Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:maybe (Score 1) 267

by Isca (#45576093) Attached to: How the LHC Is Reviving Magnetic Tape
I think Amazon's system is a hybrid. There have been numerous articles about it but Amazon has kept their system tightly locked down with NDA's for all parties involved. However the reason why lots of people have come up with this conclusion is simple -- there are occasional but regular complaints you'll see on the internet where the 3-5 hour window is blown up to 10-24 hours. I suspect that they use commodity hard drives that are powered off once filled. But backing up those hard drives is a tape system that is only kicked in when they find a bad hard drive (and the tape backs up the hard drive). This way they don't use power when the drives are on.

Comment Re:Never underestimate the bandwidth (Score 4, Interesting) 267

by Isca (#45575029) Attached to: How the LHC Is Reviving Magnetic Tape
Actually I found the article informative. I knew tapes were the cheapest and most cost effective backup solution but I didn't realize that they were so fast once the tap has been loaded.

It's also interesting to see the advances in tape reading technology that they are striving for - it sounds as if it will keep pace with HD and SSD technology to keep staying relevant.

Comment Outsourced Lowest Bidder syndrome (Score 4, Insightful) 144

by Isca (#45213347) Attached to: ACA Health Exchange Contractors Have History of Security Failures
This is what happens when you don't hire people in the agencies with technical abilities to even be able to oversee the implementation of complex systems.

Privatization is good as long as you actually have competent people with technological expertise to oversee the development. Outsourcing all of this to the lowest bidder, then that company outsourcing components to the lowest bidder (and so on, and so forth) always causes these type of issues. We need technologist inside the government that can actually manage these projects.

Comment Re:They had these during the Cold War, slow news d (Score 2) 192

by Isca (#44348699) Attached to: Interactive Nukemap Now In 3D

You are wrong. The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material. The bomb will spread radiation across one or two city blocks and that's about it.

The reason that they will never actually detonate a real nuke is that they are complicated and extremely delicate. The shape of the bomb must be absolutely perfect and the timing of the charge detonations must be accurate to within microseconds, else nothing happens. Getting the shape right is so important that people working on at least one major nuclear programat Los Alamos had to classify all spheres, including oranges.

It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil and no matter what any war-mongering politicians have said, no actual nation-state is stupid enough to do that because it means the end of that country. Not Iran, not North Korea. Not going to happen.

I don't know about that. Most of the problems in shaping it comes down to having the machines to craft and shape the bomb to tight tolerances. We've been able to keep the machines that can make objects and refine materials with such tolerance out of foreign states for the most part. That's what has saved us as much as anything. The math is pretty much out there in the open to a degree. With 3d printing and 3d shaping (lathes/cnc/etc) I don't think we are far from being able to shape any material into any shape. And there are explosives that could certainly be printed and shaped to the nth degree. With some of the new technologies going mainstream and available from all quarters it's going to be downright impossible for us to control those technologies. I think the chances are going to be much higher.

Comment Re:this just in (Score 1) 178

by Isca (#44044999) Attached to: TiVo Series 5 Coming This Fall
COX Doesn't have it set to Copy Never, but they have it set to Copy Once. (Incidentally this is the same on time Warner as well)

MythTV doesn't support Copy Never or Once - that requires encryption and a very large licensing fee to ensure your software works with the restrictions (Only microsoft has paid for this license - no other software solutions).

However if you have Windows MCE on 7/8 you can use it to record it on one machine only. You just can't ever play back that content on another machine or burn that to a DVD.

The difference between Copy Once and Copy Never is copy once allows you to copy it and keep it indefinitely. Copy Never allows you to record it once and only keep it for 90 minutes from the end of the program. I've only seen copy never turned on for PPV.

Comment Re:this just in (Score 1) 178

by Isca (#44044989) Attached to: TiVo Series 5 Coming This Fall
COX Doesn't have it set to Copy Never, but they have it set to Copy Once. (Incidentally this is the same on time Warner as well)

MythTV doesn't support Copy Never or Once - that requires encryption and a very large licensing fee to ensure your software works with the restrictions (Only microsoft has paid for this license - no other software solutions).

However if you have Windows MCE on 7/8 you can use it to record it on one machine only. You just can't ever play back that content on another machine or burn that to a DVD.

The difference between Copy Once and Copy Never is copy once allows you to copy it and keep it indefinitely. Copy Never allows you to record it once and only keep it for 90 minutes from the end of the program. I've only seen copy never turned on for PPV.

Comment Re:"Patent Holder"?! (Score 1) 178

by Isca (#44043121) Attached to: TiVo Series 5 Coming This Fall
The difference here is it's not a blocking patent. This doesn't keep you from producing a product, it just keeps you from using one tiny little feature that no one had ever thought to do. And while VCR's may have had technical reasons why this didn't happen there are other mediums that this could have applied to such as a DVD or some commercial software used for editing.

It's little things like this that set apart Tivo. And it's not like Tivo didn't have reasonable licensing.

Comment Re:"Patent Holder"?! (Score 1) 178

by Isca (#44043035) Attached to: TiVo Series 5 Coming This Fall
DirectTV is a License holder for Tivo for many of their patents (not all). Once the Dish network lawsuit appeared to have good footing most all of the manufacturers agreed to license terms with Tivo on many of the smaller (and less costly) patents such as this one.

In fact there were contracts during this time signed with Tivo the purportedly had clauses that had penalties for Tivo if the lawsuit with Dish failed. If that lawsuit had failed Tivo would have been shut down and bankrupt almost immediately.

Slashdot Top Deals

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

Close