Slashdot Mirror


User: friedo

friedo's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
300
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 300

  1. Re:Metrics are a synonym for Hell on More On Why It Stinks To Work At Zynga · · Score: 1

    #!/usr/bin/env perl
    sub function { 42 }

  2. Re:Mercury on Proposed Mercury Ban Threatens Vaccines · · Score: 2

    Would he have gone nuts anyway because it was a party? Did he go nuts because he has been conditioned (even unconsciously) by adults that candy == go nuts? Did you control by giving artificially sweetened candy to other children at the party? (Even better would be a third group with no candy.)

    I think you have failed to eliminate a vast array of confounding factors in your experiment. Not worthy of publication. :)

  3. Re:Nothing to see here.... on Proposed Mercury Ban Threatens Vaccines · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is not "hard to find" mercury-free vaccines. Thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in Western nations in decades (with one or two rare exceptions) because better preservatives have been found. It is used in vaccines bought by developing and impoverished nations, because it's cheaper. And it has been proven repeatedly to be safe.

  4. Re:No engineering? on Shadow Scholar Details Student Cheating · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Similarly, I had a Calc professor who gave all the answers on the test, but you had to show all the work on how to get there.

  5. Re:Two guys in camel costume. on Robots Guarding US Nuclear Stockpiles In Nevada · · Score: 1

    You don't find too many camels in Nevada.

  6. Re:Advertising on University Offers Class In Zombie Studies · · Score: 1

    Lighten up, Francis.

    One of my favorite classes in college was called Sci-Phi; it was all about philosophical and ethical issues in science fiction. We watched a few movies and some good Star Trek episodes, and also did a lot of reading (both science fiction and philosophers.) There was a lot of work (several essays plus a term paper) so it was not a Mickey-mouse course by any means. Courses like that, which are generally developed for fun by profs who really like their subjects, can be a lot more engaging and interesting than the same old generic "let's analyze The Merchant of Venice to death" courses that fill the majority of one's time as a student.

  7. Re:how are victory margins relevant to chess? on Chess Ratings — Move Over Elo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If some metric X is a statistically reliable method of predicting future success, then X can be defined as a margin of victory. Whether X is a function of the "values" of remaining pieces, or their positions on the board, or the number of moves, or whatever, is immaterial.

  8. Amazon S3 on Long-Term Storage of Moderately Large Datasets? · · Score: 3, Informative

    It can get a little pricey for huge datasets, but Amazon S3 now has an option where you can ship your data on a big set of disks directly to them, they will import everything into S3, and it will live there forever. The nice thing about S3 is unlike physical disks, it can grow essentially forever, and comes with retention and redundancy guarantees. And once your stuff is in S3, you can recycle the same disks to mail them more data.

  9. Gamma on Scaling Algorithm Bug In Gimp, Photoshop, Others · · Score: 0

    As a programmer who knows nothing about graphics algorithms, can somebody explain to me exactly what gamma is? I've been told I should by worrying about it for at least a couple decades, but thus far my lack of knowledge has not caused by any bodily injury. Use small words.

  10. Re:Heomeopathy = Placebo on NHS Should Stop Funding Homeopathy, Says Parliamentary Committee · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well if you were using Emacs you could have just done a M-x fight-infection and your thumb would have been better yesterday.

  11. Re:What about Yucca Mountain? on US To Build Nuclear Power Plants · · Score: 2, Funny

    I don't think you quite fully understand how a mountain works.

  12. Re:Good! Burning Oil is an ECOcrime... on US To Build Nuclear Power Plants · · Score: 2

    The amount of electricity that the US gets from burning oil is so small it might as well be zero. More nuclear power at least takes some burden off coal, which is the real environmental problem with power production in the US.

  13. Re:Ancient transportation technology is better on Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals · · Score: 1

    You mean like a Stargate?

  14. Re:There is already a perfectly good free DBMS on Monty Wants To Save MySQL · · Score: 2, Informative

    mysql> create table blurb (foo datetime);
    Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

    mysql> insert into blurb (foo) values ("hello world");
    ERROR 1292 (22007): Incorrect datetime value: 'hello world' for column 'foo' at row 1

    No problems with invalid data types if you bother to RTFM and setup the config properly. (It's not hard. Just turn strict mode on.)

  15. Re:Help me out here on G-WAN, Another Free Web Server · · Score: 1

    Perl doesn't have a case statement, you syntactically insensitive clod.

    Perl 5.10 does have given/when, though. Smartmatch FTW.

  16. Re:Build-in function library on Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language · · Score: 1

    Actually there is a procedure for taking over CPAN modules for which the original maintainer won't respond (or is dead, etc.) And if the original maintainer is responsive, but just no longer interested or too busy, they can add you as co-maintainer or transfer the distribution to you directly.

  17. Re:LyX on How To Enter Equations Quickly In Class? · · Score: 5, Funny

    It took me lightyears to explain that to someone.

  18. Re:Quadruple Extra Large on Amazon Cloud Adds Hosted MySQL · · Score: 1

    Don't forget the Diet Coke.

  19. Re:UNITS? on The Risks and Rewards of Warmer Data Centers · · Score: 2, Funny

    Fahrenheit backwards? That shit was metric before the Metric System even existed.

    To wit:

    0F is about as cold as it gets, and 100F is about as hot as it gets.

    See? Metric.

  20. Re:What is the motivation for power companies? on High-Temp Superconductors To Connect Power Grids · · Score: 1

    There are individual bilateral HVDC links between each pair of grids. But this will be the first time all three will be tied together in a single system.

  21. Five jiggawatts?! on High-Temp Superconductors To Connect Power Grids · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's enough to power slightly more than four time machines.

  22. Re:Video? on Airborne Boeing Laser Blasts Ground Target · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Found it: Link.

  23. Re:Wow this is a day... on AOL Shuts Down CompuServe · · Score: 4, Funny

    71350,2360 here. Sometimes I miss the days of terminal emulators and 1200bps modems. Then I remember how long it took to download pr0n, and I don't anymore.

    DOWNLOAD ZMODEM! ...NO CARRIER

  24. Re:Lightning once striked our office building. on Lightning Strikes Amazon's Cloud (Really) · · Score: 1

    The failure described by the article affected one availability zone out of seven in the EC2 cloud. Anybody who built their application redundantly across multiple zones would not have been affected by the outage.

  25. Re:It evidently did on Lightning Strikes Amazon's Cloud (Really) · · Score: 2, Informative

    Only one of Amazon's two zones went down

    There are two regions (US and EU) each with several availability zones (US currently has four.) The AZ's are designed to be isolated from one another. This outage affected one AZ in the US region.

    If you are doing load balancing across instances in multiple AZ's (or even using Amazon's own Elastic Load Balancing and Auto-Scaling features) you would have been fine, since this is exactly the kind of problem they're designed to handle.