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Comment You are kidding, right? (Score 2) 114

by sanborn's man (#37576244) Attached to: The Cult of DevOps
The answer to that question is "yes". In my experience what is it uncommon is to find a truly competent IT organization. And normaly the biggest it is the worse the problems are. But, what could you expect in an age where your IT group is composed with the cheapest guys you could hire with no experienced (and more costly) ones?. Or what about the clueless IT managers with little or no experience on IT?. They can't plan against what they don't know. Yeah, as a colleague told me not long ago, IT life is nowadays like war: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Iphone

iPhone App In App Store Limbo Open Sourced 432

Posted by timothy from the richarded-over dept.
recoiledsnake writes "The author of iPhone prototyping tool Briefs has decided to open source it after the App store submission has been in limbo for over three months. The app had got into trouble for what Apple believes is being able to run interpreted code, though the author denies it, saying all the compiling happens on the Mac. While Rob stays civil, his co-worker blasts Apple for not even rejecting the app. Three months is nothing compared to Google Voice for the iPhone though, which is still being studied further by Apple after more than a year."

Ballmer: Don't Expect Simpler Licensing Soon 260

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-i-want-a-pony dept.
nk497 writes "Steve Ballmer has admitted Microsoft's licensing is too complicated and contains too much fine print, but has no plans to change it at the risk of angering shareholders — and even customers who benefit from the confusion. "I'm sure we have fine print we don't need. We're not saints," he said, adding that customers have a way of figuring out how to pay the least amount of cash possible to use Microsoft's software. "Customers always find an approach which pays us less money.""
Power

Diamonds Are a Fuel Cell's Best Friend 210

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pretty-much-have-to dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UC Davis have used nanocrystals made of diamond-like cubic zirconia to develop cooler fuel cells. Even if hydrogen fuel cells have been touted as clean energy sources, current fuel cells have to run at high temperatures of up to 1,000 C. This new technology will allow fuel cells to run at much lower temperatures, between 50 and 100 C. Obviously, this could lead to a widespread use of fuel cells, which could become a realistic alternative power source for vehicles. The researchers have applied for a patent for their technology, but don't tell when fuel cells based on their work are about to appear."
Media

The Future of Creative and the Sound Card Market 351

Posted by Zonk from the they-still-make-sound-cards-huh dept.
Hanners writes "Elite Bastards investigates the future of Creative Labs, and in particular their PC sound card business, which is facing a number of big challenges during 2007. Windows Vista has seen some large changes to the driver model required by audio devices, the abilities of on-board solutions have improved somewhat, and the amount of competition in the market place has ballooned. So what does all of this mean for the traditional leader of this market? As well as outlining all of these issues, they speculate as to what measures Creative may need to take to thrive once more in this changing market."
Privacy

Life with a Lethal Gene 279

Posted by Zonk from the choose-wisely dept.
charles robert darwin writes "The New York Times is running a story on young people who are choosing to get genetic tests for conditions like Huntington's Disease that develop relatively late in life. Apparently, while a genetic test for HD has been around for a while, very few people who have a parent with the disease choose to take the test. This story focuses on a young woman who did and tested positive. The piece follows her as she deals with the consequences. '...as a raft of new DNA tests are revealing predispositions to all kinds of conditions, including breast cancer, depression and dementia, little is known about what it is like to live with such knowledge.' With the HapMap and the $1,000 genome, this is something we are all going to face in one way or another very soon, and we really need to start thinking about it."
Microsoft

Microsoft Cracking Open the Door To OSS 222

Posted by kdawson from the competition-and-coexistence dept.
AlexGr sends us to a long piece in Redmond Magazine on Microsoft's changing relationship to open source. The article centers around a profile of Bill Hilf, Microsoft's internal and external evangelist for OSS. It's an even-handed piece that fully reflects the continuing deep skepticism in the community of Microsoft's motives and actions.
Biotech

Computer Simulation of Cancer Growth 70

Posted by kdawson from the uncontrolled-growth-on-a-math-matrix dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "For a long time now, researchers and scientists have used computer simulations in the physical sciences: physics, chemistry, and engineering. But what about biology? An international team of U.S. and Scottish mathematicians and biologists has built a math model to predict tumor behavior. The researchers say their approach is similar to the one used by weather forecasters. So far, this approach is entirely theoretical. But the scientists see their effort as the beginning of a new era in cancer research — 'a sea change in how biology is being done,' as the lead researcher described it. Read more for additional references and illustrations about this use of computer simulation to predict a cancer evolution."
Microsoft

Vista Designed to Make Malware Easy 311

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-wasn't-that-hard-in-xp-either dept.
SlinkySausage writes "Trojan horses masquerading as 'cracks for Vista' are starting to appear on pirate boards. More worrying though, Microsoft has confirmed that Vista's image-based install process is designed to allow third-party software to be slipstreamed into the installation DVD. Great for corporate deployment of Vista with software pre-installed, but also a huge benefit for malware writers, who can distribute Vista images with deeply-rooted malware."
Databases

Oracle Has More Flaws Than SQL Server 229

Posted by kdawson from the nyah-nyah dept.
jcatcw writes, "Next Generation Security Software Ltd. of Surrey, England, compared bugs in Oracle and SQL Server that were reported and fixed between December 2000 and November 2006. The tally: Oracle had 233; MS SQL had 59. The products compared were Oracle 8, 9, and 10g; SQL Server 7, 2000 and 2005. From the article: '[The head of the survey said,] "The results show that the reputation that Microsoft SQL Server had back in 2002 for relatively poor security is no longer deserved."' Oracle's response: 'Measuring security is a very complex process, and customers must take a number of factors into consideration — including use-case scenarios, default configurations, as well as vulnerability remediation and disclosure policies and practices.'"

Folding@Home Releases GPU Client 177

Posted by kdawson from the call-or-fold dept.
SB_SamuraiSam writes, "Today the Folding@Home Group at Stanford University released a client (download here) that allows participants to fold on their ATI 19xx series R580-core graphics cards. AnandTech reports, 'With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results. While we do not have the client in our hands quite yet, as it will not be released until Monday, the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU.'"

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