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Submission + - Google Compute Engine open to the public

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After over a year of testing, Google has opened Compute Engine to the general public. Google's Infrastructure As A Service offering will be able to run any standard Linux distribution (including SELinux and CoreOS) as well as any kernel or software you like, including Docker, FOG, xfs and aufs. Support for FreeBSD has also been announced.

Billing is currently done in 1-minute increments, with a 10 minute minimum charge.

Submission + - Electric Car Owner Arrested For 'Stealing' 5 Cents of Electricity (networkworld.com)

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: Police in Georgia recently arrested a man for “stealing” an estimated 5 cents worth of electricity from a school where he plugged his car in for 20 minutes during his son’s tennis match. "He broke the law. He stole something that wasn't his," says a police sergeant in Chamblee, Georgia. While not the first to face legal action for taking an unauthorized charge, publicity surrounding the arrest may spark public discussion as to acceptable practices and limits when it’s a car and not a laptop or a cell phone that needs a quick charge.

Comment Re:Oh for crying out loud (Score 1) 325

by Brian (#44972029) Attached to: Google's Scanning of Gmail To Deliver Ads May Violate Federal Wiretap Laws
No, he didn't. You are either being deliberately misleading or you're not understanding. Statement 1: Email systems need to read email messages to make the system work Statement 2: Email systems also need to read the email to do ads. There's no statement 3 that links up "they need ads to make the system work"

Submission + - GTA V Proves a Lot of Parents Still Ignore or Don't Care About ESRB Ratings

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: Grand Theft Auto V has proven itself to be GOTY material, and has even managed to break a sales record already. But aside from that, the game has also become one of the most "adult" oriented games ever released, with torture, drug use and sex prevalent not long after beginning the game. Many would believe that such things would deter most parents from picking the game up for their young children — but not so. In an anonymous editorial at Kotaku written by a video game store employee, it's being said that out of the ~1,000 copies sold in the first week, at least 10% of them went to parents accompanied by a child. Clearly, this could be interpreted as a problem. Techgage adds that this is one of the biggest problems facing gaming today. In one breath, many parents criticize video games for being so violent, and in the next, they're saying "thanks" at the counter after picking up these very games for their kids. While ESRB ratings and other warnings about violent games for kids have good reason to exist, there are still many who ignore them, aren't aware to them, or simply don't care about their warnings.

Submission + - Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Dimensions and Cube Book Review (geekswithblogs.net)

Submitted by zarthur
zarthur writes: If you have suddenly found yourself in a hurry implementing the Microsoft Analysis Services 2012 (OLAP), you may consider getting the “Instant” book from Packt: Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Dimensions and Cube (available as an eBook only at the time of writing) by Anurag Acharya. Book site http://bit.ly/15aCIb4/

By the way, I like the concept of the “Instant” books, if in yesterday’s IT a task was supposed to be implemented yesterday, in today’s IT the whole project has been. So as a result there is very little time (means money) left even scouting the internet. That makes me believe such concise material must be very much in demand and the ebook format only makes a lot of sense to me.

Unfortunately, this book has quite a few quirks.

#1: Be aware the book walks you through only the vanilla, or so called default, installation with some minor (and potentially impacting) tweaks. More on that expanded below.

#2: The book at times has some odd, or let me state that politically correct, strange jargon or style of writing (still not 100% sure what caused this) which does not fall in my opinion into a typical "technical” publication. Here are a few examples: “Enlarging physical security” is a header section to a pre-installation step of SQL Server. Or how come we ended up with three dimensions (p. 51)? Or stating SQL Server has supplementary peripherals? This is probably the same as saying a chicken is more important than eggs. Besides, for example, to run SSAS we don’t even need to install the SQL Server database engine itself as well as many other shared components are not needed (reference http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144288(v=sql.90).aspx).

#3: Despite its title, the book actually devotes VERY little time to SSAS (OLAP) as a subject. The Cube and Dimension Wizards are the only two SSAS related things covered. Please note that there is no any early reference to what database was used to produce them. I assume the AdventureWorksDW was, but who knows? There was nothing on how to use the cube. Or integrate it say with the installed SSRS engine.

In short, if I would be asked to sum-up my impressions after reading this book in three words I would say: “This book is everything about SQL Server 2012 and nothing, all at the same time”.

I can’t also wait to state this book is borrowing content from the SQL Server Books Online a lot and numerous portions in it are simply one to one copy-pastes (for example, try searching for text in the book copied from the second sentence at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms174878.aspx) and so on.

If you are still reading my review, now is the time to elaborate on the weak statements and ill-fated advices: some sentences I cannot digest as “If we install and run separate SQL services, the risk of data theft is reduced.”, after all, the SQL Server Installer does not allow merging services; I believe the real intent was to convey to the reader not to install un-necessary services. But I hardly can agree it imposes a significant threat to the data storage engine because it is rare/impossible the same account running the services would be used to connect to the databases. Notably, regardless, the author chose to install all the features (page 11). The next paragraph thereafter advocates disabling some features as NetBIOS and SMB. This needs to be exercised with extreme caution and a lot of testing. The implications of disabling the NetBIOS functionality are as severe as an inability to connect, getting name resolution errors and inability to failover, to name a few. If SSAS and/or the other SQL Server components are not (and typically never) installed in an environment exposed to the Internet I see no point in doing this adjustment.

As a side note, I read this book on my Windows 7 Dell Latitude laptop in PDF format using the free Adobe Reader and on my newly acquired Samsung Galaxy Note 8” tablet with MoonReader Pro. The experience with both was very good, the navigation piece was much easier on the computer side though, but I do not think it is the publisher that is responsible.

In terms of closing, I feel I am a tad harsh on the author, but I suspect this probably is due to me being gotten used to acquiring world class content from well established authors, so I should not blame Anurag too much.

Well, to wrap the review up and be honest with myself, I am giving this book a 2 out of 5 star rating taking into consideration it is not a big monetary investment, and that it expands on the top 5 SQL Server 2012 features us, BI folks have to be aware of, but hey, still, who needs yet another copy of the BOL?

Submission + - Nikola Tesla Monument Unveiled in New York (theguardian.com)

Submitted by CodeArtisan
CodeArtisan writes: A monument in honor of Tesla was been unveiled by the Serbian President in New York state on Monday.

'Tomislav Nikolic told the crowd at Tesla's former Wardenclyffe laboratory in Long Island that the scientist was a man whose "ideas were larger than his time", in a ceremony that also served as an opportunity for the Serbian president to remind the world of Tesla's nationality.'

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