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User: Grishnakh

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  1. Re:The Life We live on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 1

    Holy crap, please steer her away from that career while you still can! Have you not heard about how awful it is to work at EA (Electronic Arts)?

    Nothing wrong with women going into programming, but I think everyone (male or female) should be steered away from sectors of the industry (not to mention specific companies) which blatantly abuse their employees, as the games industry is infamous for. Encourage her to go into something that's a better career choice, and maybe do games on the side if she's that interested in them. Then she can start her own games company if she wants.

  2. Re:Dunno... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 1

    Screw all that crap; I want to see men staffing the cosmetics counters at mall department stores. If we don't have an equal number of men and women selling and applying cosmetics at department stores and cosmetic stores like Sephora and MAC, then there's a gender imbalance that must be corrected!!!

    Not only that, but why is there in imbalance in the kindergarten teaching sector? How many male kindergarten teachers do you see?

  3. Re:We are ALL Temporary employees on Layoffs At Now-Private Dell May Hit Over 15,000 Staffers · · Score: 1

    Yep. From your link:
    "The ADC carries up to 100 W of power, an insufficient amount to run most 19-inch or bigger CRTs widely available during ADC's debut, nor can it run contemporary flat panels marketed for home entertainment (many of which support DVI or VGA connections) without an adapter. The power limit was an important factor for Apple to abandon ADC when it launched the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display."

    Looks like the idea has several shortcomings, a big one being the amount of power that can be stuffed through the cable, which makes it unusable for very large and power-hungry displays. The OP's ideas might make some sense for totally proprietary all-in-one units with no ability whatsoever for expansion (as many earlier Apples were), but when even Apple has abandoned the idea, it's probably not a great idea to begin with. If it were such a great idea, we'd probably see it on Apples, since they lead the market frequently in adopting new hardware standards, as they don't worry much about backwards compatibility with older equipment and their customer base doesn't mind paying a premium for stuff.

  4. Re:Not that simple on Should Nuclear and Renewable Energy Supporters Stop Fighting? · · Score: 1

    Sometimes, you need a lot more power during the next 10 minutes and then you go back to your baseline. Nuclear isn't fast enough. Hydro is and that's why it's so popular as storage.

    And that's why you use nuclear for baseline generation only, and supplement it with other methods like hydro for those unpredictable peak demands. There's always going to be a baseline demand load, so you size your nuclear plants for that. If you have some extra capacity, you can use that to pump water uphill at those hydro plants as a form of energy storage.

  5. Re:No, because they are not compatible on Should Nuclear and Renewable Energy Supporters Stop Fighting? · · Score: 1

    o we have no idea to where put the waste

    That's easy: give it to France. They seem to be experts in dealing with nuclear waste. Unlike the stupid Americans, the French don't mind reprocessing their waste and getting a lot more use out of it.

  6. Re:No, because they are not compatible on Should Nuclear and Renewable Energy Supporters Stop Fighting? · · Score: 1

    Wind and solar have variable output, so they need to be partnered with flexible power generation. Nuclear is fundamentally inflexible because you can't quickly ramp up or down electricity output from a nuclear power plant.

    Don't be ridiculous; they're perfectly compatible and even complementary. Nuclear is good for base load generation, while other sources are good for peak load generation. In places where it's sunny, for instance, you can use nuclear plants for the little-changing base load, and then in the daytime when loads increase, your solar plants will help make up the difference.

  7. Re:Harvard Buiness School grads are noted for this on HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers · · Score: 1

    Yep, Obama is really the "change we need" or whatever his dumb slogan was. He isn't any different than Bush or any previous administration that turns a blind eye to corporate lawbreaking.

  8. Re:Who, now? on HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers · · Score: 1

    Thanks, I'll give the spring trick a try, and look for one of the 500-sheet trays. This printer is a great high-volume (for a home office) printer since it's so dirt-cheap to run, though I'd like to have a decent color laser around too for those less-frequent jobs.

  9. Re: I'm male but... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 1

    OK, so where are the well-engineered aircraft designed in the last 15 years which didn't take ages longer than the B-52 to design? There aren't any. For your comparison to work, you need to show both well-engineered and badly-engineered aircraft in modern times, and there just aren't any examples of the former.

    You can only cite the "95% of everything is crap" rule when you can point out shining stars from the present. When 100% of everything in the present is crap, the rule breaks down.

    As for music, the same is true. What good mass-market music is there from the last 10 years? There isn't any. (Good music made by musicians/bands who are products of an earlier era don't count. If Led Zeppelin were still around, they'd probably still be making good music, but they're a late-60s/70s band.) The reality is that the entire dynamic of music production has completely changed since the 50s-90s, with the advent of the internet, MP3s, Napster, the iTunes store, etc. No one really listens to the radio any more, at least among the middle class and up (notice that most of the FM radio stations these days have switched to Spanish-language programming).

  10. Re:Quality, Too on Layoffs At Now-Private Dell May Hit Over 15,000 Staffers · · Score: 1

    Did you miss my biggest rant there? The screen is smaller and crappier than in the older model. That's not aesthetics, that's a cheaper, shittier component. So yes, they did cut costs on components.

    Also, the case is all-plastic now, no metal. That's cheaper and shittier too, not purely aesthetic. Yes, it's uglier too, but it's also cheaper.

  11. Re:I'm male but... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 2

    I disagree. It's not deadlines that are the problem, it's the complete inability to do quality engineering. Look at how long it took to develop planes like the B-52 bomber (still in service now, though it was developed in the 40s), the A-10, the SR-71, the F-4, F-14, F-16, etc. Now, look at how long it took to develop the F-22 or the F-35. The F-35 is still under development! It's been over a decade! And they're still finding big problems with the F-22, which took forever to develop. Back in the old days, it didn't take a decade to develop an airplane, and they didn't have the luxury of computerized tools, CAD, etc.; they had to do it all with paper, pencils, and slide rules, and they did it in a few years. And still they managed to develop better, more reliable, and far less expensive planes than our latest ones.

  12. Re:I'm male but... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 1

    Ever heard of sarcasm?

    Whooossh!

  13. Re:I'm male but... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 2

    The problem here is that there's nothing masculine about developing software. Many early programmers were female (did you forget Ada Lovelace?).

    There's other reasons women aren't interested in open-source software. I suspect it's because they tend to be more practical than men, and go into careers for the money and stability rather than passion for the subject. Women usually have more well-rounded lives than men, and are more social. These are not traits that are conducive to doing unpaid software development. This doesn't mean that working on open-source is a bad idea; many of these male developers get into it really early in their careers (usually back in school), get involved in an important project, then manage to turn that into career. Just look at how Linus did it, or various other open-source pioneers; they don't work for free, but they did when they started. Someone like that sacrificed their social lives during their college years to get where they are now. That's something that's just more likely with men than with women.

    Don't forget, men have much longer timespans than women where they're dateable. Women basically need to find a partner by their late 20s, or early 30s at the latest, or they're probably going to end up being single. They can only have kids up until they're around 40 reliably. Men, on the other hand, can easily wait until their 30s to start seriously dating, and in fact many men find that they have far more dating success in their 30s and even 40s than they did in their teens and 20s. So it's a lot easier for a man to skip out on dating in their 20s, focus on work, and then start looking for a wife in his 30s. (And he can marry a women who's 10 years younger than him easily too, don't forget.) That's exactly what Linus did.

  14. Re:1.5% according to this month's LXF on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 2

    I really wonder if that's as much of a factor as they make it out to be.

    I've been a software engineer for well over a decade now, and most software engineers I've met are not involved in open-source development, and have little interest. They just do what's required for the job, and if the job uses MS tools (or other proprietary stuff, like Green Hills, Rational, etc.), that's what they use. It's pretty rare I run across engineers who have a real interest in open source. Usually, to them, it's something that looks interesting, but their job doesn't involve it, and they don't have enough interest to get involved on their own since they're already busy with their work, plus family life outside of work. They don't exactly have hours and hours of time every day to pursue open-source development on their own, and unlike a lot of open-source developers, they didn't get started in it early and then manage to steer their career in a direction where they could work on open-source software development either part-time or full-time for their employer, in a paid capacity.

    I have a female neighbor who is a software developer; she works with COBOL in the finance industry. I seriously doubt she has any interest in open-source development (not like there's much open-source COBOL going on anyway). Even if she did, she has a bunch of other non-computer-related hobbies, and a family, so there isn't exactly a lot of time for open-source hobbyist work there.

    Face it, most software developers aren't interested in becoming open-source activists and developers; they just want to get a good-paying job at some corporation and work there during the day, and do other stuff outside of work. It's only a small minority of developers who are so into it that they do it in their free time, and become so good at it that they push their way into convincing an employer to pay them to do it (like Linus). And for various reasons, the people who have the luxury of doing this are almost always (98.5% of the time apparently) men. Men have a lot of advantages that women simply don't in this area: they're typically less social than women, and they don't have to worry about getting pregnant, so it's easy for them to stay single and focus on work, just like Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton did. They also have a much higher tendency towards Asperger's than women.

  15. Re:Who, now? on HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers · · Score: 1

    I've got the same printer, the LaserJet 2300 (I don't think it has the "dn" suffix; they only really made two versions of this printer, the 2300 and the 2300L which is the cheaper, slower, crappier one; the 2300 is always duplex, and has a port for the JetDirect card to make it networked). It's a great printer. The only problem I have is I have the 250-sheet Tray 3 addition (which I carried over from a 2200d I got on Ebay), which for some reason won't feed sheets. It seems to be in the removable tray cartridge, since I can swap trays with my normal tray, and then tray 2 won't feed but tray 3 will. I tried replacing the roller and separator pads, to no avail. Oh well, the rest of it works great.

    So are the 2400-series printers crap? They look like the immediate successor to the 2300 series.

    I also have one of those Canon LiDE USB scanners (LiDE 50 I think), and second your recommendation. Works great in Linux. Be careful buying scanners and always check the SANE scanner database. Some Canon scanners like this one work perfectly, others don't work at all. It all depends on the chipset the scanner is based on.

    I would like to get a good color (laser) printer in the future, any recommendations?

  16. Re:Harvard Buiness School grads are noted for this on HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers · · Score: 1

    What's even more interesting is that interlocking directorates in the same industry are illegal in the US per the Clayton Act, however the article points out that 1 in 8 interlocks are indeed in the same industry. There's simply no enforcement of this. Thanks again, Obama.

  17. Re:Government Regulation?? on HP To Charge For Service Packs and Firmware For Out-of-Warranty Customers · · Score: 1

    I think Dell is the only major vendor left that does left anyone download patches regardless of support status.

    And Dell isn't doing too well these days.

  18. Re:I'm male but... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 1

    Most of the first programmers were women. They're fairly old now.

    They wrote tight efficient code that had a lower error rate and worked better than a lot of what you see nowadays.

    That's probably a generational difference, not a gender-based one. Just look at military planes: they used to build all kinds of great military planes decades ago, but these days they can't even build a new fighter jet without having all kinds of crazy problems.

  19. Re:Why do Free/Open Source gurus use Google+? on Linus Torvalds Gives 'Thumbs Up' To Nvidia For Nouveau Contributions · · Score: 1

    Yes, that's entirely true. However, if your whole goal is to share information with other people, then it's by definition going to be out of your hands one way or another. If you want complete privacy, then you shouldn't be using social networks at all. The whole point of them is to share things with others. The problem is that people frequently like to compartmentalize their sharing, so the best compromise you're going to get is to use a service that allows you to do that, and has a reputation for upholding that. Google actually has a good record here, from what I've seen. Facebook does not; they have a terrible record in fact. Basically, those are your two choices.

    I guess if you really wanted, you could make your own web page, and have different logins for different people, but who the hell is going to want to create an account on your personal webpage just so they can see your family photos and other postings? Yeah, I'm sure your friends would really love that.

  20. Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here on Watch Bill Nye and Ken Ham Clash Over Creationism Live · · Score: 2

    Are you an idiot? Official Catholic doctrine is that evolution is correct. It's the American fundamentalists and evangelicals (all protestant) who believe in Creationism. Go get an education.

  21. Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here on Watch Bill Nye and Ken Ham Clash Over Creationism Live · · Score: 1

    Going back to what you're talking about with abnormal circumstances leading to fossilization, I think most of us would agree with that idea.

    Most of us might, but Creationists would probably try to use the lack of fossils as a way to "disprove" evolution.

    As for non-uniform evolutionary processes, that seems to be well-supported by the fossil record. The idea is that lifeforms evolve and adapt to survive best in their environment; once they've adapted, they don't need to change much, so they don't until things change. For an example, look at sharks and horseshoe crabs. Those things haven't changed much in millions of years; we have fossils of their ancestors and they're little or no different from the creatures living today. So it seems reasonable to assume that those creatures simply don't need to evolve; any non-harmful mutations in them aren't likely to help them survive any better than the ones we have now. This wasn't the case for other creatures, so they continued to evolve while the sharks and horseshoe crabs stayed the same.

  22. Re:We are ALL Temporary employees on Layoffs At Now-Private Dell May Hit Over 15,000 Staffers · · Score: 1

    Yes, that's all completely true. But the threat of force was there just in case there was an uprising, but usually convincing everyone this is the natural order worked well. Sound familiar? It's exactly like the way things are now. People are convinced by their churches and media that things are the way they should be, more or less, they're kept distracted from seeing where the real problems are and kept focused on other crap, they're provided bread and circuses to keep them distracted and happy, and the few times someone causes a problem the militarized cops beat them to a pulp, shoot them, kill their dog, etc. It usually takes a long time before people decide to make a real change, and before this can happen they have to realize who they're really being oppressed by. Americans aren't anywhere near that point; it's decades away, at best. Lots of people are somewhat unhappy about things, but they blame everything on "the liberals" or "the conservatives" or "the Democrats" or "the Republicans".

  23. Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here on Watch Bill Nye and Ken Ham Clash Over Creationism Live · · Score: 1

    At best, it'll convince more magicians that they're right, making the whole world more stupid.

    No. Don't confuse "the American public" with "the general public worldwide". Only dumbass Americans believe this Creationist shit these days (I think it's also popular in Turkey).

    Don't worry; while America is obviously going the way of ancient Rome in a hurry, the rest of the world will continue on with science.

  24. Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here on Watch Bill Nye and Ken Ham Clash Over Creationism Live · · Score: 1

    If it did, then the theory we were put here by ancient astronauts would be equally valid yet the creationist i've meet recoil at the idea that it is an equally valid theory as biblical based creationism.

    The "ancient astronaut" theory (probably not a scientific theory) is that ancient humans (wherever they came from) were visited by alien "astronauts" in some way, perhaps teaching them things, or perhaps just observing them, and that these visitations explain things found in various ancient texts, such as happenings in the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible, or the description of what sounds like nuclear war in some ancient Indian texts. It's highly unlikely, and really just conjecture, but it's a lot more believable that a 6500-year-old Earth and the idea that God planted fossils to test our faith, things that Creationists would have you believe.

  25. Re:I am reminded of pigs and engineers here on Watch Bill Nye and Ken Ham Clash Over Creationism Live · · Score: 1

    Creationists don't believe in Catholicism, and will probably tell you the Pope is the Antichrist or somesuch.