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User: mrslacker

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  1. Re:Um, tractors on VC Defends Farmville, Touts Virtual Tractor Sales · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, fair enough. But the immediate suggestion elsewhere that buying tractors helps Zynga is false.

    I admit it, I'm level 40 - have been playing for a long time. I've never spent any money on it. You do get given FV cash occasionally on levelling up, but not enough to make a difference. I think I have 15 neighbors or something. I do my wife's farm too, which has helped with various bonuses, etc.

    Yes, the fuel thing is frustrating, since a tank is nowhere near enough to harvest/plough/seed, and you are reduced to thousands of clicks. However, some of the "holiday gifts" still available contain 1 or 5 tanks of gas, and next week is "free fuel week", whatever that means. No doubt of course as a promotion to encourage people later to buy it.

  2. Um, tractors on VC Defends Farmville, Touts Virtual Tractor Sales · · Score: 2, Informative

    Except that tractors cost 30000 coins, which is easily obtained with patience, and doesn't cost any real money at all, certainly not the "FarmVille cash" - unless they've changed something recently.

  3. Re:Some kind of... on 2016 Bug Hits Text Messages, Payment Processing · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, certainly BCD confusion caused a similar problem for RISC OS. Machines have been skipping to 2012. More here:

    http://www.riscository.com/

  4. Thin clients for under $200 right now on Where Are the Cheap Thin Clients? · · Score: 2, Informative

    HP's offering: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html - $199
    This is ARM-based mind.

    From Dell:
    http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19
    $250 right now, but was about $200 during black friday

    From Acer:
    http://www.frys.com/product/6054148

    $200, has been $180.
    To be fair, all these products are very recent, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be aware of them.
    There are others too, but they tend to cost more.

  5. Re:Sorry... on Recreating the Matrix In Legos · · Score: 1

    > Oh, right, because they charge $25/lb for moderate-grade injection-molded plastic.

    And yet, it will last 30+ years, making exceptionally cheap compared to most other toys.

  6. Me too on Reusing Old TiVo Hardware? · · Score: 1

    I have one TiVo I got for $12, and another I got for free. Both series II, one is a dual tuner.

    It turns out both of the models I have require a chip mod for you to be able to do anything at all. There's a guy that sells these, but he doesn't publish much information about them. Alternatively, he'll do if for you at (IIRC) $100 a pop. After that, you can start to put in your own mods, etc.

    About the only widespread hacking information you'll find is on how to increase the disk sizes on your TiVo. As others have noted, TiVo supporters are fiercely in support of the company.

    Probably my only options now are to reuse the HDs, DVD-R and perhaps the remote (my MythTV one's buttons have their labels wearing off). Plus, the TiVos are not HD, which means they are now perhaps of limited interest to me.

    Ultimately, my MythTV machine is much more flexible, although HD/cable recording with firewire remains a joke. Getting an HD-PVR might my the best bet here to link up to it.

  7. Re:What the hell? Crazy French! on GPL Wins In French Court Case · · Score: 1

    English muffins are readily available in the UK and other Western countries.

    In the same theme, "Danish pastries" (Wienerbrød) and "Brazil nuts". (castanhas-do-Pará) And to extend it
    further, the shower water heating unit in my UK bathroom had a model name of "California", even though
    I've never seen such a thing in the US.

    Never mind "Double-dutch", or indeed "French", when talking about swearing.

  8. Re:Problem on According to Linus, Linux Is "Bloated" · · Score: 1

    And let's not forget Firefox 1.0 -> 1.5 -> 2 -> 3.0 -> 3.5, some of which have substantial architectural changes.

    I've dug through the Mozilla source extensively (although that's not saying that much, there's a good deal I haven't looked at), but there's still a mess of old code in there, endless needless layers, and plenty of code that doesn't conform to their current coding standards required for submission of patches.

  9. Re:Advertise INSIDE a business on Taking Free Software To the Streets · · Score: 1

    Actually, that _is_ the plan. At least, the local one is associating itself with a frozen yogurt place.

    Of course, this wasn't at all obvious, since the site itself is hopelessly disorganized, and the front page is a photo of a bunch of geeks, and doesn't really say anywhere what the whole thing is about (the about page says a bit more, but that stuff should be on the front).

    Oh well, maybe some lessons to learn for next year.

  10. Re:This article seems to be anti-hacker on How To Hire a Hacker · · Score: 1

    I feel compelled to say something at this point. Oh yeah, that's *Mr* Slacker to you.

  11. Re:Ads & paid use on Pandora Stabilizes, No Longer Completely Free · · Score: 1

    'zactly. Just paid my $36 a few days ago. I don't think $3/month is at all unreasonable. Still would like to skip a bit more, but hey. I can still pop over to Imeem or Deezer.

  12. Demolition Man on Railway Workers Get Daily Smile Scans · · Score: 1

    Be well John Spartan.

  13. Don't trust Michael Robertson on Lala Invents Network DRM · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not after the Linspire debacle. Plus:

    http://kevincarmony.blogspot.com/2009/04/michael-robertson-wants-to-fool-you.html - which is about this very issue.

    Yeah, I know KC has a huge thing in for MR, but rightly so. Anyway, I can't be bothered to read all of both articles, but this is Slashdot.

  14. Re:Legos on What Data Center Designers Can Learn From Legos · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you can cry that there are different collective nouns (other than "school" of course) for different species of fish.

  15. Re:I use Sprint on Viability of Mobile Broadband For Home Use? · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I don't ;-)

    Ok, I work for a competitor, and our product is quite a lot more expensive. But I personally made sure that every freakin' mobile device (I know of) available in the US over the last few years, and many more sold outside the US, work with it.

    Oh yeah, our stuff does that no one else really does effectively, which is aggregation of mobile (and wired) connections. But the pricing is such that's not really a consumer level product:

    http://www.mushroomnetworks.com/

    The product in particular is the PortaBella.

  16. Re:TFA says "18 microseconds", not "18 seconds" on Rydberg Molecule Created For the First Time · · Score: 4, Informative

    > What's seven orders of magnitude between friends?

    Still out by an order of magnitude ;-)

    Anyway, "very short" (as the original article says) in the context of particle physics has often meant measurements of the order of nanoseconds (say, nuclear bomb testing measurements) or even much much small for big bang (Planck time, etc).

  17. First Molecule! on Rydberg Molecule Created For the First Time · · Score: 4, Funny

    'Nuff said.

  18. Re:Oh YEAH? on Ubuntu 9.04 Daily Build Boots In 21.4 Seconds · · Score: 1

    About 300ms - at least according to Mythbusters. Fluorescent can take as long as 30 seconds.

  19. Not really on Lego Loses Its Unique Right To Make Lego Blocks · · Score: 1

    The choice of bricks in Lego's shop might seem large, but it's actually quite limited, compared to the number of types of bricks which have ever been products (over 10000 at a guess).

    Try here instead: http://www.bricklink.com/

  20. Re:Not for long on Lego Loses Its Unique Right To Make Lego Blocks · · Score: 1

    They've already reinvented themselves to some extent - Bionicles, which aren't really anything like their classic products, are now a huge part of their sales.

  21. Re:Old-Fashioned Navel-Gazing on Indian Moon Mission Launched · · Score: 3, Informative

    I guess you didn't get the clue the first time round and/or are too lazy to do research.

    Crude oil (theories otherwise and evidence for non-organic alternatives notwithstanding) comes from organic materials, i.e. fossil fuels. And whist it's possibly that one of Saturn's moons does have life and might supposedly have reserves of fossil fuels, there's zero evidence for that. What you're thinking of is Titan and its methane seas:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geological_features_on_Titan

    Yes, methane on Earth generally comes from organic sources (e.g. cows), but it occurs otherwise.

    Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on fuels by any means; by all means correct me where appropriate.

  22. Re:Old-Fashioned Navel-Gazing on Indian Moon Mission Launched · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Crude oil? From which fossils?

  23. Re:Couldn't find it... on Roku To Go Open Source · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, indeed. The summary is rather bad, but at least Slashdot is not alone (but typically, it's late to the game).

    The reality is that most of the Roku software is _already_ open source - Linux kernel, busybox, other standard stuff, certainly more than 95% of the system. Whether they open more stuff up remains to the seen. More accurately, Roku will be "opening the system up". In particular, everything is signed, ala TiVo, so no one's yet managed to hack into it.

    See here: http://www.linuxhints.info/index.php/Roku_Netflix_Player

  24. Too late on Jedi Knights Course Offered By Queen's University Belfast · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I put "Jedi Knight" as my religion on a census way back in 1998.

  25. Re:Not supposed to be dooms day yet. on LHC Flips On Tomorrow · · Score: 1

    Worked for Douglas Adams :p