Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Troll vs legitimate non-practicing entity (Score 1) 191

by David Muir Sharnoff (#44885851) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: When Is Patent License Trading Not Trolling?

What makes a troll a troll is the behavior of trying to get money from people for doing what they are already doing. There is no value add. A legitimate non-practicing entity, on the other hand, gets money by getting people do do something new that they were not already doing.

The distinction is clear and simple. If you approach me and tell me I need a license to do what I'm already doing, you're a troll. That's the only way to be a troll.

Comment testing on linux: use spew (Score 1) 297

by David Muir Sharnoff (#39562609) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Test Storage Media?

http://linux.die.net/man/1/spew

While you can't predict against future failures, if you want to make sure that your drive media is okay today, there is a tool that will fill your disk with garbage and then verify that your disk has the right garbage on it: spew. Spew isn't the friendliest tool, but it does the job.

As a side effect, it stresses your I/O systems and memory. Years ago, I discovered that some Dell 2550's I had couldn't pass this test with the SATA controller I had shoved into them that seemed to work fine otherwise.
Idle

Submission + - Japanese Scientist Creates Fake Meat From Feces (inhabitat.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hold on to your hamburgers — Japanese scientist Mitsyuki Ikeda at the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama has invented an artificial meat substitute made from human feces. The unseemly meal is made by extracting protein and lipids from “sewage mud”. The lipids are then combined with a reaction enhancer and whipped into “meat” in an exploder. You can see a video of the process at work here — just don't lose your lunch; it would make a great steak.
Crime

Malaysian Indicted After Hacking Federal Reserve 132

Posted by kdawson from the tip-of-the-proverbial dept.
wiredmikey sends along a security story that looks like it could be one to watch. Lin Mun Poo was arrested shortly after arriving at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport in late October, traveling to the US on business. The 32-year-old resident of Malaysia was observed by an undercover Secret Service agent selling stolen credit card data in a diner. After arresting him and seizing his laptop (which was "heavily encrypted"), authorities discovered evidence of far more serious security breaches. According to documents from the Department of Justice, Lin Mun Poo had hacked into the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and stolen over 400,000 credit and debit card numbers. Also, according to authorities, Mr. Poo managed to hack into FedComp, a data processor for federal credit unions, enabling him to access the data of various federal credit unions. He also hacked into the computer system of a Department of Defense contractor that provides systems management for military transport and other military operations, potentially compromising highly sensitive military logistics information.
Advertising

Google Awarded Broad Patent For Location-Based Advertising 54

Posted by kdawson from the you-are-here-and-we-own-you dept.
Mashable has a report of a patent that just issued (6-1/2 years after filing) — apparently Google now has a lock on location-based advertising. It's not clear that the search company intends to assert the patent against any other companies (such as emerging rival Apple), but it's useful as leverage. Here is the patent. Update: 03/02 14:34 GMT by S : Reader butlerm noted that the incorrect patent was linked. It now points to the correct URL.
Science

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"
Image

Christmas Tree Made From 70 SCSI Hard Drives 248

Posted by samzenpus from the free-time dept.
Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array. Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat. With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.
Music

RIAA Now Filing Suits Against Consumers Who Rip CDs 403

Posted by Zonk from the because-we-needed-another-reason-to-be-cranky-at-them dept.
mrneutron2003 writes "With this past week's announcement by Warner to release its entire catalog to Amazon in MP3 format with no Digital Rights Management, you would think that the organization that represents them, The RIAA, would begin changing its tune. Instead, they are pressing on in their campaign against consumers by suing individuals who merely rip CDs they've purchased legally. 'The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.'"

Comment Re:Linux as guest (Score 1) 141

by David Muir Sharnoff (#15378106) Attached to: Which OS Makes the Best VMWare Host?
I've only tried 1000 and 100. On my AMD 3200+, a Linux 2.6.12 kernel with HZ=1000 takes 10-14% of the CPU (when idle). With HZ=100, it takes about a tenth of that. I'm not using these guest installations as production servers. As test environments, I can't tell the difference between 100 and 1000 HZ except for the amount of idle cpu overhead they take.

Slashdot Top Deals

Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

Close