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Comment Re:How about reducing latency instead? (Score 1) 137

Not that fast. Circumference of Earth (~40 000 km) / Speed of Light in vacuum. (~300 000 km/s) = 0.133s.

Also, speed of light in glass fiber is about 2/3 that, so it will take light 0.2 seconds to travel around the globe in a glass fiber. Don't forget most routers take the light signals they receive, convert it into electric signals so the circuits can route the packets, before converting them back to light again. At least this is the case until full optical packet switching becomes prevalent.

Comment Re:Only 10 types of people. (Score 1) 599

This joke is dumb, one could extend it to this:

There are 10 types of people in this world: those don't know number system other than decimal, those that think this is binary, and those that know this might be tertiary.

Security

Submission + - Cracked linux boxes used to weild windows botnets (computerworld.co.nz)

m-stone writes: From ComputerWord:

"The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes," said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University.

Because Linux is highly reliable and a great platform for running server software, Linux machines are desired by phishers, who set up fake websites, hoping to lure victims into disclosing their passwords.

"We see a lot of Linux machines used in phishing," said Alfred Huger, vice president for Symantec Security Response. "We see them as part of the command and control networks for botnets, but we rarely see them be the actual bots. Botnets are almost uniformly Windows-based."

The Courts

Submission + - Cisco lost rights to iPhone trademark last year?

An anonymous reader writes: An investigation into the ongoing trademark dispute between Cisco and Apple over the name "iPhone" appears to show that Cisco does not own the mark as claimed in their recent lawsuit. This is based on publicly available information from the US Patent and Trademark office, as well as public reviews of Cisco products over the past year. The trademark was apparently abandoned in late 2005/early 2006 because Cisco was not using it. TFA: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=236
Data Storage

Submission + - Solid state disks - 64GB from PQI, 32GB from SanDi

CravingForPerformance writes: Taiwanese firm PQI announced a 64GB solid state disk with a Serial ATA connector. This is the industry's first 64GB SSD with a SATA connector. The company also says the first 128GB drives will arrive sometime this year. Also new is a 32 GB SSD for notebooks from SanDisk. The price of this SSD is unavailable but it's expected that it will add a $600 premium to the price of a notebook. The 32GB SSD from SanDisk is roughly twice as fast as a regular notebook HDD.
Music

Submission + - Senate bill S.256 aims to restrict internet radio

JAFSlashdotter writes: If you enjoy MP3 or OGG streams of internet radio, it's time to pay attention. This week US Senators Lamar Alexander, Joseph Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and Lindsey Graham in their collective wisdom have decided to reintroduce the "Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music (PERFORM) Act". This ARS Technica article explains that PERFORM would restrict our rights to make non-commercial recordings under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, and require satellite and internet broadcasters to use "technology to prevent music theft". That means goodbye to your favorite streaming audio formats, hello DRM. The EFF said pretty much the same when this bill last reared its ugly head in April of 2006. It's too soon to get the text of this year's version (S.256) online, but it likely to resemble last year's S.2644, which is available through Thomas. Last year's bill died in committee, but if at first you don't succeed...
Editorial

Journal Journal: Ethics of Ashley X or how some ethicist's are total idiots

From the article:

"THE case of a severely mentally and physically disabled girl whose parents have stunted her growth so she remains a manageable and more portable size has divided medical ethicists...She has a severe brain impairment known as static encephalopathy and cannot walk, talk, keep her head up in bed or even swallow food." University of Pennsylvania ethicist Art Caplan said the case was troubling and reflected "slippery slope" thinking among parents who belie

KDE

Submission + - Factual Inaccuracies in Posted KDE Preview Article

Troy Unrau writes: "(put this in your backslash please)

Regarding the KDE Features Sneak Preview article that was posted here earlier, I have a few corrections to make of that authors article (and one complaint). First, the screenshot shown of the K-Menu that is supposedly for KDE 4 is not accurate. That shot is of kickoff, a SuSE linux customization for KDE that is already available for KDE 3.5.5 for SuSE and other users. Second, it states of Plasma "And the surprise of all things is that it will be possible to run the beautiful Dashboard widgets of Mac OSX in KDE 4.0." which is not true. It will run desktop widgets, but not the Mac OSX ones. And lastly, the first portion of the article is a blatant ripoff of an article I had previously written for dot.kde.org about SVG in KDE... of which he stole some screenshots without any credit whatsoever, not even a link. In fact, the whole article contains nothing but derivative, uncredited material, factual inaccuracies, and ads. Thankfully for him, he got posted to slashdot so his adstream should go up. Please note that dot.kde.org is running a series called "The Road to KDE 4" which is exposing features of KDE 4 on a weekly basis that are carefully checked for accuracy by the members of KDE actually responsible for each of those features."
AMD

Submission + - AMD's 65nm cache not substantially slower

An anonymous reader writes: Preliminary reports showed the L2 cache of the 65nm AMD processors having about 67% higher access latency than the previous 90nm stepping. Some of this appears to be related to a reporting and calculation error in the benchmarks used. New benchmarks show where some of the flaws originate and provide a different comparison of the two generations of cache that show a 2-cycle or 10% access latency difference rather than 8 cycles as claimed previously. http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_65nm/12.shtml
Unix

Submission + - The birth of vi

lanc writes: "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, contributor to BSD Unix, the UltraSparc technology, NFS and even Java, tells the story in an article at TheRegister about how he wrote vi and what the motives were. In the interview he says:

"It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow."

...and so my son begun The Holy Editor War."
Privacy

Submission + - Re-shipping scams skyrocketting

sorry-scammed-loser writes: A new online threat, reshipping fraud, is emerging in the form of a massive organized crime ring that is recruiting people in the US and Europe as "shipment handlers", and having them re-ship items to Russia. The criminals are using stolen Visa card details to pay for shipments from many large retail and auction sites (including ebay.com and amazon.com), and having the items shipped to their recruits who re-ship them to addresses they have been provided with. I personally lost a laptop this way that I had auctioned on ebay — I shipped the laptop after verifying that the funds had been deposited into my PayPal account, and two days later was contacted by PayPal who said that the account holder had not authorized the transaction. Now I have no money and no laptop. In my case, the scammers had recruited my re-shipper through an online job posting site, which pointed her to a legit-looking website called expertdelivery.biz that claims to operate offices in Minnesota and the UK (but is hosted in Belize). This reads like an episode of "24"... Please get the word out about this scam, at this point consumer education is the best protection against perpetuation of these scams.
Linux Business

Submission + - Linux is legal again for the European Commission

lancho writes: "The streaming service of the Council of the EU had a legal restriction related to Linux: "We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux". A Spanish association of lawyers and programmers filed a complaint at the Council and the immediate answer was: "The FAQ you refer to in your email has an error in its English version compared to the original French version. The sentence mentioning Linux does not exist in the original French version. So, the English version has been modified". Now the FAQ shows also the legal translation omitted."
United States

Submission + - Military to forecast global wars with new computer

John Keller writes: "Scientists at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., are asking industry for ideas on how to develop an advanced computer system called the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) that is able to predict global wars and other political instability. The goal is to develop a system to monitor, assess, and forecast crises throughout the world to support decisions on how to allocate resources to mitigate them, officials say. The ICEWS will provide military commanders with a powerful capability to anticipate and respond to worldwide political crises and track their success in near-real time.

URL of this story is: http://mae.pennnet.com/display_article/281403/32/N EWS/none/none/DARPA-kicks-off-program-to-develop-a dvanced-computer-system-to-forecast-global-wars-an d-other-political-instability/"
Space

Submission + - black hole found inside globular cluster

acidrain writes: Contrary to the prediction of some computer models, scientists have found a black hole resting peacefully in a dense nest of stars called a globular cluster. Previously discovered black holes are either similar in size to a large star, or super massive holes which are millions of times bigger than a star is able to remain stable. This finding indicates there may be an intermediate size range of holes residing within these star clusters.

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