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User: ebh

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  1. Re: ob od oe of oh oi om on oo op or os ou ow ox o on The French Scrabble Champ Does Not Speak French · · Score: 1

    Some of the top English-language players in the world are Thai and speak very little English.

  2. Re:Is this a surprise? on The French Scrabble Champ Does Not Speak French · · Score: 5, Informative

    Those of us who play tournament Scrabble are only mildly surprised that Nigel learned all the words in that short a period of time. But what makes Nigel the best is much more than knowing all the words. There are a few dozen players, and a number of computer players, who can credibly make that claim.

    Nobody has Nigel's combination of word knowledge, board vision, and ability to calculate probabilities.

  3. Re:Concorde 2.0 on Supersonic Jet Could Fly NYC To London In 3 Hours · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The L-1012-Nukem-Forever?

  4. Re:Know who to blame? on 86.2 Million Phone Scam Calls Delivered Each Month In the US · · Score: 3, Funny

    Fronters may get lunch, but they don't get coffee. Coffee is for closers only.

  5. Re:What actually happened on Microsoft Hasn't Given Up On the Non-Smart Phones It Inherited From Nokia · · Score: 2

    They made everybody move to the basement, and took away their red staplers.

  6. Re:US help? on Heat Wave Kills More Than 1,100 In India · · Score: 1

    It has electrolytes! You don't want water. Water comes from the toilet!

  7. Re:Unfortunate, but could be worse... on Heat Wave Kills More Than 1,100 In India · · Score: 1

    True, but those are the only places I know of where it can literally be "95 degrees with 95 percent humidity", i.e. *dewpoints* over 90F. It has to do with the high temperature of the surrounding seawater.

  8. Re:100 degree plus temp and dryness on Heat Wave Kills More Than 1,100 In India · · Score: 2

    True story: When taking a summer class in Alabama, on a particularly hot sticky day, the Indian students were talking nostalgically about how it felt like home.

  9. Forget Duke Nukem VR on Oculus Rift Launching In Q1 2016 · · Score: 1

    Two (or more) willing partners. Camera-equipped headsets small enough not to get in the way. Enhance the visuals as much or as little as you want. Augment your other senses as desired and technologically feasible.

    THAT'S first-person shooting!

  10. Re: And it's not even an election year on Ten US Senators Seek Investigation Into the Replacement of US Tech Workers · · Score: 2

    That was the point. You'd have to offer me the same kind of money to relocate, because I really don't want to run the risk of uprooting my family, only to get laid off in six months in a place where I have no roots. I've seen it happen too many times.

    But this is a digression. The companies that complain they can't hire the talent they need are really saying that they can't afford to hire the talent they need. Hiring H-1Bs is a Band-Aid. The companies that complain that they can't even hire H-1Bs with the talent they need are forgetting that just as everywhere else, all the best Chinese and Indian workers are already taken.

    One of the root causes of all this is that companies have mile-long must-have skill lists, and they expect to "install" new workers the way they install new PCs. Plug them in, turn them on, and they work starting right now. It used to be said that any new worker would take six months to a year to become truly productive. That hasn't changed, but somehow the industry has gone into a state of denial about it. The end result is even stupider: They spend more time looking for someone who is plug-compatible with the job than they would have spent hiring someone with the right basic skills and training them.

  11. Re:Lies, bullshit, and more lies ... on With H-1B Cap Hit, Zuckerberg and Ballmer-Led Groups Press For More Tech Visas · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The other trick is that the law says that H-1Bs have to be paid "prevailing wages". But if you look at most large companies' salary bands, the bottom end of each band is often barely half of the top. So an H-1B can make, say, $60K, in the same position where the average employee makes $85K-$90K, with some making $110K, but since they're all within that position's stated salary range, the company is still not technically "underpaying" the H-1Bs.

  12. Re:Hey Roblimo: Make a "loser edit" autobiography! on Technology's Legacy: the 'Loser Edit' Awaits Us All · · Score: 1

    What editor? When the entire publishing industry imploded, copy editors were the first to be laid off.

  13. Honest question here on Google Taking Over New TLDs · · Score: 1

    If I were an entity that had its own TLD, say .ebh, it would be nice if people could get to my site with the minimalist URL http://ebh. Is there any way to disambiguate a TLD from a nonqualified host name to make that possible?

  14. Re:Not enough on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 1

    Or if you have a Netapp with a decent support contract: A disk fails while you're asleep[1]. The filer notifies Netapp over a dedicated POTS line. Netapp overnights a new disk to you. You find out the next morning that the disk failed, via a call from the loading dock about a package for you. You pop in the new drive, activate one of your other hot spares, and configure the new drive as a new hot spare, all in less time than it took you to walk down to the loading dock and back.

    [1] You don't have single disk failure alarms wake you up in the middle of the night because you configured your array to run with two failed disks.

  15. Re:For all of you USA haters out there: on Why ATM Bombs May Be Coming Soon To the United States · · Score: 1

    It wasn't quaint *being* that American, it was embarrassing.

  16. Re: jessh on "Mammoth Snow Storm" Underwhelms · · Score: 1

    The boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are *on* Long Island, so zero.

  17. Re:Why do I want to upgrade? on Is Kitkat Killing Lollipop Uptake? · · Score: 1

    As large as possible time displayed when an alarm is going off with high contrast
    Like this?

  18. Re:Pay-per-minute line on The Slow Death of Voice Mail · · Score: 1

    Don't forget that a lot of old answering machines would cut you off without warning after something like 30 seconds. People got used to talking quickly.

  19. Re:youmail on The Slow Death of Voice Mail · · Score: 1

    My work voice mail system is no different from the one I used 25 years ago. Even the menu trees only have one or two minor differences. Certainly no voice-to-text or anything like that.

  20. Re:gimme any Normal Example what can i print on it on 3D Printer Owner's Network Puts Together Buyer's Guide · · Score: 1

    Yeah, going to Maker Faire makes you think the only thing anyone ever prints are tchotchkes from Thingverse.

    One application is to reproduce plastic parts that are otherwise unobtainable. Example:

    I have a turntable microwave oven that was built almost 25 years ago. There's a piece of plastic about the size of a pair of dice that 's effectively the turntable spindle. Somebody turned the thing by hand and snapped that piece of plastic. I have a part number for it but nobody sells it any more. A chunk of the part is missing, but its shape isn't too complicated, and enough of it is still there, that I can make an STL file for it.

    That in itself is not enough to make buying a 3D printer worthwhile, but I can contract that out to someone on 3D Hubs to print it for me out of ABS.

  21. Re:Great. More touchscreens. on Ford Ditches Microsoft Partnership On Sync, Goes With QNX · · Score: 1

    That's what I like about my 2010 Fusion. It has acrtual buttons and knobs for all the important stuff, in addition to the GUI.

  22. Re:What's the Motivation? on LG To Show Off New 55-Inch 8K Display at CES · · Score: 1

    Of course usable 8K is a long way off. Even movie theater projectors are still 4K. That's why they're showing it at CES, not in the Best Buy.Black Friday doorbuster circular. CES is all about mine's-bigger-than-yours.

    Personally, I'd rather see the frame rate go up rather than resolution. The standard for 4K movie theater projection is 250Mbps, which is only enough for 24fps. The standard also specifies compression limits so that picture quality won't suffer too much. At 1Gbps, you could compress it even less, and still project at 60fps. If you ever saw a Showscan movie back in the 80s, you know the difference in realism the higher frame rate makes. (BTW, the audio is up to 16 channels of uncompressed .wav at 24-bit, 48Khz or 96Khz sampling. I guess they decided that lossless compression for audio wouldn't save enough bandwidth to matter, compared with the video stream.)

  23. Re:Shyeah, right. on Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out? · · Score: 1

    I have some 20-year-old IDE drives that still work fine. Nice novelty items, but I'd still never use disk drives as long-term backup.

  24. Re:LOL on How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive · · Score: 2

    In 1987, I bought an 80 MEGAbyte drive for $775 (around $1600 today), thinking how amazing it was that disk drives had broken the $10/MB barrier. When the first 1GB drives came out a few years later, I remember thinking, "Who would trust that much data to a single device? What an amazing single point of failure!" Now there are 128GB MicroSD cards for under $1/GB. Even understanding the technology, the mind boggles.

  25. Re:Question: on Check Out the Source Code For the Xerox Alto · · Score: 1