owenomalley - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Why has no one made a video game museum? (Score 4, Informative) 177

by edashofy on Friday August 06, 2010 @04:13AM (#33158904) Attached to: 'Old School' Arcade Still Popular In NYC

In addition to the efforts going on in Ottumwa, there is the already-existing American Classic Arcade Museum, located inside Funspot in New Hampshire. This arcade was prominently featured in the cult-favorite documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I don't think their mission is to collect every single game ever (that would be a lot of them) but they sure have a huge collection of both popular and obscure games.

The museum is really just one floor of the arcade (there are three) featuring many, many classic arcade games in excellent working order. I imagine the maintenance is a perpetual nightmare, but they do what they can. There is no admission fee, just ordinary tokens to play the games. Most still cost one token (each token costs a quarter, or less if you buy in bulk), and let me tell you $20 goes a long, long way there. For maximum childhood regression, they keep the lights down and play awesome 80s tunes over the sound system. I was there a couple months ago and got to play some games that I had not laid hands on for a long time: Elevator Action (last played at Fuddrucker's), Missile Command (pediatric dentist's office), Sinistar (Lamppost Pizza), Dragon's Lair (Chuck-E-Cheese), Star Wars (basement of the local Sears), Tapper (local bowling alley), Crystal Castles (by the front door of the local Alpha Beta supermarket) and so on. A few machines I had never seen before in person (a stand-up Pong machine, Satan's Hollow). They even have a friggin' Computer Space, but alas it was broken when I visited. The fact that you're even allowed to touch it is amazing.

I also got to play the infamous Donkey Kong machine, where I was proud to hold the high score (a piddly 18,000) for probably five minutes, and the same Pac Man machine where Billy Mitchell played the world's first perfect game of Pac Man (I think I cleared about 3 boards).

It's a real experience - if you're in the area I highly recommend stopping in.

Comment Other approaches to scalable SQL (Score 1) 122

by owenomalley on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @05:32PM (#28775273) Attached to: Researchers Create Database-Hadoop Hybrid

There are also two Hadoop subprojects that either support SQL or will shortly. They both translate SQL queries into map/reduce programs. They are:

http://hadoop.apache.org/pig/
http://hadoop.apache.org/hive/

Comment Re:C++ port of Java Hadoop? (Score 1) 139

by owenomalley on Sunday May 17, 2009 @06:59PM (#27989567) Attached to: Open Source Solution Breaks World Sorting Records

There isn't a C++ port of Hadoop's map/reduce, but there is a C++ interface to the Java code. It is used by Yahoo's WebMap, which is the largest Hadoop application. It lets you write your mapper and reducer code as C++ classes.

The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) also has C bindings to let C programs access the system. If you want another alternative, the Kosmos File System (KFS) is also a distributed file system and was written in C++. Hadoop includes bindings for HDFS and KFS, so that the application code can transparently use either at run time depending on the path (hdfs://server/path instead of kfs://server/path).

Comment Re:Not quite as impressive as it sounds (Score 4, Interesting) 139

by owenomalley on Saturday May 16, 2009 @01:06PM (#27979959) Attached to: Open Source Solution Breaks World Sorting Records

In sorting a terabyte, Hadoop beat Google's time (62 versus 68 seconds). For the petabyte sort, Google was faster (6 hours versus 16 hours). The hardware is of course different. (from Yahoo's blog and Google's blog)

Terabyte:
Machines: Yahoo 1,407 Google 1,000
Disks: Yahoo 5,628 Google 12,000
Petabyte:
Machines: Yahoo 3658 Google 4000
Disks: 14,632 Google: 48,000

Yahoo published their network specifications, but Google did not. Clearly the network speed is very relevant.

The two take away points are: Hadoop is getting faster and it is closing in on Google's performance and scalability.

Submission + - Open Source Solution Breaks World Sorting Records

Submitted by allenw on Friday May 15, 2009 @05:18PM

allenw writes: In a recent blog post, Yahoo!'s grid computing team announced that Apache Hadoop was used to break the current world records in the annual GraySort contest in the Gray and Minute sorts in the general purpose (Daytona) category. Apache Hadoop is the only open source software to ever win the competition. Apache Hadoop also won the Terasort competition last year.

Comment Facile? (Score 1) 545

by edashofy on Friday January 23, 2009 @12:51PM (#26576147) Attached to: Windows 7 Taskbar Not So Similar To OS X Dock After All

"and only the most facile of analyses would claim that it is.'"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

BD+ Successfully Resealed 443

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday December 13, 2008 @10:20AM from the effort-vs.-reward dept.

IamTheRealMike writes "A month on from the story that BD+ had been completely broken, it appears a new generation of BD+ programs has re-secured the system. A SlySoft developer now estimates February 2009 until support is available. There's a list of unrippable movies on the SlySoft forums; currently there are 16. Meanwhile, one of the open source VM developers seems to have given up on direct emulation attacks, and is now attempting to break the RSA algorithm itself. Back in March SlySoft confidently proclaimed BD+ was finished and said the worst case scenario was 3 months' work: apparently they underestimated the BD+ developers."

Simple Device Claimed To Boost Fuel Efficiency By Up To 20% 674

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday September 27, 2008 @05:02AM from the innovation-is-a-real-gas dept.

Ponca City, We love you writes "Temple University physics professor Rongjia Tao has developed a simple device that could dramatically improve fuel efficiency in automobiles by as much as 20 percent. The device, attached to the fuel line of a car's engine near the fuel injector, creates an electric field that thins fuel, reducing its viscosity so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine. Because combustion starts at the droplet surface, smaller droplets lead to cleaner and more efficient combustion. Six months of road testing in a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz automobile showed an increase from 32 miles per gallon to 38 mpg, a 20 percent boost, and a 12-15 percent gain in city driving. 'We expect the device will have wide applications on all types of internal combustion engines, present ones and future ones,' Tao wrote in the study published in Energy & Fuels. 'This discovery promises to significantly improve fuel efficiency in all types of internal combustion engine powered vehicles and at the same time will have far-reaching effects in reducing pollution of our environment,' says Larry F. Lemanski, Senior Vice President for Research and Strategic Initiatives at Temple."

Comment Re:Perhaps a good addition to data warehousing (Score 5, Informative) 99

by owenomalley on Tuesday August 26, 2008 @05:30PM (#24756761) Attached to: MapReduce Goes Commercial, Integrated With SQL

The correct project name is Hadoop. It was factored out of Nutch 2.5 years ago. And Yahoo has been putting a lot of effort to make it scale up. We run 15,000 nodes with Hadoop in clusters of up to 2,000 nodes each and soon that will be 3,000 nodes. I used 900 nodes to win Jim Gray's terabyte sort benchmark by sorting 1 TB of data (100 billion 100 byte records) in 3.5 minutes. It is also used to generate Yahoo's Web Map, which has 1 trillion edges in it.

Feed The Register: Hadoop: When grownups do open source (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Monday August 11, 2008 @10:32AM

On the emasculation of Twitter and Dirty Harry

Fail and You Hadoop is a library for writing distributed data processing programs using the MapReduce framework. It's got all the makings of a blogosphere hit: cluster computing, large datasets, parallelism, algorithms published by Google, and open source. Every four days or so, a nerd will discover Hadoop, write a “Basic MapReduce Tutorial with Hadoop” tutorial on his blog with some trivial examples, and feel satisfied with himself for educating the world about a yet-undiscovered gem. Comparatively, very few people actually use Hadoop in practice, and those who do don't write about it. Why? Because they're adults who don't care about getting on the front page of Digg.

Former FBI Agent Calls for a Second Internet 486

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @09:58PM from the it-became-necessary-to-destroy-the-internet-to-save-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet. Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials. The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight, which is why he claims we must change the structure of the Internet."

Comment Re:Wireless security (Score 1) 139

by edashofy on Monday January 28, 2008 @04:23PM (#22212194) Attached to: The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security

Am I the only one who's paranoid of entering my PayPal or CC info on an unencrypted public access point? I don't care if it's an AP ran by some mega-trusted corporation, the signal is still out there and anyone can get it.

Um, do you really enter your PayPal or CC info on a non-HTTPS connection? Because if you're on an HTTPS connection, there shouldn't be an issue. Your browser and the site itself have done a key exchange with RSA and are communicating with a very secure block cipher at that point. It doesn't matter whether the connection to the router is encrypted or not, since you've already got very strong encryption within the signal itself. If the signal is also encrypted with WEP or WPA, then you're doubly encrypted, at least for that first hop.

The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security 139

Posted by samzenpus on Monday January 28, 2008 @03:35PM from the protect-ya-neck dept.

r3lody writes "There are many households that have high-speed Internet connections, yet most people are simply not doing enough to protect themselves from the many exploits that exist. The Symantec Guide to Home Internet Security by Andrew Conry-Murray and Vincent Weafer was written to speak to those people. Symantec Press is the publisher, yet it remains reasonably vendor-neutral. This book is for non-technical people. Its ten chapters cover a relatively slim 240 pages, so it should not intimidate someone who is not a computer professional. Also, you do not really have to read the book front-to-back, but you can focus in on the chapter or chapters that interest you and have fairly complete information." Read on for the rest of Ray's review.

Science Text Attempts to Reconcile Religion and Science 1071

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Saturday January 05, 2008 @07:30AM from the something-for-both-sides-to-hate dept.

terrymaster69 writes "The New York Times reports that the National Academy of Sciences has just published their third book outlining guidelines for the teaching of evolution. 'But this volume is unusual, people who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.'"

Should Apple Give Back Replaced Disks? 446

Posted by kdawson on Monday December 24, 2007 @01:53AM from the consider-it-a-trade-in dept.

theodp writes "As if having to pay $160 to replace a failed 80-GB drive wasn't bad enough, Dave Winer learned to his dismay that Apple had no intention of giving him back the disk he paid them to replace. Since it contained sensitive data like source code and account info, Dave rightly worries about what happens if the drive falls into the wrong hands. Which raises an important question: In an age of identity theft and other confidentiality concerns, is it time for Apple — and other computer manufacturers — to start following the practice of auto mechanics and give you the option of getting back disks that are replaced?"

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