Guanine - Slashdot User

Submission + - Linux the size of a plug (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

Guanine

on Thursday May 21, 2009 @01:46PM

Guanine writes: "Today, Saul Hansell's Bits Blog featured the PlugComputer: a 1.2GHz ARM compliant processor, 512mb DDR2, 512mb flash, USB 2.0, gigabit ethernet — all in a power-brick sized, wall-plug mounted computer. Is the hardware worth the money?
The first plausible use for the plug computer is to attach one of these gizmos to a USB hard drive. Voila, you've got a network server. Cloud Engines, a startup, has in fact built a $99 plug computer called Pogoplug, that will let you share the files on your hard drive, not only in your home but also anywhere on the Internet.
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Comment Good article about this (Score 1) 117

by Guanine on Thursday July 17, 2008 @06:44PM (#24235009) Attached to: Multiple Experts Try Defining "Cloud Computing"

Joyent, the best web host I've ever used, recently wrote an extended piece attempting to define cloud computing. They introduced what they call a "CloudScore", and rated themselves as 7/9 on it. Interesting read.

Dealing With Dialup 588

Posted by kdawson on Monday May 12, 2008 @05:39AM from the life-through-a-soda-straw dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like my parents may end up stuck having to use dialup to access the Internet from their cottage inside the Cape Cod National Seashore. Neither Comcast nor Verizon want to bother upgrading the hardware required to get them faster service. They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive. I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client; I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps. , Are there other ways they can increase the functionality despite the pitiful bandwidth? Any other good ideas? Any success stories you can share where people have finally got the bandwidth they crave?"

111 Years Ago, Indiana Almost Legislated Pi 379

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday February 06, 2008 @06:19AM from the squaring-the-circle dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "On February 5, 1897, 111 years ago today, the Indiana legislature very nearly passed a bill 'introducing a new mathematical truth,' that would have erroneously established pi as the ratio 'five-fourths to four' or 3.2. The story explaining the rationale behind the bill and how they were prevented from legislating it when a real mathematician intervened is quite interesting, because the man who discovered the 'new mathematical truth' wanted to charge royalties, which could have made pi the first form of irrational property."

How Fast is Your Turnaround Time? 418

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday November 13, 2007 @05:15PM from the never-fast-enough dept.

petrus.burdigala writes "I work for a mid-sized commercial software company (~20 Mloc) and we are frequently challenged by our supervisors to get fixes around the clock. Overall, we manage to get a 'bullet-proof' patch in about 4-5 weeks (from coding->QA->Build/Packaging->shipment), which I consider not so bad. But the other day, we got an urgent request from our support team to come up with a decent fix in 48 hours. I think they're a tiny bit unrealistic. So I wanted to get feedback from my peers: are we doing that bad? It takes months for other software vendors to issue zero-day exploit fixes, are our customers being unreasonable?"

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