Slashdot Mirror


User: jheiss

jheiss's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
24
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 24

  1. Re:Millie bloody who? on Crack In Fukushima Structure May Be Leaking Radiation · · Score: 3, Informative

    1,000 millisieverts of radiation per hour

    I don't understand. Can someone translate that into old-fashioned units like luminous watches per hockey game?

    Various sources[1,2] indicate a range of 1-100 mrem/hr for a radium watch face, with about 20 mrem/hr looking like a plausible average. 1 mrem == .01 mSv[3], so 1000 mSv is about 5000 watch faces/hr. Apparently a standard ice hockey game is 60 minutes[4], so:

    1000 mSv/hr == 5000 radium watch faces/hockey game

    :)

    [1] http://trusted-forwarder.org/elgin/help/luminous_dials.html
    [2] http://www.nuenergy.org/alt/radium2.htm
    [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
    [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Hockey_League#Game

  2. Re:Good for apple on Apple Voiding Smokers' Warranties? · · Score: 1

    "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." I've never quite understood why we allow public smoking but not public drinking. Seems to me it ought to be reversed. Some guy standing next to me drinking a beer causes me no harm or even discomfort, quite the opposite for the smoking.

  3. Re:Good for apple on Apple Voiding Smokers' Warranties? · · Score: 1

    Bans on smoking in business are generally pitched as protection for the employees rather than the customers. We have all sorts of laws about protecting employees from callous employers. Banning smoking seems right up there with requiring guards on sharp tools and eye protection for welders and all the other sorts of mandated employee protection. If you can own and operate a business with no other employees than I don't have a problem with you and your customers smoking like chimneys.

  4. Re:Good for apple on Apple Voiding Smokers' Warranties? · · Score: 1

    Reading between the lines a bit it would seem that Wikipedia disagrees with you on the origin of the word marriage. In the Etymology section of the Marriage article they indicate the origin is Latin. Which means it almost certainly predates Christianity. In the European marriages section and the linked Roman marriage article religion is indicated as playing at most a supporting role in the process.

    Telling gay couples they have to use a different word seems to me a last attempt to snub them. If we change the term for everyone that's fine, although it seems a bit silly given the history. If religions want a term for their ceremony related to marriage then come up with a new one, like Mormon sealing.

  5. Re:Can I avoid this simply by avoiding Disney? on Disney Close To Unveiling New "DVD Killer" · · Score: 1

    Was just wondering that myself

  6. Re:Why can't I just use my iPhone? on The Kindle Killer Arrives · · Score: 1
  7. Re:AT&T's Been Doing This on Verizon FiOS/DSL Customers Get Free Wi-Fi Across US · · Score: 1

    Maybe someone who has the service can comment on it's openness.

    It's quite trivial, you browse to the captive portal, click the link for alternate logins, plug in your AT&T DSL username and password and you're set. I've used this for several years, it's a nice little bonus for having DSL from the mothership. Still works now that I've switched to U-verse as well.

  8. Re:I for one welcome on The Pirate Bay to Become a Distributed Storage Cloud? · · Score: 1

    Well, since you can rent nodes on Amazon EC2 for $70/month or so I think the market value of a home computer on a crappy DSL line with all the attendant flakiness is maybe $10/month max. The model of paying folks for usage of their home computer has been tried a few times, but I think it is doomed to fail. The money isn't significant enough to attract users.

  9. Re:good idea on Weather Balloons To Provide Broadband In Africa · · Score: 1

    What exactly is the scrap value of fiber?

  10. Re:Sounds more like NASA on Russian Manned Space Vehicle May Land With Rockets · · Score: 1

    "Flammable wood" is no good, but grease is OK? I don't know what kind of pencil they used, but if it was grease instead of graphite I suspect it wasn't due to flammability concerns. Broken graphite seems a more plausible concern.

  11. Re:Hype? on A.I. and Robotics Take Another Wobbly Step Forward · · Score: 1

    Indeed. Although the example listed in the article (successfully responding to "go fetch me a stapler") is impressive, I highly doubt that if I plunked the robot down in my office it could perform that task. Nor could it probably handle a request for an arbitrarily different object in their lab (go fetch me light bulb). They've integrated a lot of difficult problems and managed to get it to work in their environment, but unless they're well ahead of anyone else this is still within a narrowly defined problem domain.

    So yeah, neat trick, but I figure I'm still decades away from a robot usefully helping out around the home or office with random chores. My personal interest, locomotion and other interaction with the physical world, remains a tricky problem. Wheels won't cut it in most homes, although they could work in an office. A general sense of touch for walking and grasping remains largely unsolved. Speech recognition needs incremental improvement, language processing, reasoning and vision all need major breakthroughs. Seems like we're still solidly in the valley of "disrepute" mentioned in the article.

  12. Re:Christmas? on Larry Wall Talks Perl, Culture, and Community · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It appears within the system administration community that Ruby is well on its way to replacing Perl as the de facto language for major tools. Well over half of the new tools introduced at the LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference this year were written in Ruby. I've been developing in Perl for about 15 years, but have recently switched nearly all of my development to Ruby. I know I'm tired of hearing about how great Perl 6 will be. I've been hearing that promise for half a decade now. The biggest drawback to Ruby right now is that the availability of 3rd party libraries is nowhere near the level of what's in CPAN.

    Apple is also putting a significant amount of effort into improving and integrating Ruby with Mac OS X. MacRuby and HotCocoa both look really interesting, particularly if you want to develop GUI apps.

  13. 2x RAM if your kernel dumps to swap, otherwise 2GB on How Big Should My Swap Partition Be? · · Score: 1

    My standard (which is deployed on 10s of thousands of machines) is 2x RAM if your kernel writes crash dumps to swap (i.e. FreeBSD and many others), 2 GB if your kernel writes crash dumps somewhere else (i.e. netdump on Red Hat). The 2 GB provides enough of a buffer that the system doesn't immediately puke if you go slightly over your actual RAM, but doesn't allow you to run way over your actual RAM. On servers with 16 or 32 or even 64 GB of RAM and a 73GB SCSI or 80 GB SATA drive you can't go 2x RAM anyway.

    This is for servers, desktops are probably a totally different story, but Mac OS X is my desktop OS and it just does some magic that I don't have to pay attention to.

  14. Re:Next Logical Step... on Trekkie Communicators Now a Reality · · Score: 1

    My first thought after seeing that the server was Windows based was "Can I buy the little communicator devices and write my own server software?" Seems like some replacement server software that runs on Linux, scales decently, integrates with LDAP, etc. would be a good SourceForge project.

  15. Re:Duh on 'Extreme' Web Sites Under Fire From UK Police · · Score: 1

    Perhaps we should leave "marriage" to religious organizations and have the state simply recognize "domestic corporations"?

  16. Re:Here's my 64-bit opinion: on Linus on Intel's 64 bit Extensions · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Who says it was HTML? Did you see a DTD statement?

  17. Re:IPv4 good enough? on The State of IPv6 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Amen, I pay $20 a month to my ISP for a static IPv4 IP (I know, it's highway robbery). Then I have to play games with iptables and DNAT to access things from the outside.

    freenet6 gives me a /48 IPv6 network (2^80 addresses) for free. And with 6to4 I can get another /48 network based on my one IPv4 address. Every one of my machines (and every square micron of my house for that matter) can have its own Internet reachable IP.

  18. Re:Better security? on The State of IPv6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sure, there will be some issues to be worked out with the stacks. But this argument about IPv6 providing lots of opportunties for bugs in userspace apps seems specious to me. (I've seen others make it too, so I'm not just picking on you.) For example, in Java you generally need no code changes at all to support IPv6. Even in C you don't go poking around at IP addresses much. Mostly you just get a pointer to a addr struct of some sort and pass it along to the next system function without inspecting it. Outside of the stack and libc I don't see much opportunity for new bugs.

  19. Re:that is what I have heard on The State of IPv6 · · Score: 1

    Most IPv6 connections at the moment are tunneled through IPv4 and the tunneling mechanisms do add significant latency. IPv6 addresses are a bit larger, so theoretically it will take a few extra CPU cycles to process them, but I don't think a native IPv6 network would be noticably slower than IPv4.

  20. Access control on The Year 2003 in Wireless Network Security · · Score: 1

    Working at a .edu we don't particularly trust our wired networks either, so pretty much all of our services (HTTP, IMAP, LDAP, etc.) require encryption (SSL or SSH). So the only thing special about wireless is that someone doesn't have to walk into the building to get on the network.

    The most common solution to this for now seems to be to do some magic with DHCP, iptables, etc. to force the user to a web page where they authenticate themselves before giving them normal network access. I'd prefer we could negotiate an IPSec tunnel, but all the attempts I've seen so far were a bit of a hack. Most Linux distros don't even come with FreeS/WAN, and configuring the Windows IPSec client to talk to a non-Windows IPSec server is a nightmore.

  21. Re:Once again, Slashdot trumps logic for technolog on Traffic Light Control For The Masses · · Score: 1
  22. Patch availability more important than support on The Increasing Cost of Red Hat Linux? · · Score: 1

    Most posters seem to be focusing on the support aspect. For us, the much more important factor is security patch availability. Even Red Hat 9 is only supported until next April. So if we reinstall all of our Red Hat 7.2-8.0 boxes with 9, we'll have to start all over again within 6 months to go to 10. That ain't gonna happen.

    We've been paying for basic Red Hat Network subscriptions for our 30 servers ($60/server/year). The jump to a basic ES (Enterprise Server) subscription ($349/server/year) is too steep. Why the huge price differential for essentially the same thing, just a longer support lifecycle?

    We're a department at a state university so we can't afford the prices for RHEL. We asked Red Hat about educational discounts but they will only discount WS (Workstation), and then only in blocks of 100.

    We're looking at SuSE and Debian as the likely alternatives, but it is sure hard to give up our knowledge and experience with Red Hat. It seems to me that Red Hat needs to find some middle ground between the poor home user and the flush enterprise accounts.

  23. I've been using my Palm Pro for 5+ years on Do People Really Use Their PDAs? · · Score: 1

    I've got a Palm Professional that I bought in 1997 that I still use every day. I use it almost exclusively for the calander, because it can do something that no paper organizer can: beep 5 minutes before I have a meeting. Otherwise I get working on something and completely forget. I mostly store phone numbers in my head or in my cell phone. I've tried several times to put my todo list into my Palm but I always find it too cumbersome and revert back to paper notes. But for storing my calendar, I consider my Palm essential.

  24. Looks aren't everything... on Linux.com Finally Has Content · · Score: 1

    And apparently running on NT or a 386 since it
    is now slow as a dog.