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Comment Re:Bad PR move: Never whine (Score 1) 382

However firing someone who did nothing wrong is a bigger PR nightmare than the gossip that got you there in the first place. You have now created a much larger PR nightmare, especially if the employee goes public, also depending on labor laws or possible unions you could have other issues as well. If you read TFA you would have seen that everything that was "questioned" was an actual support ticket, and that the people claiming against CCP had nothing to do with it. The company that the allegations were tied to were completely baffled by the allegations as they didn't feel they were spied on.

Its a case of he said she said, and many of my friends that play EVE were confused by the allegations as well.

Statements of integrity, that what they did. The showed the world exactly what HAPPENED and what they DID. There statements were so strong that the rest was pointless.

By your statement I could call you a murderer and you're automatically guilty and should be punished, or any of a hundred things. Yes this is a company, but you're still playing the guilty and cannot be proven innocent card. The people who originally leveled the claims, only had that claims. CCP fires back with proof of what happened and you say the handled it wrong. I don't think they could have handled it better.

There are those who believe its better to cower in the face of adversity, and there are those who feel its better to stand up and fight, no matter what. Personally I find fighting no matter what the best sign of integrity one could possibly show.
Data Storage

Submission + - Does ZFS makes expensive NAS/SANs obsolete?

hoggoth writes: As a common everyman who needs big fast reliable storage without a big budget, I have been following a number of emerging technologies and I think they have finally become usable in combination. Specifically, it appears to me that I can put together the little brother of a $50,000 NAS/SAN solution for under $3,000. Here's how:

Get a CoolerMaster Stacker enclosure like this one (just the hardware not the software) that can hold up to 12 SATA drives. Install OpenSolaris and create ZFS pools with RAID-Z for redundancy. Export some pools with Samba for use as a NAS. Export some pools with iSCSI for use as a SAN. Run it over Gigabit Ethernet. Fast, secure, reliable, easy to administer, and cheap. Usable from Windows, Mac, and Linux. As a bonus ZFS let's me create daily or hourly snapshots at almost no cost in disk space or time.

Total cost: 1.4 Terabytes: $2,000. 7.7 Terabytes: $4,200 (Just the cost of the enclosure and the drives). That's an order of magnitude less expensive than other solutions.

Add redundant power supplies, NIC cards, SATA cards, etc as your needs require..

So storage experts, tell me why this is or isn't feasible!.
Space

28 New Planets Found Outside Solar System 258

elkcsr writes "The San Jose Mercury news reports on the phenomenal discovery of 28 new extra-solar planets out there in our galaxy. All of them are outside of the band scientists consider necessary for supporting life as we know it, but the solar systems analyzed should still be quite familiar to those of us in this neck of the woods. System layouts feature small rocky planets towards the star and gas giants further out. The biggest difference seen is a preference for elliptical orbits, instead of generally circular orbit we enjoy. ' For example, the team also described new details about one specific exoplanet, discovered two years ago. This planet, which circles the star Gliese 436, is thought to be half rock, half water. Its rocky core is surrounded by an amount of water compressed into a solid form at high pressures and low temperatures. It makes a short, 2.6-day orbit around Gliese 436. Based on its radius and density, scientists calculate that it has the mass of 22 Earths, making it slightly larger than Neptune. "The profound conclusion is, here we've found yet another type of planet that is already represented in our solar system," Marcy said.'"

Feed Joke That'll Get You Arrested (schneier.com)

Don't say that I didn't warn you: If you are sitting next to someone who irritates you on a plane or train... 1. Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case. 2. Remove your laptop. 3. Boot it. 4. Make...
Politics

FAA To Free Aircraft Hobbled By IP Laws 106

smellsofbikes writes "The FAA is attempting to develop a legal process that will allow them to release data about vintage aircraft designs that have obviously been abandoned. Existing laws restrict the FAA's ability to release this data because it is deemed to be intellectual property even though the owner of record has long since ceased to exist. This is fundamentally the same problem that copyright laws impose on people looking for out-of-print books. But in the case of vintage aircraft, the owners are legally required to maintain them to manufacturer specifications that the owners cannot legally obtain: an expensive and potentially lethal dilemma. If the FAA, notoriously hidebound and conservative, is willing to find a solution to this IP Catch-22, maybe the idea will catch on in other places."
Portables

Wi-Fi Penetration Tester In Your Pocket 121

00*789*00 writes "ZDNet has a story about the public launch of Immunity's Silica, a portable hacking device that can search for and join 802.11 (Wi-Fi) access points, scan other connections for open ports, and automatically launch code execution exploits from a built-in exploit platform."
Microsoft

Microsoft Answers Vista DRM Critics' Claims 627

skepsis writes "Recently there have been some stories on Slashdot claiming that Vista would downgrade the quality of audio and video for every application in a machine where protected content was running. One of the stories painted a scary scenario where a 'medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer' would have his medical images 'deliberately degraded.' A post has been put up on the Vista team blog explaining exactly how the content protection works, and it turns out the medical IT staff and audio pros can relax. From the post: 'It's important to emphasize that while Windows Vista has the necessary infrastructure to support commercial content scenarios, this infrastructure is designed to minimize impact on other types of content and other activities on the same PC. For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop.'"
The Courts

Submission + - Sex, Violence, Tension, & Video Games

simoniker writes: Gamasutra has just posted an interview with author Gerard Jones, subtitled 'Sex, Violence, Tension and Comic Books', in which the writer of 'Killing Monsters' talks about violence and games eloquently. When asked: 'What do you think it is in your work that resonates with the gaming community?', Jones comments: "Video games have been so much under attack recently, that I think there's a certain nervousness. Most people in this business are very pleasant and non-confrontational and the fact that they are being reviled as the causes of crime, causes of violence, is disturbing. On the one hand, I think people want to know how to respond to those criticisms. But on the other hand, I think there's some genuine anxiety that maybe games have a bad side, maybe there is a problem, and how do we deal with any guilt or fear?" He goes on to suggest of attacks on gaming: "I would say now we're kind of at the tail end. If games continue to push boundaries, particular ones could come under attack. A lot of it's just the medium being around long enough that people have realized the world hasn't gone to hell."

Comment Difficult problem (Score 1) 175

This one is kind of a tough one to tackle. First of while a single crab can lay hundreds of thousands of eggs at a time, ober 98% of the young will never survive. This is because when they hatch, crabs go through a neoplanktonic period. This means that the larva just drift around like little bits of plankton. This makes them prey to larger fish and perhaps even some zooplankton. Whether or not they can reach as far south as Gibraltar is unclear to me. They seem to be a very cold water type creature. I don't think that King crab have spread down to say Washington or Oregon (at least I haven't heard of it happening). This can be because of diffences in water temperature, or perhaps because of the direction of the currents which might prevent to larva from drifting that far. One of the things that we learn in the introductory level oceanography is that whenever a species in introduced, you run into some major problems. Once you reach the 400 level courses then the discussion becomes a little less black and white in some cases. There is a very small train of thought that in some cases, an introduced species can increase biodiversity in an ecosystem. One of the things that can happen when a species in introduced is that not only does that environment change, but also the species itself changes. I believe down in Oregon, a species of copepod from the western pacific had been introduced. It's moving up the Columbia river and is actually out performing the indigenous species. However you start to notice that there are some differences between this new species when it first arrived to the its present form, probably from cross breeding. Once we start moving into even smaller organisms, things get a lot more complicated. One of the things that we learned in Special Topics Ocean Biology is that the ocean is full of viruses that can create lateral gene transfer in organisms which can lead to the developement of new species.

Study Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance 477

pnewhook writes "The New York Times is reporting that 'by reconstructing ancient genes from long-extinct animals, scientists have for the first time demonstrated the step-by-step progression of how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts. The researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, offer a counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells.'"

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