Slashdot Mirror


User: RegularFry

RegularFry's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
479
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 479

  1. Re:No. It would not. on Would Scottish Independence Mean the End of UK's Nuclear Arsenal? · · Score: 1

    Most likely Newcastle-on-Tyne or Barrow-on-Furness. The main reason for siting the base in Scotland was presumably to get it as far away from London as possible.

    Futile, though. Either the Russians decide to take out Britain, or not. (They might as well, since they have plenty of missiles).

    You don't put your arsenal all the way over there because you think the Russians are only going to target that. You put it all the way over there in case one of *your* guys screws something up and makes something embarassingly large go pop.

  2. Re:Fine, just give us back the ThinkPad on Lenovo Shows Android Laptop In Leaked User Manuals · · Score: 1

    I'm lucky enough to have a T420. It's a glorious machine. There's enough right with it that even given the changed keyboard I'd want to at least try out the T430 as a replacement before writing it off.

  3. Re:Guns are don't kill people on The Math Formula That Lead To the Financial Crash · · Score: 1

    It's worse than that - Black-Scholes *does* make an assumption about the distribution of "more than x", and in that specific situation the assumption is catastrophically wrong.

  4. Re:Depends... on Ask Slashdot: What Is an Acceptable Broadband Latency? · · Score: 1

    Voice applications are also screwed with more than 200ms delay because of the psychological effects of any echo.

  5. Re:The dirty little secret of capitalism on Printing a Home: The Case For Contour Crafting · · Score: 1

    The fractional reserve system is what makes money not quite like an IOU. If you have unregulated reserve rates, then the GP is literally correct - money is created when it is lent. The money did not exist before the bank decided to lend.

  6. Re:Can it do the plumbing? on Printing a Home: The Case For Contour Crafting · · Score: 1

    You couldn't do the plumbing directly, but you could make holes for it which you could line with a flexible membrane after the fact. The water industry already does something like this for rehabilitating old pipework.

    Putting in a wiring harness would be an utter sod, though.

  7. Re:GPL not appropriate for taxpayer funded project on NASA Open Sources Aircraft Design Software · · Score: 1

    You may find this enlightening:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government

  8. Re:SSD Time on PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives · · Score: 1

    Why on *earth* would you expect that? It's a *completely* different technology, with completely different failure modes.

    Well, almost everyone is saying how reliable SSDs are because they have no moving parts to wear out. Also, since I do not really care about the speed, the only reason I would buy a SSD (instead of a cheaper HDD) would be reliability. If that SSD failed before a hard drive that has been already spinning for 7 years, I would be disappointed.

    SSD lifetimes aren't measured in years, they're measured in *writes*. If you had an SSD powered on for 10 years but never written to, it might well have another 10 years left in it (barring failures that are common to all electronic devices, that is). Keeping a platter spinning for that long would be asking for trouble.

    That being said, the reliability of an SSD isn't so much in that they last for a long time, it's that you can know with a fair degree of precision *for your use case* when they are going to fail *after*, so you can budget to replace them *before they fail*. This is necessary because, unlike hard drives which often fail gradually while giving you a chance to pull your data off, SSDs fail instantly and completely.

  9. Re:SSD Time on PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives · · Score: 1

    Hardly. Backup drives of either sort fail, just like primary storage of either sort.

  10. Re:SSD Time on PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives · · Score: 1

    It's not about the backup, or the data. When I buy something, I want it to last (especially if it is expensive), because I do not like paying for stuff that breaks soon.

    Even if I make a backup three times a day, when the drive beaks, my computer crashes. Then, I have to order a new drive and wait a day for it to arrive (hopefully, the drive did not break on Friday afternoon). When it arrives, I have to install it, restore the backup and restart my PC. Oh, I also had to pay for the new drive.
    Well, I could buy two drives and keep one as a spare, but then I will be paying twice the money for the same space and some part of the hassle still remains. On a desktop, I could use RAID1 but I would still need to buy two drives. Laptops usually do not have the space or the battery capacity to afford RAID1.

    Same is true for other devices (for example power supplies).

    Ok, here's a little economics for you: convenience costs money. Between the two extremes of paying as little as possible and having as little downtime as possible, you have to find a point where you are comfortable with the amount you are spending, the downtime you incur when it happens, and how predictable that downtime is. As you've placed yourself on the former extreme, you're saying that your personal time to recover from a downtime, and your ability to predict when that will be, is worth less to you than the money it would cost you to mitigate your situation.

    SSDs cost more than HDDs, so I would expect them to last longer

    Why on *earth* would you expect that? It's a *completely* different technology, with completely different failure modes.

    (and since my hard drives are quite reliable, a SSD would have to work at least 10 years). As the technology is new, nobody knows how long SSDs will last, so I will have to wait and see.

    The technology isn't that new: right now you can pay extra to get SSD drives which are guaranteed for a given number of writes. How long they last will depend on your usage patterns, but I've seen specs for drives which are guaranteed for *years* of continuous writes. Not only that, but *they'll tell you when they need replacing*.

  11. Re:Some what similar on Portable, Super-high-resolution 3-D Imaging · · Score: 1

    You can easily compensate for light placement if you've got a target object of known shape (and optical properties) in the scene. I use a three-sided pyramid with a right-angled apex; it makes the maths almost trivial, and it's very easy to fold a decent one out of printer paper if you haven't got a premade one handy.

  12. Re:invokedynamic benchmarks? on Oracle Announces Java SE 7 · · Score: 1

    JRuby master already has invokedynamic support; it's apparently about 40% faster on Java7 than on Java6.

  13. Re:Maybe a million monkeys on Can a Monkey Get a Copyright & Issue a Takedown? · · Score: 1

    For a photo that includes artwork still in copyright, yes, the photo you take in the museum is covered by the painter's copyright. It's *also* covered by yours.

    For reference photos of artwork, whether the photographer gets copyright or not actually depends on the jurisdiction. They don't in the US, thanks to a case in the 90s, but they do in Europe. That's why, for instance, MOMA has two different licensing arrangements: they use artres.com for the US, and scalarchives.com for everywhere else.

  14. Re:Colossus was not used for Enigma on The Machines That Sparked the Beginning of the Computer Age · · Score: 1

    It is slightly embarrassing (especially in light of all the "Don't nerds know this already?" traffic upthread) that yours is the first comment I've seen to mention this.

  15. Re:Because syntax is _everything_. on Mirah Tries To Make Java Fun With Ruby Syntax · · Score: 1

    I find the assumption that one's career should consist of only one language quite sad.

  16. Re:Looks almost as nice as JRuby, but not quite. on Mirah Tries To Make Java Fun With Ruby Syntax · · Score: 1

    Considering that the same person is responsible for both, I think you'd have to ask him, but I suspect that the lessons learnt from one informed the other.

  17. Re:Why didn't they design an awesome bike? on EADS Bicycle Made of Steel-Strength Nylon · · Score: 1

    It looks like it's printed in parts and assembled, so presumably if you wanted to replace the worn parts you'd just print those. Or you could print them in some sort of hard-wearing ceramic separately, or something. There are many ways to skin that cat.

  18. Re:Price isn't prohibitive to serious riders on EADS Bicycle Made of Steel-Strength Nylon · · Score: 1

    Economies of scale will apply *to the printer itself*. That's the interesting part.

  19. Re:land use on Researchers Develop Biofuel Alternative To Ethanol · · Score: 1

    I've never understood why kudzu isn't considered. It seems ideal.

  20. Re:Still doing that? on Superheroes vs. the Westboro Baptist Church · · Score: 1

    When you're reasoning about WBC, you've got to take religion out of the equation. They protest *solely* to goad someone into assaulting them, or otherwise doing *something* that gives them someone to sue. They're only using religion because it's effectively non-contestable on factual grounds, so they can't be done for slander.

  21. Re:previous works on Open Source Music Fingerprinter Gets Patent Nastygram · · Score: 1

    Shazam launched commercially in 1999. At best they were coincident.

  22. Re:obvious on Open Source Music Fingerprinter Gets Patent Nastygram · · Score: 1

    Does it count if I sketched out *exactly this idea* in my college lab notebooks from 1999, *before* I'd heard of Shazam-the-service? Seriously, it's not a complicated idea.

  23. Re:Posible prior art on Open Source Music Fingerprinter Gets Patent Nastygram · · Score: 1

    Patent 6,990,453 was issued in 2001.

  24. Re:Funny thing about these trades on Sudden Demand For Logicians On Wall Street · · Score: 1

    The problem with that thinking is that when you're wrong, you're wrong enough for it to more than wipe out your takings. That's basically Mandelbrot's message in The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets.

  25. Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Theft! on Sudden Demand For Logicians On Wall Street · · Score: 1

    Oh, for crying out loud - this is absurd. Derivatives are *not* fraud. They can be used in fraud, but so can any other instrument.

    Something you don't understand is not automatically bad; it's worthwhile reading up on options and why they are actually a rather good idea before dismissing derivatives as a dead loss.