RE: Colin

www.rethinkdb.com

This is an InnoDB strap-on to MySQL that was written with SSD-based storage in mind. Therefore, "It takes time to recode things, especially when you're waiting on a vendor to do it." only applies to proprietary vendors, or FOSS that has a marginal community around it. :)

Re: Colin

Yes, no moving parts and less heat generated, but that does not contribute to their failure rate. With SSDs, failure rate is determined by write cycles. HP figured that chunking data under a 100% workload for 1 year (up to the 3-5yr range for the non "boot drive" SSDs) would be the reliable write-endurance for these drives. Of course, if you don't continuously stream data to the drive, you could see longer life expectancies from these drives. HP just won't replace them under warranty if they crap out on you. I'd love to stick a few of these bad boys in my DB server under RAID6. I'd just feel sorry for my RAID card.

OT: Anyone know the dynamics of TRIM with the SSDs in a RAID? One would think that since the drives are in a RAID, each delete request wouldn't be able to request a TRIM on each disk affected...but I'm not sure.

@Tim Cook

Wrong. In order to sell a commercially-developed application for OSX, your program must pass an Apple inspection to ensure your GUI is inline with their GUI standards (for one). If it fails, you can't sell it with their stamp of approval.

If

If the US declared war on Iraq to steal their oil, then why are my gas prices still going up? (yes, respond with some capitalistic "so the money can go into the hands of American oil companies instead of OPEC")

Linux

Can't pop in a LiveCD if the DVD drive has no external eject button...

(I say use a paper clip to trigger the drive tray release and stuff it in that way, but who wants to carry a paper clip around???)

Title

Last I checked, when a Beta copy of Win7 "leaked" to the *net a few days prior to release-to-beta-testers, it mounted a significant number of downloads, torrents, and plenty of media coverage. Perhaps it is the Taboo of having something you're not supposed to see yet. (which falls back to Apple's secretive nature)

Title

Sorry, but I myself have written a screen scraper that's ran for a few years now. It is a kludge, it can break on a whim of the developer of the page being scraped, however, with proper maintainence, it is VERY easy to keep up. 3 minutes of analyzing reveals this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=jobs&hl=en&start=0&sa=N

hl=en is the language,

start=0 is the page to view results. So, the "next" button can be set very easily. As for results per page, simply run two or more queries (and assume 10 results per page view) and compile them together.

Shame Scroogle removed their "open" source. Any by chance have a link to their project page perhaps?

Re: "It's safe and proven technology"

436 Commercial reactors, and some 250 research reactors and one USSR [read "dodgy"] reactor explodes and you stretch to claim a 0.2% (1/(436+250) == 0.14577%, which makes it even less significant). Anyway, nuclear power has gone a long way since Chernobyl was built in !!1970!!. I'm sure we can't base today's nuclear power prowess on 40-year-old USSR tech. Would be like saying computers have poor performance because my old IBM machine circa 1970 was "slow."

Fail.

Granted, nothing has a 100% rate of success, no matter how much a fanboi insists. Even death, "biblically" has failed a few times. ;)

Title

700 Mbit/s assuming you don't have a metal object, tv, RF-noise-generating-object, sheet of paper, etc between your device and the router. And you must be within 6 feet to get max speeds, but no closer than 2 feet... (read the fine print).

Title

I give him credit for lasting a year before acting. However, Human Resources for workplace harrasment would have been the better option. Either make them fear you with the threat of HR, or get them fired so you don't have to work with the presumably childish behaving people any more. Of course, it IS is the USA, so a lawsuit for mental anguish and invasion of privacy for having been scanned in front of co-workers in the first place would have been the more common approach...

Title

"Hang on, this is a teenager. I find that somewhat hard to believe."

Nope. No nudity. These were 2 MacBooks, and Mac users would never do anything questionable...

I would have asked for the one with *nix on it. Then I could at least rest assured there's a small chance the cam wouldn't even be operational... :)

Title

Yep, just like the new Core i7 iMacs....oh you had to send yours back due to not booting/cracking? So sad.

Your iPhone gets spotty 3G or WiFi service, even next to a cell tower/router? *comfort*

You can't go to the movies with friends because you had to take out a small personal loan just to by your Mac Pro (without a monitor even)? I feel for you.

Can't watch YouTube or news video on your iPhone? Oh yeah, Apple banned Flash. That's your fault for buying it.

Yep. Apple makes excellent products that work extremely well.

Perhaps more of the Mactastic crowd should take to their neighbor's 10yr old. They could probably cobble together a better PC solution nowadays. Sure, you'll have to run Win7, but honestly, is it really that bad? No more having to explain to grandpa that he can't "borrow" his neighbor's copy <insert some app that he absolutely has to have (MS Office for instance)>.

Title

HAMR is not the tech they use for optical mediums, since the amount of heat generated is significantly less, over a significantly smaller surface area, hence, significantly faster to write a bit.

Agreed

I think this thought has merit. Perhaps it was their plan all along, just feeding off the anti-Apple sentiment of crack-down.

"Hey! Let's do an Apple parody of some sort!"

"That sounds funny! Know what would be even better?! The following episode, we can stage a 'fake' apology, claiming Apple didn't like it! Our rating will go through the roof as everyone reports our 'apology'!"

Title

Their switching system just before The Last Mile knows what MACs connect to it from which lines (one of which is your home btw and they know EXACTLY which line leads to your home). Simple matter to echo these MACs back to The Home Office for proper logging. That's how they associate your IP vs your MAC, charge end-users for services, track your usage over a given month, etc. If you're on the internet, your ISP knows who you are. True anonymity would be to only access the internet from WiFi hotspots (free ones, not the "pay us for use" ones) or wardrive/hack weak/unsecured wireless networks, and constantly rotate networking hardware (NICs, etc) or have one that spoofs its MAC addy and randomize it frequently. Of course, whether this would actually be effective in practice is an exercise for the trolls I guess. :)

Title

In Montana, stealing a horse was punishable by a longer jail sentence than 2nd-degree murder.... Some places/people do value animal life more than human life. Or in the case of Oregon/Washington tree-spikers (the "conservationalists" that drive metal spikes into tree trunks so-as to kill/maim loggers when their chainsaw backfires), "nature" is more important than humans.

We know Apple drones don't sleep well at night. They're drones. They never sleep, they just run really slow all the time.

Title

"What are we going to use for a Save icon in the future?"

A flash drive. What make and model will probably depend on who wants to cough up the highest bid for the slot. (think movie product placement!)

Title

Which OS is loaded on? Most likely VMWare or XenServer so they can host WinServer03/08 with a couple *nix OSes (well, at least 1 if their IT dept has any idea what the OS is actually good for).

Of course, there's the more Windows die-hards that will load Server08R2 or somesuch bare metal and play around with Hyper-V, but they might as well just install VMWare ESX2 for all the features and capability (not to mention stability/hog of the host OS....).

Title

"Only worth watching for the hot busty babe."

Which would be quite the spectacle in 3D. Just think of how exaggerated Angie would have been if Tomb Raider had been shot in 3D...

Ah well, I'm a Sci-Fi fan, and thus will be prone to watching it, no matter how terrible it may be.

Re

Gizmodo could not be absolutely sure who the owner was, based solely on the word of the person selling the device. Therefore, Gizmodo would have to assume the owner was unknown. HOWEVER, the person who sold the device to Gizmodo had seen the original owner (and thus was able to tell Gizmodo), so HE therefore is the one liable based on the law of theft.

Perhaps

Perhaps you missed the point of why Bootcamp is so popular. Or Parallels for that matter. It seems a fair portion of Mac fans tend to run at least one Windows OS somewhere in their chain of computing hardware (remember the PR about tablets/iPads targeting people seeking a 4th or 5th computing device, after their 2 home computers, iPhone, and perhaps iPoD/Touch/Nano/misc Apple hardware).

And as for the other previous comment regarding "rich" people being so by not giving away money....the malware is a backdoor keylogger of sorts. It doesn't ask you to pay $40 to a "full version," it simply sniffs your bank info, CC details, etc. and shuttles them of to some data logging server. No "give me money" needed. That and it is easier to hide a few thousand dollars of bank transfers/charges amongst an account that have more than $6k/mo flowing through it.

Civ4

I...just...hope they...don't....use Shatner....in...Civ5.

He was a good pick for Civ4 voice-over though. Guess all the Trekkies will go buy a copy now if they haven't already...

Shame his cameo in Fringe is going out too. He was always a classic to pull in for the extreme Sci-Fi rolls.

Scalability

What to learn about scalability in closed-source or proprietary (yes, there can be a difference) situations?

Licensing models are to be considered, not just ability to handle large databases, user counts, etc. How much did the old CMS system cost per-processor? How much for the clustering add-on? Add-on for database connectivity of your choice? Cost of (probably) running their will-only-run-on-this database? Per-processor and clustering costs for said database? OS licensing, since it only runs in Windows on IIS6 or somesuch restrictions?

Contrast that to an open source solution that can be ran on various platforms and databases of your choosing. I think that scales quite well actually, and we haven't even started talking about capabilities for massive data and user counts....

"Reverse Engineering"

"to study or analyze (a device, as a microchip for computers) in order to learn details of design, construction, and operation, perhaps to produce a copy or an improved version."

I think you (and a few others) have true "Reverse Engineering" confused with the more ill-intended aspect of it. Reverse Engineering is broader than decompiling a program. Analysing facial recognition algorithms with the intent on defeating them fully qualifies to be branded as "reverse engineering."

Gah, beat me to it.

Demolition Man FTW!

There's always the alternative option of an expletive rant to generate the much-needed crevasse paper.

However

Consider that it takes millions of attempts to entangle just a single pair of atoms (albeit done in a fairly automated way), it isn't economically feasible just yet. That and the fact that simply by observing the data held by a qubit alters that information, it is, as of yet, unreliable too.

Correction

The fault isn't that they were running MSN (or any other messenger system), it was that the user clicked on the link they received and were C&Ced by the website it directed them to. In the original press release, the exploit vector was IE6, so one would assume they clicked a link from MSN Messenger on their Win(XP?) box and their IE6 popped up and faithfully bent over and took a malicious datastream up the <insert nether-region here>.

Either way, fail on Google for not enforcing Linux+Chrome on their users. Fail to the firewall jocks that allowed the malicious site through. Fail to software vendors for not supporting IE7+ (or even better FF/Chrome/etc). And, of course, fail to MS for allowing a C&C bot to install/hide on a WinPC by simply viewing a website in what should have been a next-to-not privileged app.

This will always be a fun story for the shear amount of fail.

One other side note: If [the hackers] stole the Gaia code, and Google figured it out (presumably from the source repo logs), why not just pilfer a checked-out version instead (which wouldn't have an audit trail)? Or does the source repo not actually check-out code to a workstation, but is web-based and allows for remote editing of a virtual "checked-out" copy?

Title

The problem over The Pirate Bay being court-ordered to disclose IP addresses of people accessing their website comes to mind here. They argued that they could not due to not logging the information requested in the first place. Of course, the IP was, at some point, in their system and they chose to destroy, rather than log, that information, at which point it was argued they violated Discoverability laws. But hey, all in the name of privacy.

I guess

I guess you missed the Safari driveby download scare...

And as for a "convoluted trojan which requires an inordinate amount of user stupidity to actually work," I have seen many of these types infect Wintards. Click on a link provided by a Google search, it ends up being a webpage mimicing an AV scanning your My Computer explorer window saying it has found XXX number of virii, has a "popup" on which you click the "X", which pops up saying "download this. Run?", Click "Run" and windows pops up again, "Are you sure you want to run this? It isn't from a trusted source...blah blah". I'd say that falls on the "inordinate amount of user stupidity" side of the line. Probably more so than a link to install a supposed plugin.

Shhhh

Shhhh Jerome 2, the commentards might hear you. Why would anyone do something as simple as using ODF for their company and simply save it as a .doc to send it out to others? Everyone already has to do it due to .docx...shouldn't be hard.

@Martin

Of course it's Matlab. Do you think those scientists actually learned anything in their half-semester course of C++?

Funny how they used "programmers" in the article. Script-writers perhaps.

Title

The leopard hasn't changed it's spots, for it is black and simply has a mesh of color streaked across its coat.

*Sigh*

"the windows CMD prompy beats the Linux terminal every day"

"every" = "any" perhaps?

Anyway, I'd like you to do something like this at a windows command prompt:

ps -ux | grep "firefox"

kill -9 <insert firefox pid here>

Why you say? Because Ctrl+Alt+Delete->Task Manager (or right-click taskbar -> Task Manager, etc) -> Applications tab (or Processes if you prefer) -> select Firefox -> End Task -> Are you sure? Yes!!!.... wait 5 seconds, didn't die? select and End Task again. Are you sure?!?!? FAIL

kill -9 and it dies. Period.

And yes, I am "conversant" with BOTH, and I actually know which role each should be used for.

@Craig

"when will they implement sorting of columns such as sender?"

As soon as you realize Google is a search engine. Just start typing the sender's name/email address into that search box at the top and it will automagically suggest the sender's full name/email for which you tab+enter or click+click (depending on how tech savy you are) and you (almost) instantly get your email "sorted" by sender (and content, which can be just as handy).

I, for one, welcome our new drag-and-drop enabled, sometimes spotty reliability, email overlords. May their servers always contribute to global warming and my searches (almost) always come with at least one link to a phishing site. (but you love them anyway)

However

@R 16,

"But come on, the first thing I though of was to cause a big popup window that says your computer might be infected with malware. It is preventing this windows update from completing, here is some suggested actions to take to remove the malware."

I believe you are missing something in your post. THIS IS WHAT MALWARE DOES TO GET INSTALLED IN THE FIRST PLACE. (the suggested action is "buy this AntiVirus 2010 software")

Sorry for the flame, but it was warranted.

Title

"What I tell you three times is true (why?)"

One computer may get it wrong. Of two computers, one may get it wrong, but you wouldn't know which. With three computers, the correct answer wins by popular vote. The chance of a rare-as-it-is fluke of getting it wrong in the first place, TWICE, is an "acceptible margin of error." (most likely in the realm of <0.0000000000001%).

Why do you think any kind of true vote-based system uses odd numbers? There will always be a tie-breaker vote, since "yea" or "nay" is binary after all.