Slashdot Mirror


User: DrPepper

DrPepper's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
73
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 73

  1. Amongst the racks? on Data Center Staff Will Sleep Among the Racks For London Olympics · · Score: 1

    I think that they will find it very cold sleeping amongst the racks. Some of the data centres I've worked in have had air-conditioning on the floor that was much colder than you would want in an office.

  2. Re:What's up with the timing? on Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot · · Score: 1

    Steve Jobs came back to Apple officially in September 1997. Slashdot was founded in Septemer 1997. Steve Jobs quits in August 2011. Rob Malda quits in August 2011.

    They're the same person.

  3. Optimal != Fastest on The Mathematics of Lawn Mowing · · Score: 1

    It may be the most optimal solution in terms of not covering the same place twice, but I'm not sure it is the quickest. I'm not bothered if I go over the same area twice, so long as I get the job done as fast as possible - making a turn takes time and there are plenty of those in the proposed solution. It may still be the quickest as some of those turns are quite small angles, but I think a 'turn penalty' is required to truly find the quickest solution.

    Regarding search and rescue, the object there is not to cover the whole search area as fast as possible. It is to cover the most likely locations for whatever is being sought as quickly as possible, and then cover the more unlikely places. For a static location that might mean starting in the middle and tracing a spiral. However, for someone falling overboard at sea, retracing the ship's path at close to it would be a higher priority than a simple spiral from any point.

  4. Meant to happen on Army DNS ROOT Server Down For 18+ Hours · · Score: 1

    I think you are overreacting a little bit. The expectation always was that one or more root servers would be unavailable at any one time - hence why there are 13 different root server systems available. More than one can be unavailable for days, and due to redundancy and caching it won't affect anything - as expected, nobody has really noticed this blip.

    There should be a good mix of technologies used in the different root server systems - different architectures, OS, etc. Some sites use anycast which gives massive redundancy within that system as well as providing good performance. However other architectures have their place and may be more robust to attack or certain failures. We need the variety.

    So technically it's a shame that H has gone down - they don't seem to have a good track record. Fortunately this time it isn't an issue.

  5. Re:Another useful statistic... on In UK, Computer Science Graduates the Least Employable · · Score: 1

    I'm on the other side - an employer looking for good graduates at the moment. We're not expecting graduates to walk out of university and just fall into being a constructive member of a development team. We expect to give training to fill in a few of the gaps and cover some of the specifics on how our specific industry works. However, so far most of the people we've interviewed have very little knowledge of the basics... data structures, algorithms and so on. Quite often they hardly understand the project work they did at university - either as a group or individually. I believe that the jobs are out there, it's just that the quality of a lot of graduates is quite low.

  6. Re:energy saving? what about the wallet? on Sleeping iPhones Send Phantom Data · · Score: 1

    It isn't. S/he might mean 1$/MB. Even then, most iPhones are on large data plans that include hundreds of MB per month. I know people here that use 3G for their home internet connection - and you wouldn't do that if it cost $1/second!

  7. Re:Dial-up is all there is some places... on FCC Preparing Transition To VoIP Telephone Network · · Score: 1

    Once the core network is updated, fibre and xDSL technologies can be used to deliver IP to certain end users - especially companies or those with more than one line.

    However I imagine that (as per 21CN) there will still be provision for simple, analogue line for end users that don't need anything more fancy.

    My point was that they won't be trying to put VoIP over a line that can only do 56k voice maximum. Those lines will stay analogue as they are now.

  8. Re:Dial-up is all there is some places... on FCC Preparing Transition To VoIP Telephone Network · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think a lot of people have missed the point on this. As I read it, the proposal is to replace the core infrastructure with VoIP based technology - ie. the circuits between exchanges. Existing POTS lines will still be used back to users to terminate calls. This is already in progress in the UK - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_21CN.

  9. Re:12 Months? on The PS3's "Yellow Light of Death" · · Score: 1

    Thank you for pointing this out - I was going to make the same point myself. Everyone seems to be having a go at Sony, where as they aren't technically doing anything wrong, or that any other manufacturer would. Of course they might consider replacing consoles after 1 year themselves for PR purposes, but really customers should be going to the retailer.

    As pointed out, Sony don't release official failure rate figures in common with other manufacturers and so it's difficult to say what the industry average rate is. However even with the rate being suggested, the PS3 is far more reliable than XBox 360 was over the same period and therefore I woudl contend that the PS3 experiences below average failure for the type of hardware. I've excluded the Wii as it utilises very much different hardware - Nintendo were very clever in recognising that you don't need top end hardware to make a good product.

  10. Re:What? on The Broken Design of Microsoft's "Fix it" Tool · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If even says that you might want to download it on another machine:

    "Note If you are not on the computer that has the problem, you can save the automatic fix to a flash drive or to a CD and then run it on the computer that has the problem."

  11. Unsecured wireless networks are insecure on Owning a Wireless Camera, Its User and Its Network · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Headline News! If you don't secure your wireless network, people can see the traffic on it and spoof responses! I'll concede the camera has a few bugs that should be fixed. But this article doesn't really raise any issues that the average Slashdot reader wouldn't know about.

    The article is obviously aimed at a less experienced audience - in which case it really should provide some tips on securing your network, rather than trying to scare people about wireless network technologies.

  12. 6,807 messages? on Texting Teens Generating OMG Phone Bills · · Score: 1

    6,807 messages in 30 days is 227 a day and somewhere round about 12 to 15 messages an hour on average. Either the number is an exaggeration, or she must have sore fingers.

  13. Re:Nice try, b ut... on Sort Linked Lists 10X Faster Than MergeSort · · Score: 1
    Hi,

    Java Blog for Experienced Programmers - http://www.0xcafebabe.com/ [0xcafebabe.com]

    You might like to know that the above domain (which I assume is yours from the DNS registration) seems to have been parked.
  14. Re:Dupe on Amazon's Werner Vogels on Large Scale Systems · · Score: 1

    It's not a dupe. This is a new article, although some of the information will be familiar to those who read the earlier article.

  15. Re:Galileo doesn't... on Cracking the GPS Galileo Satellite · · Score: 1

    Yes, Galileo is still in development. However there is no doubt that Galileo will have better accuracy than GPS - nobody in Europe, the US or anywhere else disputes that.

    DGPS requires additional stationary receivers in order to improve accuracy. It could be useful around airports and so on, but it's not practical to put them in everywhere across a continent.

  16. Re:Never Understood the Logic of Galileo on Cracking the GPS Galileo Satellite · · Score: 1

    1. The original idea for Galileo was to develop a system that wasn't controlled by one nation (the USA) and was commercially based. Remember Galileo started before the USA decided to drop SA, and even so SA could always come back. Of course there is some national pride at developing such a system - what community couldn't have pride in such a project?

    2. Airbus and Boeing worked together on the pre-A380 studies. Only Airbus decided to continue with the project though. Boeing have now decided to develop their own competitor aircraft - a case of American "me-too" perhaps? Airbus is already booked with orders for the A380 into the future, so the customers are definately there - despite recent project problems. And Boeing must be seeing demand from their customers too for that segment.

    3. I won't pretend to be an economist, so I won't comment on this - I don't think it's really relavent anyway.

  17. Re:Never Understood the Logic of Galileo on Cracking the GPS Galileo Satellite · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your comments are pretty much just troll, fortunately you only make a few points really:

    1. Galileo is not just a copy of the GPS system. It has higher precision than GPS and so opens up new applications that simply aren't possible at the moment. It also works better in some countries where GPS simply doesn't work very well. In fact the two systems will coexist, and future receivers are likely to support both which will give even better accuracy.

    2. The A380 isn't just a "me-too" project - there isn't a similar competitor in the world. Even Boeing admit that it falls into a different market segment than anything they have. However Boeing don't think it is a segment worth going after and have decided to put their resources elsewhere.

    3. The US economy may have grown 20% (I've not verified this), but so have other economies. IIRC China is growing faster than either the USA or Europe at the moment.

  18. Re:Highlights problem with ntp... on Leap Second At The End of 2005 · · Score: 1

    The NTP epoch only changes with reference to TAI. Since NTP is locked to UTC, the NTP epoch in UTC is, and will always remain, 1/1/1900 at 00:00 UTC. Perhaps, as someone else said, NTP should use TAI as it's reference and have a "leap second" counter as part of it.

    How the operating system deals with a leap second is, for me, a different issue. Again, perhaps the OS should work in TAI and then convert everything to UTC (or more properly local time) for display to humans. Problem with that is the OS doesn't know when the leap second happen, since the aren't predictable - but nowadays that information could be distributed as an OS update.

  19. Re:Highlights problem with ntp... on Leap Second At The End of 2005 · · Score: 2, Informative

    NTP does include support for leap seconds - there are bits that can be set by the primary time source to indicate that a leap second will occur soon. NTP isn't a time source itself - it's a protocol for transferring time. You can use whatever time source you want for NTP - it's up to the time source to set the bits if desired.

    NTP is intended for synchronising computers together (useful for servers). It is not intended to provide a highly accurate time signal for scientific applications. If you need that kind of precision, then you use a direct time source such as a GPS signal - a common secondary use of the atomic clocks onboard the satellites. The only way to get better precision than that is to get your own atomic clock :-)

  20. Re:crank cabbie callouts? on London Turned into Giant Board Game · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can book a black cab in advance or a minicab. However, only black cabs can go around looking for business, and not all black cabs can be prebooked.

  21. Re:Open your eyes... on Where are the Large RAM Systems? · · Score: 1

    Congratulations, you spotted a mistake on Slashdot - I'm really surprised that nobody else picked me up on that one. You are prize winner #SD3497459685654.

    Once you pass the age of 6, you will begin to realise that minor writing mistakes are made everyday. Live with it.

  22. Open your eyes... on Where are the Large RAM Systems? · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...there all over the place:

    Dell Itanium
    HP Itanium
    IBM Itanium

  23. Re:Wait for the investigation... on A Car With A Mind Of Its Own · · Score: 1

    This may actually be quite believable for this car.

    The first time he braked, he probably tried it like you would normally - just ease on the brakes to take the speed off. Realising that not much was happenning (as the cruise control was not disengaging), he probably pushed harder and harder until experiencing brake fade.

    However, modern Renaults (certainly this one) feature EBA - Emergency Brake Assist. If you slam on the brakes very suddenly, the computer senses that you want to stop sharpish, and actually puts the brakes on at maximum - much faster than you can (it reacts in a fraction of second as your foot starts moving).

    So, when he was coming to the toll station, he probably started panicing and actually stamped on the brakes. The EBA would have kicked in and forced the brakes on as hard as they can go - actually stoppping the car, or slowing it enough to run it into a crash barrier safely.

  24. Re:UPDATE, more info available on A Car With A Mind Of Its Own · · Score: 2, Informative

    Removing the key card - I can confirm that this is quite hard even when the car is stationary (and the engine running).

    I have a Renault Laguna II which has the same card key ignition system. It holds the card in the slot when the engine is running - there is a hole in the card and I guess it puts something through that to stop you removing it. Whatever it does, it doesn't want you removing it without turning the engine off first.

    In addition, part of the front of the card (that is usually exposed when it is in the slot) pulls out to reveal a normal key. You can use this key to unlock a hidden lock on the doors if you ever have problems with the card. The card is great for everyday use, but I can appreciate that in an emergency there isn't much to grip on.

    I can also confirm that the semi-automatic gearbox used is designed to make sure that you don't kill the engine. Eg. in manual mode it won't let you shift when it might stall/over-rev the engine. In fact, if you put it into a gear and accelerate, once it hits the rev limiter, it will (after a short pause) shift up for you.

    I imagine that the cruise control system got fried, so pressing on the brake or pressing the "0" button on the steering wheel would both have had no effect as they are both signals to the same computer. The vehicle computer probably wouldn't let him shift to neutral either to protect the engine.

    Chances are that being in France, he would have had a diesel as it's the most common engine choice in Europe and given it maxed out at 120mph. As I am sure everyone is aware diesel engines tend to be fairly torquey, so it could well be quite fun trying to brake at the same time the engine is running flat out.

    Renault also don't have a very good reputation for electrics; very worrying given their latest vehicles contain a lot of technology as standard, which makes them attractive over the competition. That and the overall design is, shall we say, different :-)

  25. Re:had to mv my cat... on Review: Juvenile Felis Catus · · Score: 1

    Agreed. If you get a pet, then you are responsible for it for the rest of its life. Sometimes things don't go according to plan, but it's still your responsibility to ensure the pet's welfare. That's life. Deal with it.