Chaos Monkey is a service which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) that seeks out Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) and terminates instances (virtual machines) per group.
via The Netflix Tech Blog: Chaos Monkey released into the wild.
Zynga’s weak earnings show social gaming’s diminishing returns
Zynga’s stock fell roughly 40 percent, to a price of just over $3, after the company posted per-share earnings of just a penny, well below analysts expectations of 6 cents a share. The stock is down almost 80 percent from a high of $14.69 back in March, and market analysts have severely scaled back their guidance on the company. “We were wrong about the current state of Zynga’s business,” Morgan Stanley’s Scott Devitt said flatly in an analyst note. “Something smells in FarmVille,” wrote Evercore analyst Ken Sena, who thinks the stock will continue to fall.
via Zynga’s weak earnings show social gaming’s diminishing returns | Ars Technica.
What’s really troubling for Zynga, though, is that each new release seems to be seeing further diminishing returns, with smaller user peaks and quicker drop-offs. While CityVille managed to attract over 100 million users at its peak in early 2011, CastleVille peaked at just over 50 million monthly users after launching last November, and is already back down to 16.7 million players (The Ville, which launched earlier this month, is still in the “quick growth” phase of the pattern). This isn’t that surprising, since with each new wave of what’s essentially the same game, more players are likely to be overly familiar with the basic concepts already, and get bored that much quicker.
Dropbox – What is LAN sync?
Well, when you add a file to your computer’s Dropbox, the file is then synced with Dropbox servers. Dropbox will then initiate the syncing process as soon as it determines a change has been made to the file. All linked computers and shared folders will then download any new version of the file. With LAN syncing, Dropbox will look for the new file on your Local Area Network first, bypassing the need to download the file from Dropbox servers, thus speeding up the syncing process considerably.
via Dropbox – What is LAN sync? – Simplify your life.
I’m not quite sure if this is a good idea.
From: http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/viewAlert.x?alertId=23896
When synchronizing user data and communicating with the host service, a Dropbox client normally uses TCP port 443. In addition, the application may also use UDP and TCP port 17500 for communication via the Dropbox LanSync Protocol.
And…
Administrators are advised to implement an intrusion prevention system (IPS) or intrusion detection system (IDS) to help detect and prevent attacks that could detect the presence of Dropbox in a network.
WIDESPREAD SOLAR: Berkeley lab develops technology to make photovoltaics out of any semiconductor
“It’s time we put bad materials to good use,” says physicist Alex Zettl, who led the research along with colleague Feng Wang. “Our technology allows us to sidestep the difficulty in chemically tailoring many earth abundant, non-toxic semiconductors and instead tailor these materials simply by applying an electric field.”
via WIDESPREAD SOLAR: Berkeley lab develops technology to make photovoltaics out of any semiconductor.
This new technology is called “screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics,” or SFPV, because it utilizes the electric field effect, a well understood phenomenon by which the concentration of charge-carriers in a semiconductor is altered by the application of an electric field. With the SFPV technology, a carefully designed partially screening top electrode lets the gate electric field sufficiently penetrate the electrode and more uniformly modulate the semiconductor carrier concentration and type to induce a p-n junction. This enables the creation of high quality p-n junctions in semiconductors that are difficult if not impossible to dope by conventional chemical methods.
MATE | The traditional desktop environment
MATE | The traditional desktop environment.
What is MATE?
MATE is a fork of Gnome 2.
It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop to Linux users using traditional metaphors.
Just installed MATE in a Fedora 17 VM and it works just like Gnome 2. Fantastic! I can now use the latest and greatest Fedora and Ubuntu builds.
HDDGURU: Laptop and Desktop Hard Disk Drives, Tests, Software, Firmware, Tools, Data Recovery, HDD Repair
Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive?
This is a story of my efforts to repair the drive myself, my research into the question of whether or not users can repair modern hard drives, and the results of my efforts. If your drive is still detected in BIOS, you may be able to use software tools to retrieve your data. Here, we’re going to focus exclusively on hardware-related failures, and what your options are.
via Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive? | ExtremeTech.
Surf the internet for more than two minutes, and you’ll find people who recommend you do one of the following things:
- Stick your hard drive in the freezer
- Pop your hard drive into the oven
- Give it a few taps with a hammer or rubber mallet
LOL. I have been desparate to try the freezer trick a couple of times without luck.
Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS
We firmly believe that Oracle Linux is the best Linux distribution on the market today. It’s reliable, it’s affordable, it’s 100% compatible with your existing applications, and it gives you access to some of the most cutting-edge innovations in Linux like Ksplice and dtrace.
via Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS.
Hmmm. We’ll see about that.
- How is this better than CentOS?
-
Well, for one, you’re getting the exact same bits our paying enterprise customers are getting. So that means a few things. Importantly, it means virtually no delay between when Red Hat releases a kernel and when Oracle Linux does:
How to Repair a Corrupt MBR and boot into Linux
If you don’t have a Fedora CD, then you need not despair. You can also repair the boot loader using one of the numerous live CDs available.
via How to Repair a Corrupt MBR and boot into Linux | All about Linux.
The chroot command is featured in this howto article.
Question for TN 78th candidates: Internet access
You can imagine the lasting economic damage that would have been incurred if similar legislation had prevented CEMC from borrowing to roll out electricity in the 1940′s. This is a textbook case of rent-seeking behavior on the part of private ISP’s and regulatory capture on the part of the legislature, and was no doubt passed based both on some mixture of ideology unrestrained by real-world results, and private ISP’s increasing their political donations that year by a factor of 100 (as Upton Sinclair bitterly mused, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”)
via Question for TN 78th candidates: Internet access | Mathew Binkley’s Blog.
He also has an interesting comment on slashdot.