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Showing posts from March, 2017

Microsoft: No, Linux users, we didn't try to penalize you for not using Windows with OneDrive

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Summary: Microsoft fixes a bug that made its file-hosting service, OneDrive, slow on Linux but not on Windows. Microsoft has resolved a bug that made OneDrive and OneDrive for Business slow on Linux machines but not on any other platform, including iOS, Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows. A Microsoft OneDrive spokesman called Edgar has now confirmed that the issue has been resolved, pointing to a failure in a browser component designed to speed up background processing called prefetching. "We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms, iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, but for Linux it was falling back to a less efficient technique that was causing the issue. Rest assured that this was not intentional. It was an oversight," Edgar  said  on  Hacker News . Microsoft fixed the issue by disabling prefetching and then enabled it again aft

AMD's Ryzen 5 threatens Intel's grip on the mainstream PC market

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Summary: AMD takes aim at the highly lucrative mainstream PC market with its new Ryzen 5 chips. The high-end processor market may be where all the bragging rights lie, but it's the mainstream market where the volume is, and AMD is taking aim at that segment with its new Ryzen 5 processors. Ryzen 5 is AMD's new line of mainstream processors, joining the already released high-end Ryzen 7 chips, and the budget Ryzen 3 chips which are planned for the second half of the year. Ryzen 5 is a much bigger deal than Ryzen 7 because the mainstream processor sub-$300 market is about twice as big as the high-end market processor market. And AMD's re-entry into this mainstream market presents a real threat to Intel's dominance over the PC industry. AMD is unveiling four Ryzen 5 chips, ranging from the $249 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600X down to the $169 4-core/8-thread Ryzen 5 1400: Model Cores/Threads Speed (GHz) Cooler Price ($) Ryzen 5 1600X 6/12 3.6/4.0 - 249 Ryzen 5

Uber's secret Greyball program tracks cops, avoids authorities

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Summary: The secretive system uses data and other techniques to ferret out cops and root out anyone who may do the service harm. An internal program used by Uber for years to dance around the police in areas where the ride-hailing service was frowned upon has been exposed. In cities such as Boston, Las Vegas, and Paris, alongside countries including China and South Korea, Greyball is used as part of the violation of terms of service (VTOS) program which Uber created in 2014 to ferret out and black-mark anyone that may be a threat to the firm.Dubbed Greyball, Uber's program uses data analytics and a myriad of other tactics to avoid the authorities in places where the service is resisted by law enforcement or banned outright, according  to the New York Times . Predominantly used in the US, Greyball first came to light in the same year when investigators began to hail rides using the Uber app to build a case against the company. One such investigator, Erich England from

AWS typo gaffe isn't the first, or last in technology

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Summary: History is littered with typo miscues that led to major tech outages, mixups and lots of losses. Amazon Web Services outlined its post mortem on its S3 outage and the cause boils down to one word: Typo. A typo?!? That's crazy right? Not really. In fact, typos plague software, code and have cost companies billions of dollars. The cloud giant offered the following when explaining its outage. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team  was debugging an issue  causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. Folks say misery loves company and the good news for AWS is that the typo club is pretty extensive