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Comment Re: Who cares about rotational speed these days? (Score 1) 190

I have several microservers and all have 2 ssds (write and read cache) + 4hdds. I use USB stick for OS, cdrom's sata cable for one SSD and esata-to-sata cable to connect another SSD to the esata port. You will need a hacked BIOS to enable AHCI on all ports. Just search the web.

Comment Re:About the Cherry key switches (Score 2) 190

by greenfruitsalad (#48684537) Attached to: Know Your Type: Five Mechanical Keyboards Compared

My personal favourite is a pre-Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard. As a matter of fact, you can buy one that looks like half a laptop and use it with your desktop. Just search for "55Y9091".

I can type steadily at around 300 characters a minute for over an hour without a break. I fell for the mechanical keyboard hype a few years ago and bought a cherry brown keyboard. My speed immediately dropped to around 250. Although I was eventually able to regain the speed, I found typing more tiresome than on my IBM laptop (600x). To this day I consider that laptop's to be the greatest keyboard ever made for touch typists.

The other thing I noticed (while using cherry brown) was that I was no longer able to do the short bursts or 10-15 characters per second. This I can only do on my Thinkpad keyboard. (And only on certain strings like my name, a few passwords, certain phrases and various console commands with usual switches.)

Submission + - Vinyl Record Pressing Plants Struggle to Keep Up With Demand

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The WSJ reports that the revival of vinyl records, a several-year trend that many figured was a passing fad, has accelerated during 2014 with an astounding 49 percent sales increase over 2013 (line chart here). Some listeners think that vinyl reproduces sound better than digital, and some youngsters like the social experience of gathering around a turntable. The records are pressed at a handful of decades-old, labor-intensive factories that can't keep up with the demand; but since the increased sales still represent only about 2 percent of US music sales, there hasn't been a rush of capital investment to open new plants. Raw vinyl must now be imported to America from countries such as Thailand, since the last US supplier closed shop years ago. Meanwhile, an industry pro offers his take on the endless debate of audio differences between analog records and digital formats; it turns out there were reasons for limiting playing time on each side back in the day, apart from bands not having enough decent material.

Comment Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score 1) 190

by greenfruitsalad (#48570963) Attached to: Fraud Bots Cost Advertisers $6 Billion

what if he really doesn't look at porn? then he certainly wouldn't notice 99% of the web disappearing.

by using opendns, i have practically eliminated that much web on my home network. what else is there? news, lolcatz, epic fail videos, social networks, corporate websites and wikipedia. well under 1% of the web.

Submission + - New Apps Mark the Digital Return of the Rhythm Method

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Count natural family planning among the ways young people are hearkening back to the practices of their grandparents as Olga Khazan reports at The Atlantic that new apps are letting women know if they can have sex with their partners without a condom or a contraceptive pill using calendar-based contraception. The underlying motive is not so much trendiness as it is a dissatisfaction with the Pill, which is still the most common form of birth control for women. In a recent CDC study of 12,000 American women, 63 percent of women who stopped using the Pill did so due to its side effects (PDF). And while as of 2010, only about 22 percent of women used “periodic abstinence," an umbrella term that includes counting days, measuring temperature, and tracking cervical mucus to predict fertility, their ranks may grow as new apps and other technologies make it easier to manage the historically error-prone task of measuring, recording, and analyzing one’s cycle in order to stay baby-free.

CycleBeads, for example, is an iPhone app that allows women to track fertility based on the Standard Days Method, a system developed by Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health in which specific days of each woman’s cycle are considered infertile. While the method is not as effective for women who have cycles outside of the 26-32 day range, Leslie Heyer says that its success rate is about 95 percent for “perfect use” and 88 percent for “typical use,” which would mean it beats condoms and falls just short of the Pill. “At first [my husband and I] were worried,” says Kate, a woman who began using CycleBeads nearly three years ago after experiencing weight gain and moodiness on the Pill, “but then we got used to it and have grown to trust it. I honestly can't imagine ever going back on the Pill.”

Submission + - $35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size And I/O (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Hardkernel has again set its sites on the Raspberry Pi with a new $35 Odroid-C1 hacker board that matches the RPI's board size and offers a mostly similar 40-pin expansion connector. Unlike the previous $30 Odroid-W that used the same Broadcom BCM2835 SoC as the Pi and was soon cancelled due to lack of BCM2835 SoC availability, the Odroid-C1 is based on a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A5 based Amlogic S805 SoC, which integrates the Mali-400 GPU found on Allwinner's popular SoCs. Touted advantages over the similarly priced Raspberry Pi Model B+ include a substantially more powerful processor, double the RAM, a extra USB2.0 port that adds Device/OTG, and GbE rather than 10/100 Ethernet. More info is at Odroid-C1 product page.

Submission + - US Braces for Backlash from Torture Report

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that with the release of the long-awaited Senate report on the use of torture by the United States government — a detailed account that will shed an unsparing light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s darkest practices after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the US is bracing itself for the risk that it will set off a backlash overseas. Some leading Republican lawmakers have warned against releasing the report, saying that domestic and foreign intelligence reports indicate that a detailed account of the brutal interrogation methods used by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration could incite unrest and violence, even resulting in the deaths of Americans. The White House acknowledged that the report could pose a “greater risk” to American installations and personnel in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Iraq. But it said that the government had months to plan for the reverberations from its report — indeed, years — and that those risks should not delay the release of the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “When would be a good time to release this report?” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, asked. “It’s difficult to imagine one, particularly given the painful details that will be included.”

Among the administration’s concerns is that terrorist groups will exploit the disclosures in the report for propaganda value. The Islamic State already clads its American hostages in orange jumpsuits, like those worn by prisoners in CIA interrogations. Hostages held by the Islamic State in Syria were subjected to waterboarding, one of the practices used by the CIA to extract information from suspected terrorists. The 480-page document reveals the results of Senate investigation into the CIA's use of torture and other techniques that violate international law against prisoners held on terrorism-related charges. Though many details of the Senate's findings will remain classified – the document is a summary of a 6,000-page report that is not being released – the report is expected to conclude that the methods used by the CIA to interrogate prisoners during the post-9/11 years were more extreme than previously admitted and produced no intelligence that could not have been acquired through legal means.

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)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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.

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