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User: Titoxd

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Comments · 196

  1. AZ - lucky you on U.S. Election Day In Progress: What's Been Your Experience? · · Score: 1

    I went to the polls at about the same time, and had to spend one hour waiting in line...

  2. Re:Vocab Nazi strikes again! on Google To Pay $0 To Oracle In Copyright Case · · Score: 2

    Please turn in your Vocab Nazi card at the nearest Nazi Card Collection Center.

    Lanai is located east of the International Date Line, at 20.833333 N, -156.933333 W. The name "typhoon" is reserved for a tropical cyclone in the Northwest Pacific Ocean (i.e. west of the International Date Line). See http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/A1.html for more details.

  3. Re:one word on Elon Musk: Future Round-Trip To Mars Could Cost Under $500,000 · · Score: 1

    5) Re-fuel with fuel conveniently pre-manufactured by previous robotic missions (this is the only part not obvious to me how it would be done for whatever that's worth).

    You just make it there, using the Sabatier reaction or something similar.

  4. Re:obligatory... on Mastering Engineer Explains Types of Compression, Effects On Today's Music · · Score: 1

    That sound you hear is a 256-kbps WHOOOSH...

  5. Re:Great, now the terrorists are controlling natur on What The DHS Is Looking For In Your Posts · · Score: 2

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we have systems designed to monitor weather, flooding, seismic activity, volcanism and so on? If they're finding out about natural disasters from social networks, that's beyond pathetic.

    True, but sensors can't tell you what impact a tornado is causing; for that, you need "ground truth" information. The National Weather Service still has a network of weather spotters to complement the information given by the sensors, and took storm reports over Twitter a couple of years ago to further augment that info (not sure if they are still doing that, though).

  6. Re:IPv6 Info, disable Javascript to read Wikipedia on June 6 Is World IPv6 Day 2012: This Time For Keeps · · Score: 1

    I used NoScript to block the JS too, but only a few can use these workarounds. Some opt to use mirrors like thefreedictionary. For the masses though, they cannot use wikipedia for 24 hours, and they cannot work around it. It is a major disruption of operations, as far as they are concerned.

    Instead of disabling Javascript, you can access the English Wikipedia via the mobile site. Head to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 and enjoy your reading...

  7. More of the same on Russians Can't Make Contact With Busted Space Probe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And Mars continues to give Russia a big, fat middle finger. No Russian/Soviet probe has successfully completed a mission to the Red Planet...

  8. EE on Ask Slashdot: Best Second Major For a Mechanical Engineer? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you want to learn controls, it seems Electrical Engineering would be a better fit than Computer Science. While Mechanical Engineers have to learn a fair degree of controls theory, the EE guys live and breathe controls, so it would make you more proficient in that area, at least on paper.

  9. Re:This is a real problem on 'The Code Has Already Been Written' · · Score: 1

    Have you considered using Fortran? Matlab is much closer to Fortran than C (arrays start at 1 instead of 0, to pick a rather annoying bug), has plenty of libraries available (just like C) and the newer versions of the language standard are not the spaghetti-laden soup they used to be.

  10. Re:Late-Breaking News from the Council: Onwards! on Mars Rover Opportunity Surpasses 30km Driving · · Score: 2

    Heh, I was wondering what K'Breel was going to say about this. You seriously should put all of these in an eBook or something similar... if nothing else to ensure that all the gelsacs that have been sacrificed during the Blue Planet's invasion are memorialized properly.

  11. Re:So on Why Teach Programming With BASIC? · · Score: 1

    Awesome post. Let me add one thing, though: If you like BASIC, you will love FORTRAN. It is procedural, so it is similar in concepts to BASIC; and it is extensible, so you can start with a Hello World program in Fortran with a PRINT *, "Hello World", similar to BASIC's PRINT "Hello World".

    You can then gradually introduce concepts, such as loops and conditionals in the same way with BASIC; then, you can take on more complex ideas, such as variable typing and allocation (IMPLICIT NONE ftw!), pointers, modules/classes, and you can go all the way to object oriented fluff with the latest standards.

    Moreover, FORTRAN is still being used in industry, and not just as a legacy language. There is extensive development of parallel code in Fortran, and the language still reigns king in High-Performance Computing. Thus, the language can grow and be anything from a crayon to a calligraphy quill as desired.

  12. This just in on How To Be Popular On Facebook, Quantified · · Score: 4, Informative

    Trolling people encourages replies in online fora.

    News at 11

  13. Re:Solid rockets on New Molecule Could Lead To Better Rocket Fuel · · Score: 0

    The big drawback is that once they're lit you have no control, you can't turn them off, or even throttle them down.

    Something I've always wondered, if one of the shuttle's SRBs fails to lit and the other one starts up, what happens?

    At that point, you're fucked...

  14. Re:Neat, but... on NASA Confirms Discovery of Organism With Phosphorus-Free DNA · · Score: 1

    Do you really want Bush to be Reptile from Mortal Kombat?

  15. Re:GPU = supercomputer? on IBM Discovery May Lead To Exascale Supercomputers · · Score: 1

    The major problem with adoption is probably that most of the people running jobs on SC's are scientists not computer scientists. They use large piles of ancient, well tested libraries and only tweak small parts of the code that are specific to their problem. This means that most of those libraries will need to be ported to OpenCL and CUDA before adoption really picks up.

    And we have a winner!

    Most people do not want to write their eigensolvers, Poisson system solvers, matrix multiplication routines, and the like. They just want to use code that already does that, and that has been tested to do its job well. Code verification is important. So, the libraries that do so need to be ported before anyone in HPC switches to GPU architectures seriously. (Remember: this is the land where FORTRAN is still king...)

  16. Re:Remember National Opt Out Day on US Marshals Saved 35,000 Full Body Scans · · Score: 1

    Next Wednesday: http://www.optoutday.com/

    Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/779/

  17. There is nothing wrong with that on What Tech Should Be In a Fifth-Grade Classroom? · · Score: 1

    Laura Ingalls would also recognize a wheel. That doesn't mean that wheels should be "more modern" to make them harder to recognize.

  18. Re:Secure? on Minority Report Style Iris Scanners In Mexico · · Score: 1

    Vicente Fox, the first non-PRI president in recent Mexican history (and the same dude that the GP alluded to) just said the same thing you just said.

  19. On the bright side... on Mars Rover Spirit May Never Wake From Deep Sleep · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Those were the longest 90 days ever. Good job to everyone all around, although I imagine it will be a bit weird for the rover team to all of a sudden not have a rover to take care of...

  20. Re:And this is news? on Java IO Faster Than NIO · · Score: 2, Funny

    That still makes it a .COM language. As in COMMAND.COM, though...

  21. Re:Goatse Security on AT&T Leaks Emails Addresses of 114,000 iPad Users · · Score: 5, Funny

    Goatse Security: We will show you every gaping hole in your security!

  22. Re:Bad move, Apple on AT&T Leaks Emails Addresses of 114,000 iPad Users · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In the age of Facebook, I wouldn't be surprised that many people just flat out don't care.

  23. Re:Who Cares on BP Buys "Oil Spill" Search Term · · Score: 1

    Andrew? These guys are still ranting about Camille and Betsy for God's sake!

  24. Re:Flamebait on Google Reportedly Ditching Windows · · Score: 1

    That mirrors my experience as well. Pages is relatively cumbersome to use, but not horrible; Numbers, on the other hand, is unusable. It is trying to force a visual presentation paradigm when all you're trying to do is some analysis. Worse, it beachballs any machine it runs into when trying to plot anything with more than 100 data points.

    That said, iWork is still worth every penny I paid for it thanks to Keynote. I just wish the other two would match its quality. Oh, and by the way, OOo is not an option until it can produce real presentation-quality graphs...

  25. Re:A funnel on Geostationary GPS Satellite Galaxy 15 Out of Control · · Score: 1

    I haven't had a laugh this good in ages. Thanks for that!