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Comment Re:Historical significance (Score 1) 464

It's more historically significant than that -- Linux was the last major *nix to support 386s. FreeBSD and NetBSD abandoned the 386sx/dx a while ago. So if you want to tinker with that 386dx-40 you found in the basement, you'll have to find an old distro to go with it, since you can't cross-compile a working kernel for 386 any more.

Comment Re:Many years ago.... (Score 1) 395

If you are a rack switch away from the exchange's computer, you are too far. 1ms is too much latency.

Most of the hardware is sub-1ms. When I worked trading IT, we measured latency in micros.

You need to be a virtual appliance on the same virtual host, with read-only access directly to shared memory space on the host where trades are processed.

I'm not sure this is an actual offering you can purchase.

Infiniband was state-of-the-art in the trading industry about 3 years ago, although things were moving towards memory-mapped 10gig.

Comment Re:Dumb fundie article (Score 1) 858

want to lower your risk of having kids with autism? have kids in your twenties, don't party and get drunk every other day, keep healthy and have kids naturally without chlamid or invitro or any other procedure

We followed every single stipulation you stated above, including natural childbirth, and our first-born was autistic anyway. Some of your assumptions are wrong. The age distribution for mothers is not weighted towards older women; it's fairly flat. Maybe you're confusing autism with Down's Syndrome?

Comment Re:This is Sony (Score 1) 293

I have a Sony blu-ray player that in order to use any feature above just playing disks I had to create an account on Sony's web site and give them a bunch of personal information. I think this is necessary to update the device as well.

I bought a brand new Sony blu-ray player a month ago. While they direct you to a website to activate the player's internet streaming and get a firmware update, I had the option of not providing personal data, so I didn't. The website merely said "enter this code into the player" and on doing so the device downloaded updates and the additional features just started working. Sony has my IP address, but not my name or other personal details.

I'm not apologizing for Sony, just relating my experiences.

I know this means they have my browsing habits now. It doesn't bother me, as every website and streaming provider already has this. Singling out Sony is myopic.

Comment Re:16550A (Score 4, Informative) 105

Floppy disk formatting requires very little CPU resources. You should have had no problem receiving bytes even at 57600 baudrate into a buffer using an 8250 UART (with one byte receive buffer) all the while formatting a floppy disk, even on the original IBM PC.

...unless the serial data came in while the floppy interrupt handler was already in progress. In such a situation, the serial handler must wait until the floppy handler is finished, and depending on what the floppy handler is doing, it could take long enough that more serial data would be delayed or lost. And for those of us who tried to do things like download files directly to floppy disks on slower PCs in the 1980s, this was a regular occurrence.

The 16550A UART's 16-byte buffer meant that several bytes could come in before the serial interrupt needed to be handled again, allowing serial communications to run at full speed for longer time periods before needing to be emptied. This made a world of difference working on slower machines writing to floppies (and faster machines trying to download something in the background while in a multitasking environment).

Comment Re:Enjoy your delusion (Score 1) 414

You're assuming that it's encryption that's the problem. In my case, it's a problem with the size of data vs. how much bandwidth I can use. I get an allocation of 20GB a month, and even that's very expensive. Backing up my 5+ TB to the cloud is simply not an option.

This doesn't prevent the OP from using local backup in the meantime. I backup to local storage as well as cloud. The local backups complete quickly in case I need to retrieve a file, and the cloud is there for if my house burns down.

The OP stated in his question that he has a lot of data but no money to buy redundant storage -- well, that's his real problem. If you have 3T of data, buy 3T of backup. I don't know what the OP is looking for other than a magic compression answer or something.

Comment Enjoy your delusion (Score 4, Informative) 414

"I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution." Not sure what brand tin-foil hat you're wearing, but there are cloud backup solutions that encrypt your data *before* it leaves the machine. I use CrashPlan (I can't speak for others) and I've verified the encryption myself by capturing the traffic leaving my machine, even when CrashPlan was backing up to other machines on my own private network. Even the data it writes to locally-attached hard drives is encrypted. So there's at least one company who gets it right.

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