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Comment Re:Opposite Experience with Adobe Download (Score 1, Informative) 348

Two hours vs. instant streaming isn't a localization issue, you can easily stream 1-2mbps (or much more) from half way around the world. ~100ms in latency is nothing with a fat, non time sensitive stream like recorded video.\

It sounds like the specific POP the google DNS server is being fed is overloaded with traffic. It should be fairly easy for Apple to resolve the problem on their end, by simply not resolving to overloaded pops (they shouldn't ever anyway).

Other video cdn backed services (like netflix) don't suffer POP overloading on public DNS servers like GTE or open.

Science

Submission + - Russia doubles price for launching US astronauts (yahoo.com) 4

Third Position writes: NASA on Tuesday signed a contract to pay $55.8 million per astronaut for six Americans to fly into space on Russian Soyuz capsules in 2013 and 2014. NASA needs to get rides on Russian rockets to the International Space Station because it plans to retire the space shuttle fleet later this year. NASA now pays half as much, about $26.3 million per astronaut, when it uses Russian ships.

Comment Re:At least gamasutra labels their paid placements (Score 2, Informative) 71

Ahh, I was trying to figure out how I missed that - turns out the link to the article starts you on the second page where the disclaimer is nowhere to be found. Not that it's a dig on gamasutra as it's clearly stated in the title. Just wish /. had mentioned it before I read most of the way through and was wondering why I felt like I was reading and intel ad.

Comment At least gamasutra labels their paid placements (Score 5, Informative) 71

Sponsored Feature: Restless Entities Never Sleep -- The Back End of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

New features enhance the overall gaming experience, such as Intel Turbo Boost Technology (to maximize speed for demanding applications), Intel Hyper-Threading Technology (for advanced multi-tasking and support for up to eight threads), and Intel Smart Cache (to provide a higher performing, more efficient cache subsystem). Experience Warhammer Online in its best light with the processor that has become the gold standard in the gaming world, the Intel Core i7 processor Extreme Edition.

Games

An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup 71

An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting: "At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."
Portables

Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade 313

Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."

Comment Written by someone born in the 90s? (Score 4, Insightful) 249

Otherwise how could you think that v.32bis (14.4k) was introduced in 1980? I had to look it up to see what the hell they were on about, apparently the 1980 figure comes from a break through channel coding paper written in 1980 at IBM that didn't even get passed around for a few years. The reality is that the public had to wait nearly a decade before those techniques were out of the lab, and a few more years before a standard was ratified. Trying to figure out what niche this article fills - the wiki article on modems does a far better job at going over the same info. Hell, the author of TFA even put an old-time(tm) bw filter on a photo from the late 80s trying to make it seem like a shot with a laptop came from the 60s.
NASA

NASA and Space Station Alliance On Shaky Ground 73

coondoggie writes "Even as the latest shift of astronauts arrived at the International Space Station, challenges with the orbital outpost on the ground are threatening its future. Those challenges include the pending retirement of the space shuttle but also the way NASA and the ISS are managed. A report issued this week by the Government Accountability Office said NASA faces several significant issues that may impede efforts to maximize utilization of all ISS research facilities."

Comment Re:pre-doom stock inflation (Score 1) 102

I think you need more than one person to apply the tag before it hits the article summary. Tagging appropriate articles with slashvertisement will often (but not always) show up on the article for a short period of time until an editor blocks it. I assume someone else has added it too when it does show up, but I guess I don't really know.

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