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Comment Serioulsy ... (Score 5, Insightful) 361

by dnamaners (#32120014) Attached to: AMD Undercuts Intel With Six-Core Phenom IIs
There are more than a few things that AMD besides gaming and over clocking (Intel strong points) that make an AMD a good choice. I don't want to start holy war here but there is not much real gap here 10-5% in my tests at best. The price * power use thing shows AMD is a good choice in many places. Price alone makes me deploy more than a few AMD clusters. Don't just look at the max value on the "speedometer" to see how good a car is, we mostly drive at the speed limit. Take from it what you will.

Comment One suggestion or 2 (Score 1) 763

by dnamaners (#32119772) Attached to: How Do You Handle Your Keys?
Better yet, have an old leatherman belt case or cell phone holder? Have a spring loaded cord for keys that you hate to use when it jingles? Combine, recycle and triumph. It seems that the key ball fits in the case on your belt. The retractable cord keeps em on you and handy. No jingles. Add a bit of something fluffy to the case to take up any space left (if your key ball is small) and you can even pass the absolute silence test. IE "The Dune (tm) don't jingle your keys like poorly tied water tokens test" for you in the know. On the other hand, as he parent said, use less or flat keys. I personally go the Dune route as I am cool that way.

Comment I prefer old school backup (Score 3, Interesting) 34

by dnamaners (#23329376) Attached to: How To Perform a Bare-Metal Backup On Linux LVM
Don't get me wrong, I love centralized backups and backup server/client software (bacula for example). However I use old school methods for a bare metal restore. For simple things blanking the free space and then make a "dd" image is all you need. However you do it, keep it simple, and there may be no need to do bare metal on the whole of a file servers data set. Once I get the core of it back up I can use my favorite software to get the system up-to-the-last-snapshot current.

LVM and Raid can be a little complex if you boot off it so ill give some tips. A nice small boot like SLAX (may favorite) or Knoppix is needed to start any bare metal restore. Pick something that supports the hardware and had LVM and or Raid. Either make a custom disk to add your backup data to the volume or have a 2nd DVD drive. Boot and restore.

I make my backups via simple methods like rsync and tar. I use a few simple scrips to do it all. So simple that it is easy to restore by hand if need be. This makes the restore safer as it can be done a host of ways. Not to mention these unix tools are present in all distributions. Probably the biggest reason for the old school way is that on a bare metal restore often hardware may change. New drives etc, basically failure can be a reason to upgrade etc. Many utilities can choke on big hardware changes, new drive sizes and such.

I take detailed system information and note it in the backup as human notes. Then grab your raid & LVM configuration and write a quick script to rebuild these features via the command line. Basically just a list of the actions you take to make a file system and format them the desired files system types manually. These same scripts will also re-apply boot loader and such as well. If the volumes change after a failure I can just issue updated commands (or edit the script) and make a similar layout of the filesystem. Then just open the tar balls via script or by hand and populate the new filesystem with the files you archived. With a bit of practice all of this can be automated by scripts. But if you need to vary the procedure due to hardware changes or as a way to clone a system you can.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Targets New Colleges, Still Avoids Harvard

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Billboard reports that the RIAA has filed its eighth round of "early settlement" letters to twenty-two colleges. Continuing its practice of avoiding Harvard, the RIAA's new round does not include any letters to that institution, where certain law professors have counseled resistance to the RIAA and told the RIAA to "take a hike". The unlucky institutions on the receiving end of the 403 new letters include Arizona State University (35 pre-litigation settlement letters), Carnegie Mellon University (13), Cornell University (19), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (30), Michigan State University (16), North Dakota State University (17), Purdue University — West Lafayette and Calumet campuses (49), University of California — Santa Barbara (13), University of Connecticut (17), University of Maryland — College Park (23), University of Massachusetts — Amherst and Boston campuses (52), University of Nebraska — Lincoln (13), University of Pennsylvania (31), University of Pittsburgh (14), University of Wisconsin — Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee, Stevens Point, Stout and Whitewater campuses (62)."
The Courts

Submission + - Record Company Collusion a Defense to RIAA Case?

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Is collusion by the record companies a defense to an RIAA case? We're about to find out, because the RIAA has made a motion to strike the affirmative defense of Marie Lindor, who alleged that "the plaintiffs, who are competitors, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and of public policy, by tying their copyrights to each other, collusively litigating and settling all cases together, and by entering into an unlawful agreement among themselves to prosecute and to dispose of all cases in accordance with a uniform agreement, and through common lawyers, thus overreaching the bounds and scope of whatever copyrights they might have" in UMG v. Lindor. The motion will be decided by the same judge who agreed with legal scholars in sustaining another affirmative defense of Ms. Lindor, in which she alleges (pdf) that the RIAA's $750-per-song-file statutory damages theory is "unconstitutionally excessive and disproportionate to any actual damages that may have been sustained, in violation of the Due Process Clause"."
Music

Submission + - HMV Canada Cut's music CD prices because of piracy 1

Submitted by umStefa
umStefa writes: For the last few years the music industry has claimed that reduced CD sales are the result of piracy, while slashdotters have constantly defended piracy on the grounds that main stream music was overpriced. Well know the largest music retailer in Canada has gone and cut their prices on CD's to try and increase sales (CBC article). If successful could this spur music stores in other countries to reduce their prices? and could it have an effect on piracy rates? or is this simply a move destined to fail (by not increasing CD sales), thereby giving the music industry ammunition to get governments to pass legislation that will support their outdated business model. Only time will tell.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Copyright advocacy group violates copyright (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
word munger
word munger writes: "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermark and all — without paying for their use! Clearly their agenda is simply to make using copyrighted materials inconvenient and expensive for everyone but THEMSELVES."
Music

Submission + - Judge: use P2P, you're stealing music (electronista.com) 1

Submitted by
JonathanF
JonathanF writes: "If you were hoping judges would see reason and realize that just using a program that could violate copyright law was about as illegal as leaving your back door unlocked, think again: an Arizona district judge has ruled that a couple who hosted files in KaZaA is liable for over $40K in damages just because they "made available" songs that could have been pirated by someone, somewhere. There's legal precedent, but how long do we have before the BitTorrent crew is sued?"
Music

Submission + - University of Kansas will not forward RIAA letters

Submitted by Bonewalker
Bonewalker writes: Looks like the University of Kansas may not be as pro-RIAA (or anti-student) as initially assumed last week from this recent Slashdot story. Of course, this doesn't make that "one-strike" policy any less flawed, but it shows that they aren't simply throwing their students under the RIAA bus, as one poster put it. As an alum, I am happy to see this. I wonder if they needed to get a story like this out to help combat the backlash and stigma from that previous article, though?
Education

Submission + - Wikipedia corrects Enciclopaedia Britannica (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has demonstrated the usefulness of the "wisdom of crowds" concept. And that wisdom has been able to detect several mistakes on one of the most relevant references on human knowledge: the Enciclopaedia Britannica. All kind of data has been spotted as wrong, such as the birthdate of Bill Clinton or the definition of NP problems in Mathematics."
Education

Submission + - University of Kansas strict copyright infringement 1

Submitted by
NewmanKU
NewmanKU writes: "Eric Bangeman at Ars Technica writes that the University of Kansas has adopted a new strict copyright infringement policy for the students on the residential network that are sharing copyrighted files. The university's ResNet website states that, "Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is against the law. If you are caught downloading copyrighted material, you will lose your ResNet privileges forever. No second notices, no excuses, no refunds. One violation and your ResNet internet access is gone for as long as you reside on campus." According to a KU spokesperson, KU has recieved 345 notices in the past year from organizations and businesses regarding complaints about copyrighted material downloading."
Privacy

Submission + - Forensics Meets Its Match: New Tools Thwart Police (cio.com)

Submitted by rabblerouzer
rabblerouzer writes: Antiforensic tools have slid down the technical food chain, from Unix to Windows, from something only elite users could master to something nontechnical users can operate. "Five years ago, you could count on one hand the number of people who could do a lot of these things," says one investigator. "Now it's hobby level." Take, for example, TimeStomp. Forensic investigators poring over compromised systems where Timestomp was used often find files that were created 10 years from now, accessed two years ago and never modified.
Media

Submission + - Erroneous HD DVD Report Gets Tongues Wagging

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: HD DVD fanboys learned a valuable lesson in "don't believe everthing you read" this week, after the trade publication Home Media Magazine reported that the HD DVD camp planned to release more than 20x the number of releases planned on Blu-ray through the end of 2007. The suggestion was so preposterous that even the official HD DVD Promotions Group (which has the most to gain from the spread of such misinformation) has requested a correction.
United States

Submission + - Congress trying for another database

Submitted by grag
grag writes: CNET News.com reports that the US Congress, in their quest for immigration reform, seek to force employers to utilize a database to determine a person's eligibility for employment. The Department of Homeland Security would operate the database and would be given access to IRS records for this purpose.

The article also mentions similarities between the no-fly list and difficulties the proposed database could pose to valid people seeking employment.
Math

Submission + - A Mighty Number Falls

Submitted by space_in_your_face
space_in_your_face writes: Mathematicians and number buffs have their records. And today, an international team has broken a long-standing one in an impressive feat of calculation. On March 6, computer clusters from three institutions — the EPFL, the University of Bonn and NTT in Japan — reached the end of eleven months of strenuous calculation, churning out the prime factors of a well-known, hard-to-factor number that is a whopping 307 digits long.

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