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Comment Re:Come on people, (Score 1) 96

I find juniper's config mode and config file structure rather beautiful. As for their cli syntax, I don't actually see it as very different from cisco's.

if you want to clear arp cache, it makes sense that that's the actual command. no sane company would have "please make forgettings ...." or similar nonsense.

but anyway, did cisco really invent this cli syntax type? there's the Unix way of "command -x=1 -y=2 object" and there's the OpenVMS way of "command specifier anotherspecifier object". I don't think cisco can ever claim to have invented this non-unixlike cli.

i've never worked with anything older than openvms, so it's possible there's even more prior art.

Submission + - American Intelligence Agencies Building New Superconducting Supercomputer (upi.com)

An anonymous reader writes: UPI reports, "The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, a branch of the U.S. intelligence community, said in a press release that the agency has embarked on a multi-year research effort called the Cryogenic Computer Complexity program, or C3. Current supercomputing utilizes technology that relies on tens of megawatts and requires large amounts of physical space to house the infrastructure and power and cool the components. C3 hopes to use recent breakthroughs in supercomputing technologies ... to construct a superconducting supercomputer with "a simplified cooling infrastructure and a greatly reduced footprint." "The power, space, and cooling requirements for current supercomputers ... are becoming unmanageable," said Marc Manheimer, C3 program manager at IARPA. ... The international intelligence community has been competing to outpace each other and build the first computer to break the exaFLOP barrier for some time, but scaling out contemporary CMOS technologies to construct computers capable of exaFLOP calculations would require hundreds of megawatts to power, necessitating an energy source with an output equal to that of a single small nuclear reactor. ... Currently the record for single computer speed is China's Tianhe-2, ranked the world's fastest with a record of 33.86 petaFLOPS in June of 2013 ... In his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, best-selling author and journalist James Bamford reported that the NSA told the Pentagon it would need an exaFLOP computer by 2018 ..." — More at Defense Systems.

Comment Re: This is news, how exactly? (Score 4, Insightful) 187

i have an artificial ceiling on game prices. i am mentally unable to convince myself a game can be worth more than 9.99 no matter what. and even that is only for an AAA title or good flight simulator. fortunately, i've grown out of impatience long ago and don't mind buying the likes of Crysis 3 a year or 2 after release.

last year I decided to see what this steam thing was and installed it on my linux machine. it was during their christmas game sale. a LOT of slightly dated AAA (windows) games went for 3 - 9.99. now here's the thing. at those prices i bought around 40 games, most of which i later decided i didn't like and only played a few minutes of and some of them i never even installed. and at those prices, i didn't care!

but paying 60+ dollars for a game? simply NEVER GONNA HAPPEN!!! incompatible with a healthy human brain. distributors need to realise that for every sucker who pays, there are 100s willing to pay a sensible price (not steal). and for each of those, there are even more willing to buy it as a hmmm i'll play it when kids grow up for a dollar or two.

Submission + - Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers

jones_supa writes: Now that the PC gaming community has grown very large, it has become only a matter of hours before the copy protection of a major AAA title is cracked and put up for download after its official release, or sometimes, even before. However, it looks like CI Games is having great luck with its recently launched next-gen video game known as Lords of the Fallen, as its PC DRM still remains uncracked now after 3 days of release. The DRM solution that the game uses comes from a copyright protection company known as Denuvo, and it is apparently the same one that has been used in FIFA 15, which is also yet uncracked. While this DRM has kept the game from being pirated until now, it has also been speculated that this solution is supposedly the main cause behind several in-game bugs and crashes that are affecting users' gameplay experience. To improve stability, the developer is working on a patch that is aimed at fixing all performance issues. It remains officially unconfirmed if the new DRM solution is really causing all the glitches.

Comment Re:Phone Case? (Score 3, Interesting) 63

how will this work with fingers? i had a phone with narrow bezel (galaxy s4) and could not use it. it always assumed i was tapping the sides of screen with my palm, thumb, etc.. there was just no non-interfering way of holding it securely. when i got a case for it, the opposite happened - i could not tap on anything close to the edge. i got rid of it.

Submission + - Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants

sabri writes: NBC Bay Area reports about indentured servants in Silicon Valley, primarily H1-B visa holders. NBC Bay Area and CIR’s team discovered an organized system that supplies cheap labor made up of highly-educated and highly-skilled foreign workers who come to the US via H-1B visas.

It virtually makes these employees a slave,” said one worker who came from India more than a decade ago.

Submission + - Italian Supreme Court Bans the 'Microsoft Tax' (fsf.org)

An anonymous reader writes: In a post at the Free Software Foundation, lawyer Marco Ciurcina reports that the Italian Supreme Court has ruled that the practice of forcing users to pay for a Windows license when they buy a new PC is illegal. Manufacturers in Italy are now legally obligated to refund that money if a buyer wants to put GNU/Linux or another free OS on the computer. Ciurcina says, "The focus of the Court's reasoning is that the sale of a PC with software preinstalled is not like the sale of a car with its components (the 4 wheels, the engine, etc.) that therefore are sold jointly. Buying a computer with preinstalled software, the user is required to conclude two different contracts: the first, when he buys the computer; the second, when he turns on the computer for the first time and he is required to accept or not the license terms of the preinstalled software.9 Therefore, if the user does not accept the software license, he has the right to keep the computer and install free software without having to pay the 'Microsoft tax.'"

Submission + - BitTorrent Performance Test: Sync Is Faster Than Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox 1

An anonymous reader writes: Now that its file synchronization tool has received a few updates, BitTorrent is going on the offensive against cloud-based storage services by showing off just how fast BitTorrent Sync can be. More specifically, the company conducted a test that shows Sync destroys Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive, and Dropbox. The company transferred a 1.36 GB MP4 video clip between two Apple MacBook Pros using two Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapters, the Time.gov site as a real-time clock, and the Internet connection at its headquarters (1 Gbps up/down). The timer started when the file transfer was initiated and then stopped once the file was fully synced and downloaded onto the receiving machine. Sync performed 8x faster than Google Drive, 11x faster than OneDrive, and 16x faster than Dropbox.

Submission + - The Largest Ship in the World is Being Built in Korea

HughPickens.com writes: Alastair Philip Wiper writes that at at 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built capable of carrying 18,000 20-foot containers. Its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece and it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. A U-shaped hull design allows more room below deck, providing capacity for 18,000 shipping containers arranged in 23 rows – enough space to transport 864 million bananas. The Triple-E is constructed from 425 pre-fabricated segments, making up 21 giant “megablock” cross sections. Most of the 955,250 litres of paint used on each ship is in the form of an anti- corrosive epoxy, pre-applied to each block. Finally, a polyurethane topcoat of the proprietary Maersk brand colour, “Hardtop AS-Blue 504”, is sprayed on.

Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time.” The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships’ size. “You don’t feel like you’re inside a boat, it’s more like a cathedral,” Wiper says. “Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It’s like trying to think about infinity.”

Submission + - FBI: backdoors in software may need to be mandatory (nytimes.com)

wabrandsma writes: The New York Times:

The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said on Thursday that the "post-Snowden pendulum" that has driven Apple and Google to offer fully encrypted cellphones had "gone too far." He hinted that as a result, the administration might seek regulations and laws forcing companies to create a way for the government to unlock the photos, emails and contacts stored on the phones.

But Mr. Comey appeared to have few answers for critics who have argued that any portal created for the F.B.I. and the police could be exploited by the National Security Agency, or even Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies or criminals. And his position seemed to put him at odds with a White House advisory committee that recommended against any effort to weaken commercial encryption.

Comment Re:But is Linux any better? (Score 1) 577

nonsense. on my thinkpad, i installed "debian potato" in 2001, but as i ran dist-upgrade every few years, i've had to:
* add more RAM (128MB hasn't been enough since woody)
* migrate the installation to >20GB hdd (etch-and-half just wouldn't fit with all my applications)
* with the stupid vesa driver, I'm forced to run windowmaker as my UI (everything better needs 3d and enlightenment is no longer available)
* the last release that properly supported apm (power management) was woody
* oss (sound) went completely to hell with etch (or maybe even sarge)

so now, even though i have a perfectly fine as-new laptop, i'm forced to buy a more powerful machine just because kdm/gdm alone would eat my entire ram (384MB) for breakfast.

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