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User: alue

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  1. Re:We don't need as many computer scientists on The Changing Face of Computer Science · · Score: 1

    compilers and related research was at the forefront of technology itself

    Excellent point dude. Computer science as a means to profit has become the application of computer technology to specific domains: financial securities trading, automobile ignition systems, sound engineering, microwave oven design, defense systems. Why specialize in a tool you can hire somebody to use for you, when you can specialize in the domain itself?

    The change happened when computers got enabled as feasible tools. While there's still progress to be made, CS itself has lost the limelight, and things will probably stay that way until a paradigm shift fundamentally alters the field, maybe say when computers are no longer Turing machines.

  2. Broadband over Power Lines on Google Invests in Power-Line Broadband · · Score: 2, Informative
  3. Re:grammar nazis get their fp story on Hackers, Spelling, and Grammar? · · Score: 1

    i was reading a slashdot story here a while ago, and it basically showed that you can rmv th vwls frm a sntnc nd th wrds r stll ndrstndbl nd cmprhnsbl nd rdbl.

    I think the claim was that the order of letters in a word doesn't matter as long as the first and last letters are in place. If that's what you meant, you were probably referring to "Can You Raed Tihs?"

  4. Re:Now that Debian's back in the game.... on Fedora Core 4 Available · · Score: 3, Informative
    See here and here.

    Debian and Fedora are different distros w/different purposes. Fedora releases twice a year w/the latest and greatest, while Debian releases far less frequently w/a selection of old moldy stable tested proven software. Whereas Fedora brings the bleeding edge to just a handful of the most popular platforms w/o providing a convenient upgrade path, Debian makes itself available to both more platforms than any other distro and a systematic manageable way to upgrade to future releases. I may as well say this more clearly:

    Fedora
    • released every 6 months
    • latest software
    • supports few mainstream platforms
    • no feasible upgrade path


    Debian
    • years b/w release
    • old stable software
    • supports several platforms
    • well-designed upgrade system


    If you're looking for a desktop distro, Fedora would be an excellent choice. If you're running a server on the other hand, Debian would be the obvious choice.
  5. Article Text on Keyboards are Good; Mouses are Dumb · · Score: 5, Informative

    Articles : Mom, I think I'm a Cyborg
    Posted by paul on 2005/5/20 9:24:00 (1328 reads)

    Keyboards are good. Mouses are dumb.

    If I was an alien looking to slowdown the technological advancement of the human race, I would have implanted into their society the things we call the keyboard and the mouse. In fact, the only personal proof I have that this was not the case is if aliens were involved they would have updated the pain by now. Like making the "shift" key a foot pedal or something.

    Assuming mailicious aliens weren't involved, this isn't good news. It means we were silly enough to have invented these things ourselves. And then we were silly enough to let them "catch on". And we're silly enough to not personally diverge to a more efficient invention just in case we might later still need to know how to use this one. We humans follow a frighteningly simple herd mentality, God forbid someone jumps off a cliff and yells "free USB fobs!" - we'd be goners.

    Truth is however, that with the keyboard at least - we have adapted. Our brains and fingers have optimized this abomination enough to actually get decent output. Obviously, the optimal tool would be one that can output words (actually, getting rid of words and going right to thoughts would be way better, but that is as of yet - out of scope) as fast as we can think them.

    Now you might actually have been thinking the opposite. That the mouse is the more precise tool of the two. Well not for me it isn't. For artists and graphic manipulators the mouse is all that and a bag of chips - but for text people like myself, you can keep your seedy mice.

    The problem with mice (which the nefarious aliens know all too well) is that its use removes your hand from the keyboard. To open a file in your favorite editor, chances are you grab the mouse, find the pointer with your eyes, move it to "file", click, move it down to "open" (hopefully not having to deal with any of those sub-menus that always seem to unpop off my screen as I'm moving down trying to get a lower entry) and once again click.

    The alternative way to do this using just the keyboard (which I'm callously assuming is where your fingers already are) is to hold ALT, press F, let go of both, then hit O (thats as in "oh", not zero).

    I have never written down all those operations before now and just looking at the two makes me feel stupid to have every used a mouse to open a file. The ALT-F method is no secret - why the heck don't we use it? ALT-F then O is even two different hands - it really is quite fast. My only explanation is that such keystrokes are cryptic and will require a bout or two of memorization whereas the peachy mouse-menu route hand-holds us right along the way. The mouse cursor gives us a constant bookmark of where our thought process is "I just clicked the file menu - now I'm moving to click open".

    There is a nice book by Andy Clark called Natural Born Cyborgs. He makes an interesting observation that we all are already cyborgs (loosely defined as a fusion of humans and technology). His example is that if I am at your house, I may ask you "Do you know what the word poikilotherm means?". If you don't you would say "No, but we can look it up!". Upon consulting your house dictionary or your ubiquitous wifi connection, you can easily do that.

    Now similarly, I might ask "Do you know what time it is?". And, at the very instant of me asking, you may not. However, the common response is to raise your wrist to your face and say "Yeah, its 4:30".

    You liar. YOU did not know. Your watch knew but took credit for its perpetual temporal omniscience. I always know what time it is cuz dadburnit - I have a watch! In effect, we have extended our concept of self to include our watches - thus in Dr. Clark's claim we are cyborg. (Note that grammatically speaking, that sentence should end in "cyborgs", not "cyborg" - but if you ever watched Star Trek you'd know that cyborgs don't use contractions and often speak of th

  6. Excellent Scene in Spiderman 2 on Mathematicians Become Hollywood Consultants · · Score: 1

    Dr. Connors: When tau is equal to zero, who can tell me the eigenvalues?
    Peter Parker: (Hand flails in air.) 0.23 electron-volts!

  7. Rechargeable NIMH Battery Pack on User Review of N-Charge II Laptop Battery · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has anyone tried making a battery pack out of rechargeable NIMH batteries? From what I remember, they're 1.2V, so you could just put a number of them in series to match the proper voltage, and hook up a set of those in parallel to increase capacity. I've been wanting to do this but lack a good way to hold all these batteries together.

  8. Re:DEFECTIVE Interview on HP CEO Carly Fiorina to Step Down · · Score: 1

    Whoops, sorry I misread your post. I just think it's annoying when people get unfairly represented.

  9. DEFECTIVE Interview on HP CEO Carly Fiorina to Step Down · · Score: 1

    That interview is bullshit, and it's obvious why: the interviewer is deliberately setting up Carly for embarrassment.

    In that situation, it doesn't matter how brilliant or miserable Carly is in the capacity of a CEO, because the jackass interviewer will attempt to discredit everything she says. The dialogue reads more like a debate than an interview.

    Actually, the whole exchange might be just made-up. I can't find anything that says "Adaptive Enterprise is like a faucet."

  10. Re:"What Is Message Queuing?" on Open Source Message Queuing System · · Score: 1

    So how is this different from email?

  11. Re:How about this? on Independent Developer Projects in the Workplace? · · Score: 1

    Whoops, sorry; replied to wrong parent. =P

  12. Re:How about this? on Independent Developer Projects in the Workplace? · · Score: 1

    Are you kidding me? Those employees are getting paid for working on those projects. If their companies are paying them as much as when they're working on normal work, why should their companies relinquish any ownership at all?

  13. Re:Kick legs on Robot Makers Say World Cup Will Be Theirs By 2050 · · Score: 1

    I don't see how these robots can play soccer if they're 38cm tall. A soccer ball itself is like 30cm in diameter (just guessing). Besides considering how high up above the ground the ball can fly during a game, the robot'll have to be at least as tall as a human to compete--otherwise you could just kick the ball straight over these guys.

  14. CNET Article on U.S. Govt. Stipulates Free Annual Credit Reports · · Score: 1

    Sorry; forgot to include a link to the CNET article where I read about this.

    The link.

    Alan

  15. Water Cooling? on Moving Water Molecules By Light · · Score: 1

    You know what, this could make for a good water cooler for your cpu. Instead of having a noisy pump, you could just shine a fancy light down your water tubes.

  16. Like the Metric System on IPv6 Rollout Japan, China in 2005 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The US will adopt IPv6 as quickly as it's adopted the metric system.

  17. Script Fix on Can You Raed Tihs? · · Score: 1

    The script doesn't preserve punctuation location and doesn't ensure that the last letter of the word is in the right place. For instance:

    $ echo "Slashdot is nerdy." | ./scrmable.pl.orig
    Shdtolsa is n.dyer

    Here's a fix:

    <patch>
    --- scrmable.pl.orig 2003-09-16 00:57:27.000000000 -0400
    +++ scrmable.pl 2003-09-16 00:57:37.000000000 -0400
    @@ -21,7 +21,7 @@

    sub scrmable {
    while () {
    - foreach (split (/([^[:alnum:]]*[\s[:punct:]]+)/)) {
    + foreach (split (/([\s[:punct:]]+)/)) {
    if (m/\w/) {
    my @w = split (//);
    my $A = shift @w;
    </patch>

    $ echo "Slashdot is nerdy." | ./scrmable.pl
    Slhadost is ndrey.

  18. Re:More Fuzzy Math on Semiconductor Employees Suing IBM · · Score: 1

    Has it not occurred to you that "tuning this analysis" to similar demographic might entail comparing this group of IBM employees to people who experience frequent exposure to hazardous chemicals? The claim IBM stands to prove is that IBM semiconductor employees face no more risks than average people. I don't see how "all the people in the United States" functions as a legitimate control group.

    As for your other post, the defendants are presumably dealing with similar ailments with the same cause. Moreover it's clear that the defendants aren't a set of random pickings out of IBM's workforce -- they know each other and work in related if not the same groups (and therefore deal with the same work environments). I don't see how that adds up to a reasonable lawsuit.

  19. Dogears.net on University Textbook Exchange Software · · Score: 1

    Check out dogears.net. The guy who started it's an undergrad at Columbia. He offers the service to university without charge, if I remember it right. Works well, too.

  20. Re:I don't know if this helps but... on ATI's Radeon Linux drivers no longer supported? · · Score: 2, Informative

    More specifically, the DRI Status page says that "Radeons up to R9200 are supported."

    The Radeon 9200 is an rv280-based card, according to the naming scheme.

  21. Re:Same tired post..... on Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 PDA Review · · Score: 5, Informative

    In the end $499.99 quickly builds up to about $599.99.

    Actually to get full functionality of a PDA you have to spend a lot more than $600.

    PDA$500
    128M Memory Card$55
    Wireless Card$140
    Extra Battery$50
    Battery Charger$45
    Carrying Case$75
    TOTAL: $865

    And that doesn't include the opportunity cost spent on the hours it takes to get the thing to sync with Linux!

  22. Re:Cheap filters... on PC Cases for High Dust Enviornments? · · Score: 1
  23. Re:Cheap filters... on PC Cases for High Dust Enviornments? · · Score: 2, Informative
    A good filter will do the job, but consider the drawbacks:
    1. filters must be replaced regularly;
    2. they increase air flow turbulence and therefore noise; and
    3. dust builds up inside your case anyway.
    Dust builds up with any airflow, so the end-all solution is to put together a system that has no airflow, meaning no fans at all.

    This article's a good start. Here are some guidelines:
    • Remove all your case fans.
    • Use awesome passive cooling heatsinks on both the CPU and video card.
    • Use a case that's built with material with low heat capacitance to maximize passive system-cooling. All-plastic isn't a good idea.
    • Take your power supply out of the case. Consider the Apple Cube: the power supply is external, so the unit doesn't contribute to the system temperature.
    The system will run hot, but so long as it's stable, there's nothing with a warm case temperature.
  24. Given Names and Media on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Your Given Name · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As the popular films become more pervasive and as the movie industry becomes more proliferous and agressive with its idolization of superstar actors and actresses such as Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Rene Zellweger, etc, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find more and more people identifying their children with those names in mind.

  25. I'm not laughing on How Well Did You Fare on "Black Friday"? · · Score: 1

    Hey, that's not funny. What the hell do you think you're doing? If you want to say something slimey and racist like that, take it somewhere else.