Comment Re:Wow. I might actually be able to use the cloud! (Score 1) 102
See if centurylink fiber is available for you? It's probably cheaper too..
Comment The app seems really creepy/slimy? (Score 1) 79
I installed it (android), put in my phone number and real name, but denied access to my contacts. A friend (who has my phone number and name in their contacts) got a message saying that I had joined signal.
Does this mean that signal sends your phone number and/or name out to every single signal user to see if there is a match?
Doesn't seem like something that says they are about privacy should be done.
Apple's and Microsoft's 2019 Holiday Ads: Naughty Or Nice? (fastcompany.com) 71
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Apple's 2019 holiday ad The Surprise (YouTube, 11.8M views), the reveal at the end is that two young girls thought to have been frittering away time on their iPads have been making an unforgettable, heartwarming tribute to their recently passed grandmother that brings tears to their grandpa's eyes. "This is a master class in comfy reassurance commercialism," writes Fast Company's Jeff Beer. "It's something we see all the time in advertising, where a product of convenience pitches itself as a problem-solver, simultaneously making you feel less guilty for needing it. Better meals. A cool, organized house. A clean house. Screen time. The emotional journey from haggard travel to family loss to inspirational kids, all set to the soundtrack from perhaps the most tear-inducing scene Pixar ever made? It's a sentimental super weapon."
And in Microsoft's holiday spot Lucy & the Reindeer (YouTube, 66K views), 6-year-old Lucy marches outside and uses her Mom's Surface and Microsoft Translator to question Santa's reindeer ("How do you guys fly? What does Santa do in the summer?") after seeing how Microsoft's Cloud solution enabled her Mom to close a big deal with her Japanese clients without having to understand a word of their language.
So, do the Apple and Microsoft holiday ads appeal to your sentimental or cynical side?
And in Microsoft's holiday spot Lucy & the Reindeer (YouTube, 66K views), 6-year-old Lucy marches outside and uses her Mom's Surface and Microsoft Translator to question Santa's reindeer ("How do you guys fly? What does Santa do in the summer?") after seeing how Microsoft's Cloud solution enabled her Mom to close a big deal with her Japanese clients without having to understand a word of their language.
So, do the Apple and Microsoft holiday ads appeal to your sentimental or cynical side?
India Rejects Cryptocurrency, But It Isn't Giving Up On Blockchain (betanews.com) 51
Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: A budget speech given by India's finance minister led to numerous reports that India was banning the use of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum within the country. While Arun Jaitley noted in a speech that the Indian government does not recognize cryptocurrencies as legal tender, his slightly ambiguous language resulted in something of a misunderstanding. Now the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Committee of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has spoken out in an attempt to clarify the issue, and allay fears that Bitcoin et al are on the verge of being banned. At first glance, Jaitley's speech certainly seemed to imply that the Indian government wants to forbid the use of cryptocurrencies. In reality, he merely voiced concern about how cryptocurrencies were being used, and announced vague plans to introduce regulation to stop their use for illegal purposes. Delivering his speech, Jaitley said: "Distributed ledger system or the block chain technology allows organization of any chain of records or transactions without the need of intermediaries. The Government does not consider crypto-currencies legal tender or coin and will take all measures to eliminate use of these cryptoassets in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payment system. The Government will explore use of block chain technology proactively for ushering in digital economy."
Apache Hadoop Has Failed Us, Tech Experts Say (datanami.com) 150
It was the first widely-adopted open source distributed computing platform. But some geeks running it are telling Datanami that Hadoop "is great if you're a data scientist who knows how to code in MapReduce or Pig...but as you go higher up the stack, the abstraction layers have mostly failed to deliver on the promise of enabling business analysts to get at the data." Slashdot reader atcclears shares their report:
"I can't find a happy Hadoop customer. It's sort of as simple as that," says Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing, which develops and runs a cloud-based relational data warehouse offering. "It's very clear to me, technologically, that it's not the technology base the world will be built on going forward"... [T]hanks to better mousetraps like S3 (for storage) and Spark (for processing), Hadoop will be relegated to niche and legacy statuses going forward, Muglia says. "The number of customers who have actually successfully tamed Hadoop is probably less than 20 and it might be less than 10..."
One of the companies that supposedly tamed Hadoop is Facebook...but according to Bobby Johnson, who helped run Facebook's Hadoop cluster before co-founding behavioral analytics company Interana, the fact that Hadoop is still around is a "historical glitch. That may be a little strong," Johnson says. "But there's a bunch of things that people have been trying to do with it for a long time that it's just not well suited for." Hadoop's strengths lie in serving as a cheap storage repository and for processing ETL batch workloads, Johnson says. But it's ill-suited for running interactive, user-facing applications... "After years of banging our heads against it at Facebook, it was never great at it," he says. "It's really hard to dig into and actually get real answers from... You really have to understand how this thing works to get what you want."
Johnson recommends Apache Kafka instead for big data applications, arguing "there's a pipe of data and anything that wants to do something useful with it can tap into that thing. That feels like a better unifying principal..." And the creator of Kafka -- who ran Hadoop clusters at LinkedIn -- calls Hadoop "just a very complicated stack to build on."
One of the companies that supposedly tamed Hadoop is Facebook...but according to Bobby Johnson, who helped run Facebook's Hadoop cluster before co-founding behavioral analytics company Interana, the fact that Hadoop is still around is a "historical glitch. That may be a little strong," Johnson says. "But there's a bunch of things that people have been trying to do with it for a long time that it's just not well suited for." Hadoop's strengths lie in serving as a cheap storage repository and for processing ETL batch workloads, Johnson says. But it's ill-suited for running interactive, user-facing applications... "After years of banging our heads against it at Facebook, it was never great at it," he says. "It's really hard to dig into and actually get real answers from... You really have to understand how this thing works to get what you want."
Johnson recommends Apache Kafka instead for big data applications, arguing "there's a pipe of data and anything that wants to do something useful with it can tap into that thing. That feels like a better unifying principal..." And the creator of Kafka -- who ran Hadoop clusters at LinkedIn -- calls Hadoop "just a very complicated stack to build on."
Malware Linked To Government of Kazakhstan Targets Journalists, Political Activists and Lawyers, Says Report (eff.org) 23
An anonymous reader quotes a report from EFF: Journalists and political activists critical of Kazakhstan's authoritarian government, along with their family members, lawyers, and associates, have been targets of an online phishing and malware campaign believed to be carried out on behalf of the government of Kazakhstan, according to a new report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Malware was sent to Irina Petrushova and Alexander Petrushov, publishers of the independent newspaper Respublika, which was forced by the government of Kazakhstan to stop printing after years of exposing corruption but has continued to operate online. Also targeted are family members and attorneys of Mukhtar Ablyazov, co-founder and leader of opposition party Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan, as well as other prominent dissidents. The campaign -- which EFF has called "Operation Manul," after endangered wild cats found in the grasslands of Kazakhstan -- involved sending victims spearphishing emails that tried to trick them into opening documents which would covertly install surveillance software capable of recording keystrokes, recording through the webcam, and more. Some of the software used in the campaign is commercially available to anyone and sells for as little as $40 online.
NRA Complaint Takes Down 38,000 Websites (vice.com) 565
Sarah Jeong, reporting for Motherboard:38,000 websites hosted by the automated publishing service Surge went down today, after the National Rifle Association sent a legal notice over a parody website created by the Yes Men. A few days ago, the Yes Men released the parody video, "Share the Safety" -- announcing a supposed NRA program to deliver firearms into the hands of those too impoverished to afford guns. The opening frame of the video says "Paid for in part by the National Rifle Association of America with additional support from Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation." "Systemic poverty and dumb laws keep the urban poor unable to acquire life-saving firearms," says the video, which is available on YouTube. "That's why we at the NRA are teaming up with Smith & Wesson to share the safety.â The YouTube description includes a link to the "official" website, ShareTheSafety.org.
Google's Waze Jumps Into the Ride-Sharing Business 90
An anonymous reader writes: Waze, the online mapping company owned by Google, is testing a ride-sharing service in Israel called RideWith. The service will allow commuters to pay drivers for rides to and from work. This is a hard limit — drivers can give no more than two rides per day. If the restriction remains after the initial test, it could be a simple way to avoid pseudo-professional drivers, and all the taxi-related legal problems that go with them (see: Uber). "RideWith calculates a cost based on the anticipated fuel consumption and 'depreciation' based on mileage, and the driver is free to accept or decline the ride accordingly." One can't help but speculate about future involvement with Google's autonomous car project.
Caltech and UVic Set 339Gbps Internet Speed Record 79
MrSeb writes "Engineers at Caltech and the University of Victoria in Canada have smashed their own internet speed records, achieving a memory-to-memory transfer rate of 339 gigabits per second (53GB/s), 187Gbps (29GB/s) over a single duplex 100-gigabit connection, and a max disk-to-disk transfer speed of 96Gbps (15GB/s). At a sustained rate of 339Gbps, such a network could transfer four million gigabytes (4PB) of data per day — or around 200,000 Blu-ray movie rips. These speed records are all very impressive, but what's the point? Put simply, the scientific world deals with vasts amount of data — and that data needs to be moved around the world quickly. The most obvious example of this is CERN's Large Hadron Collider; in the past year, the high-speed academic networks connecting CERN to the outside world have transferred more than 100 petabytes of data. It is because of these networks that we can discover new particles, such as the Higgs boson. In essence, Caltech and the University of Victoria have taken it upon themselves to ride the bleeding edge of high-speed networks so that science can continue to prosper."
Comment Re:Heh (Score 1) 145
That was the only reason I registered as well.
Ericsson and Intel Offer Remote Notebook Lockdown 105
MojoKid writes "Ericsson and Intel have announced that they are collaborating on a way to keep your laptop's contents safe when your laptop goes MIA. Using Intel's Anti-Theft Technology — PC Protection (Intel AT-p) and Ericsson's Mobile Broadband (HSPA)
modules,
lost or stolen laptops can be remotely locked down. Similar to Lenovo's recently announced Lockdown Now PC technology, the Ericsson-Intel technology uses SMS messages sent directly to a laptop's mobile broadband chip. Once the chip receives the lock-down message, it passes it to the Intel AT-p function, which is integrated into Intel's Centrino 2 with vPro technology platform. Unlike Lenovo's anti-theft solution, the Ericsson module includes GPS functionality as well."
Doctorow On Copyright Reform & Culture 243
super-papa sends us to Locus Magazine for an article by Cory Doctorow discussing the conflicts between copyright law and modern culture, and arguing against the perception that copying media is still unusual. Quoting:
"Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you're not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you've violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement. There's a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture."
Comment Controller matters much more than the drives (Score 2, Informative) 303
All hardware (and software) sucks, and it breaks, it's a fact of life. No matter if you go with SCSI or SATA, the important thing is that you can find out when a drive dies so that it can get replaced.
Many low to mid range SCSI raid cards (most? all?) either don't have any sort of interface to find the raid status when the server is up (they just beep at you and expect that somehow that's going to be hard over the AC and server noises when you're walking by the machine), or the tools for checking the raid status are so poor that they'll lock up the shared memory segment after checking a certain amount of times (ADAPTEC, I'M TALKING TO YOU). Since being certain about your raid status means checking it via something like nagios, that means that it gets checked many times, and will thus eventually lock up.
While SATA is nowhere near the performance of scsi (despite what SATA fanboys will tell you), 3ware cards are actually really good at:
a) letting you know when a drive has failed
b) letting you check with their tools as many times as you want without locking it up
And since the SATA stuff is so much cheaper, you can buy multiple servers, so even if the card fails, you have a hot backup.
If you absolutely have to have the fastest, go for a raid 10 of 15krpm drives.
If you don't, and want peace of mind, get at least 2 SATA setups with 3ware cards.
Many low to mid range SCSI raid cards (most? all?) either don't have any sort of interface to find the raid status when the server is up (they just beep at you and expect that somehow that's going to be hard over the AC and server noises when you're walking by the machine), or the tools for checking the raid status are so poor that they'll lock up the shared memory segment after checking a certain amount of times (ADAPTEC, I'M TALKING TO YOU). Since being certain about your raid status means checking it via something like nagios, that means that it gets checked many times, and will thus eventually lock up.
While SATA is nowhere near the performance of scsi (despite what SATA fanboys will tell you), 3ware cards are actually really good at:
a) letting you know when a drive has failed
b) letting you check with their tools as many times as you want without locking it up
And since the SATA stuff is so much cheaper, you can buy multiple servers, so even if the card fails, you have a hot backup.
If you absolutely have to have the fastest, go for a raid 10 of 15krpm drives.
If you don't, and want peace of mind, get at least 2 SATA setups with 3ware cards.
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