Posted by (20% noise) View Skip
Dan Jones writes “As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux.” And reader shmG notes Intel’s release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.

Re:Apple skunkworks? - by RightSaidFred99 (Score: 2) Thread
Lol. No, they’re not.

Ah, AIX - by wandazulu (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

AIX…the last Unix you can’t just “get” a copy of, but need to actually buy the hardware (a la the Mac). We had a Power box at work with AIX for awhile, but its configuration tools was quite … unique among Unix flavors (though I was told it was pretty straightforward IBM) and I had a horrible time getting GCC to work with it; most every F/OSS package I came across either straight up wasn’t tested on AIX (because no one had the hardware), or it had a whole separate setup (I believe one of the standard lines running ./configure is “Is this an AIX system?”).

I recall the box being wicked fast when we were running Oracle on it; it was a “small” Power machine but it still could handle a monster database with hundreds of millions of rows with no trouble. Frankly, I was sort-of sad to see it go; I really did want to get more familiar with it, but apparently the maintenance costs IBM was charging made it a non-starter. Plus, ultimately, it seems that it just wasn’t very OSS friendly; xlc is apparently an amazing compiler for the PowerPC, but they wanted $6000 for a license per developer. Plus, and I’m sorry if this is nitpicking, but to have the C compiler called xlc and the C++ compiler called xlC was just, well, insane.

What I really wanted to do was get Linux on it, and Oracle even has a Linux-on-Power version of their database, but there seemed to be some grumbling from the IBM salespeople (according to my boss) that they discourage people from running Linux on Power…I guess you (according to them) need AIX to unleash the real “power” in the PowerPC.

Sigh, okay, whatever. back to Linux on x86-64.

Re:Ah, AIX - by raftpeople (Score: 2) Thread
Minor note: PowerPC was the line of processors used in the Apple computers. POWER (as in Power7) is the server line of processors with it’s roots in the as/400 servers back in the 90’s. IBM didn’t do a very good job of making that distinction clear.

Direct comparisons are bad - by the linux geek (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
POWER and Itanium are architecturally so different that kdawson’s snide “put this new Intel chip in the shade” comment is kind of nonsensical. Itanium is superscalar to an extent that POWER doesn’t come close to, with each core being able to execute up to six instructions per cycle. While its possible that POWER7 is faster, its also more expensive to get a reasonable configuration and the performance difference between the two is not as clear-cut as our illustrious editor is trying to suggest.

Re:4.14GHz? - by Totenglocke (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
You mean how you can buy a 3.4 GHz Phenom II X4 from AMD? That 3.0 GHz ceiling?

Posted by (45% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more.” The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: “This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened” (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).

Some perspective - by PCM2 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

While anyone losing their job is a bummer, the tone of the submission is a little histrionic. What actually happened here is that Oracle laid off two people who were working on accessibility. Again, that’s a shame… but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.

Also, Oracle already sponsored an OpenSolaris accessibility group, and now they’re in charge of the OpenOffice accessibility work as well, to say nothing of making sure their business applications are up to government standards… is it really fair to expect it to shoulder the burden of accessibility for Gnome, too?

Maybe Novell wants to hire these guys? Or Red Hat?

Bad title - by mysidia (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It should say: Oracle breaks their commitment to accessibility, that they inherited when they acquired sun.

In other words, Oracle is going back on their word, and is perhaps about to show how dishonest, despicable, and evil they (apparently) are, or not, depending on whether they keep their word (or not).

Once you make a commitment, you can’t “drop it”. You either uphold your promise, or you break it.

It looks like Oracle’s about to break their promise.

It doesn’t matter at all that people who worked for Sun originally made the promise. Oracle acquired Sun, so they acquired all their promises, obligations, and dirty laundry too.

Revising or ‘dropping’ a promise you made is called reneging on obligations you made.

When a company says they’re committed to something, they’ve made a promise. They can’t become “uncommitted” or “no longer committed” without either succeeding, or having lied in the first place.

Oracle DB - by Chris Lawrence (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Oracle has a solid core DB engine. It dates back to the seventies, but it has evolved and it’s still really good. Everything built around it is pretty much crap. But people buy from Oracle for the DB engine, then get stuck buying a lot of other super-expensive, bad quality software. I love PostgreSQL, and it’s getting better every day, but there’s still some stuff the core Oracle engine did ten years ago you can’t get anywhere else.

Capitalism at work… - by VendettaMF (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Surely this does not come as a surprise to anyone?

Oracle, who have deliberately lessened the abilities of their own products (from a reasonably solid database system 10 years ago to a steaming turd now) in order to sell more licenses to do the same amount of work will continue to cut anything that is not immediately profitable.

Anything that Sun pursued on moral or ethical grounds, and anything that shows “future promise” will be axed as soon as they spot it.

As well as anything that could potentially compete with their more expensive in-house crap.

People have been worrying about MySQL. They have been right to worry. However, as a corporation, Oracle can and will have all relevant American laws re-written/re-interpreted as necessary to see all commercial deployment of MySQL in the USA dead within two years.

Re:Lawyers at work… - by Sri Ramkrishna (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Actually, they did this because if Sun wants to get Solaris with GNOME on government desktops they need to have accessibility. So this is to comply with government contracts. Nobody pays for this kind of thing out of the goodness of their hearts. This is a public-ly traded company.. sheesh. sri

Posted by (41% noise) View Skip
bridges writes “The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs.” The ACM’s writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.

Re:Why? - by Spazed (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
Most of them would be running an application done in C/C++ or some other low level language with threading. The whole advantage of super computers isn’t that they have an absurd ghz rating, but an insane amount of cores. This could be useful for testing how a network of desktop computers would work, which it sounds like from the summary they are doing.  
 
TL:DR; Normal desktop software doesn’t run faster on a super computer than on your 4 year old laptop.

Cool. - by John Hasler (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Now we’ll never need to build another expensive supercomputer. We’ll just “virtualize” them on cheap desktops.

Oh. Wait…

Re:Cool. - by TubeSteak (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

I think you’ve got it backwards. 
Now we’re virtualizing cheap desktops on supercomputers.

What they’re doing only makes sense if 5% of 4096 nodes* is cheaper than coding your app to run natively on the supercomputer. 
Like really big hard drives, when you get up to supercomputer levels of performance, 5% is a lot to give away.

*Anyone know exactly what a node entails?

Other way - by Wrexs0ul (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

This is virtualization… Imagine someone Imagining a beowulf cluster of those!

-Matt

Re:so they are ‘only’ wasting 200 machines - by Barny (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Well, not sure how good they are now, but back when I studied at Uni we examined a few super-computer clusters and the rule of thumb in most cases was 1 CPU core per node was stuck doing IO for that node anyway, this was all before the move to Hypertransport with AMD though, so it may be much different for them now.

The fact was, it was a number that was constant, it wouldn’t get worse with more nodes, it was always x nodes lost per y nodes, as this is. Just add more nodes :)

A worse problem would be if it was x^2 nodes per y nodes, then you’re just throwing away money adding more.

Posted by (29% noise) View Skip
angry tapir writes “Microsoft’s XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML)”

Such a nicely chosen name for the standard… - by lotho brandybuck (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
OOXML.. I’m a regular user of Openoffice. I’m pretty interested in it succeeding, and was pretty aware of the OOXML v. ODF issues a year ago. And still, when I saw the title of this article, my first thought for 10 seconds was… oh shit.. they’re ditching Openoffice in Scandanavia! Almost like someone deliberately named OOXML to create a little confusion, isn’t it?

Re:Such a nicely chosen name for the standard… - by IICV (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Yeah, I’m 90% certain that OOXML/Open Office confusion is the basis for the name. I mean seriously, Office Open XML? Why not Word Open XML (WOX)? Microsoft Open XML Interchange (MOXI)? There’s a million more marketable names than OOXML, that wouldn’t cause any confusion with Open Office.

But then on the other hand, this is the company that brought us Bing.

What’s in a name - by Red Flayer (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

DIFI’s[1] report was written by Hypatia, a Norwegian consultancy specializing in standardization and software accessibility.

Strange, that the name of the consultancy is Hypatia. She, after all, was a mathematician-philosopher who ascribed to Plotinus’s ideal… that empirical research is inherently flawed, and only logic and mathematics can achieve truth. 
 
I mean, there’s a clear relationship here that I find very amusing. Microsoft’s OOXML, while sure to be empirically more interoperable with most users due to the pervasity of Microsoft Office, is not logically more interoperable due to the nature of what MS has done to the “open” standard. 
 
Delicious allegory. 
 
[1] DIFI is the Norwegian Agency responsible for the decision.

Re:What’s in a name - by martin-boundary (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Microsoft’s OOXML, while sure to be empirically more interoperable with most users due to the pervasity of Microsoft Office,

Doesn’t interoperability mean ability to work with diverse systems?

If users of MS Office share documents, that’s not interoperability since they all use the same software family. You have to look at users who transfer documents back and forth between diverse software systems, eg MS Office, Open Office, Lotus Symphony, AppleWorks, etc.

Interoperability is about making faithful conversions easy.

Remove one and unanimity is impossible - by H4x0r Jim Duggan (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Why does this matter so much? Once one (now two) countries reject OOXML, it means it cannot become *the* international/European document standard for the public sector.

Posted by (46% noise) View Skip
natharward writes “A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip’s traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won’t escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, ‘If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.’”

Okay guys… - by tool462 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Looks like we have a namespace collision here.

I propose the following solution: All references to ‘virus’ should now point to one of the following (as appropriate).

Meatspace::virus 
Bitspace::virus

That’ll solve a lot of confusion (and render almost every single “Funny”-modded post in this thread irrelevant)

Thanks.

Fascinating - by Anarchy245 (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
It is amazing how technologies shown in Star Trek 45-15 years ago (esp TNG, and Voyager if I daresay) have brought to life by scientists who were inspired by its intellectual dialogue and its incredible technology. Many of the things Star Trek did…like teleporters and replicators, phasers and tricorders, and pads, we marvel at and sometimes wonder how they ever possibly could work, a seemingly impossible feat of mankind’s ingenuity. And yet, over the years we have seen so many of them come to life; the Kindle and the iPAD awe me every time I see them. Consider also, MRI imaging. The ability to bring a momentarily-dead person back to life. Transplants of major organs and body parts. And now, possibly, the ability to measure the some of the most minute details of a human that we could possibly conceive. Is this another incredible step forward for mankind and his unrelenting technological, intellectual aspirations? I can’t wait to see.

Re:Fascinating - by MichaelSmith (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

None of these things were invented by Star Trek. Maybe they were, as you say “shown there” but these ideas have been common in SF since at least the 1940s and quite likely a lot longer.

But does it run linux? - by nicknamenotavailable (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

That way you wouldn’t need to worry about vir…

Oh,

sorry.

Re:what about cinnamon - by Taibhsear (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Probably none. 
Normal animal cell size: 10-30 micrometers 
Normal plant cell size: 10-100 micrometers 
Normal virus size: 10-300 nanometers

Not to mention the gap in the detector is smaller than plant and animal cells entirely:

Posted by (53% noise) View Skip
nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. “The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language.”

Got NSA - by dave562 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

This seems like something that the NSA is probably salivating over. Imagine being able to translate intercepts in near real time with accurate voice recognition. I’m sure they already have imagined it. That technology is nothing short of a Manhattan Project for the SIGINT community.

Yes! Bring back the joy of Tablespoons! - by argent (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Tablespoons, by an Apple Newton

or [allegedly] what happens when you run Jabberwocky through a handwriting recognition program… :-)

—————-

Teas Willis, and the sticky tours 
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake. 
All mimes were the borrowers, 
And the moderate Belgrade.

‘Beware the tablespoon my son, 
The jaws that bite, the Claus that catch. 
Beware the Subjects bird, and shred 
The serious Bandwidth!’

He took his Verbal sword in hand: 
Long time the monitors fog he sought, 
So rested he by the Tumbled tree, 
Long time the monitors fog he sought,

And as in selfish thought he stood, 
The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame, 
Came stifling through the trigger wood, 
And troubled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through, 
The Verbal blade went thicker shade. 
He left it dead, and with its head, 
He went gambling back.

‘And host Thai slash the tablespoon? 
Come to my arms my bearish boy. 
Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!’ 
He charted in his joy.

Teas Willis, and the sticky tours 
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake. 
All mimes were the borrowers, 
And the moderate Belgrade.

State of voice recognition - by qoncept (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Does anyone use voice recognition software? Here are a couple of my voicemails transcribed by Google Voice:  
 
Hey man, Hello, this is gonna ask you about Stockton uncle in a missed your call, so, so give well. Okay bye.  
 
Hey it’s me and I for me. Long, My of the day. So Hey Jared, Here doing. If you come for another anti, gimme a call before you go to sleep and stuff, so give me a favor you familiar with it. I love you bye.

Via Stephen Fry… - by Sockatume (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Stephen Fry offers…

“Hi, Stephen, it’s Natasha from BBC Newsnight in London. Just to say I’ve sent you two texts. One is to say that we could do it at eleven am your time after the launch, or any time sooner after the launch, or we could do it at midday as we suggested earlier. I, er, if you could text me back about that, and I’ve sent you the details of Skype that you need to do too. If you could give me a call back. Enjoy the launch and I’ll speak to you after that. Thank you Bye.”

I’ve transcribed it from the voicemail sound file that resides online on my inbox on the Google Voice site. All fine. I have also ticked the option for Google Voice to send me a text transcript of any voicemail. Below is their interpretation of Natasha’s message it’s rather endearing how hopelessly wrong the largest company on earth gets it.

“Hi Stephen. It’s Jeff from BBC needs in nuns. And just to say I sent 80 tax, one, if to say we could do it. I left in i a m your time off to go into any time soon, or the court and full we could grab me today as we suggested at. A. F. I. If you could text me back byebye. I’ve sent you the details of skylights that you need to 3 T if you could give me a call. Bye. Enjoy the loans. I’ll speak to you after that. Thank you. Bye”

On a more serious note, such transcripts at least allow you to get an idea of the rough content and tone of a message without having to stop and listen to it, a much more concentration-intensive task.

Warning Label - by Ukab the Great (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Caution: not for use with Hungarian Tobacconists.

Posted by (44% noise) View Skip
MikeChino writes “As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles.”

It’s a capcitor! - by reg106 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
The device is a capacitor that can also support mechanical load. The first hint is that they call it energy storage, but never actually call it a battery (though it may “replace a battery”). In the linked video, they are using a custom device (indicated by the Imperial College in the upper left), that is also labeled as capacitor charge-discharge indicator. The storage device appears to be two sheets of carbon fiber mesh held together with a “multifunctional resin”, i.e. a nonconductive material with a high dielectric constant that is also capable of supporting a large mechanical load (or rather, binding to the carbon fiber so that it supports a large mechanical load, i.e. a composite). The idea of using ultracapacitors to replace batteries has been around for a long while. Ultracapactiors usually use esoteric materials and have problems with leakage over long periods of time, but have met with success in some applications. The military has funded a lot of research for ultracapacitors to replace batteries for the electronics on missiles, an ideal application since missiles potentially sit on the shelf for years, and then need to function precisely for a very short period of time. (the cap would be charged as part of the launch procedure.)  
 
In the example mentioned in the video (GPS case made of the material), I’m not sure why it would reduce wiring, since the capacitor would still need to be charged, just as if it were being fed by the cars electrical system. I suspect there are some real advances in the work, but the interesting features don’t come through in this video for public consumption.

REAL link to original article - by argent (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Physorg is a tarpit. Here’s the REAL original article.

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_5-2-2010-10-26-39

Slashdot does it again! - by TimHunter (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Once again, in less than 30 minutes the Slashdot crowd finds multiple fatal flaws in the results of years of work by highly-trained educated people. And frequently without even bothering to RTFA! Is there nothing we can’t do?

NOBODY expects the Slashdot Community! The chief weapon of the Slashdot Community is presumption…presumption and arrogance…arrogance and presumption… Our *two* weapons are presumption and arrogance…and cynicism… Our *three* weapons are presumption, arrogance, and cynicism…and an overweening sense of entitlement… Our *four*…no… *Amongst* our weapons… Amongst our weaponry…are such elements as arrogance, presumption…I’ll come in again.

Re:Slashdot does it again! - by Jeng (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You remember the story about someone wanting to power a car off of hydrogen that is produced by burning magnesium in water?

Some ideas are just so stupid that they are put on the main page for us to poop on them.

Why is this one stupid?

Cost is first, this is built on top of carbon fiber which is already pretty damn expensive without also turning it into a battery. Yea, one day they may bring the cost down, but it is not in the reasonable future.

Kaboom is second. Its not just about energy storage, its about where you store the energy. With electric powered cars and petrol powered cars the energy is stored in a safe spot in the car, the body of the car is about as unsafe as you can get.

Re:Slashdot does it again! - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

This year it’s February 14.

Thank you, thank you.

Posted by (90% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “According to 4chan’s owner and administrator ‘moot,’ Verizon has explicitly blocked all traffic on their network from boards.4chan.org, where all of 4chan’s boards are located. Moot explains that only traffic to and from port 80 is being dropped and they were able to confirm that it was intentional. 4chan’s downtime for Verizon users has been in effect for at least 72 hours since Saturday, February 7.”

it’s like freudian psychology - by circletimessquare (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

4chan is the mindless id, verizon is the superego of executive function control. the superego attempts to suppress the id. but it will just comes out anyways, in some subconscious way, it always does. you can’t kill something 4chan, it’s immortal and undead. the mindless id always finds a way

Obligatory article tag. - by caladine (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
andnothingofvaluewaslost

Wouldn’t want to work at Verizon support right now - by ZankerH (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
“VERIZON YUO HAVE MADE POWERFULL ENIMEY 
ANONIMOUSE IS LEEGON”  
 
Filter error: Don’t use so many caps. It’s like yelling. Filter error:

Bad summary - by Alcimedes (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Granted it’s /. so I don’t expect anything else.

The block is only in place for Verizon Wireless traffic, not all of Verizon’s traffic.

Misleading Summary - by twidarkling (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Moot himself said on the 4chan status blog that it’s only Verizon Wireless from what they can tell.

It should be interesting to see the fallout from this. 4channers aren’t exactly the paragon of maturity.

Posted by (62% noise) View Skip
With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. “I think it’s fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it’s equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun’s executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word ‘deserve.’ But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. […] And here’s a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it’s the employees who will suffer for it, and he’ll be doing just fine.”

Blah blah Kos blah blah - by idiotnot (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Golden parachutes aren’t a Republican phenomena, and the Silicon Valley tech companies aren’t exactly fertile ground for the GOP as far as fundraising goes.

Nor is rewarding mediocrity limited to the upper-echelons of society (see: Detroit).

What the author did get right is that the boards of directors make these decisions. In companies where a scant few hold lots of sway, they look out for themselves instead of the working minions. Think Carl Ichan ever got a raw deal on a company he came in and dismantled?

The fixes are simple, but neither political party has the political will to do it. The tax reforms in 1986 allowed most of this, and it benefits wealthy interests (read: donors) on both sides of the aisle. Think Bear Stearns was a high-time GOP operation? How about Fannie and Freddie?

1. Tax stock options as regular compensation, taxed at normal income tax rates. Tax it at the stock’s full price on the day the option is exercised. If the option is never exercised, fine. The executive doesn’t pay the tax. 
2. Place a time limit on option execution. 
3. Tax fringe benefits as compensation (hello, “Cadillac” health plans). 
4. Encourage firms to hire executives on fixed-term contracts with fixed compensation. Stop making compensation based on stock price performance.

But it’ll never happen. And, while I’m glad to see that they’re taking notice, the stupid from dKos burns. It burns a lot.

Here is a theory - by mbone (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Here is a theory that I heard expressed by a C level corporate executive :

The top people should be paid enough to make the people on the rung just below them green with envy, so that they will work their butts off to get to the top, and so on, proportionally, down the line. (In other words, the motivation is not greed, but envy.)

I haven’t heard this expressed much in public, but it explains the high payments and bonuses in bad times much better than the “we pay them for their successes” theory.

Not very shocking - by Angst Badger (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Techies often have trouble understanding this, coming as they do from a very strongly meritocratic culture: the world at large is so far from being meritocratic that the sheer extent of its non-meritocracy strains the imagination. Professional academics often run into the same blank wall of incomprehension.

By no means am I saying that this is a good thing, or even that it is strictly necessary (though that is certainly a possibility given primate psychology), but the fact remains that the normal means of acquiring wealth is by conniving, cheating, swindling, and deceiving to one degree or another. If wealth was awarded on the basis of hard work, knowledge, or creativity, then the world would be full of super-rich construction workers, mathematicians, and artists. Instead, it is awarded on the basis of how good you are at talking (or coercing) people into giving it to you. Period. Things like quality, reliability, creativity, and utility are, at most, means to an end, and are by no means indispensable, except perhaps as grist for motivational speeches given to the people who do the work by the people who receive the rewards.

Reaganist? No, Economists. - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Reagan got that from the economists. He didn’t think that up himself. That’s one of the incorrect assumptions economists use in their models and theories - free markets always work and that the market is rational.

Free markets work only within a narrow range of economic activity. If they exceed those ranges then you get bubbles and collapses. That’s why the Fed was created to try to eliminate those things. Of course, if you get a Randian dogmatic believer in the free markets of a Fed Chairman (Greenspan), then you end up with serial bubbles: stock market and real estate.

There’s a few other blanket assumptions that economists make that are horribly incorrect in the real World, but I’ll save those for another time.

Oh, and economists need to get over their physics envy. They develop these impressive mathematical models and everything but the underlying assumptions are incorrect. As in this example, the assumption is that markets are rational. As we have seen, they are hardly rational.

Reading assignment: rational irrationality.

Oh, OK the last thing: the behavioral economists are redeeming the whole “profession”! :-P

Ahh, the good old days… - by stokessd (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I loved my sparc 1+ with the funky ruled reflective mouse pad, and the quirky SunOS. For some reason I always wanted pizza for lunch after working on it all morning. Ahh those were the good days, oh mosiac how we used you to find things in the larval days of the web.

Linux really ate Sun’s lunch. All the reasons to own a Sun largely evaporated with Linux. I say that as a researcher and end user, not a data center wienie. As soon as linux and commodity hardware got good enough, it was all over for Sun. I really feel bad (and old) but frankly I’m surprised that they lasted this long.

Sheldon

Posted by (52% noise) View Skip
A study conducted by researchers at University College London shows that boredom can kill you. The researchers found that people who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study. Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report said, “The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom.”

In other news… - by kpainter (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
As study is underway to see if you really can “Freeze your ass off”.

This explains… - by Lendrick (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

This explains the corpse in the back of that lecture hall in the math building.

Re:Correllation != Causation - by TheVelvetFlamebait (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Yes! Exactly! Correlation != causation!

If only researchers would read slashdot. Then they could benefit from our superior knowledge, and we would never have to say “correlation != causation” again.

*sigh*

Re:Or… - by Daniel Dvorkin (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The participants who reported high levels of boredom were significantly more likely to have died than the participants, in the same age group, who didn’t.

[sigh] TentireFA is about ten lines long; it doesn’t give much information, but it’s enough to get that much. Actually, even an intelligent reading of the summary would have given you that little bit of information. Probably too much to ask here, I know.

Re:NEWS for nerds - by jellomizer (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

I don’t know about you. But I am board listening to the same old Rant. STOP SHORTENING MY LIFE SPAN!!

Posted by (59% noise) View Skip
GJdeBoer writes “The book is aimed at people who are managing a network and would like to get insight into the performance of that network. It covers the installation and configuration of the Cacti application. In the preface the book states that it’s not necessary to be a Linux Guru to use the book and that exactly is the case. The book builds up your knowledge about Cacti and the necessary steps to configure it for your network, and it teaches you about Net-SNMP and RRDTool, the building blocks of Cacti.” Read on for the rest of GJdeBoer’s review.

As I’ve been working with Cacti for several years now, my aim was to get a book that describes the best practices for Cacti installations and to get a reference guide for myself. My hope was to get some more knowledge about the inner workings of Cacti and I think although meant for Cacti beginners, the book did a good job at that. I got a more clear idea about the architecture of Cacti which helps me with the integration of Cacti in my client’s networks. 
 
The book starts off with an introduction to Cacti. It explains what Cacti is, how the global architecture is and for what purposes it can be used. It also explains the basics of the prerequisite RRDTool. In the next chapter the book explains the installation of the prerequisites. The book then progresses on the installation, configuration and tasks like authentication and authorization of users. We then learn to add devices and assign templates to them. 
 
The last chapters end the book with advanced topics for Cacti users such as Data Management and Cacti Management. It explains how to create your own data and snmp queries to be able to monitor custom devices. Personally, I found these chapters to be the most educational part of the book. 
 
As for this book no advanced knowledge of Linux is needed. It explains the installation steps of Cacti and its prerequisites clearly and with a lot of exemplary screenshots. As Cacti is managed by means of an web interface it is the most clear way to make a point in a book about Cacti. The book is easy to read and I think the book covers the theory needed to install and operate a Cacti server perfectly. As it explains the use of Templates in Cacti and why you should use them, the book helps people build scalable and neat Cacti setups. 
 
As a downside of the book I have found the clear focus being on the Debian side of Linux distributions. All the installation done in the book is by using apt-get, Debian and Ubuntu’s package management system, but in the professional Linux world you are seeing more RedHat based distributions then Debian. I would have liked a couple of tooltips on how to install the prerequisites on RedHat or CentOS with the yum package manager or maybe by using source packages for installation. It’s not a big downside for more advanced users but for the Linux novices, at who the book targets on, it could be a bit hard to find out the right way to install Cacti on a RedHat or CentOS box. Since the configuration of Cacti is the same on every platform this is only applicable for the installation chapters. 
 
In general the book does exactly what the cover says: “Monitor your network with ease” although I found it a bit short. The book consists of a hundred and ten pages, but since there are a lot of screenshots on the pages there is less text. The book doesn’t dive very deep into the inner workings of Cacti. One could argue that is exactly the point of the book: most people don’t use that kind of knowledge. I would have liked a bit more insight into the MySQL database behind Cacti and troubleshooting steps for when your graphs stop working. 
 
I think the book is great for people who want to start with Cacti because they want to monitor their network. They can install and operate a Cacti instance very quickly with help of this book without having previous knowledge of Linux. In my field of work I often come in contact with customers who have problems in their network. I always advice them to install a network monitoring appliance like Cacti. Since most of them use Windows networks they often have no experience in configuring a Linux server for Cacti. I think I will recommend this book in the future to these people. 
 
Gert-Jan de Boer ia a self-employed IT Consultant with a company that specializes in Networking, Voice over IP, Storage and Virtualization.  
 
You can purchase Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers’ book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Read the Amazon reviews - by bofar (Score: 2, Informative) Thread
Love the Amazon review, “My initial inclination is to say that this book is worthless. Given that I spent $35 on it, it’s worse that worthless. At around 100 pages in length, the first 40 are dedicated toward understanding what a network is, a general overview of RRD and Cacti and a very poorly written install guide…”

book review on .8 version? - by alta (Score: 2) Thread

What do you think that this says about version numbers? I’m not really taking any point of view here, other than that version numbers don’t mean squat.

Here we have a book that’s been produced on a less than 1.0 version, alpha? beta? what?

Google seems to keep beta on their products for a very long time, largely so they can’t be held responsible for bugs.

Yall chime in.

Re:book review on .8 version? - by pclminion (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

I came to post the same thing. I’m really tired of open source developers being so spineless in this regard. Come on — your software is clearly successful, used by thousands, people are writing books about it — surely you can make the commitment and say hey, we’ve created a real, useful product here, let’s roll the version to 1.0. Sure, you might need to break your API at some future time, you might discover some terrible, data-destroying flaw… But at some point you ought to just pinch your nose and jump off the high board.

Software that remains continually pre-1.0 just gives the (probably accurate) impression that the authors don’t really think their software works well enough for general use. Which is, of course, an indication to the user to choose other software.

Re:book review on .8 version? - by skelly33 (Score: 2) Thread
… “maybe they figure that if they aren’t 1.0 they aren’t responsible for bugs or something” …  
 
My guess would be that it’s more of a corporate culture thing that leads Google to label their apps as “beta” for so long; their exemption from “responsibility” is specifically covered in their Terms of Service as so: 
 
14.6 GOOGLE FURTHER EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

who cares if it’s “Endorsed”? - by SuperBanana (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

This book is not endorsed by the Cacti Group.

Maybe open-source project authors will Walk The Talk, instead of producing a decent-but-slightly-cranky-and-badly-documented open-source project, and then expecting to be able to make money off book deals instead of producing decent documentation.

Posted by (88% noise) View Skip
With the oh-so-dreaded Hallmark holiday on the horizon we are flooded with tips and tricks (mostly designed to sell us things our mates cannot live without) of how to please/capture/sedate the ones we care for. One writer even suggests ways to capture the interest of a geeky girl. That said, what are some of the crazier romantically inspired, geeky V-day stunts or activities that you or someone you know has executed to terrible success or failure?

Ovid’s Advice - by WebManWalking (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
You know the song “I wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of love?” Well, it was Ovid. He wrote Ars Amatoria (2 books) and Remedia Amoris (1 book). The first book was on how to get a girl. The second was on how to keep her. And the third was on how to get over it when it’s over.  
 
From the second book, there are 2 days a year you avoid like the plague (unless you’re rich and can afford not to): Cupid’s Day (later renamed by the Catholic Church as St. Valentine’s Day) and her birthday. On both days you’ll be expected to give gifts. So, if you can’t afford that, Ovid’s advice was to break up with her before the day arrives and get back together again with her afterwards.  
 
So I guess you could say, given the fact that there are guys who think that way, simply not breaking up with your girlfriend/wife, despite the 2000 years of expectations she’s layering on top of your relationship, is pretty romantic in itself. But don’t try to convince her of that. She’ll probably want to be pampered in some way anyway.  
 
Knowing this DOES give you a conversational edge, however, on the cynical morons who think that Valentines Day was invented by Hallmark. And ladies, if you you’re reading this and are pissed that this advice was EVER given, you might take comfort in having this retort handy: A while later, Augustus Caesar exiled Ovid from Rome for the rest of his life. In Ovid’s own words, the reason was carmen et error. The carmen is widely believed to be these 3 books, which ticked off the aristocracy no end.  
 
Ovid

NinjaGram - by lula-vampiro (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
I wanted to find a nice middle ground between lovers who like to send affection to one another on Valentine’s Day and cynics who just want to dress in black and stab bitches, so a few years ago I started a charity at Swarthmore College called NinjaGram. It’s pretty simple. You pay us $3, which goes to some charity or other, and fill out a card with a cute logo, and then shadowy assassins stalk your target on 14 February and surprise them with the card when they least expect it, screaming “NIIIIINJAGRAM!” Classes and events get interrupted a lot on Valentine’s Day, but the administrators and faculty and public safety officers buy and receive as many as the students do, and besides who wants to argue with ninjas? This Valentine’s Day, black is the new pink.

Re:NinjaGram - by Dachannien (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Uh… pirates?

Re:Romance isn’t dead! - by FSWKU (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
You’re going about it all wrong:

1. Cut a hole in the box
2. Put your junk in that box
3. Make her open the box

And that’s the way you do it…

finger - by mi (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Boy, this takes me back to the past of the Internet without firewalls and Unix servers running with the regular services, including, finger, enabled. We were at different Universities and often talked using talk…

But she was not online as much as myself, so I had to know, when to start the talk… The solution is obvious: execute finger every minute. If “on since” is detected in the output, write out a log-entry to a file. A separate instance of xbiff was running to alert me, when that file was modified.

Nowadays various instant-messaging clients do this all for you, and even on Slashdot I have to provide Wikipedia links to describe things I’m talking about…

Posted by (50% noise) View Skip
Recently there was much gnashing of teeth as SourceForge (who shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) started programmatically blocking users in certain countries to comply with US export restrictions. Thankfully they didn’t let it end there and have found a way to put the power back in the hands of the users. “Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we’ve ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month’s change.”

Counterproductive laws - by presidenteloco (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The USA is squandering some of its technological lead and economic opportunities with dumb-ass laws.

I’ve already had to stop hosting several online businesses in the US due to the patriot act and international customers’ unwillingness to have there data stored in the US.

Stem cell research was set back a decade by Christian fundamentalist opposition making its way into 
federal law.

Laws restricting export of US software just result in software being innovated faster elsewhere.

As Freeman Dyson once said: The best way to defeat soviet communism would be to ship Apple computers to their population en masse. He was basically right, though who knew it would be cloned PCs that would do the trick.

Debian has never found this sort of blocking… - by John Hasler (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

…necessary. Why has Source Forge suddenly decided that it is?

Dump sourceforge - by starsong (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Why the hell does anyone even use SourceForge anymore? Their tools suck, the site is beyond slow and plastered with ads, and you have to play download roulette with their crappy 90s-era mirroring system. Plus you get crazy decrees like this from whatever’s going on at the top. It’s not like there aren’t alternatives these days. Google Code is awesome by comparison.

And these restrictions makes so much sense - by JoshuaZ (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Yeah. These restrictions make so much sense. Because we all know that North Korea has no way to get access to any servers outside North Korea. And no one can use a proxy server at all. And they really are going to be absolutely helpless without the tiny open-source projects. This is as ridiculous as the old restrictions on exporting encryption (at least those got removed a few years ago).

Re:And these restrictions makes so much sense - by JoshuaZ (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Not exactly. In 1996, Clinton issued an executive order which took commercial encryption off the munitions list. It is still on the list of controled commecial exports but that’s a lot less restrictive (much, much easier to get permission to export, less severe punishments for violations, and lower priorities for federal investigators).

Posted by (74% noise) View Skip
SpuriousLogic writes “Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being ‘mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights’ even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems. Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago.”

Same thing happened to me this weekend - by Sloppy (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

My little brother just got a Nokia N900 and brought it over to show off. My impression: this just might be the first phone I’ve ever seen which doesn’t suck. apt-get install whateverthefuckyouwant totally embarrasses everybody’s “app store” and on top of that it’s a fully working product.

Is Nexus One getting there too? Cool. I knew shitty phones’ days were numbered, but had no idea just what that number was. Looks like we’ve finally gotten to 0 and I can start taking the phone market seriously.

Re:stupid Linus - by BitZtream (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Except as soon as anyone finds out that he accepted money for expressing his opinion, people will value his opinion a whole hell of a lot less.

There is a lesson to learn there - by Weaselmancer (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

…he has chosen user-friendliness instead of endless tinkering

The lesson is: Even people famous for endless tinkering still like a simple, clean user experience once in a while.

Design your software with this in mind.

Re:There is a lesson to learn there - by Angst Badger (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Once in a while? I find that I want to tinker with the subjects in which I am most interested, and prefer drool-proof interfaces the rest of the time. FOSS at its (unusual) best makes tinkering possible but not necessary. Programs should work well off the shelf but be readily amenable to user modification if the user cares to.

So that’s who that is! - by noidentity (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones.

Finally, an article summary that explainings who some obscure person is, rather than assuming we know everyone in the tech universe.

Posted by (41% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “Zero-day vulnerabilities have become prized possessions to attackers and defenders alike. As the recent China-Google attack demonstrated, they are the basis on which most of the successful attacks are crafted these days. There is an underground market growing around these vulnerabilities, but there are also ‘white markets’ — set up by VeriSign, TippingPoint, Google — where they buy zero-day flaws and alert the companies so that they can patch their products before the vulnerabilities can be taken advantage of.”

How does the purchaser of an exploit… - by John Hasler (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

…know that it has not also been sold to someone else? And who brokers these deals? I can’t imagine the parties trusting each other.

I’m surprised white markets aren’t more common - by swb (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

…especially when the market is fairly inelastic.

The best “white market” tale I’ve ever heard is the militias that ran the “Golden Triangle” in the Southeast Asian highlands offering to sell the US the entire opium crop.

I think it would be a grand strategy in Afghanistan — build goodwill with farmers through buying their crop at prices better than the Taliban is offering, denying the Taliban a source of income through trafficking and probably having a significant supply reduction in the global heroin market. They could even use the opium for the production of painkillers for the legitimate market, which I understand is actually constrained sometimes by strict production limitations.

You would think that white marketing the supply of illicit drugs would make a lot of sense — by buying up supplies at the volume end of the market and denying it to the market, you would drive street prices through the roof and have far more impact on the consumers, pricing many out of the market. Cocaine supply diversity may make this difficult, but if pursued quietly it might actually be effective there too.

Critics would decry giving money to criminals, but the “buy” could actually take place at the farming level where that’s an option, thus totally undercutting the criminals. It’d be great to see a cost analysis to see if it would actually be cheaper to just buy up the drugs at the point of production versus the drug war, which doesn’t work.

Re:I’m surprised white markets aren’t more common - by Hasai (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

And where, in regions that routinely grow opium, would this be an ‘option?’ The criminals will show up at the farmer’s doorstep, take the money, then butcher both the farmer and his family to make an example.

I saw the same sort of thing happen in S.A., where this one campesino decided he wasn’t going to grow coca anymore: the local enforcers promptly showed-up, dragged him and his family out and forced them to kneel in front of their house, then went right down the row, from youngest to oldest. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

The term ‘naive’ doesn’t even begin to describe your idea.

Re:I’m surprised white markets aren’t more common - by L4t3r4lu5 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Buying products other than opium, i.e. incentives to plant other crops would be better. 
 
On another point, don’t you think the Taliban might be a little irritated by this and, ooooh I don’t know, cut off some farmers heads? I hear they’ve been known to do that to make a point.

Re:I’m surprised white markets aren’t more common - by Yvanhoe (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The taliban are actually opposed to drugs production. While they were in power, the area of opium cultures fell down incredibely quick. It came back thanks to the war. The drugs lords are a faction different from the talibans.

Posted by (85% noise) View Skip
Barence writes “Mozilla is ready to exorcise support for Mac OS X 10.4 from Firefox’s development code, closing the door on Apple’s aging OS. The foundation stopped supporting 10.4, codenamed Tiger, in September 2009, but, according to Josh Aas, a Mozilla platform engineer, ‘we left much of the code required to support that platform in the tree in case we wanted to reverse that decision.” We had come to a point where we need to make a final decision and either restore 10.4 support or remove this (large) amount of 10.4 specific code,’ he notes on the Mozilla developer planning forum.”

Oh, that explains Tiger. - by hey! (Score: 2) Thread

I thought he had some kind of uncontrollable sex addiction. Now I see he’s just been turned out to stud.

How about 10.2.8? - by antdude (Score: 2) Thread

It’s only like seven years old. [grin]

Wrong Question for the Mac Faithful - by buckhead_buddy (Score: 2) Thread

I’m a long time Mac user. Firefox developers are asking the wrong question of Mac users by focusing this discussion on continued support; of course, everyone wants their platform supported as long as possible.

But if you ask about whether Firefox should feel more like a “native” Mac app, you’d get a lot of Mac faithful saying “ditch Tiger if that’s standing in the way”. For example, ATSUI is the legacy text engine from the days of OpenDoc and System 7.5; apps that still use it under Mac OS X draw fire from Mac users because it’s not integrated as well as CoreText or the Cocoa Text Engine. They don’t make this text engine distinction directly, but it’s clear they don’t consider ATSUI to be Mac-like anymore with the “bugs” they file and complaints they have about lack of integration e.g. “Why doesn’t the command-control-d shortcut to look up something in the dictionary work?”

Based on the goals of the Firefox roadmap, 4.0 looks like a “must-reluctantly-kill-Tiger” release just based on its lofty memory isolation goals; that’s a feature you do not want to compromise the quality of.

Keep the bug fixes and security updates of the 3.x Firefox platform able to work with Tiger. This helps Mac users. This helps support people. This helps propagate a good standards compliant browser to as many people with legacy hardware as possible. But a major release number like 4.0 is a good end-user aware point for removing significant backwards compatibility.

Mac Faithful have a different question… - by argent (Score: 2) Thread

But if you ask about whether Firefox should feel more like a “native” Mac app, you’d get a lot of Mac faithful saying “ditch Tiger if that’s standing in the way”.

How about “replace all that XUL [expletive] with the Camino shell”?

I wouldn’t be using FF at all, except that there’s a problem with proxy URL handling that’s worse in Camino than Firefox.

Re:Affecting a small audience - by psergiu (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

Firefox on OS X updates automatically. Users just have to push a “OK” button in a dialog to re-open their current windows in tabs in the updated version.

Posted by (32% noise) View Skip
Gwmaw writes “The space shuttle Endeavour bolted off its seaside launch pad on Monday on a voyage to install the last two main pieces of the International Space Station. The 4:14 a.m. EST (0914 GMT) blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center shattered the predawn tranquility with a deafening roar and a brilliant tower of flames that momentarily turned the dark Florida sky as bright as day.” HD video of launch attached.

Decommission the shuttles in space? - by jgtg32a (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I just had a random thought, would it be useful to just decommission shuttles in space, meaning just leave them up there, possibly integrate them into the ISS?

Re:Decommission the shuttles in space? - by Graymalkin (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Not in the slightest. There’s two big hurdles using the Shuttles as long term space stations or hooking them up to the ISS. The first is the electrical power systems of the Shuttles. To provide power while in space the Shuttle uses hydrogen fuel cells where the ISS uses solar panels. While the fuel cells provide a lot of power to the Shuttle they do have a finite fuel supply. The life support system aboard the Shuttle is also a short duration design using chemical CO2 scrubbers. At best a Shuttle station would need to be refueled and resupplied every few weeks. Besides power and life support the Shuttle doesn’t really carry its own scientific payload. If you were going to leave one in orbit you would need to send it up with a SpaceLab module or something to be able to do anything useful.

Hooking a Shuttle up to the ISS for long periods would also not be very useful since without the weekly resupply of hydrogen and oxygen the Shuttle would be a power and life support vampire for the ISS. It would also affect the ISS’ atmospheric drag such that it would require more reboosts than it already does. These could not be performed by the Shuttle because it carries a limited fuel for its OMS/RCS system which can’t be refueled in orbit. A Shuttle plugged into the ISS for a long period of time would end up being a dead weight with no real scientific utility of its own.

The Shuttles were designed for relatively short term missions and for resupply and refurbishment on the ground. Leaving them parked in orbit is a nice thought but ultimately impractical.

Last Night Launch - by realsilly (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

It was a glorious morning when my alarm beeped at 4:10am. I awoke, turned on the TV to the pre-set NASA channel, checked to make sure the launch was still ‘a Go’. I then donned a bathrobe over my birthday suit, watched the last 10 seconds on TV until I heard “We have Liftoff” and stepped out on my back porch. I looked to the east and the tree line was shadowed in a orange glow that was beautiful during the pre-dawn hours. The sky was clear and the air was crisp and the sight of the flames was facinating even at 50 miles away. I watched at the shuttle began to head in a northward direction. It was around 6.5 minutes later that the sound waves rumbled through the still night air. It was more of a low rumble, but it was distinctly felt and heard. At aroun 7.5 mintues, between my screen porch, the trajectory and my poor vision I could no longer see the bright spec of light that was the shuttle that was now a couple hundred miles away. I stepped back inside watched NASA TV until about the 9.5 minute mark during the last separation, and knew our astronauts doing ok. I hung up the robe, climbed back into bed, turned off the TV and went back to sleep.

What a beautiful way to wake up in the pre-dawn hours. And to think, /sniffle that was the last manned night launch we’ll see for quite some time. Oh how I wish everyon could have seen this first hand.

Re:Is this really news? - by ColdWetDog (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Which right there tells me we shouldn’t be sending people out into space anymore. It is a colossal waste of money to send us weak ass little humans, who need protection for our weak bodies, plus food, water, a place to go to the toilet, etc, instead of robots.

And we should not continue farm subsidies, wars in obscure places for no strategic interest or gain, enormous financial support for incompetent bankers, stock traders, real estate mavens and a host of other dumb things the government does. 
 
NASA is a really cheap date when you look at the totality of the US budget.

Extended? - by Chris Lawrence (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Now that the return to the moon has been cancelled, I wonder if NASA will extend Shuttle missions beyond this year? They have already hinted they may extend the life of the ISS, but are they going to rely on the Russians for the next ten years?

Posted by (52% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “A new Google domain — 1e100.net, a nod to the company’s famously misspelled name — is now the net’s 44th most visited site. Google says the domain is used to ‘identify servers’ on its internal network, hinting that reverse DNS plays a role. The domain was registered in September and launched in October, about the same time Google unveiled Spanner, a new addition to its backend infrastructure designed to shift loads automatically among its data centers.”

The story from Google… - by chrisd (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Hey, the fellows in netops asked me to clarify for you folks here’s the story:

1e100.net is a Google-owned domain name used to identify the servers in our network. Following standard industry practice, we make sure each IP address has a corresponding hostname. Starting in October 2009, we started using a single domain name to identify our servers across all Google products, rather than use different product domains such as youtube.com, blogger.com, and google.com. We did this for two reasons: first, to keep things simpler, and second, to proactively improve security by protecting against potential threats such as cross-site scripting attacks. Most typical Internet users will never see 1e100.net, but we picked we picked a Googley name for it just in case (1e100 is scientific notation for 1 googol).

So there you go!

79 comment about the scientific notation of google - by terraformer (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

…and 1 comment asking what the article means to all of us. Not a single comment on why are they redirecting things through this domain.

Yup, this is /.

Re:Not misspelled - by sopssa (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Because they originally did:

Re:what a load of crap - by proslack (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I thought it was a contraction of “Go ogle” as a nod to the amount of porn viewed on the internet each day.

Re:Slashdot helps - by ajs (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You would be surprised how little impact that has these days. Slashdot continues to be popular with its core demographic, but that Internet has grown by orders of magnitude since being Slashdotted meant something. Now, if this had been posted to a World of Warcraft forum… ;-)

Posted by (60% noise) View Skip
The Washington Post updates a story we discussed last spring about a push in the Democratic-controlled congress to legalize some forms of Internet gambling in the US. “Partly bankrolled by offshore gambling companies, the campaign has already persuaded the Obama administration to delay enforcement of a 2006 law cracking down on Internet wagers. … The federal government, which rarely prosecutes online gambling, would net billions of dollars in tax and licensing revenue if it were legalized, proponents say. … The outlook on Capitol Hill, however, is uncertain given a slate of unfinished business… [and] nervousness among Democrats about November midterm challenges. … [A politically conservative poker player said] ‘There’s a part of the party that always believes this isn’t something people should do. But I think it behooves the party to be a little more broad-minded on this issue.’”

Stop protecting people from themselves!!!! - by RaigetheFury (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’m not a democrat or a republican so lets clear that political nonsense up right now. I’m so sick and tired of having to protect people from themselves when it’s something that THEY can control. Sure some people may need help but it shouldn’t be the governments job to prevent this.

If someone doesn’t do research on something they put money into… well… that’s their loss. If they are STUPID enough to think that gambling will eventually pay off then they deserve to lose everything they bet. That’s why it’s called gambling.

There HAS to be a point where responsibility is the burden of the risk taker. “I didn’t know” or “I’m addicted” just won’t cut it. You pay the price for the decisions you make in life.

This isn’t like insider trading, or drug testing. You know exactly what you are getting into simply via the title of what you’re doing. I’m so sick and tired of hearing people complain about gambling addiction and then blaming the Casino’s or online companies. NOONE forced you to bet the money, you did it.

I do not want this great country to start managing my life choices. If I want to be an idiot and gamble away something I can’t afford… then that’s MY responsibility.

If you want to have a chance at monitoring things like this then you need to set ground rules that CAN be enforced.

1) Anything over $10,000 must be claimed (just like current customs rules) and taxes applied. If caught not doing so, the penalty is severe (20% of amount brought in) + jailtime/community service

2) Gambling income is considered just like typical earnings. You have to pay appropriate taxes on income. Some people are good enough to make this profitable. Why stop them if they are willing to pay taxes on it.

There is ZERO need to regulate this. People go to Vegas for the experience. There is a world of difference between betting $1000 online and sitting at a table with a crowd around you as you bed $1000 and win. I’d know.

Re:Why? - by chrisG23 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
You have obviously not done any gambling online. A large percentage, perhaps even the majority of online gambling, is poker. When you go to an online poker site, you are not playing against the house/online gambling site. You are playing against other players, and the gambling site gets its money by charging a fee, a percentage of the buy in in a tournament or a percentage of the pot.

Of course there is no 100% guarantee that the online gambling site is not putting an employee that can see the cards in on a table, but that would really net them so little money in comparison to hosting 100’s or even thousands of tables simultaneously, and getting their little fee from each of them. Not the mention the damage to their reputation if it were discovered (there is great competition amongst online poker sites.)

Re:Behoove? - by mcgrew (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

But I think it behooves the party to be a little more broad-minded on this issue

You need some more coffee, there’s nothing whatever wrong with tha sentence, except maybe the dash between “broad” and “minded”.

I’m broad-minded; my mind is always on broads.

Re:Online gambling is a bad idea. - by mcgrew (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It’s harder to regulate

Why should gambling be regulated at all? Cheating is fraud, that’s already illegal. With illegal gambling, fraud is harder to prosecute, since the victim is also breaking the law.

and easier for people to get addicted and gamble away all their assets at home

It’s not up to government to keep you from eating too much, drinking too much, or gambling too much. It should not be government’s role to protect you from yourself, government’s role should protect you from ME. You would like them to outlaw McDonald’s because too many people can’t help but shove so much junk food down their gullets that they become unhealthily obese? I supppose you want to outlaw World of Warcraft because some people screw their lives up with that? Outlaw alcohol because some people are alcoholics?

If you have a problem with gambling, that’s a personal problem, not a public problem and is non of my or government’s business.

and gets people out of the house

Dude, this is slashdot. Most of us don’t even come out of the basement. HIBT?

Re:Online gambling is a bad idea. - by corbettw (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

1) Online gambling is no more difficult to regulate than brick-and-mortar casinos. If it were, you wouldn’t have sports books and race tracks across the country taking wagers from people who are not onsite. Allowing the same thing to happen from someone’s home is just a difference of degree, not of kind.

2) By making it legal, you make it possible to enforce monitoring of behaviors. Since players in the US would have to provide their SSNs for tax purposes, a central database of players could be maintained by the government (it would pretty much have to exist, again for tax purposes). That same database could be used to spot problem gamblers and steer them towards help. (Note that I personally am against this idea, but recognize it’s inevitability.)

3) There is no third point.

4) I second the call for unbanning gambling in more areas. I live in North Texas, and the police in most of the towns here spend way, way too much time raiding private poker rooms, when they should be focusing on crimes with actual victims (if you voluntarily take part in something, by definition you cannot be a victim).

Posted by (26% noise) View Skip
An anonymous reader writes “The licenser of the HDMI specification has announced the intent to ‘secure the application of 3D’ by making the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 Specification available for public download, as well as extracts from the upcoming HDMI 1.4a. While the spec includes a 3D component, apparently not everyone has decided to sign up to adopt it. Given the developments happening in DisplayPort v1.2, the next year in displays looks like it will be an interesting one.”

Re:More important for gaming than Hollywood? - by delinear (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
You know, what you’re describing as “virtual reality” is really just the interface. It’s like calling your monitor a first person shooter. The actual virtual reality is the programmed world, and sure we were promised virtual reality immersive headgear which didn’t really transpire (augmented reality is the new virtual reality, it seems), but the promise of an interactive world certainly came to pass in any number of online multiplayer games.

“Free”? - by perrin (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The document has an EULA. While that is bad enough on its own, in it you find this gem: “The term of this Agreement is one year. Agent in its sole discretion may terminate or extend this Agreement at any time and without prior notice. Upon expiration or termination of this Agreement, You shall immediately destroy and cease all use of the Specification Portion and all materials and information related to the Specification Portion.” To add insult to injury, they also slap an indemnification clause to the document’s EULA.

So, you agree to not distribute it and to destroy the document after one year. If they are sued for whatever reason, and they can blame it on you, you agree to cover all their expenses. Yay for openness!

HDMI mess - by timmarhy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
yes because the consumer is going to know the difference between HDMI 1.1,1.2,1.3 and 1.4

between DLNA, HDMI and the 3d crazy that’s comming i’m predicting lots of ripped off people. consumer electronics in 2010 is going to be a mine field.

Re:HDMI mess - by ledow (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I have a hard enough time convincing people they need to re-buy cables (and peripherals) for their new TV as it is.

“You need an HDMI cable” 
“But I already have this SCART thing and this composite thing” 
“Yeah, but you only have HDMI on your new TV” 
“Is that because it’s HD?” 
“Well, no, you can send an HD signal over SCART or composite just the same, but they just don’t want to let you. They want you to buy HDMI leads and TV’s and equipment with HDMI.” 
“Who’s they?” 
“The people who license the HDMI technology.” 
“Er… so I have to throw away my DVD player unless I pay extra to get legacy ports too?” 
“Or buy a Blu-Ray with HDMI or a newer player with HDMI. The new ones upscale the DVD so it *looks* like HD but isn’t really.” 
“Mmm…”

And then add an hour of conversation as you explain the various *revisions* of HDMI and everything else, and why they can’t just buy a £10 signal-splitter or cable-switcher without it potentially interfering with their recording of HD programmes, or why some models just won’t negotiate a HD signal with some other models, or why the cheap, shit imported versions of DVD players and Blu-Ray let you just use a composite output, or why all this was to stop pirates when you can find and download HD-anything online in the same time as you used to be able to download SD content.

Call me when consumers get bored of this crap. Then I might have a look and see if there’s a *standard* (i.e. unchanging, common, open, useful) cable set I can use to watch TV and record the stuff I want. To be honest, there already is - it’s called “ADSL over a phone line from a widescreen laptop”.

Free to read != Free to use - by l2718 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Very nice of them to allow us to read the spec. Now what about the patents? the rest of the HDMI spec on which this piece depends?

If you can’t implement the standard, what good will it do you to be able to read it?

Posted by (47% noise) View
quaith writes “Quinn Dombrowski, a member of the University of Chicago’s central IT staff, has been recording the graffiti left in the Joseph Regenstein Library Since September 2007. To date she has photographed and transcribed over 620 pieces of graffiti; over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. She has now published in Inkling Magazine a statistical analysis of the entire graffiti collection covering such subjects as love, hate, despair, sex, anatomy, and temporal fluctuations of each of these. After November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring, while sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December before declining for the rest of the school year. The story includes links to all of the original graffiti photos, which the researcher has made freely available to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.”

Re:Blah… - by MichaelSmith (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Did any of it say “insert baby for refund”?

Re:Window into their heads … - by chill (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

You can stop wondering. The line is drawn with the permission of the property owner. Vandalism is a crime unrelated to the artistic merit of the work, it has to do with property ownership rights.

From an artistic point of view, it is drawn when the intent is to deface or damage instead of create.

art/vandalism not mutually exclusive - by k2r (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I don’t agree. 
From a judicial POV some act may be vandalism / destructive act to property without the owner agreeing. 
From an artistic POV the same act may still be art.

Of course “doing art” so someones property without agreement is a problem. 
However, the “lines” are not so easily spotted: What about chalking on the pavement or laser-projections on a publicly owned building?

Re:Window into their heads … - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

There is no line between vandalism and art, because they’re not disjunct. They’re orthogonal concepts. Vandalism can be art. But even when it is art, vandalism is still a crime. It boils down to two separate questions: What is art? What is vandalism? All four combinations (art and vandalism, art and not vandalism, not art and not vandalism, vandalism and not art) exist.

License? - by Lorens (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Who is this researcher to relicense their works of art? Just because they can’t complain!