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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Good Keyboard? (newegg.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After five years of service, my keyboard is dying, and I'm starting to look for a new one. Since it's for my primary machine, and I spend a lot of hours there for both work and leisure, I'd like to invest in a high-quality replacement. What do you recommend? I've been using a Logitech G15, and it worked well enough — but not enough for me to buy another. (I've also heard that Logitech's build quality has been on the decline in recent years — has that been your experience, those of you who own their recent hardware?) Use cases include coding and gaming, so durability is a big plus.

I'd prefer something a bit less bulky than the G15, which has an area at the top for media controls and a tiny screen. I don't mind a thicker bottom bezel so much. I'm not a huge fan of ergonomic/split keyboard, but if you know a really excellent one, I wouldn't rule it out. Same with mechanical keyboards — love the action, but the noise is an issue. I don't need any particular bells and whistles, but don't mind them. As for a budget... as I said, it's for a heavy-use machine, so I don't mind investing in something. (That said, if I'm spending $150+, it better automatically make sure all my semicolons are in the right place.) So, what keyboard has served you well?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Do ITIL hates skilled people? 15

Submitted by ulzeraj
ulzeraj writes: First of all I would like to apologize about the language. I’m not a native english speaker.

I've been working with Linux and in a lower extent Windows setups for 10 years now. During most time of my career I've been involved with IT consulting firms. Last year I've joined a retail store company that was in dire need of someone with good debugging skills. Their team is awfully unskilled and during the course of the year I was able to improve a lot of their network and server systems including automation, backups and restore strategies, complicated image deployment strategies and so on. I've also worked in improving the performance of their database and ERP systems and solved every fucking problem they’ve thrown at my direction including some they didn’t really knew they existed. The company office was a great bazaar and overall fun to work and comfortable to boot because their needs were always simple for someone with my skills so in the end I would always blow their minds with the results. I should note that I never have problem with knowledge sharing and documentation.

But recently the managers were replaced and the new guys don't seem to like me. They are pushing for ITIL doctrine on the IT department (and the whole company afterwards). For starters they keep pushing me administrative tasks that I'm not really fond of like keeping in touch with our suppliers and managing project dependencies so I’ve been spending more time attending meetings and mailing people than typing on a terminal. I've heard somewhere that the cult of ITIL somewhat hates the "hero culture" and people like me are not really healthy for their dogmas and I’m considered a “risk". I feel that even as I have so much that I can do for the company I'll probably be cockblocked by their new "project management" department and whatnot.

As this is happening it seems that people on the IT consulting firms really like my job and there are plenty of oportunities around. I know many slashdoters like me that are more experienced have encountered similar situations. Do ITIL really creative and skilled people? Is my kind doomed to oblivion and I’ll face stuff like this anywhere I go?

Submission + - Issue tracker for non-engineers?

Submitted by purplie
purplie writes: My non-technical spouse is an analyst in a small county government department, a handful of people plus some contractors for projects. Their project/task management is mouth-to-mouth, sticky notes, and emails, and it's driving them crazy.

I want to suggest something like an issue tracker. It would have to work for tasks both large (year-long investigations) and small (arranging catering for a meeting).

The issue trackers I'm familiar with with are too software-development-oriented, or make too many assumptions about your "agile" religion. Are there any good options for non-engineers?

They use mainly Windows and have iPads. I don't like web-based tools, but that might work better for them because they don't have administrative privs on their machines. Something that also incorporates a wiki might be nice. There will be resistance if it's not really easy to use.

Submission + - Companies are held back from using big data by IT execs scared of open source

Submitted by Lemeowski
Lemeowski writes: Most organizations are sitting on a goldmine of data, but they're not doing anything with it because technology and service vendors have led IT leaders to believe that to be "best in class analytics, you have to pay millions of dollars and wait years for its value to materialize." That is not necessarily the case, writes Sergo Grigalashvili, who oversees analytics for his company. He says open source tools and databases combined with "the government releasing treasure troves of data" can help companies see results quickly and cost effectively. The problem, he says, is there are still IT executives who "are not comfortable or even scared of using open source tools."

Submission + - The White House's $100M, H-1B funded tech job plan comes under fire (computerworld.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: The White House has established a $100 million program that endorses fast-track, boot camp IT training efforts and other four-year degree alternatives. But this plan is drawing criticism because of the underlying message it sends in the H-1B battle.

The federal program, called TechHire, will get its money from H-1B visa fees, and the major users of this visa are IT services firms that outsource jobs.

Submission + - Monday's Keep Us Up At Night

Submitted by randomErr
randomErr writes: Tune Hotels Group completed a study that we're like Wowbagger from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that we can't deal well with Sunday afternoons and nights. People in general have a sleep deficit because of the anxieties about starting the working week. Jason Ellis, Professor of Sleep Science at Northumbria University is quotes as saying "Sunday-somnia" is something I see a lot and it's important that people deal with the issues surrounding their sleep deprivation so that it doesn't have a knock on effect on sleep later in the week.'

Comment Re:define terms in article summary (Score 1) 44

by Gazzonyx (#49201775) Attached to: Red Hat Strips Down For Docker

[...]

I'd be interested to see which distro can get their image down to the smallest (functional) size. Strip the OS down to just the absolute minimum required to boot it up, then leave it upto the docker image creators to decide what services to enable. It's a great way to minimize attack vectors, keep image size down and make the container nice and lightweight.

A few years ago for a special purposed built box, I gutted a Slackware install, modified the disk scheduler in the kernel and removed every driver and every module that my hardware didn't use. My memory is a foggy on the numbers, but I believe the install itself was under a handful of GB (with my development tool chain and libraries) and booted to run level 3 using somewhere between 64-128 MB RAM (I think it was actually in the 32 MB range, but that sounds too small for me to be confident about it) and part of that was actually dedicated to the readahead daemon.

Granted I'd never do that again, but it was a fun summer project to build a server rack when I was just out of college. These days I don't flinch to throw hardware at a problem if I think it's going to take up my valuable time and it will scale for whatever values of "N" I'm expecting to be reasonable.

Submission + - The Abandoned Google Project Memorial Page

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Quentin Hugon, Benjamin Benoit and Damien Leloup have created a memorial page for projects adandoned by Google over the years including: Google Answers, Lively, Reader, Deskbar, Click-to-Call, Writely, Hello, Send to Phone, Audio Ads, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Ride Finder, Shared Stuff, Page Creator, Marratech, Goog-411, Google Labs, Google Buzz, Powermeter, Real Estate, Google Directory, Google Sets, Fast Flip, Image Labeler, Aardvark, Google Gears, Google Bookmarks, Google Notebook, Google Code Search, News Badges, Google Related, Latitude, Flu Vaccine Finder, Google Health, Knol, One Pass, Listen, Slide, Building Maker, Meebo, Talk, SMS, iGoogle, Schemer, Notifier, Orkut, Hotpot, Music Trends, Refine, SearchWiki, US Government Search, Sparrow, Web Accelerator, Google Accelerator, Accessible Search, Google Video, and Helpouts. Missing from the list that we remember are Friend Connect, Google Radio Ads, Jaiku, SideWiki, and Wave.

We knew there were a lot, but who knew there'd be so many. Which abandoned Google project do you wish were still around?

Submission + - NVIDIA Fixes Old Compiz Bug

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in the Ubuntu Unity desktop by patching Compiz. When opening the window of a new application, it would go black or become transparent on NVIDIA hardware. There has been bug reports dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times. The problem was caused by Compiz, which had some leftover code from a port. An NVIDIA developer posted on Launchpad and said that the NVIDIA team has been looking at this issue and they also proposed a patch. "Our interpretation of the specification is that creating two GLX pixmaps pointing at the same drawable is not allowed, because it can lead to poorly defined behavior if the properties of both GLX drawables don't match. Our driver prevents this, but Compiz appears to try to do this.", wrote NVIDIA's Arthur Huillet. The Compiz patch has been accepted upstream.

Submission + - Astronomers Find a Dusty Galaxy That Shouldn't Exist (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Peering back in time to find the very earliest objects in the universe, an international team of astronomers has discovered a galaxy that shouldn't be there at all.

The problem, the scientists report Monday in Nature , is that while the tiny galaxy dates from just 700 million years or so after the big bang, it's far more dusty than something this young and small has any right to be.

The dusty galaxy is just one of the recent surprises astronomers have found. "Last week," says Marrone, "we learned of an incredibly massive black hole in the early universe. Now we have this average galaxy with significant amounts of dust. We've had this cartoon picture of the early universe, but it's clear that we really don't know what's going on."

Submission + - Photo First: Light Captured as Both Particle and Wave (discovery.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: It’s one of those enduring Zen koans of science that we’ve all grown up with: Light behaves as both a particle and a wave—at the same time. Einstein taught us that, so we’re all generally on board, but to actually understand what it means would require several Ph.D.s and a thorough understanding of quantum physics.

What’s more, scientists have never been able to devise an experiment that documents light behaving as both a wave and a particle simultaneously. Until now.

That’s the contention of a team of Swiss and American researchers, who say they’ve succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of light’s dual behavior. Using an advanced electron microscope – one of only two on the planet – at the EPFL labs in Switzerland, the team has generated a kind of quantum photograph of light behaving as both a particle and a wave.

The experiment involves firing laser light at a microscopic metallic nanowire, causing light to travel — as a wave — back and forth along the wire. When waves traveling in opposite directions meet, they form a “standing wave” that emits light itself — as particles. By shooting a stream of electrons close to the nanowire, the researchers were able to capture an image that simultaneously demonstrates both the wave-nature and particle-nature of light.

“This experiment demonstrates that, for the first time ever, we can film quantum mechanics — and its paradoxical nature — directly,” says lead researcher Fabrizio Carbone of EPFL, on the lab’s project page. The study is to be officially published this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Submission + - New Seagate Shingled hard drive teardown

Submitted by Peter Desnoyers
Peter Desnoyers writes: Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives are starting to hit the market, promising larger drives without heroic (and expensive) measures such as helium fill, but at a cost — data can no longer be over-written in place, requiring SSD-like algorithms to handle random writes.

At the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference in February, researchers from Northeastern University (disclaimer — I'm one of them)
dissected shingled drive performance both figuratively and literally, using both micro-benchmarks and a window cut in the drive to uncover the secrets of Seagate's first line of publicly-available
SMR drives.

TLDR: It's a pretty good desktop drive — with write cache enabled (the default for non-server setups) and an intermittent workload it performs quite well, handling bursts of random writes (up to a few tens of GB total) far faster than a conventional drive — but only if it has long powered-on idle periods for garbage collection. Reads and large writes run at about the same speed as on a conventional drive, and at $280 it costs less than a pair of decent 4TB drives. For heavily-loaded server applications, though, you might want to wait for the next generation.

Videos (in 16x slow motion) showing the drive in action — sequential read after deliberately fragmenting the drive, and a few thousand random writes.

Comment Re:Great News (Score 1) 234

I, for one, am concerned over the constant use of the words "legal content" without defining what is and what isn't "legal content" and under what jurisdictions that falls. My pet theory is that bullying and "hate speech" will become unlawful and then blocked, and you know how the government is when it has a new hammer; everything starts to look like our thumbs.

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