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Comment Re:Why implants? (Score 2, Insightful) 314

by davburns (#30165854) Attached to: Intel Says Brain Implants Could Control Computers By 2020

I was thinking that, too.

The oldest computer I have around is a 1990 Amiga 500; I mostly use new kit, of course. Anyone who gets an implant is going to be stuck with it pretty much for life, or commit to brain surgery every 3-5 years to install the newer one.

On the other hand, a 'trode net or hat would seem doable; sign me up for that.

Comment Re:2010 Year of the linux (Score 1) 485

by davburns (#30165026) Attached to: Respected Developers Begin Fleeing the App Store
Me, too
I wonder if we'll be able to hear the giant sloshing sound -- starting 24 months after the iPhone 3G came out -- of everyone moving away from AT&T / iPhone to whoever is offering a good plan with reasonable price/terms/etc. On the other hand, the iPhone is still a (historical) game-changer, in that it got everyone away from horrible dumb-smart-phones that couldn't even keep a calendar in a user-friendly way.
Google

Submission + - Initial Reviews of Google Wave (louisgray.com) 1

Submitted by
bonch
bonch writes: "Reviews of Google Wave are out, and opinions are that it has potential as a development platform but is noisy to use for real-time communication. Robert Scoble calls it overhyped, claiming it's useful for little more than personal IM or small-scale project collaboration. He complains about the noisiness of tracking dozens of people chatting him at once in real-time and calls trying to use it a "productivity killer" compared to simpler mediums like email and Twitter."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Obama bars federal workers from texting and drivin (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "A two-day Distracted Driving Summit in Washington concluded Thursday, after experts raised multiple thorny questions on how to reduce cell phone and texting while driving, with a big emphasis placed on driver and employer responsibility. But that was not before President Obama signed an executive order that tells all federal employees not to engage in texting while driving government vehicles. LaHood also announced that his department would ban text messaging altogether and restrict cell phone use by truck and interstate bus drivers, and disqualify school bus drivers from receiving commercial driver's licenses if they have been convicted of texting while driving. His department also plans to make permanent some restrictions placed on the use of cell phones in rail operations, he added without offering further details. The executive order "shows the federal government is leading by example" and "sends a signal that distracted driving dangerous," LaHood said."

Submission + - Why isn't AT&T Femotcell Technology an App?

Submitted by
hajihill
hajihill writes: "The technology behind a femtocell is essentially a network bridge which connects to a cell phone signal and bridges that signal via an authenticated VOIP connection back to, in this case, AT&T where it is routed as a phone call normally would be. This is understood. What I don't get is why a smartphone, with wifi capabilities, would need a femtocell to operate where there is already an available wireless connection in place. At the point where AT&T has worked out how to authenticate a call routed over the open internet as coming from your handset, isn't this extra piece of hardware they are charging us for superfluous?

I hope you choose to carry this story as it seems to be a case of AT&T blatantly profiting from customer ignorance and really shouldn't be tolerated. AT&T instead should release an AT&T branded VOIP app for it's iPhone handsets, instead of peddling additional hardware to it's customers when it should have beefed up it's wireless networks in the first place. Of course, the same could be said of others carriers and their respective smartphones, however, with the connectivity issues experienced by AT&T and iPhone users, I think this is particularly pertinent."
Cellphones

iPhone Straining AT&T Network 551

Posted by samzenpus from the got-an-app-for-that dept.
dangle writes "More than 20 million other smartphone users are on the AT&T network, but other phones do not drain the network the way the nine million iPhone users do. Because the average iPhone owner can use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user, dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds are the result as AT&T's cellular network strains to meet the demand. AT&T says that the majority of the nearly $18 billion it will spend this year on its networks will be diverted into upgrades and expansions to meet the surging demands on the 3G network."
Security

Submission + - Is there a zero-day OpenSSH exploit in the wild? (dshield.org)

Submitted by eefsee
eefsee writes: sans.org reports 'Over the past 24 hours we've had a number of readers tell us that there is an OpenSSH exploit in active use.' It is not clear if this is a real exploit or sysadmin CYA masquerading as exploit, but some web hosts have already turned of SSH in response. On 7/5 HostGator shut down SSH on all its shared servers. Site5 did the same thing the next day. The loss of SSH, of course, kills SFTP on these hosts as well, forcing customers to fall back on FTP. Now that is security!
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA's Bid to Stop Jammie From Objecting Fails (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA's motion to prevent Jammie Thomas-Rasset from objecting to evidentiary problems with the RIAA's copyright registrations has been denied. The decision by Judge Michael J. Davis (PDF) held that 'The Court's Order granting a new trial in this matter granted an entirely new trial on all issues. The fact that Defendant did not object to Plaintiffs' evidence of registration in the First Trial does not preclude Defendant from putting Plaintiffs to their burden of proof on this issue in the retrial.' Judge Davis rejected the RIAA's contention that he could take 'judicial notice' of the validity of the registrations, since 'judicial notice' doctrine is only applicable to matters which are 'not subject to reasonable dispute'."
Medicine

Cola Consumption Can Lead To Muscle Problems 420

Posted by timothy from the but-your-lifting-arm's-doing-fine dept.
wjousts writes "As I'm sure many Slashdot readers live almost exclusively on cola drinks, a new warning from doctors: 'Doctors have issued a warning about excessive cola consumption after noticing an increase in the number of patients suffering from muscle problems, according to the June issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice. ... 'Evidence is increasing to suggest that excessive cola consumption can also lead to hypokalaemia, in which the blood potassium levels fall, causing an adverse effect on vital muscle functions.' And sorry, diet colas aren't any better."

Comment Re:economics as usual (Score 2, Informative) 266

by davburns (#27781415) Attached to: ARIN Letter Says Two More Years of IPv4
No, the problem is that we really do need more address space. IP addresses include identification information and network topology information. We really do have almost that many computers, and almost that complex of topology.

Forcing the holders of large legacy allocations to give them up would hurt more than moving to IPv6, and it'd only get us a few more years of IPv4 growth. Opening up the class-E space would also hurt more than moving to IPv6, and still only give us a few more years.

NAT effectively adds 16 more bits to the address, but does so on a per-connection basis, not a per-node basis. It requires the network to be stateful, instead of just passing packets while the end hosts carry all the state. (This means that the end hosts can't just route around problems.) NAT is messy, but it happens to work because it can steal some bits of TCP or UDP to make up for not having enough in the IP header.

IPv6 adds way more address space than anyone can think of a use for. So it can encode a lot of information about the node's position in the network, plus keep an address unique for (practically) ever.

Comment Re:Old Tech Costs? (Score 1) 204

by davburns (#27778185) Attached to: What Kind of Data Center Can You Build With $500M?

Was it cheaper when they did it all with paper files?

Yes, but mostly because there were a lot fewer people back then. (Remember, that even sorting is O(N log N) -- and you have to do that to get the right papers in the right files. I would guess that there needs to be lots of O(N^2) operations to catch fraud. 300,000 Americans is a big N.

Comment opt-in (Score 1) 233

by davburns (#27350705) Attached to: Google Engineers Say IPv6 Is Easy, Not Expensive

Google does publish ipv6.google.com. And if you have classic (not ig) selected, you get an extra-fancy dancing Google logo to let you know you made it to the IPv6 version of Google.

But if you want to use their regular services, they just redirect you to plain old boring www.google.com. So it's nice that Google spent 20% of a lot of time on this, but it's not available to ordinary IPv6 connected users. I guess that's better than slashdot. (ipv6.slashdot.org has an A, but no AAAA records!)

Of course, if you want to add some entries to your ipnodes table, you can get the rest of the Google services to work for you over IPv6 and then your gmail will be extra-cool like mine.

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