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User: hax0r_this

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  1. Time to Ban Lobbying on Venture Capitalists Lobby Against Software Patents · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Yesterday I commented on the negative effects of banning lobbying and was promptly modded down for it.

    This is different I take it?

  2. Re:It's legal for foreign money to be spent lobbyi on Plotting a Coup In the Internet Age · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There is a term for a government that bans lobbying. Its called a dictatorship.

    I know we're supposed to hate corporations, lobbyists, etc, but I wish that people would stop and think about what they're saying.

  3. Re:KVM catches Xen on Work Underway To Return Xen Support To Fedora 13 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was responsible for maintaining a Xen environment for about a year and a half and had much the same experience. We compile our own kernels and in this regard Xen was a nightmare. Do I stick with a 2.6.18 kernel which is the latest supported? If we do that we have to make sure to get backported security fixes. Or do we use forward-ported Xen patchsets which weren't all that reliable and were a pain in the ass to apply?

    We finally switched to KVM and suddenly life got a lot easier.

    (Going slightly off topic here)For a while we used libvirt and the associated tools, then we discovered Ganeti, a project at Google which has made cluster management a breeze. Libvirt has a "network" driver, but really isn't designed to manage redundant virtualization clusters. Ganeti, on the other hand, is designed specifically for managing clusters, and takes care of all the dirty work like setting up and managing LVM and DRBD. You can build out a new virtual machine, complete with an operating system in just one command, or even do it over the HTTP API. You can use Ganeti with KVM or Xen, but until/unless Xen is in mainline I won't be touching it.

  4. Brother Laser Printers on HP Explains Why Printer Ink Is So Expensive · · Score: 4, Informative

    I own two brother laser printers (one at school one at home) and would recommend them to anyone looking for a cheap laser printer. The older, an HL 2070N has done a little over 10,000 pages in the 5 or so years since I got it. The newer one, an HL 2170W I've had for about a year and printed around 1600 pages on. They come with a toner cartridge good for around a thousand pages, after which I recommend buying the "high yield" ones which are around $40 and good for around 2600 pages. You'll also need a new drum unit ever 13,000 pages or so, but that hasn't happened yet.

    One thing to look out for though, neither of these models seems to have postscript support that I can tell. Brother does have Linux drivers, but I've had occasional issues with them (actually nothing in the last 6 months or so). The few times that I've tried them, the Windows and OSX drivers seemed ok.

  5. Its Not about Trust on Chrome Private Mode Not Quite Private · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think you're missing the GPs point. Although many around here might well hold the beliefs you allude to (I don't think its a significant population on Slashdot, as victimized as you might feel by them), the GPs point is that the cost of betrayal by the Government far exceeds the cost of betrayal by a Corporation. In fact, the worst a Corporation can do do you is really limited by what the Government will allow it to do - if you are really so afraid of what a Corporation can do to you, you are implicitly afraid of what the Government will let it do.

  6. Re:Back ... TO THE FUTURE! on Open Source Guacamole Puts VNC On the Web · · Score: 1

    I keep hearing about a thing called Node.js, some sort of V8 (the Chrome javascript engine) powered Javascript web framework. I've never used it, but my impression is its not something you would want to use in production.

  7. Re:Back ... TO THE FUTURE! on Open Source Guacamole Puts VNC On the Web · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How is that the worst of both worlds, or a hack? This uses Java and Javascript both in the environments in which they work best. And I'm not even sure why you would call this a hack. Do you have a problem with working with XML in a Java server? Java is far from my language of choice, but thats hardly a hack. Or is it the drawing in an HTML5 canvas that you consider a hack? Because thats exactly what its for.

  8. Re:What about Flash games and other stuff? on Adobe Not Worried About the Future of Flash · · Score: 3, Informative

    How does dropping flash for HTML5 remove an attack vector? It just replace one attack vector with another.

    Unless you're suggesting your browser would otherwise not support HTML5/Javascript, then you aren't replacing anything. Just dropping a third party plugin that is known to be buggy, non-standard and poorly maintained.

  9. Re:Saving Yourself A World Of Pain on Which Linux For Non-Techie Windows Users? · · Score: 1

    Do you really want your OS taking on the overhead of RAID? Desktop motherboards with hardware RAID 0/1/0+1 are easy to find and cheap.

    The motherboards you are thinking of actually do the RAID in software through a driver. I've been running 4 drives in RAID 5 with Linux's software RAID for a a few years now, and never had an issue. Even the parity calculations are trivial for a modern CPU, and if you're just doing RAID 0/1 the overhead is even lower. I even see software RAID being used in a lot of servers these days, although hardware RAID often has some benefits in terms of hot-swap, etc.

    I'm not sure how easy RAID is to configure from a GUI in Ubuntu, but I believe the Fedora installer can do it, and probably others. Or if you know your way around a Linux system its fairly trivial from the command line.

  10. Re:NPR is on here? on EFF Launches "Takedown Hall of Shame" · · Score: 1

    Is that an attempt to argue that none of it should be in the public domain?

    It seems reasonable to suggest that information produced with any level of public funding should belong to the public. Don't like the terms? Don't take public funding.

  11. And by "eleventy trillion" on FBI Investigates Liberator of Court Records · · Score: 1

    You actually mean less than one trillion right? Less than two percent of our total national debt?

    I'm not saying it was a good use of our money, and I could spend all day naming things I would rather see it spent on (or, you know, I wouldn't mind keeping a little more of what I earn), but I'm tired of seeing people perpetuating this idea that the wars are directly responsible for a large portion of our debt.

  12. Yeah, You're Wrong on Google Wave Backstage · · Score: 1

    Have you tried Wave? Its nothing like a chat room, mainly because it has threads and an editable history. Think 10 people editing a google docs document specifically designed for communication between participants.

    Its far closer to a wiki than a chat room. Imagine a wikipedia discussion page (click 'discussion' at the top of any article for an example) in real time.

  13. Re:Interesting... on Deposit Checks By iPhone · · Score: 1

    If it is the person who wrote the check, there is still an image of the check.

    Right, but the person who wrote the check is claiming the image is faked. They can intentionally not keep a carbon copy, or better yet just make sure the last 0 doesn't go on the carbon copy. The only evidence the bank has of a check for $1,000 is an easily faked image submitted by the customer. Everything else says it was a check for $100.

    Of course the same thing applies to a real check...

  14. Wind Farm implies Wind on The Rocky Road To Wind Power · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I could be wrong, but isn't it likely to be really windy at the site of the wind farm? Couldn't that make airships impractical?

  15. Re:Hooray, I guess? on 802.11n Should Be Finalized By September · · Score: 1

    Oops, I just actually looked at my phone and I guess its only 1 "bar". Somehow I had in mind that there were 4 total.

  16. Re:Hooray, I guess? on 802.11n Should Be Finalized By September · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Unless you use 802.11n at 5GHz, which is really necessary to see most of the speed benefits anyway. At 5GHz the range is pretty terrible.

    I get 2 bars on my iPhone from my Linksys WRT 610N from about 20 feet away through two thin walls (in the bathroom of my one bedroom apartment). The upside is that that particular router has 2 radios, so it can run on 2.4GHz simultaneously, allowing me to access it from outside where the 5GHz doesn't reach.

  17. They Aren't the ISPs Bits to Sell on Bill Ready To Ban ISP Caps In the US · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When you pay for water and electricity, you are actually buying them. The utility company produces them (well, with water they pump and purify it, and might have to pay for their water source depending where you are and how the service works) and sells them to you.

    Comcast doesn't produce the bits they deliver to me, they simply transfer them from someone else who I might be paying for the bits. If they can actually deliver the 16Mb/s they claim they can to me at any time of day regardless of "congestion" (of course they can't), then the cost difference to them of delivering nothing for a month and maxing out that connection for a month is negligible. Their routers might draw slightly more power, but the total cost of delivering an additional bit (or 100GB) is next to nothing compared to the cost of making the network available to me.

    The idea behind ISP transfer limits is totally different than paying per unit for water or electricity. With water and electricity you pay per unit (usually - in my hometown of Anchorage, AK water is actually a fixed rate I think) because it costs the company to sell you a unit. With ISPs, they want to limit your use because the speeds they charge you for aren't actually the speeds they can deliver if everyone actually uses their connection. So instead of telling you realistic speeds, they just make sure people can't actually use their connection, making it more likely that you will be able to use yours (until you too hit the cap).

    Of course there is the totally separate issue of most ISPs also selling content that they would much rather you get via pay per view, etc than via the Internet...

  18. Not Really on Thomas' Testimony and the RIAA's Near-Fatal Error · · Score: 1

    Only if you consider RIAA lawyers to be "the court".

  19. Re:Will this make be an iPhone killer? on Palm's webOS Root Image Leaks Out · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Keyboard, multi-tasking and a much more open development model. To name a few.

  20. Control on Apple's WWDC Unveils iPhone 3.0, OpenCL, Laptop Updates, and More · · Score: 1

    Because they can't control how you use a tethered computer. Try torrenting something on an un-jailbroken iPhone, then tell me how much it is like "another computer".

  21. Really so Advanced? on How Do You Greet an Extraterrestrial? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I keep seeing people posting about how much more advanced than us a species would have to be to reach earth. I simply don't see why thats true. To my knowledge we have at least general knowledge of every major technology we would need to travel between stars, and thats with NASA never having had a budget over about $34B 2007 dollars, and currently closer to half of that. If we spent less time and money on killing each other and bailing each other out, and maybe cared about something other than our own social problems, there's no reason we couldn't have people on other planets as we speak.

    Consider this:
    For about $135B 2005 dollars we effectively went from flying propeller planes to repeatedly placing men on the moon.
    Since 2001 we have spent about $865B in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    Since Fall of 2008 we have committed about $12.2 Trillion Dollars to "Economic Recovery" plans


    The barrier between us and the stars is not some insurmountable technology one, its a matter of money and willpower. The only hope I see is that private interests (including SpaceX and other companies) will pursue these technologies (considering that hundreds of companies have higher revenue than NASA) otherwise I'm afraid we may never get off this miserable rock before we kill ourselves off. You wouldn't bet the uptime of a moderately important website on a single webserver, yet we continue to bet the survival of our species on a single rock floating in space.

  22. It May Source Wikipedia... on Google Labs Offers Table-Based Search Results · · Score: 1

    But it seems very confused about what it is: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=wikipedia

  23. Terrible Summary on Cloud Computing, Music Lockers, and the Supreme Court · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't see what this has to do with consumers, as the summary seems to imply. Also, if you RTFA, no one related to the Obama administration "ruled" on anything, rather "President Obama's attorney filed papers with the Supreme Court supporting an earlier court decision that found Cablevision's remote storage DVR to be legal."

    New Summary:

    The Solicitor General filed a brief supporting a one company over another, after the Supreme Court already ruled that the first company was correct. Both companies were from industries that financed Obama's campaign and have done everything in their power to fuck the consumer, so the ruling is essentially meaningless to you unless you happen to own lots of fiber or lots of IP.

  24. Lowest Bidder? on City of Vancouver Adopts Open Standards · · Score: 2, Funny

    You always hear about governments automatically going with the lowest bidder

    Really? Where are you from?

  25. It's all in the $ on DOJ Nixes Lax Policy, Hardens Antitrust Enforcement · · Score: 1