Re:If this is the computing model of the future - by TheNucleon (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It is, no doubt.

I mean, look at the programmable hardware platforms out there that “the powers that be” won’t let you program. Game consoles, smartphones, even APIs for stinking video cards. This is all hardware that WE BUY, yet, we can’t find out how to write our own stuff unless we are a big dev house and pay tons of $$. Ridiculous.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

This will have to change… - by Karpe (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Stanford has announced that it will be offering an iPhone development course. I would also expect that many books on iPhone development are being edited to be published soon. For these to occur, iPhone development information cannot be under NDA. So it’s just a matter of time. Apple is not stupid.

I had assumed this would be lifted Real Soon Now. - by w3woody (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

After all, the iPhone SDK cannot remain a “beta” forever, and once it’s no longer a beta, I presume the SDK will show up side-by-side with the MacOS X Cocoa SDK from which it was derived.

Most of Apple’s beta stuff has the same confidentiality agreement, so I presumed this was just a bug.

So basically, no learning help? - by TellarHK (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So with this NDA issue, I can’t buy a book, read a forum, get any assistance at all with writing my iPhone application… So what the hell good is an SDK you can’t talk about? Is this cellular fight club or something?

Apple, fix this shit. Really. Fix it now. There’s no excuse for not letting the NDA go, no way that it protects you. The phone’s been jailbroken, it _will_ be unlocked, so why stifle development?

No, it’ll end when… - by PC and Sony Fanboy (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
It won’t end until the piratebay.org steps in and provides a safe, secure, overseas forum to discuss apple products. 
 
OH wait, this isn’t even piracy. It isn’t even ‘stealing’ … its just talking to another human being who has the same program you have… like, Idea sharing. 
 
I guess they really mean it when they say “Think Different”. As in, don’t you DARE think what he’s thinking. Don’t even think about thinking about it…

Babies out with the bath water. - by LostCluster (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

This isn’t going to work in the real world. Too many users you want to hear from at an ISP won’t like it when the virus-victim spammers gets their whole network preventatively banned.

Stop fixing the mail protocols we have today. It’s time to replace with some form of sender authentication.

Probably a bad idea. - by Jane Q. Public (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
The problem with ANY “predictive” statistics (like racial profiling, for one glaring example) is that even when they become accurate enough to produce useful information, they tend to produce too many false positives.  
 
And often (again using racial profiling as a good example), even a few false positives are too many.

Not really that “predictive”. - by khasim (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

They take X firewall logs …

Then they look for matches in attacking IP addresses between the logs …

And if any IP addresses appear in log A (which is very similar to log B) … then those IP addresses are “predicted” as being possible to attack the firewall from which log B was obtained.

Logical - yes. 
Predictive - no.

Re:Not really that “predictive”. - by LostCluster (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

That worked back in the say when you could say “Syracuse Unversity’s gotten hit with the latest worm. So, don’t trust any mail that comes from 128.230.x.x.” but these days mail comes from one address per organization or household. Most corperations expose only one mail server IP address to the world, and some smaller companies have hundred-user systems and only one IP to show for it. So, who you’re next to doesn’t hold much water in predicting whether the message is spam.

Not really. - by khasim (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

So if this isn’t predictive, what is? Would you rather they develop an algorithm that identifies blacklist-worthy addresses before they make their first attack?

Ummmm, yes. If you can identify them BEFORE they make their first attack then that would qualify as “predictive”.

It captures the fact that “true” attackers mostly attack “true” (that is, weak or high profile) targets, whereas those targets are mostly attacked by “true” attackers.

Not in my experience. The attacks are usually automated scripts running on zombies that randomly scan address (or search their immediate networks) looking for known vulnerabilities.

Thus some isolated attack by a never-before-detected attacker on a never-before-attacked target has very little predictive potential in the eyes of the algorithm, whereas even just a few attacks by a never-before-seen attacker on several oft-attacked targets raises a huge red flag.

That is the opposite of how their system was described. They looked for matches amongst IP addresses and then “predicted” that if your example machine one firewall it should be blacklisted for the other firewalls that closely matched that list.

Now a real predictive system would look more factors.

#1. Who was attacking.

#2. How did the attacker(s) gain access to the machines used in the attack.

#3. What other machines are vulnerable to #2 that are available to #1.

Example - Spam zombies often appear in ranges of home addresses from the large ISP’s. So machines in those ranges are given an increased score in SpamAssassin. Whether they have ever sent spam before or not. See #1 and #2 and #3.

Hype - by MojoRilla (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The article says:

The researchers developed an analytical model for designing tiny compressors that pump refrigerants using penny-sized diaphragms. This model has been validated with experimental data.

Translation:  
This is completely impractical hype so far. We are looking for grant and startup money.

Re:Condensation? - by Smidge204 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Only because they cool below the dew point - which, in turn, is dependent on the humidity levels.

People who build active cooling into their computers (for overclocking) typically insulate the chip(s) and cooling block to keep air-exposed surfaces at or above ambient temperatures for just that reason.

Also, even if it does produce condensation I’d say there’s little reason to worry… just recycle the condensate to provide evaporative cooling on the (much hotter) heat sink side of the system. 
=Smidge=

How much juice? - by fyoder (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

And how much electricity will this consume? It may not be that appealing to laptop users if it eats significantly into their battery life. And for servers many colo companies are finding themselves less constrained by space than by available electricity.

Re:How much juice? - by megaditto (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Could be pretty damn efficient if it’s a heat pump.

A good AC unit usually consumes less than 10 times the energy it moves (a 1 kW window unit rated for 40,000 BTUs for example), but that depends how much colder the inside needs to be compared to the outside air.

In case of CPU coolers (cooling things hotter than ambient air), one could even GENERATE electricity if the size and cost of the “cooler” is not a concern (A thick diamond heatpipe to conduct heat away to distant thermocouples is how I would do it).

Re:Hotter? - by Bloodoflethe (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The refrigerator’s exterior heat exchanging pipes don’t have to be inside the refrigerator itself. They didn’t give any technical specs, so what are you worried about? Surely if they are working on this project, they’ll have thought or experienced this problem if they were putting all items in the same location.

Also, consider that, to a point, the ambient heat inside a laptop can be higher, as long as the PUs are kept cool. Of course if this were the only consideration, eventually the ambient heat would screw all the components except for the processors, but, as I said, they’ve considered this already. I’m sure of it.

See if you’re vulnerable - by neokushan (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

There’s a tool on the site below that apparently checks if the DNS you’re currently using is vulnerable to such an attack. I checked my work DNS and my home DNS - both were fine. Apparently OpenDNS is secure as well, so there’s probably nothing to worry about.

http://www.doxpara.com/

Re:DNS Glue poisoning was already known… - by blueg3 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

It only works because the DNS server caches the result of the glue record, against the recommendation of the above writer.

The glue record is necessary if, say, you need to provide the address of a nameserver when you provide the name of the authoritative nameserver for a query. You should use that glue record for that query only.

What happens is that an attacker queries lbixds.google.com (or some other nonexistent domain) and then sends the server he issued that request to a response to that query that also has a glue record giving a false address for ns.google.com. If the DNS server only used that false address for resolving lbixds.google.com, cached lbixds.google.com, and left it at that, then lbixds.google.com would be the only entry the attacker could poison — basically useless. However, the DNS server caches the glue record giving the address for ns.google.com, too.

Re:DNS Glue poisoning was already known… - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Congratulations, you confused the mods. Bailiwick checking was added to all DNS resolvers in response to glue poisoning and made cache poisoning through spoofed glue records very difficult. The current problem is that the typical filter rules are insufficient for stopping a glue poisoning attack which appears to come from the authoritative server: Kaminsky found a way around the glue poisoning countermeasure. This means that a very dangerous kind of attack which was thought to be defeated is now possible again.

I know - by Daimanta (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I exploited this and let a huge cache of people visit my site(127.0.0.1) in stead of the site they wanted to go. It was kickass.

The Book Of Internets, Chapter Three, Verse Twelve - by Aussenseiter (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
And lo, all unpatched websites were rendered unto Goatse.

Knol on Wikipedia, Wikipedia on Knol - by Glasswire (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Knol on Wikipedia is pretty empty. Whereas 
Wikipedia on Knol is very informative. 
Is that an indicator?

Scholarpedia? - by jnana (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

On the topic of Wikipedia-like sites, I recently found Scholarpedia, which I imagine a lot of slashdotters might like. They don’t have that much content yet, and they are currently focusing on a few fields (science- and tech-related), but I have found some really high-quality articles by experts in the field, like:

Neural Correlates of Consciousness, by Christof Koch.

Algorithmic Information Theory, my Marcus Hutter.

Typing Equations? - by biased_estimator (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I only looked at it briefly, but they don’t provide an easy way to type equations? I suppose that might be a lot to ask for… I guess I’ll just have to LaTeXiT.

Not bad, but it’s missing something - by Reality Master 201 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Wikipedia definitely suffers from the problem of having a lot of know nothing jackasses writing articles, random defacements, and a lot of useless crap.

But Knol seems to be missing the best part of wikipedia - extensive internal links. Half the fun of wikipedia is looking up something, then wasting a couple hours wandering through topics till you get someplace you might not have gone otherwise.

Wikipedia ^ ~Wikipedia - by Metasquares (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
It’s like Wikipedia but without the open collaboration which made Wikipedia successful.

The difference between Mac and Linux “eye-candy” - by harlows_monkeys (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

When Apple introduces eye-candy, they use it sparingly themselves, and make a great API and developer tools so developers can also use it in their apps.

Linux eye-candy seems to hit a dead end, where all it gets used for is for the original project that developed it to see how many different flashy effects they can make.

The Linux projects need to realize that it is not about the flashy eye-candy itself—it’s about providing more capabilities to application developers.

it just needs the applications - by radarsat1 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Forget the UI, it’s usable and that’s what matters. What Ubuntu needs now is support from other players in the software market.

Honestly, I’m pretty well convinced at this point that Ubuntu is “ready”. I know tons of people that would switch to it if they could. The crux of the problem is that the major applications these people depend on (or at least, are used to using) don’t run on it. What Ubuntu needs more than anything is to make deals with the major players in various software markets (graphics, video, gaming, CAD, simulation, RAD languages, etc) to port their applications. I don’t know how this could happen, but I’m pretty sure it’s necessary for us to see major adoption.

While there obviously are some amazing and great tools that come with Ubuntu, it needs to be possible for someone to use those few applications they need. Companies need to start offering Ubuntu versions of their products. If that happens, it’s game, set, match. And I actually think this would be possible: considering how disheartened many people feel about Vista, convincing them to port to another platform in order to reduce their dependency on MS might not be so difficult anymore. People seem to be finally seeing the pattern than dependence on a moving target like Windows can come back to bite them.

I think a few deals in this direction might actually have the potential to push Ubuntu into the mass market.

What I like about Ubuntu - by HalAtWork (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
What I like about Ubuntu is that as a whole, the community takes the biggest problem with a given platform from an end user standpoint, and then provides an open solution that sticks to the common design rules of the software it compliments. The software doesn’t stick out, is modular, sticks to standards (or provides a defacto method that tries to emulate already existing standards), and it seems like it could be drop-in software that would work in any distribution. 
 
It’s kind of the antithesis of YaST, for example, which seems like you couldn’t separate one part from the other, and it also seems like if you use any other tool to mess with the files YaST has touched, then YaST will either have a problem or ignore it and pretend it never existed. (I’m not sure if this has changed, the last time I used SuSE was version 9) 
 
As a user of Ubuntu, it gives me security by making me feel like if the distribution ever became anything users didn’t want, they could easily take these parts and fork. Also as a user, it makes me feel like they are trying to develop software that works for the end user primarily and not as a advantage that only this distribution can have to attract users and keep them. One reason why I use OSS is because I don’t feel like my data is tied to anything, and I can always use it. Ubuntu makes me feel that way about the software as well. It really is closely rooted to Debian in that way and really I feel it ties Debian together with some sealant in the cracks and some polish as well. Good job everyone and thanks!

Re:Installation over eye-candy - by McGiraf (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

And i forgot because i do not use it, but in Ubuntu there is an “Install applications” somewhere in the menu which is another front end for apt. Way more simpler than synaptic and way more simpler than anything else i saw on any OS for the non-technical people.

“eye candy” is misleading - by commodoresloat (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Vista has better “eye candy” than XP, even arguably better than OSX, but many people aren’t switching because it’s not just about “candy.” It’s about user experience, in which animation and soothing visuals play only a part. Simplicity is more important than prettiness, and the ability of the user to know somewhat intuitively what a button will do goes a lot farther than 3D visual effects.

avidemux - by Unit3 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I’ve noticed a lot of talk about commandline options, but not the nice guis that use them. Avidemux is open source, cross-platform, gives you a decent interface, and uses multithreaded libraries like ffmpeg and x264 on the backend to do the encoding, so it generally makes optimal use of your multicore system.

F(next) = F(current) + Delta(F(current:next)) - by Lumenary7204 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The problem with MPEG encoding and decoding is that the data itself is not well suited to multi-threaded analysis.

Multi-threading is most efficient when it is applied to discrete data sets that have little or no dependency on each other.

For example, suppose I have a table with four columns — three holding input values (A, B, and C) and one holding an output value (X). If the data in a given row of the table has nothing to do with the data in any other row, multi-threading works efficiently, because none of the threads are waiting for data from any of the other threads. If I want to process multiple rows at once, I simply spawn additional threads.

On the other hand, for data such as MPEG video, the composition of the next frame is equal to the composition of the current frame, plus some delta transformation - the changed pixels.

This introduces a dependency which precludes efficient multi-threaded processing, because each succeeding frame depends on the output of the calculations used to generate the prior frame. Even if more than one core is dedicated to processing the video stream, one core would wind up waiting on another, because the output from the first core would be used as the input to the second.

keyframes - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Actually, the MPEG stream resets itself every n frames or so (n is often a number like 8, but can vary depending on the video content). These are called keyframes (K) and the delta frames (called P and I frames) are generated against them. Because of this, it is really easy to apply parallel processing to video encoding.

Re:keyframes - by DigitAl56K (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

That is not true for MPEG-4 unless you have specifically constrained the I/IDR interval to an extremely short interval, and doing so severely impacts the efficiency of the encoder because I-frames are extremely expensive compared to other types.

Keyframes are usually inserted when temporal prediction fails for some percentage of blocks, or using some RD evaluation based on the cost of encoding the frame. Therefore unless the encoder has reached the maximum key interval the I frame position requires that motion estimation is performed, and thus you can’t know in advance where to start a new GOP.

In H.264 due to multiple references you would certainly have issues to contend with since long references might cross I-frame boundaries, which is why there is the distinction of “IDR” frames, and this would certainly not be possible threading at keyframe level.

Granted, for MPEG1&2 encoders threading at keyframes is a possibility, although still not one I’d personally favor.

Load balancing: Why? - by DigitAl56K (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Why is balancing the load evenly important, as long as one thread is not bottlenecking the others? Loading a particular core or set of cores might even be beneficial depending on the cache implementation, especially when other applications are also contending for CPU time.

Sure, a nice even load distribution might be an indicator for good design, but it doesn’t have to apply in every case. I don’t think software should be designed so you can be pleased with the aesthetics of the charts in task manager.

Sound familiar? - by psmears (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
From the article:

I can’t think of any site to fit that description…

Amazon EC2 wins - by orionr (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I run a small startup in the Boston area and have been using Amazon EC2 (plus S3, SQS, and the rest of the AWS family) for the last year. It’s worked for us like a champ. A little downtime in the beginning plus some S3 outages, but with the right backup, failover, and restore procedures in place we’ve gotten reasonable uptime.

The big requirements for us were the following:

1. Ability to move our website (and code base) elsewhere if needed. Could be in-house, to another cloud provider, etc. 
2. Minimize up-front cost and allow for massive scaling if needed 
3. Cost competitive servers/computing over time 
4. Cost competitive storage/disk over time

App Engine fails the first criteria, since (at least currently) you can’t build a BigTable application on anything but Google App Engine. “Cloud computing” in general beat out traditional hosting on the second, third, and fourth points. I hadn’t checked out GoGrid or AppNexus at the time, but other competitors (Sun, etc.) couldn’t match Amazon’s price-performance specs.

So, with all of those requirements, Amazon EC2 won out and I’m a happy customer.

Missing the point? - by DragonWriter (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Sure, the services allow you to pull CPU cycles from thin air whenever you need to, but they can’t solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes.

AFAICT, they aren’t intended to. The deepest problems are software problems for which there is no general solution, only problem-specific solutions for each particular task; what they are intended to deal with is the hardware problem that having a scalable software solution is of limited value if you have a fixed pool of hardware and have to go through disruptive upgrades when you expand that pool of hardware (and deal with the associated capital costs.)

Cloud computing services are, largely, tools to help dynamically “right-size” hardware, changing it from a capital investment that requires predicting the future well to plan right to an operating costs that can be quickly adjusted based on changing needs. Complaining that they don’t solve the fundamental problems of software scalability seems to be missing the point.

Wow - by BasharTeg (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Finally, a burst of common sense on the latest hype. Hosted servers have offered many of the benefits you get out of “cloud” computing for years, without locking you into a particular vendor or platform. With virtualization, you should be able to build your own images and farm them out to hosting companies, using your technology and platform of choice. Clustered ESX and SANs already give us the resource scalability we need for most systems, partitioning finishes the job. You can just pay a hosted server company to host your vmware image on their ESX cluster and scale up your storage as needed on their SAN. The key is that YOU build a scalable design.

I highly doubt a majority of businesses are going to lock themselves into one hosting provider’s specific development platform just to take advantage of hosted servers that push themselves into the next layer.

I prefer Google for Cloud Computing… - by PC and Sony Fanboy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I’d choose Google App Engine. Since no one really knows what cloud computing is, and no one knows what google does, I think they make a good fit. 
 
oh wait. I do know what google does - It makes the internet better… and it prints money (I guess…)

Market share - by Haxx (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

    I’m curious to what the 2% number means when market share and region figures are factored in. I’ll bet it doesn’t mean much.

Newsflash! 2% of the Internet is where 2% of the hackers are!

Way to go, PC Pro - by Cajun Hell (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Sophos says:

Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware,” according to Sophos’s senior technology consultant.. 
.. 
Sophos says it doesn’t blame Google for the situation…

PC Pro’s crack writers say:

Google’s Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world’s malware hosted on the web

(Emphasis mine.) Journalism at its finest!

Hypocrisy - by Eric Smith (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
On two occasions miscreants managed to inject links to malware into my site, and on each occasion Google nearly immediately started listing my site in search results as “this site may harm your computer”, and no direct (clickable) link.

If Blogger is so full of malware or links to malware, why don’t all the search results pointing to Blogger get the same warning and lack of link?

yahoo email? - by thermian (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Most of the time the scam mail I get has a yahoo email attached. 
There are no innocents among free web service providers.

The best part . . . - by greenreaper (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
If you’re subscribed to Google Alerts, and they post a malware-hosting blogger site with material you’re watching for, it comes straight into your inbox. I’ve had this happen to me with spam copied from one of my own wikis. They seriously need to clamp down on the ability to redirect people automatically from Blogger.

Re:Significantly better than Zend? - by Balinares (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Firstly:

> I’m planning on using the Zend Framework

I understand the Zend Framework is not so much a framework as a tight collection of helper tools. If you want a framework, as in, framework, you’ll probably want to look into CakePHP. Symfony is more powerful, but also kind of more complicated. (And declaring my models in XML makes my skin crawl — but it’s just me.)

Secondly:

> Would it be worth my time to learn Python and then do the project in Django?

Short answer: If you know PHP really well and it works for you, it’ll be less work (and less risk) to just keep using PHP.

Long answer: If you’re a fast learner, and intend to keep using Django afterwards so the overhead of learning it is worth it, then I’d say, absolutely. If I were in your shoes, I believe I would probably create a small functional site in Django in my spare time — it doesn’t take very long at all to get a blog with comments up and running, for instance — and see how it flies with me. I understand learning Python and Django hand in hand works very fine, although I can’t personally comment on that, having been into Python for many years.

If you go the Django road, you’ll probably find these resources handy:

The Django community aggregator is at http://www.djangoproject.com/community/ and has many good posts with great insight on how to get the best out of your new Django toy.

The Django Snippets site at http://www.djangosnippets.org/ is a great catalog of small, useful bits of code. I read it in my RSS aggregator, personally.

And of course, there’s the #django IRC channel, and the various mailing-lists.

Enjoy exploring Django! I’ve been following it for a few months already and still don’t hate it, and for an old bitter bastard like me, that’s the biggest praise.

1.0 Real Soon Now - by the_rev_matt (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Note that Django 1.0 is due this fall and it looks to be actually on track. I used Zope for personal and freelance projects for about 9 years and professionally for about 2. I migrated my site and the majority of the content over in about a week, and that included the process of learning django.

I will note that one of the things I liked about Zope was the admin interface, which was clunky and minimal but a far sight better than what most other app servers had at the time (late 90’s/early 00’s). Django’s is immensely better.

I’ve also Read The Fine Book reviewed here and concur with the reviewer. This book is a great introduction to a useful tool.

Re:The book may be out of date soon. - by ubernostrum (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

One issue, however, is that it is still changing rather quickly. Things in version .95 or .96 can be substantially different than the current development version.

Hi, I’m James and I wrote Practical Django Projects, and I have a confession to make: I cheated while writing the book. You see, I’m also Django’s release manager, which meant I had a good idea of what would land in trunk and what would change by the time we went to press. Except for activating/hacking on the admin interface (the admin refactor just landed over the weekend), everything in the book should be up-to-date and usable on the Django 1.0 alpha we released Monday.

Django n00b - by spaceyhackerlady (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I recently had a look at web application frameworks for some new development and ended up doing it with Django.

I find it handy. It’s logically put together, the Python back end is fast, and, once you figure out a few basic concepts, you can put web apps together very quickly. The template system is particularly clever. I find that I like to set up my database tables first, then let Django create the model classes. Not the other way around. I also like to do table joins as views in the database, rather than gluing things together in Django. YMMV.

My last experience with web application development was with Tomcat. I still have nightmares. :-(

…laura

Currently on sale at Bookpool.com - by gorbachev (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I just got a newsletter about a sale at Bookpool.com for APress books. APress books are 45% off until 8/31.

This particular book is $5 cheaper at Bookpool.com than Amazon right now.

Videos from RoboCup - by Falkkin (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The RoboCup 2008 world competition just finished in Suzhou, China — new this year was a league where all the teams must use the Nao robots. The top two teams were from the University of Newcastle (Australia) and a combined Carnegie Mellon/Georgia Tech team. The final game was scoreless and decided by penalty kicks. Full results are here:

http://www.tzi.de/4legged/bin/view/Website/NaoResults2008

I wasn’t at the competition but it’s clear due to the scores that the league is still in its infancy, with scores being few and far between. As with any humanoid robot, falling over is a huge problem. I’m sure there will be some videos of the competition online once all the teams get home and have time to edit and upload them.

Here’s a video of the robot walking, from the 2008 RoboCup US Open (where there was no competition but a couple small demos for the public.)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=N7USdkA0My8

Boston Dynamics Big Dog is the best - by MrSteveSD (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww  
 
Why can’t someone make a bipedal robot as impressive as bigdog?

Re:Boston Dynamics Big Dog is the best - by OzPeter (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Although big dog is great (and I was amazed at its abilities), I pissed myself laughing at this one instead: Another big dog robot

The technical specs (yes, it runs linux) - by gozu (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

For all the details, hit this PDF

NAOs head is equipped with an x86 AMD GEODE 500 MHz CPU motherboard with 256 Mb SDRAM. An additional 1Gb Flash memory is available. Communication with the robot is possible through WiFi 802.11g protocol and through Ethernet port. The CPU manages audio, video, and WiFi and other advanced modules. One ARM7-60MHz microcontroller located in the torso distributes information to all the actuator module microcontrollers (Microchip 16 bit dsPICS) through a RS485 bus (throughput of 460[Kbits=s]). There are two RS485 buses, one that connects the ARM7 microcontroller to the dsPICS modules of the upper part of the body, and the other that connects the ARM7 to the dsPICS modules of the lower part of the body. This bus partition permits to increase the data throughput.

The ARM-7 microcontroller communicates with the CPU board through a USB-2 bus with a theoretical throughput of 11[Mbits=s]. It can be used to control the robots stabilityusing the inertial unit. The operating system is based on Linux, but the whole system can be modified.

Sensors:

30 FPS CMOS videocamera 1 
Gyrometer 2 
Accelerometer 3 
Magnetic rotary encoder (MRE) 34 
FSR 8 
Infrared sensor (emitter/receiver) 2 
Ultrasonic sensor 2 
Loudspeaker 2 
Microphone 4

Re:Why humanoid? - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Specialized robots are useless outside their function, and are thus just expensive deadweight when not in use. For example, a Roomba is great at vacuuming a floor, but when the floor is clean it can’t do anything else. It can’t carry boxes or wash dishes. You’d need additional robots for those specialized tasks, and they’re going have the same “deadweight” problem as the Roomba too.

A humanoid robot would be able to do any physical job that a human could do. Such robots would be versatile enough to be useful all the time. A single humanoid robot vacuums the floor, then it carries boxes, and then washes dishes, and then etc etc etc. A humanoid robot would always be useful in some way, and thus more efficient in the long run.

He forgot UPS-triggered shutdown - by SleptThroughClass (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The author did not mention having the system set up to have the UPS trigger an automatic shutdown.

If you’re not at the machine, or don’t know how to shutdown without a CRT, the disk can get messed up when the UPS runs out of power. Unless you only have a desktop machine with no network applications writing to disk (no BitTorrent); then you might be OK if you just walk away from your keyboard and let the system become quiescent before it loses power.

Chose your UPS carefully, and TEST it the hard way - by jalet (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

This morning we had a planned shutdown of 100 servers for eletricity works, all were on the same 40 kVA UPS. All went fine, we shutdown all servers to be safe, and kept some stuff online for montoring and the like, then main power was shut off. The UPS gladly took the load, with an estimated battery life of 75 minutes, more than what was needed for the electrical work. Once this was done, the electrician put the main power back on, and… the UPS shutdown !

Since all servers were stopped already we didn’t lose anything, but we had to put the UPS in bypass mode for a while, then back on, and now we hope for the best waiting for the UPS to be repaired, crossing most of our fingers because of the holidays…

In summary : testing that the UPS can handle the power coming back is as important as testing for it to be able to handle the power shutting down.

Other reasons to run a UPS - by rwa2 (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

UPS units are relatively cheap, it’s well worthwhile to invest in one, not just to protect from data loss:

* Hardware loss: I’ve seen a lot of hardware blown up from power interruptions. Do you trust your power company that much to provide clean power to you? Sure surge protectors help a bit, but a decent UPS costs maybe twice as much as a good surge protector.

* Time lost restoring your session after blackouts / brownouts: OK, maybe you’re used to restarting your computer every morning anyway. But I like to leave things open and return to my desktop just the way I left it arranged.

* Stats: Using NUT and Munin, you get to monitor and log your power, so you can see things like exactly when your electricity went out and for how long, what load your PC is drawing after that last upgrade, etc. e.g.: http://hairball.bumba.net/cgi-bin/nut/upsstats.cgi?host=apc@localhost

* Graceful shutdown: you have a chance to tell your buddies that your power just went out, and you’ll be coming back once it’s restored.

Frankly, I’m a little surprised a backup battery isn’t built into PC power supplies already, so they’d work a bit more like laptops. Same with networking gear.

A UPS is good to have. Even at home. - by Forge (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Last night we had a power outage. I shut down the desktop and was able to continue working for almost 2 hours on the laptop because with the Desktop down the UPS was only carrying the DSL router and the WiFi box.

At work. Power is a whole enterprise within the company I work for.

Dual gas powered Generators at each location, Rooms full of Batteries for the Telecoms gear (most is straight DC) and Inverters for the Servers. (DC PSUs are available for some of the servers we use but at so high a premium that the inverters are cheaper.)

We can handle a dozen Power cuts in a day with no service interruption or data loss (“Tested” 2 weeks ago) and we can stay up without external power for more than a week. After that we have to start trucking in additional diesel.

Yep. That’s right. With sufficient fuel we can be online indefinably. Which we will have to do if we get hit by a major hurricane.

Which means the phone network is a lot more reliable than the Power grid where I live.

As for Data loss. I have over the years done a lot of recovery work. “Morfy” of “Murfy’s Law” fame isn’t a guy or a girl. He is a deamon from the darkest pits of hell sent to torment the souls of IT workers everywhere.

Imagine a server, where UPS #2 is down for repairs, UPS #1 fails during a power cut, When everything comes back up we find 2 failed hard drives in the RAID 5 on the email server.

despite previous testing and confirmation that the backups work the most recent tapes failed to read.

Eventually we sent the failed drives off to a Data recovery company in Florida because

#1. The customer can afford it. 
#2. Simply “skipping” a few days of Email is not an option for a bank (hence the ability to afford data recovery).

So yeah. A UPS is essential. Just like RAID, Clustering and Backups but in the end it can all fail.

Best advise? Memorize all your important data. That way if you loose your mind, you are not responsible for the lost Data (or anything else).

And this is what ZFS looks out for - by E-Lad (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

…by design. TFA doesn’t delve into too much detail, but a sudden power loss on such software RAID systems is a condition that ZFS accounts for. Its Copy-on-write (COW) and write-length stiping strategy prevents things such as the RAID5 write hole condition, a condition that has the biggest chance of occurring when a power loss event happens.

Not sure why this is bad. - by MrShaggy (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
I was watching the documentary “Heavy: The History of Metal.”. They were talking about how the PMRC made a big deal out of the fact there was explicit lyrics, and that the kids might actually hear this. There were senate hearings. They interview Dee Snyder(Twister Sister) , expecting him to be a blithering idoit. He wasn’t. The PMRC was succesful in the ‘WARNING; this album may contain…’. Tommy Lee of Motley Crue was ecstatic, they had the first label ever. When asked why, he said “this is the best advertisding ever. How many kids are going to buy this knowing that they had these lyrics in them.” true enough! Many bands thanked the pmrc for the extra ash in there pocket. Wouldnt this be the same effect that the publishers would realise if this were to pass?? Not so much on the lockout stuff for the conolse just the labling.

Re:“Simpsons already did it” - by DragonTHC (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

yes, this is true. the ESRB has had content labels on their products since 1994. The problem is, retails and retarded parents don’t read the labels.

I’m a parent and a gamer. My kid isn’t playing violent games any time soon. I read the labels.

Fine. - by kellyb9 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Fine, then put the label on movies too. There’s no reason video games and cds should be differentiated from any other form of entertainment.

Because Violent Video Games are Hiding so Well - by hardburn (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So you take a game like “Grand Theft Auto”, which is named after a felony, and comes with subtitles like “Vice City”, and which has a back cover talking about guns and gangsters, and if that’s not enough for you, comes with an M rating with a clear label of “Blood and Gore Violence”. Apparently after seeing all that, some people’s first thought is that it’s a game about rainbow-colored horses galloping across fields where the trees blossom lollipops.

Parents should have more than enough information already about what games are violent or not. If they’re still buying them, then that’s their fault, not the gaming industry.

Re:What could this possibly do? - by Repossessed (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

ESRB ratings don’t work because Grand Theft Auto IV is in the same damned category as Warcraft (The RTSes, I’m not familiar with the MMO game).

Somehow I doubt the government would do a better job at defining labels though.

Integrity - by Pointy_Hair (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I agree with many others that point out the gaps in the headlines. The so called “rest” of the story. This circumstance didn’t just develop in a week. This case is a classic story of I/T service immaturity - which could be caused by dastardly BOFH’s or equally by incompetent management failing to initiate/fund a proper plan. Or both.

Once you strip away the glorius certifications and acronyms that give you credibility, all that’s left is your integrity. Terry Childs has gone to jail to keep his intact. So he’s either really stupid or really right.

Within the linked article is a link to the original InfoWorld “scoop” that contains copy from a confidential source. That copy contains statements that back Childs as having proposed and promoted an I/T security policy, which would be a first step toward process maturity (having a process in the first place).

My guess is when the dust settles, the story will be as follows:

1. For years Childs unsuccessfully tries to bring I/T service maturity to the city
2. Childs continues keeping things running while excercising some CYA
3. Management finally gets interested or worried enough to hire a “security manager” who then
4. Crashes down on Childs to relinquish control unconditionally and without any explanation or bothering to include him in the process (typical PHB approach)
5. Terry bows up and says “you ain’t getting shit from me”
6. New security manager calls the police while preparing a wooden cross and some 20d nails for Childs’ hands and feet.
7. Hello this is InfoWorld, how can we help?

Is this irony? - by erroneus (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

To have someone ELSE give the “key to the city” to the mayor?

It Being San Francisco… - by Illbay (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

…Couldn’t the guy have just MARRIED the computer system, then claimed that it couldn’t testify against him under Spousal Privilege?

Sounds like a Heroes episode - by Spy der Mann (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

“Save the network. Save the world.”

Just out of curiosity… what if he isn’t? - by Bomarc (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Reading a lot of comments about him being a nut job. My question is - what if he isn’t? Is it possible that as a administrator of a SAN/Network, he saw some significant security issues, and when he presented them to his supervisors was slammed for reporting the problem — including being fired? I know from experience the feeling: Management does not like to know that they’ve screwed up, and will fight kicking and screaming rather that admit that they’ve done something wrong. For me — most recently this includes bogus Business Requirements, and critical Business Requirements that are not being met. I’ve found significant security holes in the where I currently work. Presented the problems to management. The response - don’t call use, we’ll call you.

A Major Advantage You’re Missing - by floateyedumpi (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

All the concern about too many eggs in one basket is certainly valid. However, one major advantage of a centralized login system is being missed here: the ability to change all of one’s password easily on a somewhat regular basis. As it stands now, I have so many accounts, many of which use the same password, some of which use variations of that password, etc., that the notion of going through and changing all those passwords is completely daunting. Hence, I never do it.

With openID, every time I got a bit nervous, I could change the one true password, and still have to remember only it. A good openID provider could even give reminders or enforce a password expiration, which would go from extreme nuisance when done on an individual site basis, to real additional security, potentially offsetting the loss of security inherent in the single point of failure for many users.

Re:One Password to Rob Them All - by Jellybob (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Good security doesn’t even let the other party know your cleartext password, or access your account with them without it. But I don’t see how OpenID will do anything like that.

Maybe you should try reading the spec then, since that’s exactly what it’s designed to do.

The only place that gets your plain text password is your OpenID provider, and whenever you try to login to another site using OpenID, you get redirect to your provider’s site, where:

1) If you don’t already have a session open, you login, and then go to 2.

2) You get asked if you really want to login on the client site, and if so, what information do you want to let them have (usually anything from “nothing at all” to “everything”, or a combination of them).

This way the only site you need to implicitly trust is the OpenID provider - which if you choose can be on your own server, running your own code, with whatever means of authentication you like.

If you’re feeling really paranoid you could even have it send you a text message, or electrocute your balls, every time someone logs in with your credentials, so that even if someone does get them you’ll know as soon as they try to use it, and can disable or change them.

Is 1 ID really wise? Single point of failure? - by SpecialAgentXXX (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Is having 1 global ID really wise? It sounds like a single point of failure to me. And do you really want the same ID across all sites? i.e. Do you want to be able to be tracked across multiple sites, especially those that cater to different audiences? And with social engineering, if you divulge your personal info to a phisher for one site, he would then be able to use it for all other sites. 
 
Call me a bit concerned, but I have unique IDs & passwords across all sites (social networking, blogs, financial, political, etc.) There are free user ID/password management software so you don’t have to memorize every ID and password.

Re:OpenID? - by phoenix.bam! (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I don’t think you understand how openid works. The only way to compromise all sites is for your openid provider to be compromised. You only provide 3rd party sites with a URL which points to your openid provider. You are forwarded to your openid provider (SSL cert verifies to you that the provider is legit.) You enter your credentials to the openid provider who then sends over a back channel that you are verified back to the 3rd party site. At no time does the 3rd party site have any of your authentication credentials and therefore can not access anything on other sites which you use that openid account for.

Re:OpenID? - by cathector (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

> Who cares about a unified username/password “experience”.

fair enough, but i think for many users it would be cool to have a unified identities across several sites. ie, so my MySpace social network could be parsed by YouTube or my favorite online game or what have you. Not saying it’s for everyone, but there’s certainly some value there for some.