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Comment Re:12GB? (Score 1) 309

When I built mine I planned on the max - 32GB. If it would have taken 64, that's what i'd have put in. If you like to game - it's kinda a given that you max your ram at the highest stable speed the Mobo will allow. Not crazy at all IMHO.

Comment Re:Another example of bloat (Score 1) 309

Ya, that all makes sense and one would assume a given. However, that would take more man hours and the devs would likely have to actually spend some time writing code, rather than just cut/paste chunks in and write a few lines to tweak or bridge (not that they couldn't do it - would just mean more resource allocation). This push it out the door as soon as possible and patch later paradigm (old and tired) is lately coming around to smack them in the face for the reasons you point out. The project managers and department heads push this agenda - generally in response to the sting on their backs from the board room cracking their whips and demanding a product that generates revenues before the close of the next fiscal quarter. Not much one can do in this event until the culture in the board room changes is my take... Just my $ 0.02 worth.

Submission + - New Seagate Shingled hard drive teardown

Peter Desnoyers writes: Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives are starting to hit the market, promising larger drives without heroic (and expensive) measures such as helium fill, but at a cost — data can no longer be over-written in place, requiring SSD-like algorithms to handle random writes.

At the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference in February, researchers from Northeastern University (disclaimer — I'm one of them)
dissected shingled drive performance both figuratively and literally, using both micro-benchmarks and a window cut in the drive to uncover the secrets of Seagate's first line of publicly-available
SMR drives.

TLDR: It's a pretty good desktop drive — with write cache enabled (the default for non-server setups) and an intermittent workload it performs quite well, handling bursts of random writes (up to a few tens of GB total) far faster than a conventional drive — but only if it has long powered-on idle periods for garbage collection. Reads and large writes run at about the same speed as on a conventional drive, and at $280 it costs less than a pair of decent 4TB drives. For heavily-loaded server applications, though, you might want to wait for the next generation.

Videos (in 16x slow motion) showing the drive in action — sequential read after deliberately fragmenting the drive, and a few thousand random writes.

Comment So... (Score 2) 329

If my family's name is "Palin" this means she owns the rights to my daughter if she's was named Sarah? What about the "prior" art argument? According to howmanyofme dot com there are 790,847 named Sarah, 1,178 people with the sir name of Palin, and 3 people named Sarah Palin. Do the other 3 people have to pay a licensing fee if the former governor get her patent (very likely give the behavior of the U.S. PTO of late)?

Facebook

Facebook's 'Like This' Button Is Tracking You 273

Stoobalou submitted a story about some of the most obvious research I've seen in a while ... "A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook's 'Like This' button is watching your every move. Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not. Roosendaal says that Facebook's tentacles reach way beyond the confines of its own web sites and subscriber base because more and more third party sites are using the 'Like This' button and Facebook Connect."

Comment Ya Right!!! (Score 1) 488

I can imagine all those borderline acrophobics freaking out about 10 secs after the plane leaves the ground. Unless, like one previous poster, the floor and the ceiling are covered with boxes and cables, etc.. Airbus' head of research and technology, Axel Krein must not have taken into account that many people may not be too keen on being constantly reminded that they sitting in a "glass" airplane 30,000 feet in the air - especially when they're flying over the ocean with no land in site. Talk about feeling like a canary in a coal mine!

Comment Wonderful! (Score 1) 126

According to the website, Konqueror (3.5.10) isn't supported. One gets bumped to a page informing one of this advent and you are further instructed to use Safari or Firefox (2 or 3). Way to go Novell/SUSE! Gotta love a website promoting a product that doesn't support the primary webbrowser provide by said product maker! Sheesh!

Comment Re:I dislike reading anything from (Score 1) 333

Perhaps you might garner the services of a willing post-grad or similar colleague to assist you! I can't believe some individual, at least from time to time, would not be willing to summerize your entries for lay persons so that they may be able to wrap their heads around the legal proceedings and their meanings therein more readily. I personally have had to do this in my profession. Unlike your situation, however, I did this in the context of my profession in the performance of my duties (critical care cardiac RN). So, I trust the most people fully understand the constraint you've mentioned between pursuing your case load while posting entries in your blog. Is there no viable remedy to this situation? Can anyone of those possibly qualified "/,'ers" perhaps contribute to this end?

Cheers!

Comment Typical (Score 1) 158

So the heat is on and the RIAA find themselves in a less than desirable position - e.g. their "respondant superior" entity, aka SafeNet was breaking the law by "invading peoples privacy" (by their own admission) . So the RIAA and their members throw SafeNet under the bus and exclaim their amazement as to the unsavory tactics that their "employee" has been conducting. Like they had no clue that this was going on??? Ya Right, that's the ticket.
Tell it to the judge!

Movies

MPAA Botched Study On College Downloading 215

An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that in a 2005 study the MPAA conducted through an outfit called LEK, the movie trade association vastly overestimated how much college students engage in illegal movie downloading. Instead of '44 percent of the industry's domestic losses' owing to their piracy, it's 15 percent — and one expert is quoted as saying even that number is way too high. Dan 'Sammy' Glickman's gang admitted to the mishap, blaming 'human error,' and promised 'immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report.'"
Patents

IBM Patents Pricing Motorists Off Highways 805

theodp writes "Self-professed patent reformer IBM snagged a patent Tuesday for the Variable Rate Toll System, which covers the rather anti-egalitarian scheme of pricing motorists off of the roads by raising tolls as congestion increases. 'Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market for IBM,' boasted Jamie Houghton, IBM's Global Leader for Road Charging."

Collapsed UK Bank Attempts to Censor Wikileaks 230

James Hardine writes "Wikileaks has released a couple of hilarious legal demands over a confidential briefing memo entitled Project Wing — Northern Rock Executive Summary. Northern Rock Bank (UK) collapsed spectacularly late last year on the back of the sub-prime lending crisis and was re-floated by the Bank of England at a cost of over £24bn. The memo was used by the Financial Times, the Telegraph and others. It attracted a number of censorship injunctions, as reported by the Guardian, which only Wikileaks continues to withstand. In their legal demand to Wikileaks, Northern Rock's well-known media lawyers, Schillings, invoke the DMCA & WIPO, claim it'll be 10 years in prison for Wikileaks operators for not following the UK injunction, but then, incredibly, refuse to hand over a copy of the order unless Wikileaks' London lawyers promise not to give it to Wikileaks. Finally they claim copyright and more — on their demands! The letters raise a serious issue about the climate of censorship in the UK, where one can apparently easily obtain a censorship order — a judge made law — that everyone is meant to obey, but no one is meant to know."

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