AT&T willing to spy for NSA, MPAA, and RIAA
They’ve actually been doing this for some time now…read on.
Author Archive
Phanfare: Moving to Amazon S3
If you haven’t heard of Amazon’s S3 web service yet then you are missing out…this is a very cool service and with the addition of the new MySQL service could very well become the new infrastructure for small internet startups.
Google says S.M.A.R.T. is Dumb!
Google’s study looked at more than one hundred thousand disk drives which were a combination of serial and parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to 400 GB. The observed range of annualized failure rates varied from 1.7 percent, for drives that were in their first year of operation, to over 8.6 percent, observed in their third year.
I have spent many sleepless waiting for a hard drive to fail simply because S.M.A.R.T. predicting impending failure. For several years I would have the following email message sent by cPanel.
Subject: [cPanel smartcheck] Possible Hard Drive Failure Soon
S.M.A.R.T Errors on /dev/hda
From Command: /usr/sbin/smartctl -q errorsonly -H -l selftest -l error /dev/hda
ATA Error Count: 1
Error 1 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 93 hours
—-END /dev/hda–
I eventually switched to another machine simply because I couldn’t take the stress but the hard drive never did fail.
Take a look at Google’s findings…if only I had known! 
Google Gadget Ventures – earn $100,000 from Google to develop gadgets
Marissa Mayar, VP of Google, announced a Google Gadget Ventures where they pay developers $100,000 to build gadgets.
80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding
This list was just so useful that I had to post it here. It is a list of Ajax techniques & tutorials: Auto-completion, instant field editing, menus, calendars, interactive elements, visual effects, animation, basic javascripts, as well as an extensive developer’s suite should give you a useful and powerful toolbox you can use every day, without a need to go through hundreds of AJAX-related bookmarks.
Google opens up malware blacklist API
Google employees Brian Rakowski and Garrett Casto from the Antiphishing and Antimalware Teams have announced that the company is opening up its Safe Browsing API to the public. The Safe Browsing API allows easy access to Google’s updated blacklist of suspected phishing and malware-infested web pages.
EMI says DRM-free music is selling well
EMI’s senior VP Lauren Berkowitz reports that sales of the label’s digital music sales have seen a spike in sales after going DRM-free through iTunes a few weeks ago. If EMI can maintain that increase in sales, the other major labels may follow sooner than later.
AT&T ‘Spy Room’ Documents Unsealed; You’ve Already Seen Them
A civil liberties group suing telecom giant AT&T for allegedly installing illegal secret surveillance rooms in its internet facilities at the behest of the National Security Agency published substantial portions of long-sealed case documents Tuesday.
Amazing things possible thanks to ZFS, including fast incremental backups
Very nice reliability features, but still quite simple and flexible. IMHO very nice.
Virtualize AND dual-boot the same Windows on your Mac
The problem with dual-booting Windows is the inconvenience of having to restart your Mac entirely. The problem with virtualizing Windows is that it can be unreasonably slow for a prolonged session. Now that Boot Camp and Parallels work together, you can choose between virtualizing or booting into your Windows depending on what you have to do.