Hacker News Reader

thereallurchon IBM To Furlough Most Of Its U.S. Hardware Staff In Late August

This furlough is an attempt to prevent another round of layoffs. Another round of layoffs would cause IBM to reconsider which projects are necessary and start eliminating projects as a whole.

30% pay for 1 week of a 52 week year works out to 0.5% of your salary. It could be worse...

thereallurchon IBM To Furlough Most Of Its U.S. Hardware Staff In Late August

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/solutions/cloud/

They are. IBM's mainframe business is quickly becoming a dinosaur, cloud or not.

The furlough is a way to prevent another round of layoffs. By furloughing a division, you can save X%. You cant have two rounds of layoffs within 3 months and not destroy existing projects.

thereallurchon The Reddit sleuths who brought down a meme empire

estimated $1.6 mil a month for > 12 months? For a meme generator? I'd say they had a good run.

thereallurchon Malibu homeowners foiled by $30K Kickstarter campaign

Seems like some of these homeowners would pay $30k to not have this program, or for some control over the final product. I could imagine some rich guy paying $15k to keep his section of beach off the program.

thereallurchon IBM to Acquire SoftLayer

IBM has had private clouds for a few years now. It's not like AWS where anyone can click and spin up an instance. It's geared towards very large companies. These companies have been reluctant to use AWS, or have specific requirements (hardware requirements, licensing issues, corporate policies). So it's incorrect to say IBM cant build a cloud. IBM's cloud isnt a public facing entity.

thereallurchon Boxfish: Realtime Index of Every Word Spoken on TV

Wont this just amplify existing trends instead of exposing new ones?

thereallurchon Employee Turns Gaming Network Into Private Bitcoin Mine

Like pushing ads to the phones.

thereallurchon Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

few months - year...

thereallurchon IBM looks to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo as profits crash

Quite a few. It puts food on my table.... :)

thereallurchon IBM looks to sell its x86 server business to Lenovo as profits crash

Why would POWER be affected by this decision? Everyone and their mother sells a x86 server. Hard to make a profit when everyone is competing. How many other companies sell POWER hardware?

thereallurchon Google I/O 2013

Really? I'd love a new pair of glasses.

thereallurchon The new Acer Chromebook

The 100GB of cloud storage is worth $5 a month/$60 year. I'm hoping Google starts throwing around storage with all their future devices. Maybe on the Nexus 4?

thereallurchon How Long Will Programmers Be So Well-Paid?

I think you underestimated the cost of major cities in UK.

thereallurchon Fusion Drive: Apple jumps on the SSD cache bandwagon

Apple apparently abandoned ZFS to adopt specific subsets of the technology. Someone else mentioned 4 GB of the SSD is for write cache (log device). Guessing the other XGB is the traditional cache device.

Should really improve daily usage performance. Makes sense their benchmarks only go to 4GB.

thereallurchon Fusion Drive: Apple jumps on the SSD cache bandwagon

My guess it's using some tech similar to ZFS. Creating a 4GB log drive for writing, and the rest as a cache drive. Sounds like they abandoned the adaption of ZFS to make their own interpretation.

thereallurchon The Amazing iOS 6 Maps

I'm sure google is sitting on a treasure chest of map related patents, too.

thereallurchon Building a supercomputer from 64 Raspberry Pis and Lego

No, 256 MB of RAM on each rasp. It's 16GB of storage on each rasp.

thereallurchon Facebook co-founder Moskovitz scrambles to offload his shares

He sold 1.3m shares out of the 113mil he has? "Scrambles to offload his shares" = 1.1%?

thereallurchon How to crawl a quarter billion webpages in 40 hours

fuzzy hashing and a database? Break the content into parts, and generate scores for each part. calculate a hash entry for each part and enter into a database. Compare against existing entries. If the content is too similar, then reject. Doesnt get you around spam, though.

thereallurchon Valve brings non-game software to Steam

Do you still dislike Steams DRM on 30Mbps?

thereallurchon Valve brings non-game software to Steam

Sure, sometimes you don't have a choice. But saying progress cant be made because it cant accommodate the edge cases is absurd. Dont like Steams DRM? Dont use it. But dont bitch about it because you cant use it properly.

thereallurchon Valve brings non-game software to Steam

.2Mbps = .025MB/s

thereallurchon Valve brings non-game software to Steam

Right. But saying you cant have internet based DRM because you dont have a capable connection is equivalent to denying the last 5 years of progress.

thereallurchon Valve brings non-game software to Steam

.2Mbps...maybe that's your real problem? DRM is here to stay, and internet drm is increasingly popular. Maybe time to upgrade your connection?

thereallurchon Steve Wozniak: "I worry about everything going to the cloud"

As someone without facebook, care to enlighten me as to what happens?

thereallurchon The Heretic - the U.S. government banned medical studies of the effects of LSD.

How about Kary Mullis crediting the invention of the PCR machine to LSD?

thereallurchon What's so special with minimalweather.com?

Is there something I am missing? Why would you be checking the weather so often? I agree that this is a novel use of a site icon, but it has limited (minimal) advantages.

thereallurchon Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen

While you make a good point, your end number is wildly inaccurate.

1) I highly doubt the NSA is buying $100 dollar low grade hard drives. I bet this data is backed up at least twice per site, at multiple sites.

2) The data is not unstructured, it will be structured in some sort of database. Storing your facebook photos alone will be potentially hundreds of megabytes.

3) I doubt NSA is spending it's entire budget every year on hard drives.

thereallurchon Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

IBM does something similar as well.

thereallurchon The bandwidth of a Boeing 747 and its impact on web browsing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_window_protocol

It does send multiple packets (which helps throughput), but it doesn't cut down on latency. Round trip time is hard to improve.