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Comment: This is absolutely correct (Score 4, Insightful) 337

by williamyf (#47209035) Attached to: Cisco Opposes Net Neutrality

The internet had, since IPv4, provisions for exactly this, and whole careers have been built by this. It goes by different names, Type of Services, QoS, Traffic Engineering. IPv6 has also provisions for this, so did ATM in its time. MPLS has a HUUUUGE component of this...

Having said that:

Video on Demand traffic from, say comcast, should have the same priority as video on Demand traffic from youtube or netflix (or some future cash strapped start-up).
Videoconferencing traffic from skype should have the same priority as videoconferencing trafffic from google+ o Cisco (or some future cash strapped start-up).
Web traffic from yahoo should have the same (slighty lower) priority as the web traffic from "mom & pop web server".

You get the drift, not because some big company is willing to pay more, or the ISP wants to double dip you can play with the priorities.

And THAT is net neutrality for y'all!
 

Comment: Windows server 2003R2 32Bit Hack (Score 1) 322

by williamyf (#47096735) Attached to: Registry Hack Enables Continued Updates For Windows XP

As things stand, the POS editions have a lot of components that will not be fixed (because they are not there) that the main version has/needs.

Wake me up if/when a hack is released to make an XP install pose a a server 2003R2. That will buy me/us a full year of patches., nost likey illegal.

+ - "Patent Owner/Troll" Intelectual Ventures defeated in Court by Capital One->

Submitted by williamyf
williamyf (227051) writes "According to Reuters, Intellectual Ventures, a Patent Owning company (some may say, a patent troll), was defeated in court when two of their patents were found invalid by the judge, as being too abstract to be patentable.

I.V. had "[...]filed separate patent lawsuits against several financial institutions last year, including Capital One, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Bank of America Corp. However, the Capital One case had been further along procedurally."

To stroke the flames of Slashdot, I.V. is largely owned by Space tourist and former Microsoft bigwig Nathan Myhrvold"
Link to Original Source

Comment: You may se in UV latter in life (Score 2) 510

by williamyf (#46710295) Attached to: How Cochlear Implants Are Being Blamed For Killing Deaf Culture

Since the christaline is opaque to UV while some intraocular lenses are not, some people report that after cataract surgery, they can see in augmented colour, probably due to some sensitivity to UV.

slashdot talked about it a while back

http://ask-beta.slashdot.org/story/11/10/02/1937232/ask-slashdot-how-to-exploit-post-cataract-ultraviolet-vision

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/02/14/165202/followup-ultraviolet-vision-after-cataract-surgery

So if/when the time comes to replace your christaline, make sure to go for the UV transparent lenses

Comment: With enough eyes... NOT (Score 4, Interesting) 231

by williamyf (#46401967) Attached to: Bug In the GnuTLS Library Leaves Many OSs and Apps At Risk

I have always been critical about that conventional wisdom of "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

I contend that is inacurate. With enough QUALIFIED AND MOTIVATED eyes, all bugs are shallow, and sometimes, some FOSS project lack enough Qualified eyes.

This bug, the KDE one, or even the Metafile bug in windows (and more importantly in WINE) among many others, show that many eyes are not enough.

Again one needs MOTIVATED AND QUALIFIED eyes AAAAAND good QA and test cases.

Cheers

+ - Bug in the GnuTLS Library leaves many OSs and Apps at risk->

Submitted by williamyf
williamyf (227051) writes "According to our friends at ArsTechnica:

"The bug in the GnuTLS library makes it trivial for attackers to bypass secure sockets layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections available on websites that depend on the open source package. Initial estimates included in Internet discussions such as this one indicate that more than 200 different operating systems or applications rely on GnuTLS to implement crucial SSL and TLS operations, but it wouldn't be surprising if the actual number is much higher. Web applications, e-mail programs, and other code that use the library are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers monitoring connections to silently decode encrypted traffic passing between end users and servers."

What's even more, the coding error *may* have been present since 2005, so one has to wander, again, where were those "many eyes that render all bugs shallow" one keeps hearing about..."
Link to Original Source

Comment: The caps are electrolytic (Score 0) 111

by williamyf (#46365195) Attached to: Intel's New Desktop SSD Is an Overclocked Server Drive

Not supercaps, no, electrolytics.

What happens if your superduper SSD develops bad cap syndrome?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

I am stil finding equipment with those sorts of failures today...

Not recomending, even having two of them in parallel...

Nope, not for me, sorry

Comment: YES! Definitely yes! (Score 2) 167

by williamyf (#45148129) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: As a Programmer/Geek, Should I Learn Business?

I remember when I was a young engineer. I got promoted through the ranks quickly, and at some point faced the same quagmire as you. What I ended up doing was to take a program of marketing management. Two months, Friday all day and Sat mornings for a month and a half to get a taste of the discipline (I was exposed to economy and accounting at the University, 12 weeks each, and lots of reading on economy, administration, etc). After that brief and non compromising stint, I realized that there were more nuances to marketing than what could be anticipated, and that the whole "Business" field was VERY interesting to me. Therefore, I went and did a full time MBA.

If you are gonna learn on your own (which I do not recommend), try to read the classics, Kotler on marketing management, rice & trout for positioning, etc. No Wikipedia or "Business for dummies" for you.

If you are going to take (a) short course(s) on the subject, go to reputable schools (I did the Short stint at IESA, not high in the world rankings, but best in my country, and did my MBA at IE in Madrid), while there are no hard and fast guarantees, going to reputable institutions will raise the possibility of being exposed to great teachers. Try to go for classroom courses, is harder, but you will build your "networking thingie" much better.

There is no guarantee that doing an MBA will improve your situation. But it would be hell to sign up for an MBA and discovering that you HATE "Business", and ALSO it would also be a grave mistake to decide "What you want to do" without at least a glance of what this "Business" thing is all about.

+ - Google Ignores Whitehouse.gov Attempt to Block Snowden Pardon Petition

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I’ve been following the Edward Snowden – NSA saga the past week or so with fascination, as I suspect some of you are as well. Last night over dinner, my wife and I were pondering what might be the final outcome of this, depending what happens between Russia (or the left leaning Latin America) and the US in the coming days. I wondered – might there be any chance of an eventual pardon for Snowden from the White House on Obama’s last day in office? There must be some discussion of whether a pardon could be in the works or not, right? So I consulted the Oracle of Google, searching pardon Edward Snowden.

The number one organic result is a subdomain from Whitehouse.gov. This ‘petitions’ subdomain facilitates citizens to create, manage, and promote petitions to our government. If a petition receives more than 100,000 supporters then the administration has made a commitment to address the petition with a response on the matter in question.

What is immediately curious to any of us with a trained eye in search marketing is that the result from Petitions.whitehouse.gov is ranking highly despite the page being marked disallowed by the subdomain’s robots.txt file.

Why is Whitehouse.gov choosing to block search engines from indexing content of their petition pages, when these pages are created by the people and for the people to express and promote concerns to their government leaders? I cannot think of a good rationale for this. Can you?

I’ve created a petition page on petitions.whitehouse.gov to petition the Obama administration to remove the robots.txt disallow from petitions on their site. This action will promote the transparency and conduit for democracy in action that the web platform was created to serve in the first place.

Find the petition located here and pass this URL to your networks.

People may have trouble finding my new petition via search engines, so that will make it harder to achieve the 100,000 signatures to garner its due attention. Oh, the delicious irony

More details here and looking forward to all the /. comments."

+ - Mastermind of 9/11 Attacks Designs a Secret Vacuum Cleaner

Submitted by HonorPoncaCityDotCom
HonorPoncaCityDotCom (2980655) writes "AP reports that while confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could design a vacuum cleaner. After all KSM earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering, the agency had no long-term plan for him, but might thought he might someday prove useful and might even stand trial one day and for that, he'd need to be sane. They were concerned that his long imprisonment might do so much psychological damage that he would no longer be useful as source for information. "We didn't want them to go nuts," said a former senior CIA official. So, using schematics from the Internet as his guide, Mohammed began re-engineering one of the most mundane of household appliances. It remains a mystery how far Mohammed got with his designs or whether the plans still exist and even Mohammed's military lawyer, Jason Wright, says he is prohibited from discussing his client's interest in vacuums. "It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger," says Wright. So now, says Doug Mataconis, if you happen to start seeing ads for the CIA’s revolutionary new home cleaning device, you’ll know where it came from."

Memory fault -- brain fried

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