Comment Seiko 5 (Score 1) 399
I just bought a Seiko 5 that is accurate to +1 sec a day, and I love it. $50 on Amazon. It's a special feeling to wear a mechanical watch.
Comment Re: Won't do any good. (Score 1) 264
Happened 2 years ago in my city. Regular traffic stop, guy just steps out with an AR15 and unloads on the cop car.
Comment Re:Won't do any good. (Score 0) 264
The situation changed when thugs started getting out of cars and unloading on the cops with fully auto assault rifles. Different times.
Comment Re:Won't do any good. (Score 1) 264
I work in IT for a PD, and we have body worn cameras that are locked into an upload, with no way for the officer to delete what's on the camera. That was one of the main reasons for purchasing said camera.
Comment Re:Clone my car! (Score 1) 500
The real solution? Reimage the production server to just get it working, then you dig around on the dev server until you find out what's actually going on.
Exactly.
If the machine is in production it needs to be working. You don't have time to dig around and find the root cause. You need it to work. Now. If you've got a virtualized environment it is trivial to bring up a new VM, throw an image at it, and migrate the data.
Then you take your old, malfunctioning VM into a development environment and dig for the root cause, so that you don't see the same problem crop up on your new production machine.
I ditto this. Its really hard to troubleshoot a problem when users are ringing your phone continuously because a critical server is down. Much easier to pull it into dev and troubleshoot at your leisure. The key being going back to figure out the problem. Not just "forgetting" about it and moving on.
California's Santa Clara County Bans Happy Meal Toys 756
WrongSizeGlass writes "The L.A. Times is reporting that Santa Clara County officials have voted to ban toys and other promotions that restaurants offer with high-calorie children's meals. 'This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys' to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure. 'This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes.' Supervisor Donald Gage, who voted against the measure, said, 'If you can't control a 3-year-old child for a toy, God save you when they get to be teenagers.' The vote was 3 - 2 in favor of the ban."
Comment Re:Yet MS insists in using it (Score 1) 472
Yeah, but when your company still has critical programs that will only run on 2003 or earlier, you don't have a choice. Sometimes you still need that floppy. We keep a USB floppy and a stack of disks in the server room for just these times! Perfect example: NetMotion. Critical program, but will not run on 2008. Doesn't fit well into the VM environment due to multiple NICs and the need for a big ol SQL database.
Tower Switch-Off Embarrasses Electrosensitives 292
Sockatume writes "Residents in Craigavon, South Africa complained of '[h]eadaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns' after an iBurst communications tower was put up in a local park. Symptoms subsided when the residents left the area, often to stay with family and thus evade their suffering. At a public meeting with the afflicted locals, the tower's owners pledged to switch off the mast immediately to assess whether it was responsible for their ailments. One problem: the mast had already been switched off for six weeks. Lawyers representing the locals say their case against iBurst will continue on other grounds."
App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202
An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.:
"There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers."
A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.
Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi 428
Scyth3 writes "A man is suing his neighbor for not turning off his cell phone or wireless router. He claims it affects his 'electromagnetic allergies,' and has resorted to being homeless. So, why doesn't he check into a hotel? Because hotels typically have wireless internet for free. I wonder if a tinfoil hat would help his cause?"
Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203
Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes."
Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.
Dev Discusses Upcoming Spy-MMO, The Agency 75
Kheldon writes "The MMO Gamer recently sat down with Lorien Gremore, lead producer on SOE's upcoming spy-shooter MMO, The Agency. They discussed various aspects of its development, such as the 'stickiness' of session-based games, striking a balance between FPS and MMO players, and whether or not The Agency even falls under the definition of a traditional MMO at all. 'You might be in Prague, and experiencing play with a lot of different other players; you might have come in at your field office and gone out into the city, encountering many other players doing missions that you are also doing,' Gremore said. She added that the game's areas are large enough to have 'lots of different people in them, collecting intel, engaging in public combat, all of those types of things. These areas are big enough that there’s shops, there’s secret spaces, photos to be taken of suspicious objects, things like that. They’re all out there in the world. We’re really trying to create a balance, where you’re encountering a lot of social situations, chances to get into groups with other people, just by merit of the fact that you guys are doing the same sorts of things in the same sorts of places.'"
Comment Re:My method of HDD disposal (Score 1) 289
Also, as a side note, we invite people to our "smashing day". It seems to be pretty therapeutic for people to smash computer equipment!
Comment Re:My method of HDD disposal (Score 2, Insightful) 289
I work in law enforcement IT, and we routinely dispose of drives that have sensitive data on them. This is our technique. We strip the magnets and keep them on the workbench to hold screws when we take things apart, then smash the platters with an 8lb sledge hammer. If you can recover the data after a sledge hit, you're smart enough to go about obtaining this data another way!
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