dy2t - Slashdot User

SKA Telescope To Offer Neighbors Cheap Broadband 63

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 29, 2014 @01:57PM from the port-in-a-storm dept.

An anonymous reader writes The Square Kilometer Array is a giant telescope currently being built in the middle of the Karoo in South Africa, which when complete will be 50 times more sensitive than any existing Earth-based telescope. The problem is that it's so sensitive, the thousands of antennas need to be protected from terrestrial radio interference. Given that cell masts and technologies like TB white spaces are the only way people living in the remote areas near SKA are going to be able to get affordable net access, this is a bit of a problem. In order that its neighbors aren't completely cut-off, SKA is offering them subsidized satellite broadband instead. Which is nice.

Outlining Thin Linux 221

Posted by Soulskill on Monday September 22, 2014 @07:40PM from the tux-on-a-diet dept.

snydeq writes: Deep End's Paul Venezia follows up his call for splitting Linux distros in two by arguing that the new shape of the Linux server is thin, light, and fine-tuned to a single purpose. "Those of us who build and maintain large-scale Linux infrastructures would be happy to see a highly specific, highly stable mainstream distro that had no desktop package or dependency support whatsoever, so was not beholden to architectural changes made due to desktop package requirements. When you're rolling out a few hundred Linux VMs locally, in the cloud, or both, you won't manually log into them, much less need any type of graphical support. Frankly, you could lose the framebuffer too; it wouldn't matter unless you were running certain tests," Venezia writes. "It's only a matter of time before a Linux distribution that caters solely to these considerations becomes mainstream and is offered alongside more traditional distributions."

EFF's Cell Phone Guide For US Protesters 82

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday August 17, 2014 @02:14AM from the do-not-use-your-cell-phone-as-a-projectile-weapon dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has updated its guide for protecting yourself and your cell phone at a protest. In addition to being extremely powerful tools (real-time communication to many watchers via social media, and video recording functionality), cell phones can also give authorities a lot of information about you if they confiscate it. The EFF is trying to encourage cell phone use and prepare people to use them. (The guide is based on U.S. laws, but much of the advice makes sense for other places as well.) Here are a few small snippets: "Start using encrypted communications channels. Text messages, as a rule, can be read and stored by your phone company or by surveillance equipment in the area. ... If the police ask to see your phone, tell them you do not consent to the search of your device. Again, since the Supreme Court's decision in Riley, there is little question that officers need a warrant to access the contents of your phone incident to arrest, though they may be able to seize the phone and get a warrant later. ... If your phone or electronic device was seized, and is not promptly returned when you are released, you can file a motion with the court to have your property returned."

Valve Sponsors Work To Greatly Speed-Up Linux OpenGL Game Load Times 202

Posted by timothy on Monday May 05, 2014 @05:11AM from the small-steps-add-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Valve Software has sponsored some interesting improvements developed by LunarG for the Mesa OpenGL library on Linux for deferred and threaded GLSL shader compilation. What these changes mean for users of the open-source Linux graphics drivers when running their favorite games is that OpenGL games now load a lot faster. As an example, the time from starting Dota 2 until the time actually being within the game is reduced by about 20 seconds on an Intel system. While Direct3D has offered similar functionality for a while, OpenGL has not, which has given it a bad reputation with regard to game load times until all shaders are compiled and cached — fortunately it's now addressed for OpenGL if using the Mesa Linux graphics drivers on a supported game."

Ask Slashdot: Which Router Firmware For Bandwidth Management? 104

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 17, 2014 @04:18PM from the but-the-neighbors-will-object dept.

First time accepted submitter DeathByLlama (2813725) writes "Years ago I made the switch from DD-WRT to Tomato firmware for my Linksys router. I lost a couple features, but gained one of the best QoS and bandwidth management systems I have seen on a router to date. Admins can see graphs of current and historical bandwidth usage by IP, set minimum and maximum bandwidth limits by IP range, setup QoS rules, and see and filter graphs and lists of current connections by usage, class or source/destination — all from an elegantly designed GUI. This has allowed me to easily and intelligently allocate and adjust my network's bandwidth; when there is a problem, I can see where it's coming from and create rules around it. I'm currently using the Toastman's VPN Tomato firmware, which has about everything that I would want, except for one key thing: support for ARM-based routers (only Broadcom is supported). I have seen other firmware projects being actively developed in the last few years, so in picking a new 802.11ac router, I need to decide whether Tomato support is a deal-breaker. With solid bandwidth management as a priority, what firmware would you recommend? Stock Asuswrt? Asuswrt-Merlin? OpenWRT? DD-WRT? Tomato? _____?"

Google Chrome Flaw Sets Your PC's Mic Live 152

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 10, 2014 @05:30PM from the lives-of-others dept.

First time accepted submitter AllTheTinfoilHats (3612007) writes "A security flaw in Google Chrome allows any website you visit with the browser to listen in on nearby conversations. It doesn't allow sites to access your microphone's audio, but provides them with a transcript of the browser's speech-to-text transcriptions of anything in range. It was found by a programmer in Israel, who says Google issued a low-priority label to the bug when he reported it, until he wrote about it on his blog and the post started picking up steam on social media. The website has to keep you clicking for eight seconds to keep the microphone on, and Google says it has no timeline for a fix." However, as discoverer Guy Aharonovsky is quoted, "It seems like they started to look for a way to quickly mitigate this flaw."

College Grads Create Fake Tesla Commercial That Elon Musk Loves 100

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 20, 2014 @08:00PM from the best-resume dept.

cartechboy (2660665) writes "Two University of Southern California grads were looking to start a digital content company so they decided to roll the dice and create a home-made (but incredibly professional looking) television commercial for Tesla — just to see if they could get some attention for it. Well, apparently, mission accomplished. R.J. Collins and James Khabushani took $1,500 and created a 60-second Tesla 'faux-mercial' dubbed 'Modern Spaceship' that is well, pretty good. Elon Musk noticed, tweeted it and has helped the thing go viral."

Genomic Medicine, Finally 64

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Friday March 07, 2014 @08:04PM from the sorry-you're-defective dept.

Daniel Dvorkin writes "When I first started studying bioinformatics almost fifteen years ago (!) what drew me to the field was the promise that we might soon be able to provide effective, personalized treatments for a wide variety of diseases. There have been some successes along the way, like genetic tests for warfarin dosage, but for the most part our gains in understanding of basic biology haven't been matched by clinical advances. Now it looks like that is at long last about to change, and it's about time.

Too many people suffer and die from too many diseases that we more or less understand, but can't effectively treat. I hated it when I worked in hands-on patient care, and I hate it now in the lab. We are, finally, getting there."

Silicon Brains That Think As Fast As a Fly Can Smell 84

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 30, 2014 @01:39AM from the greased-lightning dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Researchers in Germany have discovered what they say is a way to get computers to do more than execute all the steps of a problem-solving calculation as fast as possible – by getting them to imitate the human brain's habit of finding shortcuts to the right answer. A team of scientists from Freie Universität Berlin, the Bernstein Center Berlin, and Heidelberg University have refined the idea of parallel computing into one they describe as neuromorphic computing. In their design, a whole series of processors designed as silicon neurons rather than ordinary CPUs are linked together in a network similar to the highly interconnected mesh that links nerve cells in the human brain. Problems fed into the neuro mesh are broken up and processed in parallel, but not always using the same process. The method by which neuromorphic processors handle problems varies with the way they're linked together, as is the case with neurons in the brain. The chips are designed to copy the layout and functions of brain cells, but the way they're interconnected is based on another highly efficient biological model. 'The design of the network architecture has been inspired by the odor-processing nervous system of insects,' said one of the researchers. 'This system is optimized by nature for a highly parallel processing of the complex chemical world.' In tests using real-world datasets, the prototype was able to match the performance of specialized Bayeseian pattern-matching systems. Even better, the stable decisions reached by 'output neuron populations' take approximately 100 milliseconds, which is the same speed required by the insect nervous systems on which the network design is based, according to the paper."

Is Amazon Making a Sub-$300 Console To Play Mobile Games? 76

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 29, 2014 @11:04PM from the play-time dept.

itwbennett writes "Yesterday, a story suggesting that Amazon was planning to launch a sub-$300 Android game console made the rounds. A $300 box to play mobile games on your TV? ITworld's Peter Smith doesn't buy it. 'If Amazon is working on some kind of set-top box, it's going to be about streaming,' says Smith. 'Music, video, and games. Remember back in November when Amazon announced G2, a new AWS instance type designed for streaming GPU intensive tasks like games? Combine Amazon's G2 cloud servers and an Amazon set top box for console-like game streaming, plus supporting Android and/or iOS games (possibly the latter would also be streamed), and of course support for Amazon Video and MP3, and we're getting closer to something that may be worth $300.'"

LinkedIn's New Mobile App Called 'a Dream For Attackers' 122

Posted by timothy on Friday October 25, 2013 @07:59PM from the throw-off-your-chains dept.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to the New York Times' summary of a security and privacy disaster that's been inspiring angry posts on various social networks, including LinkedIn itself: "Security researchers are calling LinkedIn's new mobile app, Intro, a dream come true for hackers or intelligence agencies... Intro redirects e-mail traffic to and from users' iPhones and iPads through LinkedIn's servers, then analyzes and scrapes those e-mails for relevant data and adds pertinent LinkedIn details... Researchers liken that redirection to a so-called man-in-the-middle attack in which hackers, or more recently, intelligence agencies, intercept Internet traffic en route to its destination and do what they will with it."

Comment Fit 120 HDDs in 4U enclosure? (Score 1) 358

by dy2t on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @02:32PM (#41896469) Attached to: Should a Teenage Entrepreneur Sell Out To Facebook?

My rough calculation says the volume of 120 HDDs (3.5") will use 90% of the volume of a 4U container. I can't imagine how to physically position the HDDs inside the container.

Maybe they are using 2.5" HDDs each of which has 8x less volume than a 3.5" HDD. That would be an easier exercise.

In either case, the drives are probably not hot-swap (unless you do it like a puzzle)

Submission + - Apple Said to Be Exploring Switch From Intel for Mac (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by

concealment

on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @09:45AM

concealment writes: "Apple Inc. (AAPL) is exploring ways to replace Intel Corp. (INTC) processors in its Mac personal computers with a version of the chip technology it uses in the iPhone and iPad, according to people familiar with the company’s research.

Apple engineers have grown confident that the chip designs used for its mobile devices will one day be powerful enough to run its desktops and laptops, said three people with knowledge of the work, who asked to remain anonymous because the plans are confidential. Apple began using Intel chips for Macs in 2005."

Comment Re:They Just Don't Get It... (Score 1) 82

by dy2t on Friday April 24, 2009 @09:29AM (#27700871) Attached to: <em>Star Trek</em> Game To Launch Alongside New Movie

I agree completely. The Star Trek: Judgment Rites released following that game was also great and seemed to capture to a suprising degree the flavor of the old show.

I just saw the "Not your father's Star Trek" trailer for the movie the other day. It seems to dovetail this new mindless shoot'em up game. I'm sad to see Star Trek de-evolve from an interesting, optimistic future into a rehash of Tom Corbett or Flash Gordon fighting BEMs (but with better sfx, of course.)

Yes, I am old.

Comment LACP (Score 2) 293

by dy2t on Wednesday August 15, 2007 @04:15PM (#20240925) Attached to: One Failed NIC Strands 20,000 At LAX

Also known as IEEE 802.3ad supports aggregating NICs to both improve overall bandwidth as well as gracefully deal with failed links.
More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Aggregation_Cont rol_Protocol

Systems seem to be more commonly shipping with multiple NICs (esp. servers) so maybe this will be used more and more. It is important to note that the network switch/router needs to be able to support LACP (dumb/cheap switches do not while expensive/managed ones do) so that might be a barrier. Cisco switches and maybe others have implemented proprietary trunking/aggregation schemes but this 802.3ad is a standard.

In practice, I tried to use LACP with a Linksys SRW2048 $800 switch (targeted at small-businesses, much cheaper than typical managed switch) but it did not work reliably (performance got worse, some clients could not connect/timed-out.) Still working on it.

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