Simap - Slashdot User

DRM Shuts Down PC Version of Gears of War 598

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 30, 2009 @02:58AM from the you-know-what-really-grinds-my-gears dept.

carlmenezes writes "It seems that the DRM on the PC version of Gears of War came with a built-in shut-off date; the digital certificate for the game was only good until January 28, 2009. Now, the game fails to work unless you adjust your system's clock. What is Epic's response? 'We're working on it.'"

Getting Started With Part-Time Development Work? 262

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 02, 2009 @02:17PM from the stability-vs.-fulfillment dept.

fortapocalypse writes "I'm getting paid a good salary as a Java developer and the hours are great. It is also very stable, which means something in today's economy, especially with a family to feed. However, I'm very unmotivated both because of the work that I do, which is boring, and because the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability. I've done what I could to try to change things at work and have pretty much given up on that. I want to go out on my own, either starting my own company or just working as a contractor doing Java development, but I'm not sure of the best way to get started, and my family needs the stability of my current job. I'd really like to start out part-time at 5-15 hours a week to use it as supplemental income (which my family could really use at the moment), but I really don't know where to start. I doubt many contracting agencies would be interested in a part-time worker. What would you suggest for someone in my position?"

Automated Scripts Overrun eBay Holiday Contest 182

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 05, 2008 @12:15PM from the dollar-for-this-dollar-for-that dept.

turnkeylinux writes "TechCrunch is reporting that eBay is under fire from users because of a holiday giveaway contest gone awry. On Tuesday Nov. 25, eBay announced its $1 Holiday Doorbusters deals promotion, giving away 100 gifts on a daily basis, all for a $1 fixed price. The gifts ranged from jewelry, clothing, digital cameras, and GPS devices to a brand-new Chevrolet Corvette. The only catch is that there's no announcement on when these items are released or in which category they will be. But cheaters came up with a clever way of winning deals on an automated basis by continuously running scripts to bid on items for $1."

How To Help Our Public Schools With Technology? 378

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 21, 2008 @02:32PM from the freedom-programmers dept.

armorer writes "I'm a programmer engaged to an inner-city public school teacher. I've been thinking for a long time now about what I can do to help close the technology gap, and I finally did something (very small) about it. I convinced my company to give me a few old computers they were replacing, refurbished them, installed Edubuntu on them, and donated them to her classroom. I also took some vacation time to go in, install everything, and give a lesson on computers to the kids. It was a great experience, but now I know first-hand how little technology these schools have. I only helped one classroom. The school needs more. (Really the whole district needs more!) And while I want to help them, I don't really know how. With Thanksgiving a week away and more holidays approaching, I suspect I'm not the only one thinking about this sort of thing. I know it's a hard problem, so I'm not looking for any silver bullets. What do Slashdot readers do? What should I be doing so that I'm more effective? How do you find resources and time to give back?"

RICO Class Action Against RIAA In Missouri 213

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 21, 2008 @01:49PM from the take-'em-down-dano dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, an RIAA case pending in St. Louis, Missouri, the defendant has asserted detailed counterclaims against the RIAA for federal RICO violations, fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prima facie tort, trespass, and conspiracy. The claims focus on the RIAA's 'driftnet' tactic of suing innocent people, and of demanding extortionate settlements. The RICO 'predicate acts' alleged in the 42-page pleading (PDF) are extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud. The proposed class includes all people residing in the US 'who were falsely accused ... of downloading copyrighted sound recordings owned by the counterclaim Defendants and making them available for distribution or mass distribution over a P2P network and who incurred costs and damages including legal fees in defense of such false claims' or 'whose computers used in interstate commerce and/or communication were accessed ... without permission or authority.' This is the second class action of which we are aware against the RIAA and the Big 4 recording companies, the first being the Oregon class action brought by Tanya Andersen, which is presently in the discovery phase."

Moore's Law Is Microsoft's Latest Enemy 395

Posted by kdawson on Thursday March 06, 2008 @01:07PM from the eee-running-aero-yeh-right dept.

Glyn Moody writes "Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated. One of the achievements of the popular new Asus Eee PC is that it has come up with a tab-based front end that hides the complexity. But maybe its real significance is that it has pushed down the price to the point where the extra cost of using Microsoft Windows over free software is so significant that ordinary users notice. As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?"

Western Digital Service Restricts Use of Network Drives 315

Posted by Zonk on Thursday December 06, 2007 @06:23PM from the drm-means-don't-read-disk dept.

sehlat writes "Via BoingBoing comes the news that Western Digital's My Book(TM) World Edition(TM) II, sold with promises of internet-accessible drive space, is now restricting the types of files the drive will serve up. 'Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?'" Update: 12/07 03:28 GMT by Z : To clarify, it actually seems as though this is a bad summary. The MioNET service that WD packages with the networked drives is responsible for the rights of users via the network. There are a few (obvious) ways to get around that.

USPTO Examiner Rejected 1-Click Claims As "Obvious" 195

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @02:15AM from the well-duh dept.

theodp writes "Faced with a duly unimpressed USPTO examiner who rejected its new 1-Click patent claims as 'obvious' and 'old and well known,' Amazon has taken the unusual step of requesting an Oral Appeal to plead its case. And in what might be interpreted by some as an old-fashioned stalling tactic, the e-tailer has also canceled and refiled its 1-Click claims in a continuation application. As it touted the novelty of 1-Click to Congress last spring, Amazon kept the examiner's rejection under its hat, insisting that 'still no [1-Click] prior art has surfaced.' The Judiciary Committee hearing this testimony included Rick Boucher (VA) and Howard Berman (CA), both recipients of campaign contributions from a PAC funded by 1-Click inventor Jeff Bezos, other Amazon execs, and their families."

Comment Re:Great! (Score 1) 208

by Simap on Thursday April 26, 2007 @02:47AM (#18881279) Attached to: Google Releases MySQL Enhancements

Yep, thanks for correcting me there. I was half asleep and without coffee :-) It is write-back cache that enables a massive speed boost when using InnoDB and the fully ACID settings. (parent probably knows this, but im putting the rest of this message here for anyone else reading the thread)
Write back-cache is possible without a battery, however having a working battery makes the write-back cache safe; when power is lost in the middle of a write, the cache keeps this data until the computer regains power, then it is written to disk. It is possible but ill-advised to have a write-back cache and no battery :-) If you do that you shouldn't bother with InnoDB's ACID safe settings. According to the manual, some drives and controllers have write-back cache (and no battery) which is not configurable, so be careful putting your fancy ACID applications on cheap SATA controllers/drives.

My test setup is a Dell 2950 2G ram RAID 1 SAS drives. The controller has a battery and 256m of cache. I had to turn write-back on, as it is configured to write-through by default. I did several unplug tests while I had 50 threads updating different records in the table on one machine while unplugging the DB server. After each unplug test the number of successfully committed transactions matched the data when the machine came back up. Switching between write-back (fast) and write-through (slow) had a very significant impact on the number of write transactions per second.

Disabling the syncs altogether boosted the performance several fold, MySQL was maxing all 4 CPUs and was not bottlenecked on I/O at all. If you can afford to lose 1 second of transactions with these fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants settings then go for it. Stuff like web forums, content sites, etc could probably survive. Places where the worst case is that someone has to repost is not going to kill you. Online stores, etc should not go that route, as losing a second of transactions could leave you with a lot of billed and not shipped customers! Some people will tell you that with these settings you will have inconsistent state, but they are full of it. You will have state that is transactionally consistent, you just might have a slightly older version of it as the last second of transactions may have been lost. Uncommited transactions are rolled back. InnoDB crash recovery still works fine.

I have not found any significant read performance difference between innodb and myisam on identical tables.

Microsoft Gets Help From NSA for Vista Security 233

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @10:55AM from the keeping-them-from-getting-into-mischief dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft received help from the National Security Agency in protecting the Vista operating system from worms and viruses. The Agency aimed to help as many people as they could, and chose to assist Vista with good reason: the OS still has a 90 percent lock on the PC market, with some 600 million Vista users expected by 2010. From the article: 'The Redmond, Wash., software maker declined to be specific about the contributions the NSA made to secure the Windows operating system ... Microsoft said this is not the first time it has sought help from the NSA. For about four years, Microsoft has tapped the spy agency for security expertise in reviewing its operating systems, including the Windows XP consumer version and the Windows Server 2003 for corporate customers.'"

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL comparison 390

Posted by Hemos on Monday December 18, 2006 @09:25AM from the get-the-morning-starter dept.

prostoalex writes "Ever find yourself wondering which open source database is the best tool for the job? Well, wonder no more, and let your tax dollars do the work in the form of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory publishing this unbiased review of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL. After reading it, however, it seems that MySQL ranks the same or better on most of the accounts." My poor sleepy eyes misread the date of posting on here; caveat that this is more then 15 months old.

Apple Releases 31 Security Fixes 319

Posted by kdawson on Thursday November 30, 2006 @10:40AM from the more-secure-than-you dept.

Agram writes, "This week Apple has released fixes for 31 vulnerabilities in its OS, although reportedly a number of known flaws remain un-addressed (according to the instigator of the Month of Kernel Bugs, 'Apple hasn't fixed any of the bugs published during [MoKB], except for the AirPort issue'). Earlier this year, in a move reminiscent of Microsoft's past patching faux pas, Apple released a 'fix' the installation of which broke features unrelated to the targeted flaw. With the growing number of low-level flaws, one has to wonder if Apple's 'more secure' argument still stands. Earlier this month, Microsoft released 6 fixes. Linux does not seem to fare much better. Despite all of these fixes, exploits remain in the wild for each platform. Perhaps, security-wise, the OS choice really boils down to a 'pick-your-poison X user-base' equation?"

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