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Comment Re:Oracle will do just fine (Score 3, Insightful) 154

Nonsense. I work for a fairly large university in the NE. We were an virtually exclusive Sun hardware/Solaris shop. Due to Oracle's behavior, we've moved wholly away on both hardware and software since they acquired Sun. Good riddance. I also know of an enormous urban school district (where I used to work and still know many people) that has done the same. While this is only an N of 2, I doubt we're all that rare.

I work for a University out west, and our story is the same as yours. We had a large Sun/Solaris presense... not anymore.
Google

Ex-Google Engineer Blasts Google's Technology 158

Posted by timothy from the or-is-it-just-sour-grapes dept.
lee1 writes "Dhanji R. Prasanna, an engineer who recently resigned from Google, describes Google's famous back-end infrastructure as a collection of obsolete technologies, designed 10 years ago for building search engines and crawlers. He blasts MapReduce and its closed-source friends as 'ancient, creaking dinosaurs', compared with outside open source projects like MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop. He also criticizes Google's coding culture, which has become unfriendly to hacker types due to the company's enormous size." I suspect that most people would be happy to have company infrastructure problems as pressing as Google's, though.
Iphone

AT&T Cracking Down On Unofficial iPhone Tethering 513

Posted by Soulskill from the convenience-charge-for-different-bits dept.
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T is sending warning notifications to jailbroken iPhone users who use unofficial tethering methods like MyWi and PDANet. 'Customers are being notified that their service plans need updating to subscribe to a tethering plan, and that they will be automatically subscribed to a DataPro 4GB package that costs an additional $45 per month if they continue to tether.'"
Image

Teenager Tries To Hire Hitman Via Facebook 464

Posted by samzenpus from the assassin-request dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hiring a hitman can cost a pretty penny these days. Why buy an ad in the classifieds section when you can simply use Facebook? Of course, you may end up having to face 11 to 22 years in prison, but that's worth the risk, right? That's what happened to 19-year-old Corey C. Adams of Pennsylvania. Last June, Adams' 20-year-old victim said after she left a party, he jumped into her car and raped her. She went to police. He went to Facebook. Specifically, his status update read: 'I got 500 on a girls head who wants that bread? Hit me up anyway possible.'"
Moon

Does the Moon Have Military Value? 332

Posted by timothy from the only-if-it-was-a-forest-moon-or-ice-moon dept.
MarkWhittington writes "Despite the fact that under President Barack Obama's space policy, Americans will not be going back to the moon any time soon, discussions are occurring about what, if any, military value the Earth's nearest neighbor has. Opinions, as can be expected, vary on the subject."
Open Source

Fedora Infrastructure Compromised 115

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "The infrastructure of the Fedora Project was compromised over the weekend and an account belonging to a Fedora contributor was taken over by an attacker. However, Fedora officials said they don't believe that the attacker was able to push any changes to the Fedora package system or make any actual changes to the infrastructure. The attack appears to have targeted one specific user account, which had some high-value privileges. The attacker was able to compromise the account externally, and then had the ability to connect remotely to some Fedora systems. The attacker also changed the account's SSH key, Fedora officials said."

Comment kfreebsd kernel too (Score 2) 283

by aodash (#34581308) Attached to: Debian 6.0 To Feature a Completely Free Kernel
Not just Linux, they yanked it out of the kfreebsd kernel too, which is causing problems because you can't just install a firmware-kfreebsd package - yet. I think they were a bit premature pulling the trigger on the kfreebsd kernel. Check out: http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2010/12/msg00046.html and http://bugs.debian.org//cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=594940
Networking

Why Anonymous Can't Take Down Amazon.com 392

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-imagine dept.
suraj.sun writes "The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted."
AMD

Hidden Debug Mode Found In AMD Processors 154

Posted by timothy from the sooper-seekrit dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A hidden (and hardware password protected, by means of required special values in processor registers) debug mode has been found in AMD processors, and documented by a reverse engineer called Czernobyl on the RCE Forums community today. It enables powerful hardware debugging features long longed for by reverse engineers, such as hardware data-aware conditional breakpoints, and direct hardware 'page guard'-style breakpoints. And the best part is, it's sitting right there in your processor already, just read the details and off you go with the debugging ninja powers!"
NASA

NASA Launches Giant Magnifying Glass Into Space 115

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it's-all-in-the-name-of-science dept.
ByronScott writes "Early this morning NASA kicked off Operation LENS, an ambitious plan to concentrate and collect solar power using a giant magnifying glass in outer space. Long speculated to be a rumor, the 7,000,000 ft. wide lens was fabricated over the course of the past three years and launched from Cape Canaveral much to the dismay of almost every scientist in the world. While the first phase went exactly as planned, the plan hit a major snag when the magnifying glass began to work a bit too well, and ended up scorching large regions in the western hemisphere."
Sun Microsystems

Scientists Need Volunteers To Look At the Sun 110

Posted by Soulskill from the ow-that-hurts-it's-a-trap dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Royal Observatory's 'Solar Stormwatch' needs volunteers to help scientists spot Sun storms — known as coronal mass ejections — before they cause damage on Earth. 'When you look up at the Sun obviously it's too bright to look at properly,' says Dr. Marek Kukula of the Royal Observatory, but 'with special instruments and telescopes you can see there's all sorts of stuff going on.' NASA already monitors the Sun using two 'STEREO' spacecraft that produce 3D images of earth's nearest star, which can show the trajectory of these explosions. However, the sheer amount of data means NASA's scientists are unable to analyze the data as closely as they need — which is where the world's Internet population comes in. After a brief tutorial, users get access to the actual 3-D images taken by the STEREO spacecraft. If a user believes they have spotted the beginnings of a solar storm, they can bring it to the attention of scientists. 'Every little bit counts,' says Kukula. 'I've spoken to the scientists involved and they all agree that even if you log-on and just do it for a few hours, get bored and never touch it again it's all really useful — and helps them to do their work.'"
Robotics

When Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence? 979

Posted by samzenpus from the I'm-afraid-I'm-smarter-than-you-dave dept.
destinyland writes "21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence. (The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test.) One also predicted that in 30 years, 'virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings ... can be done by computers for pennies an hour,' adding that AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' The experts also estimated the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that's bad for humanity ... and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% — regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."
Math

Why Computers Suck At Math 626

Posted by Soulskill from the must-be-lit-majors dept.
antdude writes "This TechRadar article explains why computers suck at math, and how simple calculations can be a matter of life and death, like in the case of a Patriot defense system failing to take down a Scud missile attack: 'The calculation of where to look for confirmation of an incoming missile requires knowledge of the system time, which is stored as the number of 0.1-second ticks since the system was started up. Unfortunately, 0.1 seconds cannot be expressed accurately as a binary number, so when it's shoehorned into a 24-bit register — as used in the Patriot system — it's out by a tiny amount. But all these tiny amounts add up. At the time of the missile attack, the system had been running for about 100 hours, or 3,600,000 ticks to be more specific. Multiplying this count by the tiny error led to a total error of 0.3433 seconds, during which time the Scud missile would cover 687m. The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation and saw no target. Accordingly no missile was launched to intercept the incoming Scud — and 28 people paid with their lives.'"

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