humboldt - Slashdot User

Scaling Facebook To 140 Million Users 178

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 17, 2008 @12:02PM from the that's-a-lotta-load dept.

1sockchuck writes "Facebook now has 140 million users, and in recent weeks has been adding 600,000 new users a day. To keep pace with that growth, the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Why Climbers Die On Mount Everest 417

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 14, 2008 @08:02PM from the failure-to-be-born-sherpas dept.

Science Daily reports that researchers have conducted the first detailed analysis of deaths during expeditions to the summit of Mt. Everest. They found that most deaths occur during descents from the summit in the so-called "death zone" above 8,000 meters, and also identified factors that appear to be associated with a greater risk of death, particularly symptoms of high-altitude cerebral edema. The big surprise that the data indicate those deaths aren't primarily from avalanches or falling ice, as had long been believed.

Optimizing Linux Use On a USB Flash Drive? 137

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 03, 2008 @06:18PM from the right-here-in-my-pocket dept.

Buckbeak writes "I like to carry my Linux systems around with me, on USB flash drives. Typically, SanDisk Cruzers or Kingston HyperX. I encrypt the root partition and boot off the USB stick. Sometimes, the performance leaves something to be desired. I want to be able to do an 'apt-get upgrade' or 'yum update' while surfing but the experience is sometimes painful. What can I do to maximize the performance of Linux while running off of a slow medium? I've turned on 'noatime' in the mount options and I don't use a swap partition. Is there any way to minimize drive I/O or batch it up more? Is there any easy way to run in memory and write everything out when I shut down? I've tried both EXT2 and EXT3 and it doesn't seem to make much difference. Any other suggestions?"

(Useful) Stupid Regex Tricks? 516

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 10, 2008 @10:17AM from the hope-you-like-reading-lots-of-random-characters dept.

careysb writes to mention that in the same vein as '*nix tricks' and 'VIM tricks', it would be nice to see one on regular expressions and the programs that use them. What amazingly cool tricks have people discovered with respect to regular expressions in everyday life as a developer or power user?"

Fraud Threat Halts Knuth's Hexadecimal-Dollar Checks 323

Posted by timothy on Friday October 31, 2008 @11:36AM from the sobering-thought-about-checks-in-general dept.

Barence writes "You may be aware of Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming, who used to post checks to anyone who spotted an error in one of his books — one hexadecimal dollar, or $2.56. No one cashed them though. This blogger has two of them proudly on his wall, but the sad news is that modern day bank fraud has put a stop to Knuth's much-loved way of keeping his books free of errors." (Here's Knuth's own post about the sad change.)

Businesses Choosing "Community" Linux Distros 149

Posted by kdawson on Monday September 01, 2008 @08:03AM from the dropping-the-training-wheels dept.

An anonymous reader sends along a PCWorld recap of a new study by the 451 Group, which claims that business use of 'community' Linux distributions is on the rise — distros like Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian, as opposed to "corporate" packages like RHEL and Suse. The trend is most evident in Europe. The article points out examples in Sweden and Germany, and cites growing in-house expertise with Linux as one factor helping enterprises get comfortable choosing Linux distros without commercial support. Interestingly, the Swedish company mentioned, Blocket.se, has made a one-off support arrangement with their hardware vendor HP: "HP is really providing device driver and utility support it uses for customers running RHEL, but because the two distributions are binary-compatible, that support approach works just fine for CentOS. Blocket relies on its own engineers, systems administration, and software development to get its applications running on Linux. "

Feed Toshiba sues everyone over "DVD-related" patent infringement (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Tuesday April 10, 2007 @04:52AM

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Joining the (unfortunately) growing fray of companies tossing out blanket lawsuits like it's their job, Toshiba is now requesting that a whopping 17 companies, mostly manufacturers and importers from Hong Kong and China, have their imports barred from entering the United States. Reportedly, Tosh feels that a number of "DVD-related patents" have been infringed upon, and doesn't want to see any more of those taboo "DVD players, DVD recorders, and other digital video disc products" hitting the States. As if banning the items from sale wasn't enough, it also filed a lawsuit "demanding an undisclosed amount of monetary damages to the same companies." We sure hope Toshiba wasn't looking for any partners for joint ventures anytime soon, as it just made enemies with a whole horde of potential allies.

[Via JapanToday]

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Comment Non-compete agreements (Score 2, Interesting) 720

by humboldt on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @02:09AM (#13111121) Attached to: Microsoft Sues Google For Hiring MS Exec

Wow, such a non-compete agreement is pretty sick.

Over here in Germany those agreements are permitted by law and an accepted practice. However, they come with a twist:

These agreements are limited to (I think) two years. If you have one in your work contract and you resign or get fired, you employer can either decide to let you go and accept you working at the competition or has to continue paying about 75% of your salary as a compensation.

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