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  1. Without weighing in on TFA or any of the other subject matter, or even the economics of nickel isotopes since I have no clue, materials that have little current use can and do cost more than they would were there reason to produce them, so to make that statement one must assess the projected cost of large scale production.

  2. Re:Unicomp on The Greatest Keyboard Ever Made · · Score: 1

    Yep as the TFA states:

    But fans say the springs' resistance and their audible "click" make it clear when a keypress is registered, reducing errors

    However, with modern software's 7 layer abstraction burrito and race conditions up the wazzu, that's only half the battle.

  3. Re: In which country? on Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In" · · Score: 1

    What I meant is that some people do it in Europe. Here in the U.S. I've seen someone other than me do it about a grand total of once.

  4. Re:In which country? on Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In" · · Score: 2

    We do better than that in MA. Our left lane law was actually apparently written before multilane highways and never adapted. It's technically even illegal to take a left exit here (never enforced) and to use the middle lane unless passing.

    There's a common code that many states to defer that gets it about right, unlike the "passing only" states: you have to be going the average speed of traffic to use the left lane, should pull over if safe to let people pass, and generally shouldn't use the left lane unless there's too much congestion for everyone to drive in the right lane. with exceptions for left exits and preemptive passing positions when going by entrance ramps.

    In Europe they put on their blinker towards the median side rather than obnoxiously flashing their high beams to remind people in front to vacate the fast lane. Very civilized. This also lets the driver behind you know you'd pass the guy if you could.

  5. Re:Changes require systematic, reliable evidence.. on Why the FCC Will Probably Ignore the Public On Network Neutrality · · Score: 1

    This is pretty much the way I see it, working in the field. On the "pro-net-neutrality" side there are those with reasonable views on balancing common carriage with legitimate needs for priority, some with a basic level of network literacy with a wide range of conflicting specific suggestions who don't usually understand the consequences of what they are asking for, and a whole lot of people who don't even understand what it is they are asking for and prefer to converse in vague terms and catch phrases. I doubt there are even 3 million Americans who know what "statistical multiplexing" means so how are they supposed to weigh in on the issue.

    Being a progressive my peers are generally surprised when I answer :"it depends" when asked whether I support "net neutrality" rather than "yes."

  6. Re:Please explain on Linux 3.17 Kernel Released With Xbox One Controller Support · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It doesn't, you can load it as a module.

    ...or run the alternative userspace driver, which linux supports doing as well.

    What really should be the question is why can't even Microsoft, which despite their software reputation generally is well reguarded for input accessories, not present a consistent interface across different generations of controllers. It's not like there isn't an enumeration standard they could follow.

  7. Re:So, if not the FCC, who should regulate it? on Marriott Fined $600,000 For Jamming Guest Hotspots · · Score: 1

    Now... what happens when a Hotel guest brings in a portable device [theverge.com] and starts shutting down the official Cameras, Printers, and Wireless APs?

    Well, if the Microsoft would fix the damn surface so MFP doesn't break it and operators have to disable MFP, and the hotel sets things up right, nothing, just a bit of congestion.

    What happens when conventioneers start using MFP? That's the real fun, there.

  8. Re:Jamming unlinced spectrum is illegal? on Marriott Fined $600,000 For Jamming Guest Hotspots · · Score: 1

    I used to work in the IT department at a university and we did EXACTLY the same thing that Mariott was doing,

    I work in a university IT department and we never go near those vendor features because of legal concerns. I don't know how the vendors get away with offering them.

  9. Re:Now if they could only fix... on Marriott Fined $600,000 For Jamming Guest Hotspots · · Score: 1

    I have thousands of hosts on the same L2 network over WiFi. Works fine. Just turn off broadcast/multicast, use proxy ARP, and pinhole/convert the bare essential multicasts/broadcasts to unicast. RF is indeed a big problem with density, which is why stadium setups use directional antenna arrays, but the biggest problem is consumer-grade wifi drivers that lose their s**t if they see too many APs, die horribly in the face of modern roaming assist standards, and if they are even lucky to have a 5GHZ antenna to drive, can't do DFS channels right.

  10. Re:OK, OK correlation != causation. on Lost Sense of Smell Is a Strong Predictor of Death Within 5 Years · · Score: 1

    Too much nose picking?

    Naw I can still smell just fine.

  11. Re:perfect? on MIT Study Outlines a 'Perfect' Solar Cell · · Score: 1

    Actually thermophotovoltaics, like stirling engine collectors, have the advantage that you can use them as a an electricity generator from natural gas at night instead of using a dedicated natural gas plant. Not sure if TFA is a technology that enables that use case, but it has been looked at as a way to combine the installation costs of solar arrays and natgas plants. Also there's been speculation as to whether they can be made into a more efficient way for hybrid cars to burn gas than an ICE.

    TFA, though seems like it is more focused on photo-thermo-photovoltaics. No pun intended.

  12. Re:Profitable, if self-contradictory on Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million People On Mars To Safeguard Humanity · · Score: 2

    It's actually pretty simple logic:

    Either A) there will be an unavoidable "heat death" which no race may survive or B) Some undiscovered aspect of the universe will prevent A)
    and Either C) we get off this rock or D) we stay on this rock.

    A and C -- we are doomed
    A and D -- we are doomed
    B and D -- we are doomed
    B and C -- chance of survival.

  13. Re:Businessese Bingo on Linux Foundation Announces Major Network Functions Virtualization Project · · Score: 1

    No this is more reasonable than SDN. SDN pretends to be a road to virtualizing the capabilities of actual grunt-work networking equipment, without being arsed to actually be able to enumerate said capabilities and thus is doomed to never fully succeed. This, however, is for the higher level intelligence well suited to virtualization -- basically the stuff thateats all your RSPs' CPU.

  14. Re:"the Phoebus cartel still casts a shadow today" on The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy · · Score: 1

    Wiring LEDS in series for use with a household voltage makes sense, (as long as you can precisely batch-match the LEDs.) Then you don't have to step down the voltage as much so you can use less expensive and failure-prone electronics and achieve higher efficiency.

    That said, given the progress of increasing LED efficiency, it might not be such a bad thing if the early models didn't last so long, because they last so long that by the time they are replaced, they may have burned off more electricity relative to an earlier replacement than the cost of that replacement.

  15. Re:Hmmm ... on Ask Slashdot: Is Reporting Still Relevant? · · Score: 1

    The connotation of "Dashboard" is that it may give you a trendline, but not necessarily be able to pull up trendlines for arbitrary time intervals.

    There are of course dashboards that do so, but it is reasonable to argue that those are really dashboard/reporting hybrids.

    It sounds like TFA is referring to a dashboard that is fully featured in that department. Few are, even these days.

    In any case, if the product doesn't make autodefinition of intervals and side-by-side comparisons as easy for managers as pulling up two PDFs side-by-side from their email or (if they are old school) printouts, then there's a deficiency compared to the traditional reporting solution, despite any advantages in other areas. And, if a dashboard-oriented product cannot present a nice list of autopopulated intervals, then either you need to go the report route, or instead of making reports you'll find yourself logging in every morning to manually create those intervals for the front row.

    Also depending on the nature of the data, reports can sometimes be used as supporting documents in legal/business procedings, and so must be presentable in a the form of a document.

    Finally when your data gets large enough to become cumersom. the report model starts to make sense in that it schedules DB resources.

  16. Re:min install on Outlining Thin Linux · · Score: 1

    He's talking about systemd. That's the only real architectural change that affects the server installs of many desktop/server distros.

    Not the only one (nor is systemd entirely desktop driven). Before systemd ate it, DBUS gave us the session bus, and many applications would only ever use the session bus, and could not be used without a login (usually X) session, even if they really didn't need it. In many cases one had to at least recompile and sometimes even hack the source to change it to use the system bus (or disable DBUS support entirely.)

    Then there are the various attempts to unify configuration across large suites of applications, which usually devolved into a system that was XML or some such crap just on principle and hence tedious to manage from the CLI/text editor -- but the authors of those didn't care as log as they had a control-panel workalike GUI.

    And there were lots of individual groupware oriented network services that seemed to think they had to be intrinsically tied to a desktop login to work.

    As to TFA, I doubt there will be a convergence onto a single "thin" distro, since so many levels exists allready ranging from OpenWRT/busyboxish systems all the way up to "server" editions that are really quite bloated.

  17. Re:If you believe this on Next Android To Enable Local Encryption By Default Too, Says Google · · Score: 1

    Yeah, well, outside of a corporate IT despotism there is nearly no such thing as a "consumer space" at all. You can usually convince management to kick off everything that simply won't do WPA enterprise to get rid of the hassle of AAA web portals, but excluding Androids is not going to happen, so you fire up wpa-enterprise and let the chips fall where they may and try not to worry that all the Androids can get themselves phished. So it's been a more than just a "pain" but an actual security threat to millions of educational sector users. For several years.

  18. Re:Good on Next Android To Enable Local Encryption By Default Too, Says Google · · Score: 1

    There is actually a sort of sad irony/schadenfreude to be had here, if I could just get myself to stop chronically sobbing in a quivering ball in the corner about the general state of IT security.

  19. Re:Really? on Next Android To Enable Local Encryption By Default Too, Says Google · · Score: 1

    The biggest conceptual mistake people make about encryption is that it is only for protecting read access. It's also for protecting against write access. Specifically to your live sessions, so that you don't merrily think you are talking to your bank when you're actually talking to a thief.

  20. Re:If you believe this on Next Android To Enable Local Encryption By Default Too, Says Google · · Score: 1

    Also, I have to say that from my perspective as a security engineer at Google you couldn't be more wrong about Google's concern for user security. Actually, if you look at the company's track record on security technology creation and deployment, I think that point is unarguable.

    From my perspective as a WiFi network administrator, for years you've been accepting any old certificate for WPA-Enterprise PEAP authentication and not allowing the users to configure certificate the subject_match option that have been available in the underlying wpa-supplicant software all this time. Nor is there any process for oboarding for using local PKIs for WPA-Enterprise. You don't even lock in the first encountered cert until the wifi profile is deleted as apple does. Despite persistently repeated independently filed starred bug reports about it. So I find that a bit hard to swallow.

  21. Re:This is a good thing. on Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise · · Score: 1

    A) Waves are from wind, not the moon.
    B) Even with tidal energy you have no sense of proportion as to the scale of the energies involved.
    C) The effect would have been opposite what you state.

    The moon will slingshot away as is, were we to draw enough energy (impossible), this would keep it, but it would also slow the earth's rotation so then our days would be a month long and we'd be toast.

  22. Re:Too bad on Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise · · Score: 1

    That fact won't stop the people who want to spew uninformed rhetoric, sadly.

  23. Re:Too bad on Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise · · Score: 1

    There are a number of math problems here. First AC (Alternating Current not Air Conditioner :-) watts are not DC watts. They are DC
    watts over (the square root of two.) So when converting from a DC value like BTU/hr you need to factor that in. Assuming a power
    factor of 1, the actual equivalent DC watts of the air conditioner is about 2.5K (8500ish BTU), and will actually be less because the power factor will
    be less than 1 for the type of motors used in an air conditioner.

    Secondly Heat != electricity unless you are using a resistive device. You don't compare them kWH to kWH, there's a
    COP involved though usually a SEER is used when talking HVAC. This COP will be well over 1, as you can move way more than 1kWH of heat with 1kWH of electricity; often several times more, but it depends on the temperatures involved. If you have a heat ballast like a ground source loop attached to a heat pump that boosts the COP dramatically.

  24. Re:Too bad on Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise · · Score: 1

    The solar water heating vendors spent decades charging "what the market would bear" instead of competitively expanding/economizing. At this rate a heat pump and a solar panel may economically pass them up before they can.

  25. Re:Mechanical stresses ... on Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise · · Score: 1

    Not so much. There are location-specific seasonal variations but it is more predictable and has a more reliable baseline.

    Both wave and off-shore wind suffer greatly from the transmission problem, but with off-shore wind, they get to use technology that has already been developed because it also works on land. Wave doesn't get that leg up, and still has to deal with transmission expenses.