antonpiatek - Slashdot User

Major Cache of Fossils Unearthed In Los Angeles 215

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @02:18AM from the sticky-underfoot dept.

aedmunde sends along news from the LA Times: "A nearly intact mammoth, dubbed Zed, is among the remarkable discoveries near the La Brea Tar Pits. It's the largest known deposit of Pleistocene ice age fossils... in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places — under an old May Co. parking lot in L.A.'s tony Miracle Mile shopping district. ...huge chunks of soil from the site have been removed intact and now sit in large wooden crates on the back lot... The 23 crates range... from the size of a desk to that of a small delivery truck... There were, in fact, 16 separate deposits on the site, an amount that, by her estimate, would have taken 20 years to excavate conventionally. ... Carefully identifying the edges of each deposit, her team dug trenches around them and underneath, isolating the deposits on dirt pedestals. After wrapping heavy plastic around the deposits, workers built wooden crates similar to tree boxes and lifted them out individually with a heavy crane. The biggest one weighed 123,000 pounds."

Stephen Hawking Going To Canada 204

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 27, 2008 @07:50PM from the making-reservations-on-a-guild-heighliner dept.

thepacketmaster writes "A previous Slashdot article I posted mentioned the possibility of Stephen Hawking coming to Canada. The Toronto Star now reports that he has accepted the position. Hawking will hold the title of distinguished research chair at the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics."

Comment Re:Small ISPs not entirely blameless... (Score 5, Informative) 120

by yani on Wednesday April 16, 2008 @05:18AM (#23087392) Attached to: Bell Canada's Misinformation About Throttling

Mod parent up, this is a correct counter-example to the original post which seems to buy into Bell's rhetoric.

In fact Teksavvy even gives its customers a choice of which routing they would prefer, unlimited over Cogent or 100gb/month over Peer 1 (lower latency)!

http://www.teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1

VoIP's Security Vulnerabilities 117

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday June 13, 2006 @11:26AM from the is-your-refridgerator-running dept.

garzpacho writes "Experts predict that attacks on VoIP systems could be right around the corner, and are calling for preemptive security measures. The BusinessWeek article compares the current state of voice-over-IP to the pre-spam email era and suggests that spammers could be the first to exploit the system. From the article: 'Here's what VoIP security breaches could mean for consumers. For starters, it's a big channel for spammers. Think of the Viagra ads that flood your e-mail inboxes now. They work because the cost of e-mailing thousands of people at once is so low, only 1% to 3% or so need to respond for it to be worth it, Ingevaldson says. Comparable economics apply to VoIP calls, he says. Then there are potential phishing attacks, where fraudsters posing as banks lead consumers to fake sites. Those and other attempts at identity theft could spring up via VoIP accounts too, experts say. Imagine the messages from relatives of deposed Nigerian dictators -- only this time they're on voice mail, too.'"

Judging The Apple 'Sweatshop' Charge 828

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday June 13, 2006 @10:44AM from the that's-laterally-not-differently dept.

jurgen writes "MacWorld summarizes an article published in the U.K., stating that Apple's iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day, make $50/month, and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food. The article also claims the workers live in dormitories where they are housed 100 per room, and are not allowed visitors." A Wired article looks at the same story, exploring the reliability of the Mail on Sunday's claims. From that article: "The situation is too murky for a rush to judgment on Apple's ethics here, and it may well meet minimum global standards. But for a company that has staked its image on progressive politics, Apple has set itself up as a potential lightning rod on global labor standards. Sweatshops came back to bite Nike after its customers rose up in arms; and Apple can expect a similar grilling from its upscale Volvo-driving fans in the months ahead."

Comment Re:Misleading Headline (Score 1) 349

by antonpiatek on Wednesday May 17, 2006 @05:13AM (#15349226) Attached to: Sun to Release Java Source Code

IBM already releases its own version of java. IBM Java.
It has a license with Sun to release its own derivative of Java when included with its products.

Most of the work is performance improvements, but AFAIK there is nothing stopping them doing what they want with it already, only that it cannot be shipped seperately

Exploring Active Record 266

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday March 08, 2006 @03:34AM from the language-midlife-crisis dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Everyone knows that no programming language is a perfect fit for every job. This article launches a 'new series by Bruce Tate that looks at ways other languages solve major problems and what those solutions mean to Java developers. He first explores Active Record, the persistence engine behind Ruby on Rails.'"

Comment Re:That's frightening (Score 4, Insightful) 784

by blyon_prolexic on Wednesday May 04, 2005 @04:07PM (#12434840) Attached to: Taking on an Online Extortionist

A "box" to fight multi-gig DDoS attacks is just a bad way to go about it. Ask Tipping Point what their box can do when there is 50,000 SSL TCP sessions (real TCP sessions) with real HTTP headers in there. If their hardware performed as well as marketing engines that TopLayer, Tipping Point, and Cisco have, then everyone in the security industry would all have to go find a new job.

Along with IPS in general, I think a lot of the devices out there have some pretty good rate-limiting and SYN flood mitigation, however, they all seemed to miscalculate the sheer amount of processing power it takes to do deep packet inspections and protocol verification. Prolexic's network is currently representing about 10 Terahertz of processing ability just for the DPI, so hoping a single FPGA based hardware device will do the trick may be a bad idea. Also, most devices can not handle out-of-state TCP based attacks (see: Riverhead), so keep your eyes out on that too.

Prolexic often gets new customers when the TopLayer, Tipping Point, and Riverhead gear fails, so I don't see how anyone could be comfortable with just a single unit to save the day when there are people out there that will take down DNS servers, router serial interfaces, carriers, do long lived TCP sessions to slow down web servers, HTTP connection floods, and anything else they can think of to just hurt the network (75k machines all doing random searche quries on a cgi, etc.)

Further, a box does not have much of a turn-around time, so just call Tipping Point at 2 AM on sunday when the network failed and nobody has any clue with what is going on. Then wait for their one good programmer to fix the FPGA issue and a week later cross their fingers that whatever they did can stop the botnet that is causing someone's business to fail.

I may just be a little beat up from all the traffic we deal with, but it's a little isane to say things like, "we have box X, its magic will fix everything."

-Barrett

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