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Databases

Submission + - MySQL Founder fears 'Bait and Switch' from Oracle (ostatic.com)

Submitted by ruphus13
ruphus13 writes: Monty Widenius has been a vocal critic of the Oracle acquisition of Sun, fearing for the future of MySQL. Now that the deal is pretty much done, Monty is very skeptical on the future, especially for the Open Source version of MySQL, and fears a 'bait and switch' from Oracle. From the interview, "It's clear that Oracle is in the game for the profit and it's in their interest to get out as much money from MySQL as they can over the long term. There will be less development of the Community version of MySQL. MySQL Enterprise will over time be only available as closed source and with a different feature set than the Community version. By keeping the price very low in the beginning for MySQL Enterprise, they will have a high conversation rate as it will be much easier to move to this than to another database. This will create an efficient lock-in and make it very hard for a MySQL 'fork' to survive or get traction, as it's almost impossible to keep things compatible. When Oracle finally raises prices, most users just have to pay..."
Idle

Submission + - "Tube Map" Created for the Milky Way (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Assuming you had an interstellar spaceship, how would you navigate around the galaxy? For starters, you'd probably need a map. But there's billions of stars out there, how complex would that map need to be? Actually, Samuel Arbesman, a research fellow from Harvard, has come up with a fun solution. He created the 'Milky Way Transit Authority (MWTA),' a simple transit system in the style of the iconic London Underground "Tube Map." (Travel Tip: Don't spend too much time loitering around the station at Carina, there's some demolition work underway.)"
Space

Submission + - Hubble Confirms Asteroid Collision (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "100 million miles from Earth, in the asteroid belt, a strange object appeared (called P/2010 A2). At first it was assumed to be a rare comet-asteroid hybrid, but there was another theory: it could be an unprecedented asteroid collision. Requesting observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope, David Jewitt (UCLA) zoomed in on P/2010 A2 capturing high resolution photos. This mysterious object could be aftermath of the first hypervelocity asteroid collision ever witnessed."
Music

Submission + - P2PNet Silenced 1

Submitted by Hodejo1
Hodejo1 writes: Kazaa's Nikki Hemming could not take down P2Pnet with her libel suit back in 2006 that tried to hold the site fiscally responsible for slanderous posts made by a reader. The irony, of course, was that P2Pnet was mostly a supporter of Kazaa, which prompted The Register's Ashlee Vance to note at the time "The sound of the pigopolists laughing is unbearable" Four years later things turned bad for P2Pnet. On January 19th El Reg reported that the site's publisher Jon Newton was fast running out of cash, blaming it "on Big Music for shutting down two advertisers and for causing his other two advertisers to scale back." Yesterday, Newton shut P2Pnet down, silencing a vocal supporter of fair use and consumer rights.

Comment Re:No thanks (Score 1) 248

by mlts (#30708762) Attached to: Blizzard Authenticators May Become Mandatory

I have two issues with authenticators. First, what happens if the battery dies? On PayPal, you can have multiple authenticators to prevent having to send faxes and prove you are you, if one of them gives up the ghost. IIRC [1], Blizzard only allows one authenticator, and if that one decides to take a dirt nap, it is very difficult to regain control of an account.

Blizzard's authenticators are OK, they are rebranded VASCO DigiPass Go 6 models (PayPal uses DigiPass Go 3s.) For the money, they are a great buy.

My other issue is that the software authentication is for a number of phones and Java based, but none for Windows Mobile, nor Android. It would be nice to see an Android app that can do this functionality. Combine this with mobile authentication, and this would be a solid winner with some failsafe-ness built in. Of course, if someone loses their phone, that could be a problem, but that is why one would have software authentication as well as a device that gets tucked away somewhere safe.

Best of all worlds would be standard offline authenticator software (OATH compatible, etc) that is built into the iPhone OS, Android, and other phone operating systems. It would be seeded via a SMS handshake, then the user can just pull up the application, enter a PIN to unlock the app, copy the number showing on the screen either into a window asking for it, or append it to one's password, and have secure, standard offline access regardless of application.

[1]: I could be completely wrong, but I didn't find any documentation to state otherwise.
Operating Systems

Submission + - World’s Smallest Operating system 5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever heard of an OS which fit inside a Floppydisk ? Maybe Not. But there is.It is known as KolibriOS. KolibriOS (also known as KOS and Kolibri) is a free operating system with a monolithic preemptive, real-time kernel, video drivers, for 32-bit x86 architecture computers, developed and maintained by The KolibriOS Project Team. Its only 2.4 MB in size.
Intel

Submission + - An x86 smartphone? - here comes the LG GW990 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by gbjbaanb
gbjbaanb writes: I love stories about new smartphones, it shows the IT market is doing something different than the usual same-old desktop apps, maybe one day we'll all be using super smartphones as our primary computing platforms.

And so, here's Intel's offering: the LG GW990. Running a Moorestown CPU, which gives 'considerably' better energy efficiency than the Atom, it runs Intel's Linux distro — Moblin.

"In some respects, the GW990 — "which has an impressive high-resolution 4.8-inch touchscreen display — "seems more like a MID than a smartphone. It's possible that we won't see x86 phones with truly competitive all-day battery life until the emergence of Medfield, the Moorestown successor that is said to be coming in 2011. It is clear, however, that Intel aims to eventually compete squarely with ARM in the high-end smartphone market."

Comment Re:No thanks (Score 4, Informative) 248

by MajroMax (#30705826) Attached to: Blizzard Authenticators May Become Mandatory

Also, do they plan on putting them out other ways for free if they try this. When I looked into one you had to buy the thing from Blizzard for like $25 or something.

The authenticator is hardly $25. In the US, it's $6.50 with free shipping, and in the EU it's EUR6.99 also with free shipping. The price covers the cost of the physical unit and (obviously) the shipping. Blizzard's hardly making a killing on these.

For mobile authenticators, the Blizzard Website has more detail. The short version is that the Mobile Authenticator is available on a wide range of phones, depending on provider. Support isn't universal, though.

That said, the only time Blizzard could make Authenticators mandatory would be at a game-changing event, like the release of the next expansion. If they go ahead and do that, they'd probably throw Authenticators in the box, to automatically have near-total distribution. Their biggest concern is probably whether they can source a few million of them.

The long and short of it is that account theft is a big problem, both for Blizzard and for people who play WoW. Not everyone has a locked-down system, and phishers are using tactics formerly reserved for actual banks to try to get account info. Players have to deal with having their account possibly stolen, Blizzard has to deal with perpetual requests (some possibly fraudulent!) to restore characters/items, and the game as a whole suffers from the RMT that goes on.

I, for one, welcome our Keyfob and Mobile-Authenticating Overlords.
Security

Submission + - Smart Neuroscientist Stupid in Love 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The mystery man who breached security at Newark Airport last weekend, shutting down a major terminal for six hours, is a mystery no more. Haisong Jiang, a neuroscientist-in-training at Rutgers who allegedly slipped under a security ribbon inside Terminal C to share a kiss with a woman before she caught her flight, was taken into custody by Port Authority police and charged with defiant trespass. Looks like sneaking past security to steal a kiss doesn't play too well outside of Love Actually.
Google

Submission + - Google Seeks Patent on Selling the Brooklyn Bridge

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: CNET reports that Google is 'musing' about placing ads in Street View. The search giant reportedly floated the idea in a presentation to marketing and ad agency types in Europe a few months back. So will virtual billboards be popping up in Google Street View? A Google rep said the company had no current plans to put ads in Street View, but you might want to take that with a grain of salt. On Thursday, the USPTO revealed that Google is seeking patent protection for Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising. From the patent application: 'The street view display server can locate an ad image within the image database and overlay the region of interest with the associated ad image.' Connect the dots, and it sure sounds like a plan, doesn't it? Selling the Brooklyn Bridge is a pretty good scam — selling a view of it is even better!
Google

Submission + - Cisco trying to choke Google? (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: Cisco has filed a patent application on a method that seeds search engine crawlers using intercepted network traffic. The idea is to monitor data packets and detect requests to access a given document. In theory, this could speed up the Web crawling process, but Cisco says it could also do things like control the re-crawl frequency for a given Web page. Interesting! It takes the power of the search engine out of the hands of said search engine (ehem, Google) and puts it into the hands of the network operator. Would you like to be able to tell Google which documents on your site to crawl, when to crawl them and then be able to enforce that? Wouldn't Rupert Murdoch love that!

Submission + - China Luring Scientists Home (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by blee37
blee37 writes: The NY Times reports that China is increasing incentives for Chinese students earning PhDs in the U.S. to return home. One example is a prestigious Princeton microbiologist who returned to become a dean at Tsinghua, the Chinese MIT. In my experience as a grad student, Chinese students were often torn about returning home. The best science and the most intellectually stimulating jobs are in the U.S. Yet, surely they miss their families and their hometown. As alluded in the article, Chinese science remains far behind, especially because of rampant cronyism in academia as well as government. But, if more Chinese students go back, it could damage the U.S.'s technology lead. A large percentage of PhDs students in the U.S. are from China. Also, the typical PhD student has their tuition paid for and receives a salary. Does it make sense to invest in their training if they will do their major work elsewhere?

Comment Re:Trends (Score 1) 264

by A beautiful mind (#30695674) Attached to: IPv4 Will Not Die In 2010
Note, the statement that I made and the statement about the model by the author almost a year ago, is not contradictory. I wouldn't disagree that the uncertainty is years, as there is a small chance of a more than few months' worth of swing.

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