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Comment Gopher was sooooo much better at the time... (Score 1) 225

Gopher was cool because it was way easier to follow references to other content on other sites than FTP, even if you often had to download the content and figure out which app was needed to display it. Xgopher was cooler yet because it could display images. Then Mosaic showed up, and had the ability to handle many more data types, and the fuse was lit... In the early 90s, everyone who knew anything about the 'Net knew where the main gophers were. Opened up communications a lot, and was far more direct than Usenet, which had already descended into being mostly noise by then. Great way to share information, 'til there was a greater one.

Comment RAID0 of SSDs will be faster than a single SSD, ya (Score 1) 73

A RAID0 of 3 SSDs will be faster than a single SSD drive for multiple reasons, the primary one being that the kernel reads from all three devices at the same time, and (secondarily) both the SSDs and the kernel are doing read-ahead, so that once hundreds (if not thousands) of sectors are in memory, you're only looking at the time to copy them into the destination buffer. For more speed, set your read-ahead buffers up - /sys/devices/(device)/hostX/targetX:0:0/X:0:0:0/block/sde/queue/read_ahead_kb, in Linux... Usually defaults to 128KB....

Comment ETOH? No, thanks.... (Score 5, Insightful) 586

If ETOH were actually worth anything (i.e., didn't harm engines, was *really* energy balance positive, didn't put aldehydes into the atmosphere, cause food prices to go up, could be produced from cellulose, etc.) it could survive without a government subsidy. The only reason it's still lurching along, taking up 40% of the corn produced in the USA, is because the lobbyists, farmers and ETOH producers can continue to suck $$ from the US gummint.
Transportation

Heroic Engineer Crashes Own Vehicle To Save a Life 486

scottbomb sends in this feel-good story of an engineer-hero, calling it "one of the coolest stories I've read in a long time." "A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — 'there was no time to take a vote' — Innes kicked into engineer mode. 'Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together,' Innes explained."
Security

Is Open Source SNORT Dead? 127

alphadogg writes "Is Snort, the 12-year-old open-source intrusion detection and prevention system, dead? The Open Information Security Foundation, a nonprofit group funded by the US Dept. of Homeland Security to come up with next-generation open source IDS/IPS, thinks so. But Snort's creator, Martin Roesch, begs to differ, and in fact, calls the OISF's first open source IDS/IPS code, Suricata 1.0 released this week, a cheap knock-off of Snort paid for with taxpayer dollars. The OISF was founded about a year and a half ago with $1 million in funding from a DHS cybersecurity research program, according to Matt Jonkman, president of OISF. He says OISF was founded to form an open source alternative and replacement to Snort, which he says is now considered dead since the research on what is supposed to be the next-generation version of Snort, Snort 3.0, has stalled."
Image

New Hungarian Government OMGs All Gov Sites 59

An anonymous reader writes "The new Hungarian government chose to replace the home pages with a 'disclaimer' page on several governmental websites such as ministries or the Foreign Office. The title and the main message is 'OMG,' which is followed by an explanation that the inherited websites 'lack any kind of uniform structure' and this is 'unworthy of Hungary.' Today is the takeover day in most ministries for the new administration."
Image

Man Swallows USB Flash Drive Evidence 199

SlideRuleGuy writes "In a bold and bizarre attempt to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid, a New York City man grabbed a flash drive and swallowed the data storage device while in the custody of Secret Service agents. Records show Florin Necula ingested the Kingston flash drive shortly after his January 21 arrest outside a bank in Queens. A Kingston executive said it was unclear if stomach acid could damage one of their drives. 'As you might imagine, we have no actual experience with someone swallowing a USB.' I imagine that would be rather painful. But did he follow his mother's advice and chew thoroughly, first? Apparently not, as the drive was surgically recovered."

Comment Re:3 months real-word experience with SSD (Score 1) 215

I wouldn't mention the Samsungs in the same sentence as Dells running Sandisk SSDs - there's a world of difference between the Samsung and Sandisk SSDs. We found that the IDE interface on the Sandisks was being reset under moderate usage - which might account for the "hangs" you mention. Have yet to see any resets on the (IDE interface) Samsung drives.

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