Slashdot Mirror


User: Hadlock

Hadlock's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
4,653
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 4,653

  1. Re:If only it stayed confined to that level on How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting · · Score: 1

    Some people are redundant and have to look busy. I would imagine Tom Smykowski spends 30 hrs a week in meetings looking important, pulling an office wellfare paycheck. Office Space illustrates this exceedingly well! http://www.llakomy.com/Projects/flashvideo/office-space/tom-smykowski-s-interview-with-bobs/view
     
    Wally from Dilbert is another prime example of this.

  2. Re:Not necessarily on How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting · · Score: 1

    If your job is to make decisions, maybe 30 hours a week being informed and making decisions is a good way to spend your time? Particularly if say, you work for a computer manufacturer and your boss says "ok, we're going to start up a Netbook division, and you're in charge of it. get back to me in a month and let me know what your budget is, when you expect to ship your first product, and what your division's earnings is going to be for 3rd quarter 2011."
     
    However, if your job is writing testing procedures for the new netbook division, they're probably wasting your time with meetings after the first few months.

  3. Re:Pirate parties should rename themselves on The Pirate Party of Canada Is Official · · Score: 1

    True, I just had a great idea for an organization in the USA. The Pirate Party. As in, Tea Party, House Party, Cocktail Party etc. The NRA (national rifle association) has a nice feature that if you are indicted in ANY lawsuit involving gun use, the NRA will pay your entire legal bill. I would join a Pirate organization like that in an instant(!). Imagine you are part of the Pirate party, and your internet is disconnected due to excessive bandwidth use, or used by the MPAA/RIAA. Call up your Pirate Party and have them sick their legal team on them.

  4. Re:I wonder on New MacBook Pros Launched · · Score: 1

    Man, once you get used to it, Fn + Arrow keys is the way to go. When I finally moved on from my old Powerbook I sorely missed the functionality of being able to zip around text documents with Vi-like ease using Fn + Arrow or Command + Arrow. Maybe if the Fn key was poorly placed, but I think you'll find if you give it a chance you'll really like it. Some people really like their full size keyboards however... I'm going to ignore your intel hardware qualifiers :)

  5. Re:Still Overpriced? on New MacBook Pros Launched · · Score: 1

    After careful discussion, we've determined $1000 for a bone stock netb^H^H^H^HMacbook is a pretty decent machine for the money once you toss in the Apple Tax. The low end Macbook is spec for spec identical to an $850 desktop I built for myself from scratch in Jan 2008 (one small difference, I had an 8600GT, Macbook has 9400m, both within 10% performance of eachother). 27 months later Apple releases a well built laptop for $1000? Yes please! If I were in the market for a new laptop, this would definitely be in my top three choices. My gut tells me $875 or $925 is what the laptop is really worth to me, but I'd probably still pay full price for one. However, I will probably upgrade my netbook this fall instead rather than buy a new Laptop, to something that can properly play and display 720p youtube and mkv files.
     
    Fanboy Disclaimer: I own an ancient Powerbook G4 (TiBook Rev. B)

  6. Re:I wonder on New MacBook Pros Launched · · Score: 1

    Fn + Arrow Keys does all that -- or at least does on my old G4 powerbook. What's the max throughput on the non-intel gig-e chip? It probably exceeds the read/write of the internal HD, and FW drives are hot-swappable if speed is really an issue :)

  7. City of Dallas removing cameras on Red-Light Camera Ticket Revenue and Short Yellows · · Score: 1

    Dallas (Texas) ended up removing their Red Light Cameras all together - they were too effective; people simply stopped running the red lights, and weren't bringing in the revenue that was promised. In short - they were cash flow negative, so they axed the program entirely. They finally pulled the camera post by my house out of the ground last month.

  8. Re:HTC on Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale · · Score: 1

    I will eat my hat (signed by Cowboy Neal!) if HTC buys them for anywhere near the asking price of $870 million dollars mentioned in that article.

  9. Re:HTC on Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale · · Score: 1

    You can buy a heck of a lot of lawyers and corporate blackmail artists for a billion dollars! No, let me rephrase that. A BILLION DOLLARS! A BILLION!
     
    You can hire almost 2000 IP lawyers at $250/hr full time for a year for that amount of money. You could employ the entire Dominican Republic for a year with that kind of money! And you're saying A BILLION DOLLARS is the best way to fight, at most, a $100 million dollar ($100 million stretched over a period of 10 years) lawsuit battle? The WebOS licencing revenue isn't worth hardly anything. They'd be a niche player, at best, under HTC.

  10. Re:HTC on Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale · · Score: 1

    That's assuming HTC thinks they can do a better job of selling WebOS/the Palm brand better than Palm has been able to do. Palm has managed to keep their head above water far longer than anyone thought they would, but as a managed brand name, I doubt HTC would/could give Palm the love it needs to extract the value the paid for the brand. In the long run, buying the Palm brand is going to the the albatross around the neck of whoever buys them, much like TimeWarner buying AOL, or Yahoo buying Broadcast.com.
     
    That's not to say a venture capitalist company like the one who bought Chrysler will come along with some sort of pump-n-dump strategy to float the brand another couple of years. This is likely what Palm is hoping for at this point.

  11. Re:Google should buy them on Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale · · Score: 1

    The other problem is that there is nothing anyone needs at Palm. Palm is the only one using WebOS, and anyone can order up a million devices from a manufacturer using reference designs from Symbian or HTC (using either Windows CE/Phone7 or Android) and market them under their own brand name with almost zero licencing fees. By building a phone around the Palm platform you're doomed to vendor lock-in from the beginning, on a mostly-dead platform to boot. From a development standpoint Palm is a terrible choice in the long run, unless you've got some killer licencing deal from Palm from the get go.

  12. Re:Endorsement on Rupert Murdoch Hates Google, Loves the iPad · · Score: 1

    I'd probably invest in an ipad if I could get some sort of package deal for $25/month of

    • The New York Times
    • Washington Post
    • The Economist

    Barring that, I'll probably pony up $15/mo for the NYT when their android app is released, so long as it has true offline reading capability so I can use it with my (non-touchscreen) netbook.

  13. Re:from the article on Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town · · Score: 1

    Fuel oil is a lot closer to $1 a gallon (seasonally), especially if you have the luxury of buying it in bulk and have your own storage facilities. You're looking at closer to $2400/month, or in other words, you could run the generator during the 8 hours it takes to switch over to mexican power for 400 years for a million dollars, including the cost of transportation.

  14. Re:Some guesstimate? on Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure those low values have any statistical value though.

  15. Re:from the article on Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town · · Score: 1

    Considering they'd only run the generator 8 hours every 3 weeks or so, probably not a whole heck of a lot. At a dollar a gallon that's $2400 a month. For a million dollars you can buy 400 years worth of fuel + delivery costs.

  16. Re:from the article on Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town · · Score: 1

    Rei, meet flash floods. Flash floods, meet Rei.
     
    You'd think with someone with the name REI would have some idea of weather conditions in the back country. I've personally seen flash floods coming down the hills in far west Texas. Pretty scary stuff if you're not in a car.

  17. Re:Some guesstimate? on Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid · · Score: 1

    Some people like to play games with 3D graphics. Until VMware releases software that allows you to play the latest games under emulation at full screen and similar framerates to what you see natively under windows, needing to dual boot is still a valid argument.

  18. Re:Some guesstimate? on Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid · · Score: 1

    I run Ubuntu on my netbook, but I only use it maybe 3 hrs a week unless it's a holiday where I'm traveling. Otherwise I am firmly a windows user for games. Should I count as a user? Listing the total number of users doesn't make a whole lot of sense if the total is dramatically larger than the number of actual users.

  19. Re:from the article on Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's the cost of legislation for a nuke plant in the US per mW though? Diesel generators produce the same energy for half the price as nuclear in the kW range, and regulation is slim to none.

  20. Re:from the article on Largest Sodium Sulfur Battery Powers a Texas Town · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder what a diesel generator would cost them? Reportedly many communities in Alaska are serviced by power generated by massive diesel generators. 4mw is what a data center consumes, right?

  21. Re:Heres the thing... on Obama Unveils New Nuclear Doctrine · · Score: 1

    Out of curiosity, what does it cost for a country to build one nuke? I guess you could take the cost of a nation's nuclear weapons program, and divide it by x warheads, but I'm guessing you have a better idea than I do. If we've spent say, a trillion dollars on nuclear warheads and built 10,000 total, and retired 5,000 that puts the cost at about $200 million for a state of the art high yield military nuke. That's roughly half the cost of a nuclear powered flagship aircraft carrier, or five F-18 fighter jets.

  22. Re:Actual reasons on Obama Unveils New Nuclear Doctrine · · Score: 1

    I've read that NK has somewhere on the order of 1,000,000 troops - how true is that? What's the combined number of S.Korean stationed US troops + S. Korean troops? It would appear to me that they have the advantage in a ground war, assuming they have the bullet supplies to maintain a sustained offensive. 100 bullets a month x a million soldiers is a lot of bullets for a country like NK.

  23. Re:50W lightbulb using a common 2L Bottle on Pumping Sunlight Into Homes · · Score: 1

    Let me introduce you to 1985: The introduction of silicone caulking

  24. 50W lightbulb using a common 2L Bottle on Pumping Sunlight Into Homes · · Score: 5, Informative

    This has been done in the 3rd world for ages. You drill a hole in your roof, mount a 2L soda bottle filled with water (and two cap-fulls of bleach to keep it clean and clear), and stick an old black plastic film canister overtop of the white lid to keep the plastic from degrading. The video of these in use is amazing. Sadly however it only works when the sun is up - which is most of the workday (12 hrs typically) in the tropics.
     
    Watch it in action. Wow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zMAWztZ6TI

  25. Re:Read the license? on Print-On-Demand Publisher VDM Infects Amazon · · Score: 1

    Throw enough shit at a wall and eventually some of it will stick...
     
    At $45-60 per book, the risk:profit ratio is pretty favorable here. Print-on-demand makes it very lucrative since there's no cash up front to start the business, and you can contract out/automate all the printing. Hell, I bet most of those "books" aren't even written/generated; they'll just crunch the data to print if/when someone actually buys one of the "books".