What's the Best Way to Share Files Across Multiple Home Computers? - File Sharing - Lifehacker

What's the Best Way to Share Files Across Multiple Home Computers? - File Sharing - Lifehacker: "ou could also put together your own network-attached storage (NAS); FreeNAS is an extremely popular free and open-source NAS worth checking out.

One of our absolute favorite ways to swap files is with Dropbox. For the low cost of free, you can install a folder on any Window, Mac OS X, or Linux-based computer, then just drag and drop files right into it that you want to share with others. Once you stick a file into the folder, it instantly syncs to Dropbox's server and is available to the rest of your family on their own computers in just a couple of clicks."

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Microsoft 2010 SP1 - Cringely on technology

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Microsoft 2010 SP1 - Cringely on technology: "For a company with 10,000 employees, setting them up to use Microsoft technology will cost you $3,360,000. Over half of that will be for Office and you’ll pay that Office tax every year."

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : First Cousins Once Removed

Fabulous Adventures In Coding : First Cousins Once Removed: "Take two different people who have a common ancestor but who are not related by direct succession (that is, neither is the mother, father, grandmother, and so on, of the other):

Degree of cousin-hood is the minimum of the numbers of generations back that you have to go to find the nearest common ancestor, minus one.

Removed-ness is the absolute difference between the numbers of generations back you have to go to find the nearest common ancestor."

A Software Insider’s Point of View » Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit - SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision

A Software Insider’s Point of View » Event Report: 2009 SAP Influencer Summit - SAP Must Put Strategy To Execution In Order To Prove Clarity Of Vision
Technology strategy: “C+”. Middleware strategy remains murky at best. SAP should revamp NetWeaver or junk it. NetWeaver is to Blackberry as Salesforce.com’s Force.com is to iPhone. It’s so much easier to build apps on Force.com and iPhone than it is for SAP’s NetWeaver and RIM’s Blackberry. The decision to emphasize the NetWeaver ABAP stack over the NetWeaver Java stack will leave customers and partners confused despite how much more efficient it is to build on ABAP. In addition, the lack of good business process orchestration at both run time and design time remains a critical hole for investment and gives vendors such as IBM and Cordys opportunities to sit on-top of SAP apps. Mobile strategy at first seems less emphasized with the rare mention of native apps development on Blackberry and other platforms. Nevertheless, SAP’s decision to leave mobile platform integration of Blackberry and others at the NetWeaver Mobile layer may prove to be the most efficient and effective approach. The move to in-Memory will help with future development, yet customers lack confidence in SAP’s execution of the Timeless Software argument, despite its best intentions. It appears that SAP will have 2 OnDemand strategies. Lighter applications will be built on Java. More complex applications to be built on the OnDemand stack.

blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: Why did we take reddit down for 71 minutes?

blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: Why did we take reddit down for 71 minutes?: "We use a lot of the EBS disks. All of our databases were each using one EBS. This worked really well for us up until a week or so ago. Then all of you came back from holiday and decided that work was just too boring or something, and our traffic spiked, essentially breaking the camel's back, if you will.

In response, we started upgrading some of our databases to use a software RAID of EBS disks, which gives drastically increased performance (at a higher cost of course). This worked really well, but there was still one missing piece of the puzzle.

Part of our setup uses what we call a 'permacache', which uses Memcachedb. Memcachedb is Memcached with a built-in permanent storage system using BDB. One of the 'features' of this system is that it saves up its disk writes and then bursts them to the disk. Unfortunately, the single EBS volumes they were on could not handle these bursting writes. Memcachedb also has another feature that blocks all reads while it writes to the disk. These two things together would cause the site to go down for about 30 seconds every hour or so lately."

Getting Good IO from Amazon's EBS

Getting Good IO from Amazon's EBS: "Now, I just need to take a moment to point something out. Performance testing on EBS is very hard. The disks speed up and slow down on their own. A lot. Telling when your tweak is helping vs it just being luck is not easy. It feels a bit like trying to clock the speed of passing cars with a radar gun from the back of a rampaging bull. I fully expect to find that some of my discoveries here are just a mare’s nest, but hopefully others will prove enduring."

Windows 7 RTM God Mode (GodMode) - Windows client deities are actually in short supply - Softpedia

Windows 7 RTM God Mode (GodMode) - Windows client deities are actually in short supply - Softpedia
The trick lies in a fully documented Windows 7 shell feature that developers can leverage, namely “Using File System Folders as Junction Points” according to BrandonLive. Devs have the possibility to use MyFolder.{Extension CLSID} in order to transform file system folders into junction points. This means that folders created in this manner will feature the MyFolder label in Windows Explorer, in the search box in the top right hand side corner.

Mark Nandor's Solution to the Longest Line Question

Mark Nandor's Solution to the Longest Line Question: "Our journey starts at Ocean Creek by the Makah Indian Reservation in Washington (124° 41' 38'' W, 48° 21' 44'' N), and our amazing journey ends near 1 Ocean Drive, Jupiter, Florida, 33469 (80° 4' 29'' W, 26° 57' 11'' N). The distance between these two points is an impressive 2802 miles"

FT.com / Books - Books of the year

FT.com / Books - Books of the year: "Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon
By Craig Nelson
John Murray, £18.99
This punchy, popular history focuses on the Apollo programme within the context of the space race – the US and the USSR’s contest to outdo each other in space technology. Gripping, geekily detailed accounts of what it was like to ride a Saturn V or walk on another world are interspersed with a lively take on the cold war rivalry that made it happen."

Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com

Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com: "Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them."

Writing Debug and Trace Messages :: BlackWasp Software Development

Writing Debug and Trace Messages :: BlackWasp Software Development: "Debug messages are created using the Debug class in the System.Diagnostics namespace. By default, when using the debugger within Visual Studio, these messages are displayed in the Output window if running software in debug mode. However, listeners can be added that write messages to other locations, such as text files. The methods used to generate the messages are decorated with the Condition attribute and the DEBUG symbol, so are not called when the program is compiled in release mode. This ensures that debug messages are not seen by the end-user and do not cause any performance impact.

Trace messages are written using the Trace class in the same namespace. They are different to Debug messages because they are included in the code when the TRACE symbol is defined, as it is by default for Visual Studio users. Trace messages can exist in code that has been compiled in either debug or release mode. They are useful when you do wish to log information from the software that you distribute to end-users."

Jeffrey Richter's Blog : Receiving notifications when garbage collections occur

Jeffrey Richter's Blog : Receiving notifications when garbage collections occur: "ool little class that will raise an event after a collection of Generation 0 or Generation 2 occurs."

How the brain encodes memories at a cellular level

How the brain encodes memories at a cellular level: "'One reason why this is interesting is that scientists have been perplexed for some time as to why, when synapses are strengthened, you need to have proteins degrade and also make new proteins,' said Kosik. 'You have the degradation of proteins going on side by side with the synthesis of new proteins. So we have now resolved this paradox. We show that protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand. The degradation permits the synthesis to occur. That's the elegant scientific finding that comes out of this.'"

Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners - NYTimes.com

Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners - NYTimes.com: "Allen H. Kelson, a restaurant consultant, wrote, “If admen had souls, many would probably trade them for an opportunity every restaurateur already has: the ability to place an advertisement in every customer’s hand before they part with their money.”"

Git: The Lean, Mean, Distributed Machine

Git: The Lean, Mean, Distributed Machine
Good overview presentation -- nice form, nice data.

Atheist Ethicist: Climate Change: The Need for Proof Argument

Atheist Ethicist: Climate Change: The Need for Proof Argument

You are the first mate on an ocean liner, when the Captain gives the following order. "You are to proceed at full speed without any deviation in course and speed unless and until you have absolute proof that there is an iceberg straight ahead. Then and only then are you permitted to take preventative action."

Or, you are an adult supervisor on a bus trip with a bunch of school children. The bus is approaching a train crossing. Yet, the driver says, "I am not slowing down unless and until I have absolute proof that the bus will not be across the tracks before the train gets here."

We know these people to be guilty of the moral crime of reckless endangerment.

If these types of people wish to take actions that risk their own lives, we may leave that up to them. They pay the costs for their own mistakes. However, when they put the lives of others at risk, then they are guilty of a moral crime.

We have good reason to condemn people like this and to condemn them in very harsh terms. They are responsible for the deaths and suffering of a great many people every year.

Now, we have a whole slew of these types of people engaging in reckless endangerment of whole cities and whole populations. They have already maimed and killed a great many people and destroyed a great deal of property, and they seem to have no qualms about continuing along the same course of action. In all cases, they behave as people who are almost if not entirely indifferent to the death and suffering of others - because they are not motivated to take any action that would avoid potential death and suffering.

The morally responsible person would not demand proof that there is an iceberg straight ahead before slowing down and taking precautions. The mere possibility of an iceberg is good enough. His responsibilities to his passengers demands that he take precautions to reduce the possibility of catastrophe - not that he act as if there is no risk until catastrophe is certain.

The responsible bus driver will not risk racing the train at the crossing. She will take precautions to protect the well-being of the children trusted to her, which means slowing down and avoiding the possibility of harm coming to them.

These same principles of moral responsibility demands that, in the face of risk of massive destruction due to climate change, that people slow down and reduce the risk. It does not require absolute proof.

Principles of rationality give us a simple formula for determining how much caution to use in the face of risk. The basic form states that the amount that it is rational to spend avoiding risk is equal to the cost times the probability.

It is worth spending up to $250 billion to avoid a 1% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

It is worth spending up to $2.5 trillion in avoiding a 10% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

It is worth spending $12.5 trillion to avoid a 50% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

It is worth $22.5 trillion to avoid a 90% chance of suffering $25 trillion in harm.

EETimes.com - How much of a lead does Intel have at 32nm?

EETimes.com - How much of a lead does Intel have at 32nm?
We plotted (Figure 1 online) the minimum interconnect line pitch for all three manufacturers as a function of the technology node. All three players had comparable critical dimensions, illustrating that Moore's law is alive and well with no sign of slowing.
Interestingly, TSMC has slightly smaller dimensions than the two other manufacturers, probably because TSMC's customers are mainly SoC manufacturers, such as graphics processor and FPGA makers. With the latest graphics processors having more than a billion transistors, any reduction in chip size is highly beneficial to foundry clients, even though the individual transistors may not be as fast as Intel's or AMD's.
Every new technology node both reduces critical dimensions and improves process. Two fundamental process innovations being adopted by the main semiconductor companies are embedded silicon-germanium source/drain regions (eSiGe) and high-k metal gate technology (HKMG). eSiGe increases the performance of the slower type of transistors (PMOS), while HKMG helps the transistors switch faster and reduces the gate leakage.

Red Hat Open Sources Desktop Application Protocol - PC World Business Center

Red Hat Open Sources Desktop Application Protocol - PC World Business Center

SPICE can be used to deploy virtual desktops from a server out to remote computers, such as desktop PCs and thin-client devices.

It resembles other rendering protocols used for remote desktop management and deployment, such as Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Citrix's Independent Computing Architecture (ICA). Brennan said SPICE has advantages over those other protocols, in that SPICE can dynamically customize desktop instances to fit specific operating environments.

Crossbow Virtual Wire: Network in a Box

tripathi.pdf (application/pdf Object)

and so on. These components can
be combined to build an arbitrarily complex virtual network
called virtual wire (vWire) which can span one or
more physical machines. vWires on the same physical
network can be VLAN-separated and support dynamic
migration of virtual machines, which is an essential feature
for hosting and cloud operators.
vWires can be reduced to a set of rules and objects

Natural selection 150 years on : Article : Nature

Natural selection 150 years on : Article : Nature

But can speciation be observed? Yes. Field biologists have witnessed speciation in action among several plant, amphibian, bird and fish species18. What matters for Darwin's theory is that the process by which populations of interbreeding individuals split into two non-interbreeding populations follows straightforward routes of natural selection. One good example is that females of a cichlid fish species vary genetically in their preferences for males of red and blue colours. Biologists are witnessing red males occupying the lower depths of Lake Victoria, in Africa, and females with matching preferences are following them. These mating preferences are causing this single species to split into two19.