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User: curmudgeon99

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  1. Re:4,000 Books = 4,000 Screens on Poll Shows That 75% Prefer Printed Books To eBooks · · Score: 1

    It's not the same. You only have one physical screen and you can only have one book open at one time on that one screen.

  2. 4,000 Books = 4,000 Screens on Poll Shows That 75% Prefer Printed Books To eBooks · · Score: 1

    I have 4,000 books, most of them hardbacks. I stopped watching television in 8th grade and have never owned a TV. I have two 27" iMacs. If I were to buy a kindle, I could have one book open at a time. I like to read 4 or 5 books at a time, reading a few chapters of one and then switching to another one. Sometimes I will encounter a particularly brilliant passage in a book and so I will leave the book on my desk open to that page for quick reference. It is, in effect, as if I have 4,000 screens. Many dozens of them can be open at the same time. My favorite place to read long-form works is in the bathtub. I just finished "Free Lunch" by David Cay Johnson about how the rich are ripping all of us off by getting the US government to underwrite them. Then I switched to "The Definitive Guide to CentOS". I have "War & Peace" open on my desk to a brilliant passage that never fails to inspire me as I work on my 12th novel. All of these activities would be impossible if I had one measly Kindle. The printed book is a technology that has never been bettered.

  3. Re:Jag Off Republicans on Draft NASA Funding Bill Cancels Asteroid Mission For Return To the Moon · · Score: 1

    Oh? So what possible benefit can we derive from going to the moon AGAIN? If you read the article, it's clear the only reason they want to go to the moon is for a jobs program. Having followed politics for years, I can clearly state that the Republicans care about nothing but getting their money. They are all about cashing in and this is yet another example. So, douche bag, I stand by my comments.

  4. Jag Off Republicans on Draft NASA Funding Bill Cancels Asteroid Mission For Return To the Moon · · Score: 1

    If President Obama announced a desire to cure cancer, the Republicans would take the side of cancer. Jag offs.

  5. Re:The Path To Faster-Than-Light Travel on Does Antimatter Fall Up? · · Score: 1

    No, I understand that this particular story was about the reverse effects of antimatter.
    I was taking the excuse of this news to point out the idea of negative mass being the ideal way to circumvent E=MC2. If your net mass is zero, then the massive energy that would be converted into mass does not need to happen. I agree with your assessment of what kind of mass antimatter has--positive mass--but if there were negative mass, that's the way to Warp 5.

  6. The Path To Faster-Than-Light Travel on Does Antimatter Fall Up? · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I have been thinking this for twenty years.

    Think of E=MC2.

    Faster than light travel is only impossible when you have a net positive mass. If your mass is net zero, (meaning in your magnetic grip you hold matter and antimatter in the same functional unit but not touching each other (two magnetic bottles), then you could travel faster than the speed of light.

  7. Last Dealings With Microsoft for me? 1998 on Microsoft Telling Users To Uninstall Bad Patch · · Score: -1, Troll

    For all of the morons out there who are so uncreative as to still be using a damned Windows OS, I pity you and wish that you could set up a curtain so the rest of us don't have to see the ugly machinations going on in your Windows ecosystem.
    As I write this from my 27-inch iMac, I know that nobody's perfect. Macs are 99% awesome but even they have a tiny blemish or two.
    But that's nothing like the ongoing decade-long bloodbath going on in the Microsoft camp. So, Microsoft itself cannot get it right? Them asking you to clean up a mess they pushed on you? Are you freaking kidding?

    In the Apple world, we have had the occasional inconvenience as Apple reacted, proactively, to protect from some zero-day Java exploits. (Thank you, you Apple bastards.)
    But that is NOTHING like living in Microsoft's jungle with all those rabid wild animals sniffing around, looking for fresh meat.

  8. Please, Take Python Out And Shoot It in the Head on Python Creator Guido van Rossum Leaves Google For Dropbox · · Score: 0, Troll

    Please, God, cannot somebody please take that stupid abomination of a language Python out in back and shoot it in the head until dead. I have never used a less friendly piece of Monkey Pus than the "language" Python.

  9. Last Software Written By Bill Gates on 30 Years of the TRS-80 Model 100 · · Score: 1

    This was my first computer! I spent $1,000 on it. It was awesome and I still have it. I'm sure if I popped some fresh batteries in it it would still work. The funny thing is I'm betting Bill Gates also wrote the manual which was famously a mess with references to non-existent sections. Still, this got me into software development. I remember I had a tape-backup drive that I used to store off programs and after I had been storing them on tape for a long while I noticed that I had a variable-speed tape player and I was never able to recover a dang thing from tape. Still, I loved this and eventually got a floppy disk drive for it that would store 250K. Still have all that in a bin.

  10. WHAT New York City Phone Booths ??? on Giant Touchscreens Coming To NYC Phone Booths · · Score: 1

    So, they're going to do this for all six pay phones in New York City? I should clarify to mean working pay phones. The subways are full of the derelict hulks of formerly working pay phones. Across the five boroughs, pay phones--especially working ones--are as scarce as hen's teeth. Actual step-inside phone booths are even less abundant.

  11. Stop The Yahoo Spam Tsunami First on Yahoo To Implement Do Not Track · · Score: 0

    Yahoo, this is all fine but I think the rest of the world would be happier if you would first stop the tsunami of spam email that comes from @yahoo.com servers. It's ridiculous. Unless you want to block every moron who still uses an @yahoo.com email address, you are stuck putting up with a tidal wave of spam.

  12. Hah! What Has Indian Invented? on Indian Government To Tax Angel Funding · · Score: 0

    This is rich. They're going to tax Indian entrepreneurs. So, who? What has India invented? The last thing they invented was Sanscrit. The rest has been derivative.
    But I will say the only impact this law will have is making sure it stays that way. To a person who lives in the United States, this is comical. "Don't interfere with your enemy when he's committing suicide."

  13. Re:Why the anxiety? on Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x? · · Score: 1

    I have firebug on my mac no problem. But for my windows 7 pc, FF8 does not support firebug.

  14. Re:Why the anxiety? on Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x? · · Score: 1

    As I said, XPather remains the reason I keep FF3.6.

  15. Re:Why the anxiety? on Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x? · · Score: 2

    There's a good reason. Firefox 3.6 is the last version that supports those nice-to-have goodies such as Firebug and, in my case, XPather. After 3.6 Firefox started to progress so quickly through the versions no plugin maker could keep up.

  16. The Brilliance of 'MapReduce' Is Overblown on First Look: Oracle NoSQL Database · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I cannot understand why MapReduce has been turned into such a holy creation. The idea could not be simpler: you have a big dataset? Break it apart into pieces that are free of external dependencies, process the pieces in parallel and then aggregate the matches from the processed pieces.
    This is not Hadoop, with its elaborate application plumbing or CouchDB with its curious use of MapReduce as part of its querying system.
    MapReduce is too simple for all acclaim. It's too obvious.

  17. TFA F'd in the Ass, Oracle Lied on First Look: Oracle NoSQL Database · · Score: 1

    The person who wrote this article was an idiot. First of all, it describes several brilliant innovations Oracle brought to the table:

    It's a key-value store I guess they have to steal that idea to join the category.
    Consistency can be throttled so that a write does not complete until it has gone to one, a quorum or all replication nodes. Duh! For years that has been a feature on nearly every incumbent NoSQL DB such as CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others.
    It allows you to attach a version number to an object. Duh! again. Another common and central features in CouchDB.

  18. Hadoop Is Easy: MapReduce + plumbing on IT's Next Hot Job: Hadoop Guru · · Score: 1

    This should be a no brainer. Hadoop is merely MapReduce plus the plumbing to care and feed for it. All the various nodes and TaskTrackers, it's not that complicated at all. You can learn the basics in a night and master it in a month.

  19. AWS EBS on Which OSS Clustered Filesystem Should I Use? · · Score: 1

    Why are you spending your money like that? Sneaker-net your drives to AWS EBS. It's a no-brainer.

  20. Cringely Rocks on Lost Hour-Long Jobs Interview Found · · Score: 1

    Robert Cringely, famous as the only pioneer from Silicon Valley not to get rich, is just an awesome human being. If you don't know why I say that, go to YouTube and find his three-hour creation "Triumph of the Nerds". It's something that is going to be watched for the next thousand years, if humanity survives. It's just an amazing document on the origins of the tech industry and all of its later fruits are visible there.

  21. Re:Wall Street Should Be Afraid on Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global · · Score: 1

    I think you make some good points. How ironic--the left and the right are joining in their hatred for banks and our government. :)

  22. Re:Wall Street Should Be Afraid on Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global · · Score: 1

    The world finds a movement driven by intuitive disgust at Wall Street, with millions involved without a central organization, and this guy thinks the movement is toast. There are always cynics who hate everything. I have heard many precise issues raised by members of OWS. I think they have only begun to fight.

  23. Re:Wall Street Should Be Afraid on Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global · · Score: 1

    I think the Tea Party and OWS share nothing but the same enemies. The Tea Party has been co-opted by the Koch group "Americans for Prosperity" so the original Tea Party group no longer exists.

  24. Re:Wall Street Should Be Afraid on Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global · · Score: 1

    Hannity, go back into your hole.

  25. Re:Wall Street Should Be Afraid on Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global · · Score: 1

    Yes, I agree. When I wrote the original it had paragraphs. But one forgets that you're posting as HTML and haste makes one neglect P tags.