Jason W - Slashdot User

Comment: Re:I do something similar (Score 1) 325

by Jason W on Sunday October 10 2010, @08:07PM (#33855356) Attached to: What Tech Should Be In a Fifth-Grade Classroom?

I do the exact same thing, WWBFT (What Would Ben Franklin Think?). I imagine him working on a project and I figure he would be glad to be able to get information so quickly so he could continue the thought process immediately. But I also figure he'd get distracted by all the same things we do; it's hard to stay in thinking mode when the whole world's at your fingertips.

Still, I always think WWBFT whenever someone complains about their slow phone or can't find something on Google. Most people take technology for granted today.

The binary code in Canada's Gov-Gen coat of arms?-> 2

Submitted by Lev13than on Sunday October 03 2010, @09:54PM

Lev13than writes "Dr. David Johnston, formerly the president of the University of Waterloo, was installed as Canada's new Governor-General on Friday. As de facto head of state and the Queen's representative in Canada he is required to design a personal coat of arms. One modern detail has attracted particular attention — a 33-digit palindromic binary stream at the base. Efforts to decode the meaning of the number using ASCII, Morse, grouping by 3/11 and other theories has so far come up empty (right now it's a toss up between random, the phone number 683-077-0643 and Morse code for "send help — trapped in a coat of arms factory"). Is 110010111001001010100100111010011 the combination to his luggage, or just a random stream of digits?"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:and who said that 10Mpix is more than enough? (Score 1) 99

by Jason W on Saturday October 02 2010, @10:32PM (#33774006) Attached to: Masterpieces Online — High Culture At High Resolution

Or in other words, CSI was actually accurate all of these years. They just had better cameras.

Comment: The May 9, 1979 reference (Score 3, Informative) 307

by Jason W on Friday October 01 2010, @07:53PM (#33766678) Attached to: Stuxnet Analysis Backs Iran-Israel Connection

For those too lazy to read the dossier:

Export 16 first checks that the configuration data is valid, after that it checks the value “NTVDM TRACE” in the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MS-DOS Emulation

If this value is equal to 19790509 the threat will exit. This is thought to be an infection marker or a “do not in- fect” marker. If this is set correctly infection will not occur. The value appears to be a date of May 9, 1979. While on May 9, 1979 a variety of historical events occured, according to Wikipedia “Habib Elghanian was executed by a firing squad in Tehran sending shock waves through the closely knit Iranian Jewish community. He was the first Jew and one of the first civilians to be executed by the new Islamic government. This prompted the mass exodus of the once 100,000 member strong Jewish community of Iran which continues to this day.” Symantec cautions readers on drawing any attribution conclusions. Attackers would have the natural desire to implicate another party.

Next, Stuxnet reads a date from the configuration data (offset 0x8c in the configuration data). If the current date is later than the date in the configuration file then infection will also not occur and the threat will exit. The date found in the current configuration file is June 24, 2012.

But really, May 9, 1979 being Rosario Dawson's birthday puts this back on the teenager in his basement path to me.

Inside Facebook's Infrastructure-> 0

Submitted by miller60 on Wednesday September 29 2010, @06:56PM

miller60 writes "Facebook served up 690 billion page views to its 540 million users in August, according to data from Google's DoubleClick. How does it manage that massive amount of traffic? Data Center Knowledge has put together a guide to the infrastructure powering Facebook, with details on the size and location of its data centers, its use of open source software, and its dispute with Greenpeace over energy sourcing for its newest server farm. There are also links to technical presentations by Facebook staff, including a 2009 technical presentation on memcached by CEO Mark Zuckerberg."
Link to Original Source

Internet Archive Challenges Google 115

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 22 2007, @09:52AM
from the pistols-at-dawn dept.

richards1052 writes "The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance. It's purpose is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search. A number of major library systems, including the Boston Public Library and Smithsonian, have refused to sign up with competing ventures by Microsoft and Google because they do not provide for universal access to digitized books. These commercial ventures prohibit books being accessed by competing search engines. So far, 80 libraries and research institutions have signed on with Open Content Alliance. They must pay for the scanning of their books while Google and Microsoft offset that cost for their participating institutions."

BBC iPlayer moves to Flash, goes cross-platform.-> 0

Submitted by

l-ascorbic

on Tuesday October 16 2007, @03:29AM

l-ascorbic writes "The Beeb's free catch-up download service has been widely criticised for being Windows-only, relying on Microsoft DRM. The BBC governors ordered that it should be cross-platform as soon as possible. Seems they've opted for Flash, meaning iPlayer will be available for Mac and Linux by the end of the year."
Link to Original Source

Internet Uses 9.4% of Electricity In the US 271

Posted by Zonk on Thursday September 27 2007, @06:03PM
from the that's-it dept.

ribuck writes "Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S., and 5.3% of global demand, according to research by David Sarokin at online pay-for-answers service Uclue. Worldwide, that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors (which makes up two-thirds of the total), plus other energy sinks including modems, routers, data processing equipment and cooling equipment."

Comment: Linux Virtual Server is great (Score 4, Informative) 50

by Jason W on Friday December 13 2002, @05:40PM (#4883623) Attached to: Load Balancers for Linux?

LVS was able to handle a medium-sized HTTP/HTTPS load at my last job quite well. It had 6 months of uptime serving 5-10 hits/second, and I literally never had to worry about it going down. In combination with mon, bringing machines up and down was never a problem, and failure situations were handled without the end user noticing.

Installation was a bit frustrating because I hadn't dealt with the networking issues before (the ARP problem). However, in the end it was only my lack of networking knowledge that was lacking, and the ARP problem turned out to be simple to overcome.

Support from the mailing list was great, I got thorough replies to my questions in a few hours. The documentation is good, although some parts of the HOWTO could be trimmed back a bit (more information than is needed to understand the problem, takes a bit of time to filter).

The hardware was two slower UP boxes (one live, one for failover), and the load was esstentially 0, even with mon and MRTG running.

LVS is of course just the load balancer, and the setup also included mon for monitoring, heartbeat for failover, and MRTG for trending. They all play well together, and create a very reliable, informative, load balancer setup.

Depending on your setup, one of the meta-packages such as Ultra Money or Redhat's HA suite might be best, but installing the components individually isn't much of a hassle either.