binaryfinery - Slashdot User

Comment Re:It is a good sign (Score 1) 168

by binaryfinery on Monday February 16, 2009 @06:57PM (#26878887) Attached to: Microsoft and Red Hat Team Up On Virtualization

You'll see this a lot more as companies try to save money - in a support environment, why buy multiple servers to mimic your customers? Create VMs and mimic your customer constraints in software. If they fork, create a new VM. Buying memory to run VM's is cheap compared to purchasing and supporting multiple hardware formats(and scales nicely as its not parallel processing)

The Environmental Impact of Google Searches 516

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 11, 2009 @06:33PM from the compounding-wild-ass-guesses dept.

paleshadows writes "The Times Online reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: 'While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g [...] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions.'" Google makes an interesting focus for such claims, but similar extrapolations have been done before about, for instance, the energy costs of sending a short email.

Is the Gaming PC Dead? 417

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 24, 2008 @03:48AM from the no-way-dude-check-out-my-$8000-alienware dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Rahul Sood, HP's CTO of gaming, argues that the days of a market that wants PCs running three $500 GPUs is history; he argues that it's really a tough or impossible sell. '... let's face it, high-end hardware has delivered diminishing returns in terms of value. This is why you don't see ridiculous offerings like Quad SLI and 2-kilowatt power supplies coming from our company.' But don't the ideas of customization and market pricing for components tend to undercut that? Is the gaming PC dead?"

Argentine Judges Disappear Celebrities From Internet 81

Posted by timothy on Wednesday November 12, 2008 @04:18PM from the unsearchterms dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of the country's most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona. Try it yourself — compare the results for a Yahoo! Argentina search for Diego Maradona (0 results) to a search at Yahoo! Mexico and Google Argentina (both with millions of results)."

Daylight Savings Time Increases Energy Use In Indiana 388

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 09, 2008 @02:58PM from the all-change-has-friction dept.

enbody writes "The Freakonomics Blog at NYTimes.com reports on a study of Indiana energy use for daylight savings time showing an increase in energy use of 1%. 'The dataset consists of more than 7 million observations on monthly billing data for the vast majority of households in southern Indiana for three years. Our main finding is that — contrary to the policy's intent — D.S.T. increases residential electricity demand.'" Maybe that's just from millions of coffee makers being pressed into extra duty.

Two New Class-Action Suits Against EA Over DRM 336

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday November 09, 2008 @02:02PM from the ea's-chickens-have-come-home-to-roost dept.

In September, we discussed a class-action suit filed against Electronic Arts over the DRM in Spore. Now, two new class-action suits have been filed that target the SecuROM software included in a free trial of the Spore Creature Creator (PDF) and in The Sims 2: Bon Voyage (PDF). If this sort of legal reprisal continues to catch on, EA could be seeing quite a few class-action suits in the future. One of the suits accuses: "The inclusion of undisclosed, secretly installed DRM protection measures with a program that was freely distributed constitutes a major violation of computer owners' absolute right to control what does and what does not get loaded onto their computers, and how their computers shall be used ... [SecuROM] cannot be completely uninstalled. Once installed it becomes a permanent part of the consumer's software portfolio ... EA's EULA for Spore Creature Creator Free Trial Edition makes utterly no mention of any Technical Protection Measures, DRM technology, or SecuROM whatsoever."

Comment Re:The UK only says "no never" (Score 1) 152

by binaryfinery on Thursday September 27, 2007 @02:54PM (#20772205) Attached to: Why Japan Leads the Mobile World

Its coming -its like the early days of dialup when you paid £15 month for 56K and were happy. Then came ISDN, ADSL and fibre and now £15 month can get you 8MB+ (if close to the right exchange). 3G in mertro areas, EDGE is being deployed, followed by HSDPA - as the rates increase the telco's will look for the differentiator and the prices will fall.

Submission + - German police arrest admin of Tor anonymity server (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 16, 2007 @03:33AM

An anonymous reader writes: In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a data center, over 500km away. In the last year, Germany has passed a draconian new anti-security research law and raided seven different data centers to seize Tor servers. While back in 2003, A German court ordered the developers of a different anonymity network to build a back-door into their system. CNET's article has the full details.

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