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User: Sentry21

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  1. Re:Nothing new on Squeezing a Wikipedia Snapshot Onto an 8GB iPhone · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Given the trouble Patrick had squeezing down a full DB dump of Wikipedia to fit into 2GB (for the app store), I find it impossible to believe that the 162 MB files I've found so far for Wikipedia in MDict format are anywhere near the full text (which Patrick's app is).

  2. Re:this wasn't my experience on IE8 Update Forces IE As Default Browser · · Score: 1

    Automatic update will do an automated install including changing the browser. Running Windows Update manually will prompt you.

  3. Re:Wireless Mighty Mouse on Bluetooth Versus Wireless Mice · · Score: 1

    My roommate has a wireless Mighty Mouse, and it never right-clicks properly for me.

    Take your finger off the left side. It's touch sensitive: if you click with a finger on the left, it's a left click; if on the right, it's a right click. If both, it treats it as a left click (to prevent confusion for users who don't know the difference).

    Click with just one finger on the mouse, and I bet it'll work just fine.

  4. Re:My experience... on Bluetooth Versus Wireless Mice · · Score: 1

    I've had the issue you've described on my iMac; worse yet was that I discovered how to quickly and easily reproduce it, and was about to start trying to track down the issue to figure out how to stop it. Bad timing (IT emergency) and then a power failure meant that by the time I had a chance to sit down and figure it out, the batteries in my mouse died anyway.

    I'm hoping that one day I'll stumble across some reliable reproduction method again and be able to figure out what the problem is and stop it.

  5. Re:Stability, reliability on Btrfs Is Not Yet the Performance King · · Score: 1

    Or, put another way, Sun released ZFS code under an open-source license, and that should be good enough, but the GPL is too focused on rigid adherence to a strict set of rules, and is thus incompatible with many open-source licenses, including Sun's.

    How is it that FreeBSD, for example, got Dtrace support included, but Linux can't? Oh, that's right, it's Sun's fault somehow.

  6. Re:Hard drives are cheaper now. on GE Introduces 500GB Holographic Disks · · Score: 1

    And are fixed storage. You obviously haven't R'ed TFA or you'd see that this is removable storage, like DVDs or Blu-ray.

    These are essentially DVDs that store around 450G for $45. Even Blu-ray discs are about $0.50/GB.

    That's a lot cheaper, and even if it takes so long for them to come out that BD discs are $0.05/GB, $0.10/GB for ten times the storage will be definitely affordable. These could be great backup solutions for homes or servers depending on the write speed.

  7. Great in theory, lousy in practice on RMS Says "Software As a Service" Is Non-free · · Score: 1

    RMS argues against having anything that is not under your direct control (or cannot be brought under your direct control). I wonder how he computes?

    Does he have the source code to his BIOS? And to that of his video card, DSL modem, and cellphone? Does he host his own website, routing his packets using open-source routers that run only Linux?

    Sure, all of this is likely possible to some extent, but not entirely. Should we avoid software as a service and do everything ourselves? I want a good issue tracking system. Lighthouse is pretty good. Github's new system is pretty good. All the open-source systems out there are pretty awful. Trac is awful. RT is awful. It's all junk.

    I use a Mac. I'd use Linux, but it doesn't do what I want. It's not up to snuff. At the last job I worked at, we all used Linux on the desktop (we were essentially a team of sysadmins), and you know what? Not a week went by when someone had to spend an entire day 'fixing' their broke Fedora machine because some minor Xorg point update had broken, or their yum database was corrupt and they couldn't upgrade their systems. I had a button in my taskbar that ran 'killall -9 soffice.bin' because OpenOffice kept locking up on my machine (but not on anyone else's).

    Open-source is great, and I use it whenever the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but all I see lately is RMS talking about how everything should be free, but not helping to make good things free or free things good. Until he finally grounds himself in reality, I'm not interested anymore.

  8. Re:Different challenges. on Contrasting User-Driven Play With Developer Vision · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The same thing happens in World of Warcraft. A new 70-man raid instance is made available, and all the high-level, best-gear-available guilds on the server all start hitting it, doing it as much as they can, trying and trying desperately to be the first to beat it.

    Eventually, one group beats it, and then there's a cascade. The second group finishes it, maybe faster. Then the third. Then 60 people. Then 40. Eventually you have three hotshots essentially solo'ing something that used to be nearly incomprehensible.

    In a lot of cases, it's just a progression of knowledge and skill. Once you know exactly what needs doing, you can refine it further and further, hone the edge sharper and sharper, until you can make one swift stroke instead of the dozens it once took.

  9. Scale and Scope on Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities · · Score: 1

    It's kind of amazing really. If you think about it, the scope of Geocities was likely huge, requiring what must have been, for the time, a colossal amount of bandwidth and hardware to handle the traffic being served by all those users.

    Now, however, since it's largely static pages with some minor ad munging, you could probably serve the entirety of their content from a single server, largely from memory, without a lot of fuss.

    We've come a long way from Geocities' (almost) static pages in 1995 to our current 'request per user per second' dynamically updating AJAX-enabled user-generated socially-networked drop-shadow rounded-corner web-font lifestyle. Time marches ever onward, and while there's something to be said for simplicity, it's hard to fathom a website that doesn't change any time I do something with it.

  10. Re:Already there on F-Secure Suggests Ditching Adobe Reader For Free PDF Viewers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Funny I know, but it's not far off â" Acrobat only bugs me about updating when I'm about to try doing something else. 'I know you said you wanted to see this PDF, but wouldn't you be happier waiting 10 minutes for a software update instead?'

    Acrobat needs some method of downloading updates in the background and then just asking you if you want to apply them (yes/no) when you start it, but applying them later, when you're done.

    Then again, most apps need to do things like that.

  11. Re:A big medical breakthrough. on World's First X-Ray Laser Goes Live · · Score: 4, Informative

    As far as medical radiology goes, a pencil-thin beam would be nice for added precision, but also for dramatically reducing the radiation dose. My local hospital has stopped giving me CT scans because I've had so many in the past (out of necessity) that they don't want to fry me any more than necessary.

    Replacing the emitters in a CT scanner, which basically spray you with radiation and rely on carefully-placed sensors to create the line-of-sight they want, with a directed, low-power beam that only hits with radiation those cells that actually need it, will dramatically reduce the amount of radiation that patients receive.

  12. Re:So I got a new sink..... on Should Network Cables Be Replaced? · · Score: 2, Funny

    I didn't overclock my sink and bling it out with tube lighting and a giant plexiglass window just so I could settle for a measily 100gpm. I want power, and damnit I'm going to get it, no matter how much those pipes cost!

  13. Re:Yes on Should Network Cables Be Replaced? · · Score: 2, Funny

    Part of the efficiency is the arrows, so the data knows which direction it should go. Otherwise it gets confused and just goes round and round in circles. You can save some money by drawing arrows on the cables you already have. I've done it on all the cables in our office building, and the tests don't show it, but it FEELS faster!

  14. Reduce the number of certs? on Build an Open Source SSL Accelerator · · Score: 1

    How does this reduce the number of certificates required? It might reduce the number of copies of the certificate, but you still need either one certificate per subdomain, or one wildcard certificate per domain.

    I'll grant that it makes certificate management simpler, but not significantly so â" it really only saves two minutes every year.

  15. Re:fail2ban and firewall won't help with this atta on The Low-Intensity, Brute-Force Zombies Are Back · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I personally don't like the concept of fail2ban as it is permanently adding an IP address to your banned list. As most of these IPs are dynamic, keeping them in your banned list isn't really serving any useful purpose. I personally prefer a system that temporarily bans an IP.

    fail2ban temporarily bans IPs. It removes them after a configurable time limit.

  16. Re:Not seeing it yet on The Low-Intensity, Brute-Force Zombies Are Back · · Score: 1

    A fair point. I've set up on our production servers two lists for ipset, one each for China and Korea. Bullshit accesses to SSH and HTTP dropped way way off once I did that.

    With 719 unique CIDR blocks for China and 430 for Korea, we get a lot less garbage traffic to our servers. Worth the hour it took to set up, too.

  17. Re:why are passwords even allowed? on The Low-Intensity, Brute-Force Zombies Are Back · · Score: 1

    Likewise - I use fail2ban with iptables to drop any packets from someone who fails auth about 5 times in a few minutes. I've toyed with the idea of adding them to a global blacklist for all servers in all locations, but in reality this solution works just fine.

  18. Re:lawmakers on Paper Companies' Windfall of Unintended Consequences · · Score: 1

    Except that the largely prevailing attitude in the US judicial system seems to be that of the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. The trend is that if there's a loophole, you exploit it, and if the law says it's ok, then it's ok.

    The US needs to shift in the opposite direction, that of intending to do the right thing and punishing those who don't. The spirit of the law, in American legal culture, is meaningless. Until that changes, loopholes will be created and exploited at every opportunity.

  19. Re:Um.... on Goldman Sachs Tries To Shut Down Dissident Blogger · · Score: 1, Redundant

    The term for this is the Streisand Effect

  20. Re:Taxes? on Apple Promises Mother Lode to Billionth App Downloader · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've always found it amusing that in the US, you get taxed on things you win, whereas in socialist Canada, where our tax rates are *so high*, prize winnings are considered windfall income and are non-taxable. Thus, if you won this contest in Canada, you wouldn't pay any tax.

  21. Re:Requires root privileges or physical access on Researchers Demo BIOS Attack That Survives Disk Wipes · · Score: 1

    If my system gets rooted, I take backups of whatever data I need that hasn't been backed up already, wipe the machine, and reinstall.

    With this, I now have to throw the entire mainboard out and replace it. Pretty significant change.

  22. Re:I've already had BIOS malware on Researchers Demo BIOS Attack That Survives Disk Wipes · · Score: 1

    'Non-system disk or disk error? What the f**k does that mean?'

  23. Re:Adapt on Windows and Linux Not Well Prepared For Multicore Chips · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the sort of thing I like about Apple's 'Grand Central'. The idea behind is that instead of assigning a task to a processor, it breaks up a task into discrete compute units that can be assigned wherever. When doing processing in a loop, for example, if each iteration is independent, you could make each iteration a separate 'unit', like a packet of computation.

    The end result is that the system can then more efficiently dole out these 'packets' without the programmer having to know about the target machine or vice-versa. For some computation, you could use all manner of different hardware - two dual-core CPUs and your programmable GPU, for example - because again, you don't need to know what it's running on. The system routes computation packets to wherever they can go, and then receives the results.

    Instead of looking at a program as a series of discrete threads, each representing a concurrent task, it breaks up a program's computation into discrete chunks, and manages them accordingly. Some might have a higher priority and thus get processed first (think QoS in networking), without having to prioritize or deprioritize an entire process. If a specific packet needs to wait on I/O, then it can be put on hold until the I/O is done, and the CPU can be put back to work on another packet in the meantime.

    What you get in the end is a far more granular, more practical way of thinking about computation that would scale far better as the number of processing units and tasks increases.

  24. Re:Apple Insider on Dell's Smartphone Rejected — Too Dull · · Score: 1

    Ignoring the fact that the article from AppleInsider was reporting on the actual story (adding their own spin on it)? AppleInsider posted it because it was relevant, and is biased towards Apple, but they didn't write the analysis, they just reported on it. The original article (also linked from the summary) says the exact same thing.

  25. Re:Or they're terrified on Study Finds the Pious Fight Death Hardest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Couple that with the fact that the more 'pious' people that I've met are generally the worst Christians. They're judgmental, opinionated, closed-minded, bigoted, and full of hate. The most laid-back Christians I know are more liberal and open-minded, and follow the teachings of Christ a lot better.

    Perhaps when faced with their impending death, some of them realize just how much of assholes they've been, and how badly that's going to look come judgement.