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French President Violates His Own Copyright Law, Again 356

Posted by kdawson from the trois-grèves dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been caught violating someone's copyright again. This time, presidential services made 400 unauthorized copies of a DVD when only 50 had been made by the publisher. Mr. Sarkozy, of course, is the one pushing the HADOPI law, which would disconnect the Internet service of an alleged pirate after three allegations of infringement. This isn't the first time he's been connected to copyright violations, either. His party had to pay some €30K for using a song without authorization. If he were he subject to his own law, Mr. Sarkozy would be subject to having his Net disconnected the next time he pirates something."

Comment Re:"RAID"-style system for RAM... (Score 2, Informative) 333

by MattRog (#29662769) Attached to: Google Finds DRAM Errors More Common Than Believed

No, not really.

RAID-5 allows for disk failure via distributed block parity. ECC recovers single bit error.

The "Memory RAID" design should prevent a larger issue (multi-bit/DIMM failure/etc. that ECC cannot prevent) from taking the whole system out.

I would imagine that ECC memory would be used in conjunction with higher-level striping or mirroring to prevent and recover from both failures.

Comment "RAID"-style system for RAM... (Score 4, Interesting) 333

by MattRog (#29661483) Attached to: Google Finds DRAM Errors More Common Than Believed

RAM is dirt cheap and most server systems support significantly more RAM than most people bother to install. For critical systems, ECC works but that doesn't prevent everything (double bit errors etc.). Is it time for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive DIMMs? Many HA servers now support Memory Mirroring (aka RAID-1 http://www.rackaid.com/resources/rackaid-blog/server-dysfunction/memory_mirroring_to_the_rescue/) but should there be more research into different RAID levels for memory (RAID5-6, 10, etc?)
Businesses

Submission + - Server Relocation?

Submitted by
MattRog
MattRog writes: "We're relocating a rack or two of servers from our office's datacenter (Lexington, KY) to a co-loc facility about 100 miles away in Cincinnati, OH. For reasons which should be obvious (insurance, insanity, etc.), we are looking for a dedicated hardware relocation provider to disassemble, crate, and ship to Cincy. The co-loc facility will do the uncrating and re-racking.

Googling provides a TON of "AWESOME" providers, but has anyone worked with a provider to do this? Is there a place that rates this type of moving provider (http://www.movingscam.com/forum/ is a great resource, but doesn't target this sort of business relocation service)?

Thanks!"
The Internet

The Internet Is 'Built Wrong' 452

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-he-said-so dept.
An anonymous reader writes "API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was 'built wrong,' and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. 'We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to the projected size of the future Internet. We know too that near-universal deployment of technologies with inadequate security and trust models, like SMTP, can mean millions if not billions lost to electronic crime, defensive measures, and reduced productivity,' says Payne, who calls for a 'content-centric approach to networking.' Payne doesn't mention, however, that his own system, Twitter, was built wrong and is consistently down."

Comment Wouldn't work on ASE... (Score 1) 202

by MattRog (#24584319) Attached to: New SQL Injection Attack Fuses Malware, Phishing

for a few reasons, the biggest of which is that no one in their right mind would use ASE on Windows to begin with (thus probably wouldn't be running IIS)...

But seriously, ASE doesn't use xtype in such a way, nor do (most) of the (x)type ID's match up to meaningful ASE datatypes (the TEXT type IDs do match).

Anyway, ASE admins need not fear any more than Oracle or MySQL or DB2 or PostgreSQL or $DB admins; this script would have to be modified to run successfully on ASE.
Earth

Submission + - Phosphorus shortage ahead? (timesonline.co.uk)

Submitted by MattRog
MattRog writes: We've heard of peak oil. We've even discussed peak helium. Now we are facing peak phosphorus!

According to scientists, due to increased demand from sources such as biofuels (not exactly "renewable" if the inputs aren't!), we will exhaust our supply of non-renewable phosphorus in 50 to 130 years. If you didn't know, phosphorus is one of three major nutrients for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Without phosphorus it's tough to grow crops. As the USGS wrote, "There are no substitutes for phosphorus in agriculture."

The European Fertilizer Manufacturers Association has a similar analysis, with recommendations for recycling and better use of the element.
Education

PhD Research On Software Design Principles? 541

Posted by kdawson from the and-don't-tell-me-to-use-emacs dept.
cconnell writes "I am working on a PhD in software engineering at Tufts University. My interest are the general principles of good software design, and I am looking for links/references on this topic. The question is: What design/architecture qualities are shared by all good software? Good software means lacking in bugs, maintainable, modifiable, scalable, etc... Please don't tell me 'use object oriented methods' or 'try extreme programming.' These answers are too narrow, since there is good software written in COBOL, and by 1000-person teams for DoD projects. I am looking for general design principles. If it helps, I am trying to build on the ideas in this article from some years back."

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