castrox - Slashdot User

Submission + - Western Digital pulls a performance stunt (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by castrox on Saturday April 18, 2020 @03:31PM

castrox writes: Western Digital has quietly changed the technology in their marketed NAS drives and lowered the number of platterns driving down performance significantly.

From Ars Technica:
"Storage vendors, including but reportedly not limited to Western Digital, have quietly begun shipping SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) disks in place of earlier CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) disks."

Submission + - Share links, become extradited to the US (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Friday July 22, 2011 @09:07AM

castrox writes: "Sharing links online, particularly links to copyrighted material, may render you extradited to the United States of America.

The case is unique because the site, which the accused 23-year-old Englishman ran, was not located in the US in any way. Does this set a new precedent of things to come?

The agency responsible for the extradition request is Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After contacting the site operator, shutting down the .com and .cc domain and finally paying the guy a visit in person, extradition is now on the table.

Read more on Ars Technica"

Submission + - Wiretapping law sparks rage in Sweden

Submitted by castrox on Monday June 16, 2008 @08:17PM

castrox writes: This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA — Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order. Further more, by law, the sitting Government will be able to instruct the wiretapping agency on what to look for. It also nullifies press tip or whisle blowing anonymity.

Many heavy agencies within Sweden have weighed in on this, with very hefty critic, e.g. SÄPO (akin to FBI in the U.S.), the Justice Department, ex. employees of FRA, and more. None the less, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote Yes to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents.

The new proposed law has given rise to a MASSIVE people uprise which will likely result in huge street protests on Wednesday. People have been completely surprised since this law has not gotten any media uptake and for the most part been kept in the shadows.

After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens and street protests the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources.

There is more information on the Swedish (in English) newspaper, The Local. Specifically, see here, here and here.

Submission + - Prince, Village People to sue The Pirate Bay (thelocal.se)

Submitted by castrox on Sunday February 17, 2008 @11:32AM

castrox writes: YMCA to all! It appears the long since famous artists Prince and The Village people are getting ready to sue The Pirate Bay, if only they can figure out who to sue.

The Local:

Sandberg has been hired on behalf of the US musicians by British law firm Web Sheriff, which wants to claim "several million dollars" in damages in both Sweden and the United States, he said.
It's unclear how many tracks of Prince and Village People are being swapped via TPB at this moment. They are to seek damages nonetheless, of course..

Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told The Local that Giacobbi [Web Sheriff president] had "no clue" what he was doing but that he was welcome to try to sue the file sharing site.
You might remember TPB taunting Web Sheriff multiple times in their much appreciated legal threats section.

Submission + - Dell considers bundling virtualization on mobos (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Thursday August 09, 2007 @10:51AM

castrox writes: "Ars Technica is reporting on a rumor at The Register that Dell is considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? Quoting Ars Technica:

Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this.
Though it looks like more than a rumor, considering the following quote from The Register:

Dell CTO Kevin Kettler today confirmed these plans during a speech here at LinuxWorld, saying the company expects to see major performance and power-saving improvements by dumping a hypervisor in flash.
"

Submission + - EU slaps Intel with formal antitrust charges (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

castrox

on Friday July 27, 2007 @08:34AM

castrox writes: "Quoting Ars Technica

Intel faces a long and costly legal battle in Europe after the European Commission formally lodged antitrust charges against the world's leading CPU manufacturer.

Seems Intel has been playing dirty. A suit filed by AMD last year includes Intel making at least one sell-only-Intel deal in Germany. Sort of interesting since this is what e.g. Microsoft does on a daily basis?"

Submission + - Microsoft to simplify downgrades from Vista to XP

Submitted by castrox on Friday June 29, 2007 @08:21AM

castrox writes: It seems Microsoft have taken a notice that users may want to run XP instead of Vista. The new deal is to simplify downgrading for the OEMs. Currently, all OEMs must call Microsoft whenever a downgrade is done. After this "simplification" OEMs may submit batches of keys to Microsoft which will save time.

According to the Microsoft blog on ZDNet, the "downgrade software" will still need to be supplied by the end user. The deal is rather perplexing — it does not seem like you can convert the license since the only eligible versions for downgrading is Ultimate and Business.

Effectively, it seems nothing has changed. More on the downgrade "rights" (warning: PDF) here.

Slashdot Top Deals