Comment: Farewell (Score 1) 1521
/. has been pretty influential in my life and career and I want to thank you and the crew still on for all the work.
Comment: Thanks Bob (Score 4, Interesting) 187
I appreciate all the insight you lent me and the fact that you opened my eyes to a better way to troubleshoot and think about systems.
Comment: Re:What OS? And how annoying? (Score 5, Informative) 366
Back in the late 80s we had a bunch of 10MHz XT clones in a computer lab networked together using Novel and 10BASE2 or maybe even TokenRing. Some of the games we had ran timing loops for the original 4.77 MHz PC so we had some simple TSR that sat on the interrupt timer and ran some NOPs to slow the computers down. I thought it would be a funny prank to add this to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on most of the boot floppies in the lab, sadly I didn't test it on more than one computer.
The interrupts and NOPs interfered greatly with the network cards, causing the whole thing to come crashing down when more than a couple of the computers were running at a time. It took at least a couple of days for the sysadmin to sort it out.
RIP George, thanks for introducing me to the Internet and I'm sorry that you didn't get to stick around for Linux and
Comment: Re:overwritten once CAN be recovered (Score 3, Informative) 780
Markup Fail!
Great Zero Challenge
Comment: Re:overwritten once CAN be recovered (Score 5, Informative) 780
The [a href="http://16systems.com/zero.php"]Great Zero Challenge[/url] says otherwise. They're simply asking for the filename of one of the files on a drive that has been wiped once with zeros. Despite offering the challenge for over a year and actively speaking to data recovery companies, no one has taken them up on the offer.
Police Race At Dragway To Fight Illegal Street Racing
15
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the to-fuel-inject-and-swerve dept.
from the to-fuel-inject-and-swerve dept.
For $25, anyone over the age of 18 can race a police officer at the monthly "Beat the Heat" night in Miami, Florida. The races are held at County Line Drag Way and are designed to redirect people from racing on the streets to the dragstrip. "You could bring your mother's minivan. You can bring a pure racing car. It doesn't matter," said Officer Jose Ayala with the Medley Police Department.
Comment: Intelligent Agents all failed 10 years ago (Score 1) 100
Intelligent Agents were a big deal at the beginnings of the dotcom bubble era. There are plenty ofBooks and Articles about them. A good part of Java's sandbox security model evolved from the anticipation that we would be allowing agents to come visit our computers to do their intelligent activities.
In the real world other technologies did a better job at whatever agents were designed to do. As the article points out, Google and other well constructed search engines are much better at finding online information than a series of wide-flung bits of software. Well designed APIs filled much of the gap for more specific applications.
Intelligent Agents did find one toehold in the marketplace though, spyware and botnets show just how useful it can be to have your software running on someone else's machine. Of course they're completely outside of any security 'sandbox' and get to do what they please.
It sounds as if someone is making an attempt to capitalize on some IP before it expires.
Exploit Found to Brick Most HP and Compaq Laptops 294
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the cool-looking-paperweight dept.
from the cool-looking-paperweight dept.
Ian Lamont writes "A security researcher calling himself porkythepig has published attack code that can supposedly brick most HP and Compaq laptops. The exploit uses an ActiveX control in HP's Software Update. It would 'let an attacker corrupt Windows' kernel files, making the laptop unbootable, or with a little more effort, allow hacks that would result in a PC hijack or malware infection.' The same researcher last week outlined a batch of additional vulnerabilities in HP and Compaq laptops, for which HP later issued patches."
Bees Can Optimize Internet Bottlenecks 128
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the bee-all-that-you-can-bee dept.
from the bee-all-that-you-can-bee dept.
prostoalex writes "Georgia Tech and University of Oxford scientists claim bees can help up develop a better Internet traffic algorithms. By observing bees, the researchers noticed that bees pass back information on route quality. 'On a basic level, the honeybee's dilemma is a tale of two flower patches. If one patch is yielding better nectar than the other, how can the hive use its workforce most efficiently to retrieve the best supply at the moment? The solution, which earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize, is a communication system called the waggle dance.' Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page."
Interconnecting Wind Farms To Smooth Power Production 112
Posted
by
Zonk
from the sounds-like-a-plan dept.
from the sounds-like-a-plan dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Wind power is one of the world's fastest growing electric energy sources, but as wind is intermittent, a single wind farm cannot deliver a steady amount of energy. This is why scientists at Stanford University want to connect wind farms to develop a cheaper and more reliable power source. Interconnecting wind farms with a transmission grid should reduce the power swings caused by wind variability and provide a somewhat constant and reliable electric power (or 'baseload' power) provided by other power plants."
Study Warns of Internet Brownouts By 2010 318
Posted
by
kdawson
from the told-you-them-pipes-was-too-small dept.
from the told-you-them-pipes-was-too-small dept.
Bergkamp10 writes "Consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown-outs in two years unless backbone providers invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure, according to a new study. A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Net by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to US $137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study by Nemertes Research Group. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand, Nemertes said. Quoting from the study: 'Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years.' Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year."
+ - Tracking Down an ISP on Craigslist.org
Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes "Hi — I'm sort of desperately in need of help because somebody is harassing my sister. I was wondering if any of you knew or had suggestions about how to track down an ISP or email address of an anonymous posting on craigslist.org. Some dickhead posted my sister's phone number and a raunch photo (not her) on the casual encounters section. Needless to say, she's been getting a lot of nasty calls and is really freaked out. Shy of subpoena-ing craigslist (which we think we're gonna do), I wanted to know if there was a way to find out who did it. Then I can begin plotting his (her?) comeuppance ...
I don't know if its possible. I don't know if any of you are looking to make a few bucks to do it (we'll most definitely pay). I swear this isn't anything sketchy and honestly, you'd really be helping her out because she's having a shit day. Thanks in advance and please contact us at the email posted."
+ - Snow Drift Game Replaces Prisoner's Dilemma->
Submitted
by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "It's a well known situation and one often studied in everything from behavioral sciences to artificial intelligence. It involves the idea that cooperation is promoted by two or more individuals working together to achieve a return greater than working for their own interests. Scientists are now leaning toward the iterated snow drift game (ISD) replacing the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) to accurately model what humans experience in real life. Essentially it removes the defective partner risk that is inherent in the IPD situation. If you are fingered by your friend while in separate interrogation rooms while you claim that both you and your friend are innocent, the outcome is much worse. In the ISD, your idle partner does not negate points from your efforts to work together — it just doesn't add anything either."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Underground Mac Community Foils a Coup 253
Posted
by
kdawson
from the fortunately-bloodless dept.
from the fortunately-bloodless dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In an attempted palace coup that would not have been out of place in a Shakespearian tragedy, a moderator faction at Mac Serial Junkie, one of the largest underground Mac communities, was shut out this weekend after it was discovered that many staff members were plotting a coup. The plans included a surreptitious takeover of the domain name macserialjunkie.com. In an Open Letter to the Community, the founders of MSJ explain how a number of people at the highest levels of the underground planned their takeover activities for almost two years, only to be foiled at the last minute."
+ - Multiformat Listening Test at 64kbps 1
Submitted
by
prospective_user
prospective_user writes "Do you think you have good ears? Think again.
The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.
Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.
The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.
Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"
The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.
Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.
The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.
Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"