Slashdot Mirror


User: Animats

Animats's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
14,273
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 14,273

  1. Re:Here's the project poster on Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal · · Score: 2

    Only to a topologist is a stellarator a torus. But, yes, stellarators have fewer stability problems, and after three decades of torii, they're starting to come back.

  2. Here's the project poster on Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's the project conference poster. "Total equipment cost for the development path is less than $1 billion". Nothing on the poster, though, indicates why this should work. It's yet another torus-based design, of which there have been many. The best performance to date is from the Joint European Torus: "In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1MW of fusion power (65% of input power), with fusion power of over 10MW sustained for over 0.5 sec."

    All torus designs run into plasma instability problems. So far, nobody has a working solution. Nobody even has a good theoretical solution. No combination of fixed magnets has yet worked. There's some modest interest in active feedback for stabilization, and some modest success has been reported. The instabilities are on the order of milliseconds, so active feedback is quite feasible.

    Even ITER probably won't work. The thinking behind ITER was originally "maybe it will become more stable if we make it bigger." Now, a little "maybe the feedback control people can make it work" has been added. It's not looking good, which is why there really isn't that much enthusiasm for ITER.

  3. Three year s ubscription... on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With an Unresponsive Manufacturer Who Doesn't Fix Bugs? · · Score: 1

    That may give you some rights. Post a link to the EULA, please.

  4. Re:Live by the cloud, die by the cloud. on Belkin Router Owners Suffering Massive Outages · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why not using that DNS server has fixed the heartbeat ping issue.

    Their router may be trying to distinguish, as Windows and most things that connect through WiFi now have to, between real Internet connectivity and fake Internet connectivity. Fake Internet connectivity is when some WiFi access point hijacks all DNS requests to take you to some login web page or ad. So, many devices try to connect to some known site which produces a known response to verify that they can connect to the outside world.

    It's the choice of "known site", and not having alternatives for it, that's the problem.

  5. Live by the cloud, die by the cloud. on Belkin Router Owners Suffering Massive Outages · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Did Belkin tell you their router was dependent on their site being up?

    "When I die, the world ends." - Belkin policy

  6. It's a "used car", stupid. on Tesla Is Starting a Certified Preowned Program · · Score: 2

    "Pre-owned" - come on.

  7. Harley-Davidson laid off 125 Americans. on Former Infosys Recruiter Says He Was Told Not To Hire US Workers · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Harley-Davidson laid off 125 Americans and replaced them with people on H-1 visas from Infosys. H-D's biker customers aren't going to like this once the word gets out.

  8. Less static hardware. on Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In" · · Score: 4, Informative

    UNIX, and Linux, were designed with the concept that the hardware configuration was static during operation. So "startup" and "configuration" occured at the same time. Now that many peripherals hot-plug, that model is obsolete. Many people find it painful to switch to an "everything is dynamic" model, especially since, for many server applications, there is no hot-plugging.

    Hence the unhappiness with a redesign.

    This is a more general problem with UNIX/Linux. Many programs are designed on the assumption that they read a static configuration file in text format, and will be restarted if the configuration changes. Various hacks have been added to some programs to allow dynamic reconfiguration (often involving sending a signal to the process to tell it to re-read a text file). Real dynamic configuration models usually involve storing the configuration in a database, which a lot of UNIX/Linux types don't like.

  9. Re:Timing and Assumptions on Living On a Carbon Budget: The End of Recreation As We Know It? · · Score: 1

    I think the idea that by 2035, we should expect every country in the world to have a comparable standard of living to America today is nothing short of laughable.

    Western Europe is already there. Japan is mostly there. China is getting there. Russia, not so much.

  10. Happy talk financials. on Apple Sapphire Glass Supplier GT Advanced Files For Bankruptcy · · Score: 0

    last quarterly financial numbers. Note the -62% margins. Uh oh. The press release has lots of happy talk, but the numbers don't back it. ("GAAP" here means Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Those are conservative assumptions. "Non-GAAP" numbers are numbers adjusted based on management's exclusion of certain negative items. They're usually flaky.)

    The company was profitable at the beginning of 2013. They should have turned down the Apple deal. It's not good to have one big customer.

  11. "Feedback" code in the release version? on Test Version Windows 10 Includes Keylogger · · Score: 1

    This is a huge vulnerability. Microsoft's claim that the code "turns off" after the test period has to be viewed with scepticism. If they can turn it off, they can turn it back on. Or someone else can.

    This is telling us that Windows 10 is totally unsuitable for any business with security requirements. Lawyers, banks, and medical service providers probably can't use it and be compliant with the regulations in their industry.

  12. Android without Google. on Cyanogen Inc. Turns Down Google, Seeing $1 Billion Valuation · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When do they set up a "Cyanogen store"?

    Even without Cyanogenmod, Android phones work just fine without Google services. At first power-up, there's a "sign up/log in" screen, with a "Later" option. Click "Later" and go on.

    You can disable the "Google One-Time Startup" app to keep it from bothering you again.

  13. How fast did they report this? on GlaxoSmithKline Released 45 Liters of Live Polio Virus · · Score: 1

    If this was reported immediately, the sewerage plant could increase their chlorine injection to far higher levels than usual. Chlorine will destroy polio virus. Sewerage plants usually chlorinate at a modest level to kill bacteria, but in an emergency like this, they can easily crank the levels way up. Sewerage plants are constantly adjusting their systems depending on what's coming in.

    If the safety people at GlaxoSmithKlein, or whoever this was reported to, called the plant operator at the sewer plant, there would have been immediate agreement to crank up chlorination levels, and sampling would have been started at the sewerage plant. The reports, which indicate after the fact analysis, indicate that didn't happen.

  14. Might help with kernel bloat on Object Oriented Linux Kernel With C++ Driver Support · · Score: 0

    I wonder how much kernel they can throw out. There's tons of stuff in the Linux kernel that should't be there. If it can be done in a user space driver, it should be done there. USB devices, printers, etc. have no performance need to be in the kernel.

  15. From Hacker News on Marriott Fined $600,000 For Jamming Guest Hotspots · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Lately, Slashdot seems to be echoing Hacker News, about three hours late. If you're going to be a scraper site, you have to do it faster.

  16. Re:Duh! on Experiment Shows Stylized Rendering Enhances Presence In Immersive AR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Right. The original post doesn't make it clear that the system applies edge enhancement filters to the "real world" objects as well as the virtual ones. So everything looks crappy. It's not clear what this is supposed to prove.

    Watching the video, the easiest way to tell real from virtual objects is that the amount of lag on the real and virtual objects differs.

  17. Re:If you don't want people to see your picture... on Online Creeps Inspire a Dating App That Hides Women's Pictures · · Score: 1

    ...then simply create a profile that doesn't have a picture. Then state in the profile that pictures are available upon request.

    On Craigslist, that's the profile of a spammer.

  18. What they're gaining: software upgrade sales on Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista · · Score: 1

    No business is going to "upgrade" their desktop machines for Windows 10. Their business applications won't run any better. If Microsoft wants to sell this as an upgrade, it has to run on the installed base of hardware.

    Realistically, business mostly wants to run Windows 7.

  19. An XP problem? on Will Windows 10 Finally Address OS Decay? · · Score: 1

    That seems to have been a problem only with Windows XP. I didn't have it with Windows NT 3.1, NT 4, Windows 2000, or Windows 7. (I skipped XP).

    Ubuntu Linux seems to have an incredible number of background processes that aren't really necessary.

  20. Re:Internet of Stupidity on Factory IoT Saves Intel $9 Million · · Score: 2

    This story has pretty much nothing to do with the "Internet of Things" they are trying to sell us.

    Right. It's ordinary industrial automation. It's also strange that Intel would have CPU testers that weren't networked and reporting to some machine aggregating statistics and looking for process variance. It's pretty much routine in factories today to network the machines. That's been going on since the 1980s.

    The Mitsubishi C Controller mentioned is just a CPU board packaged as a Mitsubishi Electric industrial automation module for convenient mounting in industrial automation cabinets. "It includes two Ethernet ports, an RS232 port, a USB port, a CompactFlash card slot and a 7-segment display for debugging and diagnostics. The (Intel Atom) CPU comes with the Wind River VXWorks real time operating system pre-installed." It's programmed in C.

  21. Kidnapping? on Obama Administration Argues For Backdoors In Personal Electronics · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Only about 100 missing-child reports each year fit the profile of a stereotypical abduction by a stranger or vague acquaintance." Those are the real kidnapping cases, and there's usually no identified suspect whose phone law enforcement could dump.

  22. Not a problem. on Are the World's Religions Ready For ET? · · Score: 1

    Rank of this problem in things we need to worry about: 4,534,211.

  23. Terahertz radar on Arducorder, Next Open Source Science Tricorder-like Device, Nears Completion · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Low-cost terahertz radar imaging is going to be very useful in handheld devices. You really can see a short distance into many materials. Great for seeing pipes and electrical wiring in walls. The day will come when that's a standard tool one buys at Home Depot.

    Until that's working, a cooled IR imager would be useful. Those are great for finding heat leaks in houses, but currently cost too much.

  24. Then eBay can become a bank. on eBay To Spin Off PayPal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Then eBay can become a bank. In exchange for more regulation, they get to do lending and can borrow from the Fed.

  25. New tablet price point on HP Introduces Sub-$100 Windows Tablet · · Score: 2

    Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.