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Submission + - Oracle, RedHat tapped to fix Obama Health Care site. (nbcnews.com)

nairnr writes: The troubled federal health insurance website, which went offline just before a climactic hearing in Congress, is back in action again, officials said Thursday.

They said Healthcare.gov was working and handling fairly high volumes. And after days of badgering from Congress, journalists and critics, officials named two of the tech whizzes drafted to help fix the troubled site.

“Our focus now is really on maintaining system stability and testing,” Julie Bataille spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the site, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Obama says an "A-team" of technical experts has been brought in to fix the problems. He appointed his incoming chief economic adviser, Jeff Zients, to head the project. But CMS had given little detail about just who was working on the site.

Bataille finally named some of them. “They come from leading technology companies such as Red Hat and Oracle; and include individuals with expertise on site reliability; stability; and scalability," she said.

Comment Too Narrow (Score 1) 1191

In my mind it is too narrow for a site that is heavily text based. It makes it harder to go through the comments which is really the highlight of slashdot. The response and discussion that stories generate is the crux of the site. Eye candy is nice and all, but don't lose the base.

Comment Re:No one to blame but themselves (Score 1) 208

The problem is that the rules are phenomenally complex. It's easy to say that they should have just followed the rules, but IRS rules are a serious PITA to satisfy. It is quite likely that no matter what Xorg had done, the IRS could have found some error in their compliance that would enable them to revoke 501c3 status. So the real issue is that by making it so hard to comply with the rules, regulations, and laws, it raises the question of whether the government is using "selective enforcement" to punish people, organizations, and views that they don't like. Did this happen because of a general review of nonprofits, in which case this was a simple case of good enforcement, or are "hackers" being targeted by the government (for lots of reasons, e.g. resistance to NSA monitoring), and any one of a number of technical violations would have led to the IRS' actions? In that way it is similar to the Aaron Schwartz case, and is something that should be noted, if not actively resisted.

They can't be so complex... If you don't understand them you get someone who does understand. Put away the tinfoil hat about selective enforcement of a software group. Enforcement of the rules is a good thing. Just because you may support the group that had the action taken against them doesn't mean it wasn't correct. It is 100% their fault for not maintaining compliance with the requirements if they valued that status...

Comment Re:New features? (Score 1) 147

Backup and restore are new features in this latest version of the Oracle Database??

How on earth did they manage before?! Seriously? Is it just me or am I the only person who writes programs from scratch with data security, portability and safety in mind? Gosh, My data has been separate from the program since I was loading out to 90-minute Type II's!

I mean, seriously, from this article can we assume that mysqldump offered a more sensible backup than every version of the mega-expensive Oracle, until this version?

No, it says that it has new capabilities - not that backing up is new to Oracle...

Comment Re:Here comes the legislation (Score 1) 174

That would be a waste of time. Many jurisdictions are already paying for aerial imagery taken by aircraft flying and filming precise routes over their territory. They can clearly see when new structures appear or when existing structures are modified. In fact, automated algorithms can actually find the changes for them. With oblique imagery, jurisdictions can even measure the height of structures. Here is an example of a company that provides such services. Pictometry - Government - Assess

Very true... It is very important to most municipalities to have accurate GIS based data. It is used for so many things. I was just at the local ESRI conference in Calgary where they were showing their integrated awareness system which incorporates something like 200+ datasets from different business units. When I had a city tree removed they knew its entire history - what kind of tree, when it had been pruned. All of this helps a city run smoothly and react to requests.

This very example was shown from a county in the states. They had LIDAR shot every year and using land parcels and volumetrics were able to determine if significant additions had been done to the property to cross reference permits and taxes. There is nothing special about using google to do it. In fact it is less current then they would be doing it themselves anyways...

Submission + - International Space Station switching to Linux (globalnews.ca) 1

nairnr writes: Computers aboard the International Space Station have switched from the Windows operating system in favour of Linux.

The United Space Alliance – the company responsible for managing the computer systems aboard the station – has switched “dozens of laptops” that were previously running Windows XP to Debian 6 OS.

In a blow to Windows, Keith Chuvala of the United Space Alliance noted that the switch was made in order to ensure improved reliability.

“We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable,” said Chuvala in a release from Linux Foundation.

Comment Re:Do Canadian credit cards for sub $10? (Score 1) 248

So how do you buy something larger than $50? You have to change payment methods?

I get charged $0.50 when I use my debit card. So I never use it as debit.

I get unlimited free transactions with my debit card, so I use mine almost exclusively. The limit was strictly for the contactless tap to pay method. Anything more than your limit is required to use chip/PIN method of payment. Same card, different verification.

Comment Privacy (Score 3, Insightful) 121

Everything seems like a good idea until you actually get to do it, especially when it comes to the next social wave. I think people are reconsidering what it means to be on social media, and what the companies get from you using the service. Most importantly, it is the commoditzation of yourself as data points. In the end, these companies are raising gobs of money on the prospect that they can turn you or your information into revenue for them. Free services are not free, they have a cost - hidden or not- to you as a consumer.

There are so many bubbles of tech companies trying to be the next big thing, people trying it our, and then getting bored with it. With so much money invested, how could they possibly get such a return on it?

Submission + - Rockmelt shutting down desktop browser

nairnr writes: According to Techcrunch “Distributing a desktop browser is hard and expensive (especially if you don’t have an operating system or the world’s most trafficked website to promote it)” says Rockmelt, so today it announced it will soon stop supporting its social browser. Rockmelt concedes it was using up to 50% of its time trying to keep up with the changes to Chromium, the browser it is based on. They will continue to develop a new web portal, as well as mobile apps to enhance the browsing experience

Comment Re:I'm not quite sure how you're supposed to do it (Score 2) 179

Maybe this is over my head. But how would one rung a "safe" DNS server then? My interpretation of the article basically says to let only specific people use your DNS server, but then how would a company run a public resolver?

For example, Google runs open public name servers on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, same with OpenDNS, and many, many more. What is to stop those servers from being used in this sort of attack? Is this article really advocating a situation where you MUST use only your own ISP's resolver and trust them not to do what so many of them consistently do and mess with the results?

Or am I completely missing the point to this article?

Two different things. If you are running a DNS server yourself, for your own domain then you should only respond to requests for your domain from the outside. IE - Non-recursive. The only answers you serve are for those queries you are authoritative for. You only accept recursive queries from inside your own network. Those are the recursive ones.

Public servers would use rate-limiting to to protect against being effective in spoofed attacks.

Comment Re:Who's up first? (Score 2) 205

The vortices of planes last a long time. At airports when you are dealing with the big planes they have to leave minutes later so that the vortices have time to dissipate. Otherwise there is severe turbulence for the next plane. Watch a plane coming down through fog and see how long it takes for it to settle down...

Comment Re:drafting... (Score 1, Informative) 205

It is drafting in a sense... The vortices off of the wings create a slight updraft which reduces the effort that the trailing birds need to expend. I think Mythbusters took this one on. There is an effect but the trailing plane has a very narrow margin that they have to stay within to see any benefit.

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