Slashdot Mirror


User: clem.dickey

clem.dickey's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
274
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 274

  1. Re:Watergate? on RNC Calls For Halt To Unconstitutional Surveillance · · Score: 1

    Watergate was done by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), which was in no way associated with the Republican Party. Trust them on that.

  2. Re:Incorrect correlation on Apple Devices To Reach Parity With Windows PCs In 2014 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The BIOS was "open" in that anyone could read it. The Technical Reference Manual included a source listing. It was copyrighted, however, and so could not be used in clones.

  3. Will this be on the test? on MPAA Backs Anti-Piracy Curriculum For Elementary School Students · · Score: 1

    The student's grade, and the schools' grade are test-based. (The teacher's grade may be too, though that's still a bone of contention.) Until it's on the test (Common Core, in the current instance), where is the incentive to teach it?

  4. Re:I always justed used an external editor on Facebook May Dislike the Social Fixer Extension, but Many Users Love It (Video) · · Score: 1

    History: The IBM 3270 series terminals, which predated the PC and with which all the original IBM PC developers were familiar, had separate "Return" (carriage return) and "Enter" (submit form) keys. This architecture minimized precious CPU interrupts. You would fill out an entire form in the terminal, with multiple fields and multiple lines on the peripheral device, then send the whole form to the CPU in one action. This was important in an architecture originally designed for batch processing, and which referred interactive support as the "Time-Sharing Option."

    That's a long way from the Unix model, in which every keystroke generated an interrupt, or the PC paradigm, where every key-down and key-up action generated an interrupt.

    On my IBM PC keyboard, the word "Enter" is above a "return" symbol. So for sites like Facebook, which require a shift for the "return" function, the non-shift action is the upper marking and the shift action is the lower marking!.

  5. Re:Kind of on topic on Owner of Battery Fire Tesla Vehicle: Car 'Performed Very Well, Will Buy Again' · · Score: 1

    The lens probably provides an orientation neutral, disc-shaped image. If the image sensor and recorder supported a disc shape, then the viewer (or editor) could choose the framing: horizontal, or vertical, square, Cinerama, or just leave it as a disc.

  6. Re:The key phrase here is: on True Size of the Shadow Banking System Revealed (Spoiler: Humongous) · · Score: 1

    The "occult quality" in this case being the applicability of Zipf's Law, to which the +2 comments so far have exactly one reference. And that reference getting things exactly backwards. Even the graph in the article omits most of the area of the curve which is key to the hypothesis. That is the area in the upper left corner, between the actual values reported for largest banks and their hypothetical position on the Zipf's rule line.

  7. Re:Amusing scenario... on Concern Mounts Over Self-Driving Cars Taking Away Freedom · · Score: 2

    This is like vaccinations. If you are the sole anti-social person, no problem. But if you run into (pun intended) a like-minded person, they become your moderator.

  8. Re:Frequency vs. Distance on Door-To-Door Mail Delivery To End Under New Plan · · Score: 1

    I would not want to walk a whole block 6 days a week, but once a week would be okay. And put a big shared recycling container just below the mailbox cluster. Or would that make the obvious too obvious?

  9. Re:Can't read the article on The Pentagon's Seven Million Lines of Cobol · · Score: 1

    ... and I apologize to C (and Slashdot), there is a C11!.

  10. Re:Can't read the article on The Pentagon's Seven Million Lines of Cobol · · Score: 1

    COBOL too is being updated. It is on its fourth ANSI/ISO standard, most recently in 2002. Compare with ANSI C, still stuck in 1999.

  11. Possible to time yellows below speed limit reqs? on Florida DOT Cuts Yellow Light Delay Ignoring Federal Guidelines, Citations Soar · · Score: 1

    According to TFA, the Federal guidelines recommend times based on the posted speed limit or the 85th percentile of actual speed, whichever is greater. Florida is ignoring/removing the "whichever is greater" clause.

    In most cases, one can assume that the 85th percentile is greater than the posted limit, in which case the times are based on the posted limit. The ones at risk of a ticket are speeding drivers. But reading the article literally, there is another possibility. If the 85th percentile of actual speed is *less* than the limit (as in a congested area), FDOT is free to time yellow lights according to the 85th percentile, and *below* what the posted speed limit would require. Such an action would put drivers who are otherwise law-abiding at risk for tickets.

  12. Re:Shhhhh!! on You've Got 25 Years Until UNIX Time Overflows · · Score: 1

    "What are all these binary types?" "C++ is just so clunky" Wait - we hear that today. "Can't we just rewrite it all using q-bits?"

  13. Re:I'm not surprised. on Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots · · Score: 2

    It is not surprising that people don't see the ads. The traditional Facebook page (I have not seen Timeline) has four columns, three of which can be entirely ignored.

    I find myself developing a unique "blind spot" for every common page with static ad placement. It's hard for me to find the ads even when I want to browse them.

  14. It's about "right to sue", not about damages on Ohio Supreme Court Drawn Into Magnetic Homes Case · · Score: 3, Informative

    Slashdot summary does not agree with the original article, which says the Supreme Court will only decide whether the couple has the right to sue (a matter of law). Only later might the question move to whether magnetized joists have caused any trouble, a matter of fact.

  15. Re:Long time coming... on IBM's Watson To Help Diagnose, Treat Cancer · · Score: 2
    An anecdote from Dr. James C. Cain (former head of section, gastroenterology and internal medicine at Mayo), from about 1981:

    A patient came to May Clinic with vague symptoms. One histologist remarked "This guy has weird blood. I've seen it before, but can't remember where." Several days later the histologist came back with the book where he had seen that "weird blood." Leprosy. Mayo didn't get many lepers.

    "We were just lucky," said Dr. Cain, "that the histologist remembered the pattern. But imagine what we could do with a computerized search."

  16. A more sensible chair on UN Names N. Korea Chair of Disarmament Committee · · Score: 5, Funny

    The United States deserves the chairmanship, on a semi-permanent basis.

    In terms of volume, the United States is doing more to disarm itself than any other country. We presently have disarmament operations underway over Afghanistan, Libya, and to a lesser extent Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

  17. Re:Unconstitutional? on Google/Facebook: Do-Not-Track Threatens CA Economy · · Score: 1

    If it is unconstitutional, why are the companies complaining? Let the legislature pass the law and then the MPAA et al. can take constitutionality up with the courts. Except that the companies would have to hire a law firm to represent them in court.

  18. There is honor among thieves on Amazon Named the "Most Reputable Company" · · Score: 1

    Amazon does a very good job of looking after their customers' interests. Even when those interests include letting other people pay for police, fire suppression and education.

  19. Re:DecorMyCell.com on Malicious Online Retailer Ordered Held Without Bail · · Score: 1

    Did you put the name in quotes, to get an exact match? There is a good summary in this InfoWorld article. Note that in his first computer scam he passed as "Col. David W. Winthrop, USAF retired" in a Santa Maria CA computer club. Santa Maria is a stones throw from Vandenberg AFB, and I imagine that a large part of the tech community there worked at Vandenberg. Amazing, I think that he pulled it off. I never met him, but heard that he was a *very* personable fellow.

    In those days (1977 or so) it was common for computer start-ups to take money in advance of shipment and use that money to fund development. Hunt used that model, except that he was planning to skip town with the money. He did hire engineering staff and a receptionist to make DataSync (no relation to any current company using that name) look legitimate. I understand that the staff were made corporate officers, which meant they were working for stock options rather than salary.

    After Hunt was caught the staff - which had not known that they were working for a con man - tried to make a go of what was left. The receptionist was required to warn customers with a script that went something like this: "I must inform you that the advertisements placed by DataSync were fraudulent, and the person responsible for them is now in jail. Knowing that, would you still like to order quality products from DataSync?" But DataSync finally folded before filling any customer orders.

  20. Re:DecorMyCell.com on Malicious Online Retailer Ordered Held Without Bail · · Score: 5, Informative

    Modded funny. Okay, but perhaps the moderators have forgotten the case of Norman Henry Hunt. Mr. Hunt was convicted of mail fraud (phony computer parts). He escaped from prison, was caught and convicted again (more mail fraud, plus the escape). After the second conviction, he was found to be running a mail order business out of a P.O. Box at NNCC. His ads represented NNCC as the Northern Nevada Computing Center; it was actually the Northern Nevada *Correctional* Center.

  21. Re:Pot meet kettle. on Foxconn's Founder Opens Up About Making iPhones · · Score: 1

    In one part of the article it talks about him involved in a libel suit over the suicide reports

    Good point.

    It wasn't actually over the suicide reports, but over an earlier article on "working conditions." A personal libel suit against the journalists and a court order freezing their assets.

  22. Re:Bit = Binary Digit on Toshiba Claims Bit-Patterned Drive Breakthrough · · Score: 1
    Everyone knew a byte was 8 bits, so everyone knew base 10 didn't apply in computers, being binary and all.

    Parent has history backwards. Disks were invented, and measured in megabytes, back when bytes were not necessarily 8 bits and computers were not necessarily sold as "binary" machines. The typical disk record was 80 bytes long, since it came from a Hollerith card. The IBM 1401 was typically sold with 4K bytes of main memory. Four thousand 6-bit bytes.

  23. Re:What does slashdot say? on Sentence Spacing — 1 Space or 2? · · Score: 1

    My favorite markup language uses this disambiguation: A period at the end of a line ends a sentence. Any other period does not.

    No escape characters necessary to mark abbreviations. Just begin each sentence on a new line.

  24. 60 Minutes did this story in 2008 - pointer on Inside the Fake PC Recycling Market · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pointer to an old 60 Minutes story on just this. The U.S. recycler in question was shocked that his dumpster-full of CRTs ended up in China.

  25. Re:I wonder on Seagate Confirms 3TB Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    > a standard that the industry has long since abandoned

    Or rather, never adopted. IBM has specified disk capacity in powers of 10 since RAMAC.