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User: Detritus

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  1. Re:Stop playing solitaire on my dialysis machine on Fed-Up Hospitals Defy Windows Patching Rules · · Score: 1
    They want COTS. They want cheap. They want TCP/IP, the Internet, a familiar GUI, and compatibility with Microsoft Office. They want bells and whistles.

    It isn't just the vendor, the customers want this stuff too. It reduces development costs and helps sell the product. Plus there are a lot of PHBs who believe that Microsoft is the solution to everything.

  2. Re:On the one hand this is good news on MSIE 7 May Beat Longhorn Out The Gate · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's nothing new for Microsoft. From my experiences with them, any investment of time/money in producing patches or updates requires a business case. How is it going to generate more profits or advance the strategic goals of Microsoft? Broken software is not a sufficient justification.

  3. Re:Call Me Clueless on MSIE 7 May Beat Longhorn Out The Gate · · Score: 1

    Control. The ability to dictate "standards" and the presence or absence of features.

  4. Re:Something you know, you have, and you are on Passwords - 64 Characters, Changed Daily? · · Score: 1

    If security really matters, nothing beats an armed guard with instructions to shoot anyone who tries to enter without authorization. It boils down to how serious you are about security, and are you willing spend money on physical security and secure communications links.

  5. Re:What's the problem? on Passwords - 64 Characters, Changed Daily? · · Score: 1

    The problem is that computers are getting faster at a rate that greatly exceeds the the rate of improvement in human memory. A long password with low information content is not going to necessarily be more secure than a short password with high information content.

  6. Re:Bad assumption on Passwords - 64 Characters, Changed Daily? · · Score: 1
    They do now :-).

    Seriously, the more common ways of making passwords "secure" are provided as search options in many of these programs.

  7. Re:My microwave on 2.4GHz-Friendly Phones? · · Score: 1
    Your post is completely wrong and dangerous.

    You don't need standing waves to couple energy from the magnetron to the food. High-power microwave devices are dangerous if not properly designed and operated. If you don't believe me, try standing in front of a high-power search radar.

  8. Re:In addition on 2.4GHz-Friendly Phones? · · Score: 1

    The electronics for 900 MHz are cheaper and consume less power than the electronics for 2.4 GHz. It is also cheaper to build a cross-band phone (900 MHz/2.4 GHz) than it is to build a single-band full-duplex phone. The manufacturer is more concerned about costs than range.

  9. Re:I don't get it on 2.4GHz-Friendly Phones? · · Score: 1
    Lower is better, to a point. The problem is designing an efficient antenna at the frequency that is in use. Normally it should be a quarter-wavelength or longer. A quarter-wavelength at 900 MHz is about 8 cm, which is a reasonable size for a handset antenna. At 40 MHz, a quarter-wavelength is about 190 cm, which is way too large for a handset. There are ways to electrically shorten the antenna, but you give up a lot of performance and efficiency.

    There is also the problem that there are fewer channels available in lower frequency bands, making interference more likely. There may also be additional restrictions on modulation methods and bandwidth, which can reduce audio quality and make it easy for eavesdroppers to listen to your call.

  10. Feedback on Mandelbrot Suggests A Hunt For Financial Patterns · · Score: 1

    It wouldn't work. Let's say Frobozz Inc. sells for $100 a share. During the week, the market receives orders to sell 10,000 shares and orders to buy 2,000 shares. On Sunday, it clears all of the buy orders and only 20% of the sell orders. The people with unfulfilled orders are going to be upset, especially if they want to liquidate their position now, before they suffer additional losses. Investors are suspicious of schemes that reduce liquidity. Loss of liquidity is often a warning sign that something very bad has happened, or is about to happen.

  11. Re:It's time to let the Hubble go on Farewell To Eyes Above And Below · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You do if a new lawnmower costs $100,000 and has to be ordered five years before delivery.

    NASA and HSTSI have invested very large amounts of money and time in the HST program. Even if a new telescope was built and launched, it wouldn't make the instruments magically become 50% cheaper. With the way NASA is being funded, it may be decades before another optical telescope is put in space.

  12. Re:*ESSENTIAL* skill for (software) writers.... on Is Typing a Necessary Skill? · · Score: 1

    When I got my first programming job, my boss told me that my job was to think and write, not to type. That's why we had secretaries and data entry clerks.

  13. Re:rather simple to protect yourself. on Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts? · · Score: 1
    WTF are you doing having a family when you haven't made the investment of time in obtaining a marketable skill or trade?

    Things change. What is marketable one year may be worthless the next. In a economic depression, there are just not enough jobs for all the people with skills or trades. Unfortunately, the American tendency is to blame the unemployed for their plight. Obviously, they must be defective in some way, and it's their fault.

  14. Re:rather simple to protect yourself. on Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts? · · Score: 1

    It's easy to have principles when you have money in the bank. It's not so easy when you are broke, have a family to support, and the job market allows employers to dictate terms. The reason that we have labor laws is the disparity in power between employers and employees. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to pick and choose their employer. Employers can get petty and vicious when they know that there are dozens of people willing to take your job tomorrow, for less money. Try living in an economically depressed region where hundreds of people show up at dawn to apply for any shit job that is open.

  15. Lottery on Primer · · Score: 1

    Winning the lottery attracts a lot of attention. Winning it twice would start some investigations. Being excessively "lucky" at gambling, such as betting on sports results, would also create problems. The stock market would be safer, but even there, the SEC and other regulators are looking for suspicious patterns that might indicate insider trading.

  16. Re:EDS on Database Glitch Grounds American/US Airways · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Staffing quality is rather strongly correlated to what the customer is willing to pay for labor. If the customer only cares about the bottom line, they get what they deserve.

  17. Trial by Combat on D Squared To Stop Sending Pop-Ups · · Score: 2, Funny
    We should revive trial by combat for cases involving spam. It's been argued that it is still a valid part of the common law in some places.

    In the red corner, at 110 pounds, we have a pencil-necked geek from UCSD, who is an accused spammer.

    In the blue corner, at 250 pounds, we have California's Special Prosecutor for Spam, the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger!

    Let's get ready to rumble!

  18. Re:Who benefits really? on IBM Announces Chip Morphing Technology · · Score: 2, Informative

    They already do #2 with DRAM chips, to keep the yields at reasonable levels. Although I think they have to be tested and repaired before they are shipped from the factory.

  19. On-Chip Sparing on IBM Announces Chip Morphing Technology · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sounds like it is most useful for permanently reconfiguring a chip to use spare functional units after problems are detected with the currently selected functional units.

  20. Re:90nm and Moore's Law on Intel Delays Release of 4Ghz Chips · · Score: 1
    From Moore's original paper:
    The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page).
    Complexity for minimum component cost is not the number of transistors or their surface area. It's the sweet spot when you graph "relative manufacturing cost/component" against "number of components per integrated circuit".
  21. Feed Supplements on Artificial Prion Created · · Score: 1

    I think it might be require more than not feeding dead cows to cows. Other species suffer from prion related diseases and there is a possibility of cross-species transmission.

  22. Vector Machines on On the Supercomputer Technology Crisis · · Score: 1
    That old Cray could still kick the Pentium-4's ass around the block a few times when it came to memory bandwidth and making efficient use of the floating point hardware with large data sets.

    When you have a data set that doesn't fit in the machine's cache, it doesn't matter how fast the CPU is.

  23. Re:Moreover I think those industry panelists... on On the Supercomputer Technology Crisis · · Score: 1

    FPGAs are slow, expensive and inefficient when compared to normal chip designs. Their only saving grace is their programmability.

  24. Re:Tax on the stupid? on Phish Scams Fooling 28% of Users · · Score: 1

    Right, and muggers are just a tax on the slow and weak.

  25. Re:is this sarcasm on The Linux Filesystem Challenge · · Score: 2, Informative

    No. You may not see them very often, but there are a lot of AS/400 systems out there.