Slashdot Mirror

Quatro?

Nah, that's too old for the millennials to remember.

They are offshore, in the Galapagos. They also have flamingos just a few miles away. If you can, take a trip there, it was beyond amazing.

Photos I took on the trip:

Penguins:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Flamingos:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Full Photo Album:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

They are offshore, in the Galapagos. They also have flamingos just a few miles away. If you can, take a trip there, it was beyond amazing.

Photos I took on the trip:

Penguins:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Flamingos:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Full Photo Album:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

They are offshore, in the Galapagos. They also have flamingos just a few miles away. If you can, take a trip there, it was beyond amazing.

Photos I took on the trip:

Penguins:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Flamingos:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Full Photo Album:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

It was a good commercial, if a bit late to the game.

No it wasn't.

1. "Masculinity" is not the problem. It is lack of masculinity. Boys raised in female headed households, without a strong male role model, are more likely to grow up to be violent and abusive toward women.

2. "Online bullying" is attributed to "toxic masculinity", but is actually almost entirely a female-on-female phenomena.

3. In the commercial, nearly all the "bad" males are white. Nearly all the "good" males are black. Why does race need to used so prominently?

4. A "bad/white" man steps toward a woman, apparently to initiate a conversation. A "good/black" man stops him, because talking to women is toxic. Really?

5. Here's a nice butt photo of some "pit babes" in another Gillette commercial, shamelessly exploiting women's bodies to sell razor blades. They aren't preaching from the moral high ground.

Thailand at night from space
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

https://www.google.com/search?...

Tell me how is that treehouse in the yard where you hide from your parents working out ?

Don't forget to set the toggle switches on the panel: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Here are full resolution images from yesterday.

5 minute exposure.

1 minute exposure. Even at that short of an exposure, the comet is zipping along in the sky ...

Here are full resolution images from yesterday.

5 minute exposure.

1 minute exposure. Even at that short of an exposure, the comet is zipping along in the sky ...

Indeed. They also did cup holders for PC, could we have something similar for a cell phone ?

... we picked up the Gemini capsules back in the day.

Astronauts Eugene Cernan (left), and Thomas Stafford receive a warm welcome as they arrive aboard the prime recovery ship, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Wasp. [June 6, 1966]

Not sure how I got the Slashdot URL instead of Flickr, but here's the IPhone X/Xs image gallery I was talking about.

You don't use a hammer on a screw

'Shows what you know.

--
Where there is will, there is a way

I do more stills than video, the video there I was just learning video and the camera but I'm stills 99%. I have a couple dedicated Gh5s albums https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

I don't have the GH5s anymore as I mostly got it for video and will be too busy to hit up nightclubs and raves for several months so no point of having it depreciate anymore more in value but after going back to my Em1.1 I miss the Gh5s size and ergonomics. The button layout was so nice.

What a relatively recent first-world "problem".

I had a shared slide-rule. Literally. Till I got my own. https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Then I advanced to programmable calculators and punch cards.

Seriously, where do these pundits come from?

Percentage of people using it: 1%
Number of people using it who have ever touched a boob: 0
Percentages of people using it who also post on /.: 100%

Mac User :
https://s8.favim.com/orig/72/b...

Windows user :
https://farm4.static.flickr.co...

Linux User :
http://78.media.tumblr.com/926...

This is a properly working free market and it works proportionally.
We can look at economic freedom and the more economic freedom people have the better off they are:
https://www.heritage.org/index...
Economic freedom improves quality of life https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

So we have good evidence that government meddling doens't work.

None of the things you mention require government intervention: - low barriers to entry; creating barriers to entry is far too expensive, they're only profitable when companies can get the government to steal money from the people and pay for it that way. - Kartels always fail because it serves each individual business involved to lower their price.
- Nothing good requires government intervention and you haven't shown any evidence that government meddling made life better on any issue ever.
- Product safety. Safety costs money, if the consumer can't afford the product, I'd rather they have the option to take a risk so that they can still benefit. If you think people are too stupid to do that, what makes you think they're smart enough to elect the right rulers? When people can afford the costs for safety they're happy to do so. In cars we have second hand cars from $250 and really expensive and safe cars for $100k. The second is obviously more safe, should all less safe cars be banned?

Your belief in government is based in instinct, not logic.

Quite frankly I'd like to see them make a robot that could cook steak, potatoes, side veggies meal....because I'm quite certain they couldn't. Even a quality hamburger would confound a robot.

I agree with this 100%. Otherwise it's more or less this.
Do not want.

ZFS volume

You are actually the worst kind of IT person out there and have basically just fallen into every trap that gives the field a bad reputation.
- Assumed that this problem is caused by one specific issue.
- Assumed they don't have this issue already taken care of.
- Provided a detailed technical solution to a problem you don't know about.
- Provided a detailed technical solution without considering any of the many alternatives that achieve the same thing your solution proposed to fix.

You need one of these: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

I hate to say it, but if you're getting too old and making way for new blood then the field is better off for it. No doubt you have a wealth of experience and knowledge but that typically comes with the baggage of thinking you know every answer without ever even asking a question.

I still remember these with utter lack of fondness.

Will this year's Yuri's Night not be politically correct? as in https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Yuri gets a pass. He was part of that rare component of the Soviet system that accomplished something good and worthwhile, space exploration and research.

Will this year's Yuri's Night not be politically correct? as in https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

This is what you can redeem it for.

Chris, I thought you threw away the emails for all your sockpuppet accounts?

Now that I know what you look and sound like, your replies have taken on an even more comical, desperate, and sad tone.

A toothless virgin sitting in his 475 square feet of squalor, waiting two hours on the bus to read my latest reply.

Don't forget [...] you can build a pretty nice home theater

I'm not likely to forget. :)

I have a 204" inch screen and I'm perfectly happy with many of the DVDs in our library, which are about (hand-waving) 1/4 res against 1080p. Many movies have been made where detail just isn't really a core issue of viewer appreciation.

But you and I both have 1080p anyway. Because for some things, it does matter. As does frame rate for action movies.

Marketing will bring 4K into households, just as it did 1080p. And many will upgrade, and many will elect to try 4K streams. And many movies will be made that take advantage of this, and then we will see what happens - death as with stereo pseudo-3D, or life as with 1080p.

IMHO, it's not about "what's enough"; It's about what the masses end up accepting. It seems to me that 4K is going to be something they accept pretty quickly.

As an aside: I used to have a video (as in, NTSC, or Never Twice the Same Color) security system. When 1080p video security systems came out, I upgraded, and I have to tell you, it was more than worth it. When 4K security systems come out, I'll be all over that. Detail matters hugely in that application; and there are movies, particularly SF movies, where details also matter. That's the hook. And unlike the psuedo-3d stuff, no one will need special glasses and all that annoyance to see the difference. 8K too.

What about Detroit conditions?

http://farm3.static.flickr.com...

1% chance that.

No moving parts, everything is solid state, and if one has an on-grid system, there are no batteries to have to keep watered or replaced.

Out on the bleeding edge, you can already build electrical storage that is maintenance-free, and does not require grid connection. I built a pilot installation for my radio trailer - I'm a ham operator - where the storage is entirely ultracap based. I've got enough out there to provide about as much power as two 110 AH car batteries, which is more than enough to run the three LED lights in the trailer and my 265 watt consume / 100 watt output (on transmit only, it's about 10 watts consumption on receive) radio. I mostly listen, so that's an excellent consumption to supply ratio.

One of the thing that many people don't appreciate about standard solar panels is that they produce energy on cloudy days, albeit a reduced amount; my system never, ever goes down, because there is sufficient capacity to keep it up as compared to the amount of use it gets.

In the future, I expect the cost of ultracaps to come down considerably, and if that happens, the whole battery issue will go right out the window. Ultracaps have very long lifetimes, just as solar panels do. They're not nearly as toxic, either.

For now, I freely admit up front that the cost to do this was not something that is practical for a large installation, such as that which would be required to run a home with a typical 10 KW electrical service. You'd need a lot of panels and a lot of ultracaps (ultracaps are presently at about 10%-20% of energy storage as compared to a comparable size / weight bank of batteries.) However, that 10 KW service is almost always that large to deal with surge demands, rather than constant demand, and that means that you'd need fewer panels overall. The ultracaps are actually far better at delivering surge power than either the grid or batteries, so that cost is only about what you use on average, not peak usage. The converter (ultracaps have a very different discharge curve than batteries do, and require dedicated electronics to produce a steady output comparable to batteries), however, still has to handle the peaks.

Not everybody has been sucking at the tit of Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. In the PC space

In the PC Space? You mean in the Windows space? The MICROSOFT Windows tit?

The first to support 22-bit graphics (Voodoo), 32-bit graphics (RGBA), 4K, 120 fps, SSD, etc, consoles are always playing catching -- signified by the "PC Master Race" slogan.

Son, consoles had graphics back when home computers were using 40 column text and customized character sets for most of their displays. And I distinctly remember the PSone version of DOOM having TRUE transparency aka 24bit+8bit 32 bit color when the PC version didn't. The PSone had 24bit True color in 1995, the Voodoo 3 came out in 1999 and wasn't actually true color but 24 bit dithered down to 16 bit for output (which 3Dfx called 22-bit)

The keyboard + mouse blows the gamepad away for any sort of precision.

The PS2/PS3/PS4 have USB ports for a reason.

http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/ps2...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com...

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/cm...

I also must have imagined using a keyboard and/or mouse with various games for the PS2/PS3/PS4.

i.e. I'll seriously doubt we'll ever see StarCraft (1 or 2) on a console anytime soon

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wik...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

because console peripherals never sell well.

Who says? How many MILLIONS of mics, drums, and extra guitars have been sold for the various Rock band style games. how many millions of network adapters and eyetoys/playstation eyes has Sony sold. How many MILLIONS Of Dual Shock 3's, which wasn't the original PS3 controller, were sold. How many headsets?

Ah yess Symantec https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

I used a Minolta X-9 film camera with a Tokina 50mm f8 RMC Schmidt-Cassegrain lens mounting a solar filter on the front. In between shots I put a box over the lens to shade it to prevent the camera and lens from overheating. I thought it was a pretty obvious thing to do. Apparently it wasn't as obvious others. https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

http://www.progressiverailroad...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Not wanting to risk damage to my 60D, I invested in a Lee 20-stop neutral density solar filter. I only had a 300mm lens so the images were only so-so

I WAS in totality for about 2.5 minutes, so I did get corona shots: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

We were in the 90% zone for the recent solar eclipse and were entirely unwilling to make the drive to totality.

However, I was intrigued by the various articles that spoke to the idea that you couldn't shoot photos without filters, that cellphones couldn't be used, etc.

So, contrarian that I am, I shot DSLR photos without filters, and cellphone shots as well.

No corona shots (90% zone means the corona was never accessible) but I got some adequate shots, some of which are online here.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com...

a haven for anti-Science Inquisitors.

Anyone supporting libertarians, conservatives, classical liberals, or scientific gender differences will be fired, humiliated publicly, excoriated on twitter, made a target in the Mass Media, then lied about repeatedly.

Wecome to the #Goolag

Chinese Goolag https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

SJW Goolag https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DG...

here

In the future, all ads will be like this one.

Or we could just stop using fossil fuels which cause us harm directly with their emissions

This! 1000x times this. I don't care about climate change because frankly I don't think I'll be alive to see the worst of it or the best of it. I don't have any children or a stake in the future.

That said I hate the smell of the city. I hate the smell of working one block down from a coal fired power station. I hate when I clean my windows outside the main crap coming off them is black diesel soot.

All this ties back to my favourite comic: http://farm5.static.flickr.com...

This is not good news. It's a DMA-capable port, or worse: equivalent to a PCIe port. There is no way to secure such a port. Some have suggested IOMMU, but it's inadequare. ThunderStrike and ThunderStrike 2 already demonstrated trivial persistent implants over this port. It means if your laptop is out of your control even briefly, the screen lock can be bypassed, the unwrapped disk encryption key stolen, and persistent BIOS or AMT malware implanted. The multi-use of the port is even worse because it means your laptop doesn't even have to be out of your control. When Thunderbolt was a separate port, it was rarely used, or used through an adapter you control locking it to a more limited interface like displayport, limiting the frequency of your exposure. Now any charging brick will have physical RAM access and ability to implant backdoors.

With this port, things like tamper-proof screws become meaningless, and everything you stick into your laptop becomes a serious threat so using a public charger becomes a ridiculous proposition when it shouldn't be.

This is a terrible port, continuing the theme of Intel's NSA-friendly or at least NSA-blitheringly-ignorant designs (hardware RNG, AMT rootkit, AMT over wifi).

What do you do for a living?

I write software. Generally non-trivial application software. For instance, this is something I'm working on, and have been for some years now.

How would you feel if 10 years from now something failed and you were required to go back and fix it?

I have been fixing products for years as the bugs / errors were found. For free. Usually within hours or at most, days. I feel really good about it. For my commercial work, I charge for new features and keeping up with OS malfuckery. Not for my own errors. I am also very careful to maintain maximum compatibility with various OS releases -- rather than using the new OS features, I concentrate on using as few OS features as possible; and when they break I write my own if at all possible, thereby eliminating the dependence on the now-broken OS feature. For instance, at some point Apple's OS X file dialog began hanging the system when opened, which is pretty much a death sentence for real time signal processing software. So I wrote my own. No more hangs, plus it has some cool features the OS X dialog doesn't -- and it's highly unlikely to break, because it is coupled in as limited a manner as I could manage to OS X. But if it does, I'll fix it.

I am willing to put my best efforts forward fix every bug I can find that is "mine." I work around OS bugs if and when I manage to figure out how. I keep my documentation up to date, basically the same philosophy applies there: the docs should be as "right" as I can make them. I wrote my own documentation system to make sure I could keep control of that without my work becoming roadkill consequent to the "next cool thing" WRT someone else's documentation system.

Again: perfectly content with this. I like keeping my work as current as possible and as reliable and accurately represented as possible. I sleep very well because of it.

A car manufacturer is actually legally required to support their vehicles. If your car has a problem, and you discover it 10 years or more after manufacture, even if they sell the same model where they've fixed that flaw, they are in no way required to fix it on your car.

If the vehicle was defective with regard to features and/or capabilities touted at the time of sale, then in my opinion -- and I agree, not the law's, but the law is often bad and/or wrong, and I submit that this is one of those cases -- then the manufacturer should remain on the hook. That's not about wear; it's about it being what they said it was at the time of sale. If it isn't what they said it was, then they either owe a fix, or a refund. Simple fix: Don't sell stuff you aren't willing to put your best efforts into. I don't find that to be any problem. Then again, I'm the boss, so I get to say that. I don't need the law to tell me to do that, I do it because I am confident that it is the right thing to do.

Legally, 10 years tends to be the expected lifespan of things. Don't believe me, look how long your houses structural warranty lasts. Yup, 10 years. Even though standard mortgages are 30 years.

Apples and oranges. I'm not talking about something wearing out. I'm talking about it being supplied in a defective state.

1) Company sells you a home, claims has full basement
2) You buy it
3) Turns out there's no basement ...yes, even if it takes you fifty years to figure it out, they should still be on the hook for the deceit and the consequences of that deceit.

Again, simple fix: Don't DO stuff like that.

Yep. Hey, you know what's great? Talking to people. Sex. Building models. Organizing one's rock/stamp/severedhead collections. Writing code. Playing with the cat/dog/cockatrice. Martial arts. Photography. Reading. Taking courses. Exercising. Working out a sane budget. Listening to music. Playing music. Sewing. Legos. Fooling with hardware. Home improvements. Giving the domicile a good once-over at the ultra-picky level, just for the fun of it. Putting the yard in tip-top order. Walking the canine or the cat. Visiting Rome, Paris or Venice (while pretending to be Canadian, of course.) Or just going to see a friend. You know, in person, not with that phone-tumor. Taking a walk, preferably somewhere you haven't been or really love. Etc. Lots and lots of etc.

Television... I just can't bring myself to call that "great." The couch, it really does make for potato generation.

I don't know how much an anatomically functional interactive sexbot will cost, but it will likely be way cheaper than alimony and child support, and it won't get headaches. If it has a "mute" button and can make sandwiches, that is even better.

True story:

My SO, Deb, and I were laying about in bed one lazy afternoon; she seemed to be dozing lightly.

Me: "Hey, baby?"
Her: "Mmmm?"

Me: "When {unspoken:sex} robots come out, can we get a French maid?"
She: "Sure."
 
...a few seconds pass...

She: "We'll call him 'Pierre.'"

I made a photo-toon of this

It sounds like you haven't used any actual software development/engineering skills in a long time

Heh heh. Yes, well, I suppose I can see how you might get that impression. However, no. It's just that a lot of the make work is gone, and so I can concentrate on the meat of the problem instead of having to write menu systems, widget systems, threading, etc. Here is an example of the stuff I write. That software is pretty much state of the art for the sector it addresses. It offers some things that nothing else in the market segment does, and it's very high performance. None of the core functionality comes from anywhere but my head. But having said that, there's a shitload of stuff I didn't have to write to make the app work, and I have the source code to all of it too, so generally speaking, nothing is "going away" such that it would get all up in my face.

As for my career, I'm retired. Already made my nest; I do this for fun now.

if you are ignorant of history, or a cat.

Early airports did not in fact have paved runways. The fields were often large squares or circles that enabled aviators to land in any direction they chose, and they generally chose based upon wind direction, taking off and landing into the wind which provided better airspeed/lift at lower ground speed.

As time went by even developed airfields retained the large square or larg circle layout. The airfield on North Island in San Diego, which was at one time an army airfield, then a shared army/navy field before becoming a navy field can be seen in old archival images online with the circular layout. Here is an example image:

North Island in the 1930s. The large dark rectangular runway (lower-right half of island) is the Naval Air Station runway. The large dark circle in the upper-left half of the island is the circular runway of Rockwell Field Army Base. Here is an image that shows the army/navy parts of the island back then, and here are the runways in 1933 from another view.

A little historical knowledge could kill a lot of bogus patents and sloppy PopSci/PopMechanics-style over-enthusiastic "journalism" about "new" inventions and ideas.

if you are ignorant of history, or a cat.

Early airports did not in fact have paved runways. The fields were often large squares or circles that enabled aviators to land in any direction they chose, and they generally chose based upon wind direction, taking off and landing into the wind which provided better airspeed/lift at lower ground speed.

As time went by even developed airfields retained the large square or larg circle layout. The airfield on North Island in San Diego, which was at one time an army airfield, then a shared army/navy field before becoming a navy field can be seen in old archival images online with the circular layout. Here is an example image:

North Island in the 1930s. The large dark rectangular runway (lower-right half of island) is the Naval Air Station runway. The large dark circle in the upper-left half of the island is the circular runway of Rockwell Field Army Base. Here is an image that shows the army/navy parts of the island back then, and here are the runways in 1933 from another view.

A little historical knowledge could kill a lot of bogus patents and sloppy PopSci/PopMechanics-style over-enthusiastic "journalism" about "new" inventions and ideas.

if you are ignorant of history, or a cat.

Early airports did not in fact have paved runways. The fields were often large squares or circles that enabled aviators to land in any direction they chose, and they generally chose based upon wind direction, taking off and landing into the wind which provided better airspeed/lift at lower ground speed.

As time went by even developed airfields retained the large square or larg circle layout. The airfield on North Island in San Diego, which was at one time an army airfield, then a shared army/navy field before becoming a navy field can be seen in old archival images online with the circular layout. Here is an example image:

North Island in the 1930s. The large dark rectangular runway (lower-right half of island) is the Naval Air Station runway. The large dark circle in the upper-left half of the island is the circular runway of Rockwell Field Army Base. Here is an image that shows the army/navy parts of the island back then, and here are the runways in 1933 from another view.

A little historical knowledge could kill a lot of bogus patents and sloppy PopSci/PopMechanics-style over-enthusiastic "journalism" about "new" inventions and ideas.

If this means they can make some money by selling my info then perhaps my internet bill out-of-pocket will come down over time.

No, it just means they'll make more money.

Here's the key idea you have to understand when you see moneyed interests enabled to make yet more money:

"Trickle down" is a metaphor for the moneyed interests pissing on your head.

Also, this.

But this makes as much sense as welding a Chevy to the back of a Honda and pretending you've achieved something worthwhile.

Reminds me of these:

Bus on a bus
Early camper truck?