IT News
My Job Went To India
Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.
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NASA Installing Shocks On Orion
caffiend666 writes "In order to abate the massive vibration issues of their new Ares I spacecraft, NASA is installing shock absorbers. "The plan is to install 16 canisters in the bottom of the rocket with 100-pound weights attached to springs. Battery-powered motors will move the weights up and down to stop vibrations. Those are essentially remote-controlled shock absorbers, said Garry Lyles, who headed the team of NASA engineers tackling the shaking problem." So, when the spaceship is a rocking, don't come a knocking?"
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Foresight Linux: Two out of three's not bad
According to its past and present marketing, Foresight Linux has three claims to fame: Its user-friendliness, its use of the Conary package management system, and its role as a showcase for the latest in GNOME. In practice, its latest 2.0.4 version is not more user-friendly than any other GNOME-based distribution -- if anything, it is slightly less so because of its limited software selection and package management -- but its other claims are enough to make Foresight one of the more distinctive modern distributions.
Categories: IT News
Apple's IPhone 3G Firmware Update Bombs
JagsLive writes "After lots of complaints about iPhone 3G connection issues, Apple released a firmware update Monday with hopes it would fix the issues. But early reports suggest it didn't work as planned. Complaints have included dropped calls, abrupt network switches, poor reception, and service interruptions. Apple declined to offer details about its iPhone 2.0.1 update, other than saying it included "bug fixes." However, comments in Apple's support forum say plenty about the latest attempt to rectify poor user experiences. In fact, the update seems to be causing new issues, apparently interfering with the GPS function, among others."
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Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud
SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here and here, showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever".
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Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse
whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time."
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States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines
Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.
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Magpies Are Self-Aware
FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."
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Why Corporates Hate Perl
Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."
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Find the DVD containing those files with VVV
The Virtual Volumes View (VVV) project lets you index your data DVDs and perform searches to figure out whether a given file is backed up and what disc contains it. If you routinely back up a large amount of data onto DVDs, you can simply number your discs and keep them in numerically sorted order. When it comes time to find an image or digital video you burned to DVD, just use VVV to figure out the disc number and quickly locate the right disc in the pile.
Categories: IT News
FTC Bans Prerecorded Telemarketing Drivel
coondoggie writes "In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather, and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed recorded telemarketing calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008."
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Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts
iminplaya sends in an item from TechNewsWorld that begins, "Several incidents of iPod Nanos bursting into flames have created consumer jitters in gadget-happy Japan. Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported. The problem is due to defective batteries, the company said, and only a tiny percentage of the devices have caught on fire." Japan has seen 14 such incidents so far, two in recent days. iminplaya adds, "I like that. Only a 'tiny percentage'... Is anybody beginning to understand why I would prefer that these devices not be allowed on airplanes?"
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Adobe Flash Ads Launching Clipboard Hijack Attacks
bullyBEEF writes "Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which affect Mac, Windows, and Linux users running Firefox, IE, and Safari, bad guys are seizing control of the machine's clipboard (probably using the Flash command setClipboard) and inserting a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program. A number of legitimate sites have been seen to host acs carrying the attack — including Newsweek, Digg, and MSNBC.com. Researcher Aviv Raff offers a harmless demo of how it's done."
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New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached
Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near."
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Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's PGP passphrase. A conviction is still likely because prosecutors have the testimony of the two border guards who saw the drive while it was open." The article stresses the potential importance of this ruling (which was issued last November but went unnoticed until now): "Especially if this ruling is appealed, US v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach." Update: 08/19 23:49 GMT by KD : Several readers have pointed out that this story in fact did not go unnoticed.
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DPI and Net Neutrality's Overseas Weak Spot
Ian Lamont writes "An unnamed source at an American ISP says staff there briefly considered using Deep Packet Inspection to comply with an order from Argentina's Department of Justice to block access to a local gambling site. The ISP ended up not going that route, owing to the cost, but some engineers at the company worry that DPI will eventually be implemented on the ISP's overseas network, thereby positioning it for an easier US rollout should Net Neutrality lose out in Washington. Besides being used for traffic-shaping, DPI can also monitor the traffic of ISP subscribers to supply targeted advertising."
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IBM and AMD Create First 22nm SRAM Cell
arcticstoat notes an announcement from IBM that, along with technology partners, they have produced the first working sample of a SRAM cell built on a 22nm fabrication process. According to the article, this represents the next generation after 32nm process chips and won't be in products for some years. "The technology was developed with several partners, including AMD, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics and Freescale, as well as the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, where IBM performs a lot of its semiconductor research. IBM says that the cell's development involved 'novel fabrication processes,' including high-NA immersion lithography..., high-K metal gate stacks, extremely thin silicide, damascene copper contacts, and advanced activation techniques."
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Flagship Studios' Founder Discusses Its Demise
1Up is running a lengthy interview with Bill Roper, founder of Flagship Studios. The game company, known primarily for its Hellgate: London and Mythos titles, announced massive layoffs last month, and is now simply winding down and taking care of a few final issues. Roper gives quite a bit of detail regarding the financial machinations of a game developer and the current status of the games' code. Co-founders Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree gave a related interview recently as well. "The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn't a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn't like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we'll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn't really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development."
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Open options for cloud computing
Some cloud computing vendors, such as 3tera and Nirvani, push their own proprietary platforms and tools, which forces adopters to limit their options and work in a restricted or closed architecture. When these established vendors say cloud, they mean their cloud. As a result, Web developers may believe that, in order to use cloud computing, they must accept limitations in the way they write and build their applications. But that view is a misconception; open standards for cloud computing are already in place and are being tweaked.
Categories: IT News
MIT Students' Gag Order Lifted
mytrip and several other readers let us know that a judge in Boston has lifted the gag order — actually let it expire — against three MIT students who discovered flaws in the security of the local transit system, the MBTA. We've discussed the case over the last 10 days. "Judge O'Toole said he disagreed with the basic premise of the MBTA's argument: That the students' presentation was a likely violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to protect computers from malicious attacks such as worms and viruses. Many had expected Tuesday's hearing to hinge on First Amendment issues and what amounts to responsible disclosure on the part of computer security researchers. Instead, O'Toole based his ruling on the narrow grounds of what constitutes a violation of the CFAA. On that basis, he said MBTA lawyers failed to convince him on two points: The students' presentation was meant to be delivered to people, and was not a computer-to-computer 'transmission.' Second, the MBTA couldn't prove the students had caused at least $5,000 damage to the transit system."
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