are not 'intelligent'
Comment Note to Google: Infrastructure sucks (Score 1) 363
Having worked at UUNET/Worldcom I can tell you that building and maintaining infrastructure is a pain. What is Google going to do when a backhoe digs into their fiber feeder? I predict it will be 'beta' for a while and then dropped quietly.
How about customer service? Where is the 800 number? Oh I am just 'Labs' experiment? Sorry for bothering you. What is the name of that guy in the video, can I call him?
Researchers Pooh-Pooh Algae-Based Biofuel 238
Julie188 writes "Researchers from the University of Virginia have found that current algae biofuel production methods consume more energy, have higher greenhouse gas emissions and use more water than other biofuel sources, such as switchgrass, canola and corn. The researchers suggest these problems can be overcome by situating algae production ponds behind wastewater treatment facilities to capture phosphorous and nitrogen — essential algae nutrients that otherwise need to come from petroleum."
Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246
Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.
Comment Open Source Lab? Big Deal! (Score 1) 141
It's not like it's the Accounting department or HR. I have my own open source lab in my home.
Comment Re:No Comment (Score 1) 580
print "DEBUG: This is not a comment\n";
Comment It depends on your SLA (Score 1) 414
As long as you manage expectations and, make management aware of the costs vs. risk.
There are a lot of factors that determine the manpower needed:
1) Are backups of files required by all users or just a few users (ie CEO, finance, hr etc)
3) What is the expected work hours 24/7? or 8/5?
4) How much redundancy is built into the servers? If they are in pairs then one can go down and be fixed during regular work hours.
5) How is your storage set up ? Disk drives fail so you will need RAID, mirroring etc
6) Have the servers been properly maintained ? A lot of times applications are put on servers without correct startup and shutdown scripts. If there is a power outage and the servers are cycled they should come up correctly with all applications.
7) Do you have a monitoring system in place to try to catch problems before they become catastrophic failures.
8) Do you have good configuration management so that the systems are as identical as possible.
9) Do you have routine maintenance items automated - this is easier if you have item 8 above.
All of these have cost and risk associated with them so it is important to go over them with management. You can explain how if you don't have a decent backup plan then data can get "lost."
Comment Do it in your head and keep a Journal (Score 1) 428
If you are a one man IT shop then you can control your own work flow. Keep cryptic notes and todo lists in notebook in a journal style. File emails in different folders. It is funny but it works like a dynamic priority system. The hot projects will pop up any you will not have trouble remembering what to do. The repetative housecleaning tasks are good to do when you get tired of the 10 other things you need to do. One of the most rewarding things is going back through your notebook and cross of completed tasks. If you are good and can produce a lot of results then the management will not try to impose a "Time Management" system on you.
