Slashdot Mirror


User: caveat

caveat's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
865
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 865

  1. going a bit OT, but.. on Yamaha CD-RW Drive Writes Images In Substrate · · Score: 1

    ...as a maccie (at least i assume you are from your sig), you of all people should know Mac *is* 'nix. Although for writing CD-R drivers, it probably isn't...
    bleh...i hate mondays, i'm always at loose ends and posting garbage.

  2. Re:Vinyl quality on Moby Says Techie Fans = Fewer Sales · · Score: 3, Funny

    a clean record, on a $6000 turntable, with a $2500 tonearm and $3000 needle, through an $8000 tuble amp with a $15,000 set of speakers, makes a CD sound like a clown farting through a kazoo. you just can't get that kind of warmth and tonality with canned digital music.
    of course, for a system us mortals can afford, CDs sound perfectly fine (espeically since the amp's probably digital).

  3. Um... on Moby Says Techie Fans = Fewer Sales · · Score: 1

    Moby's featured fairly regularly on MTV...his music gets plenty of coverage.

  4. Won't work in their Perfect World... on Microsoft's 'Palladium' Privacy/DRM Scheme · · Score: 1

    ...since the camera will recognize you're trying to take a picture of something secure and meltdown, or explode, or call the gestapo, or something.
    if they want to do it with ADCs (plug the "analog gap"), i can't see them not doing it with purely digital devices (cameras, video cams, scanners, yadda yadda).

  5. jumping out of planes on Software Dead Man's Switch · · Score: 1

    first time i went skydiving, i set up an 8-hour countdown script to mail out "hi, i just went skydiving and hit the ground awfully hard...call my next of kin" messages to everybody in my address book. keyed it to seti@home screensaver mode, so when it quit the script was aborted. otherwise i know i'd have forgotten.

  6. Re:Normally... on Dutch Judge Cracks Down on Hyperlinks · · Score: 1

    It's easy to be for free speech, if you like the someone else is saying. It's requires some courage to support free speech that you disagree with.
    i have no problem with supporting speech i disagree with; let the nazis and black panthers say whatever they want, i could care less. i do have a problem with idiotically dangerous speech...i think shouting "fire" in a crowded theater should be illegal, which it is, and i think promoting the derailment of trains carrying nuclear material is definitely tending towards the dark-gray end of the speech spectrum. hell, why not advocate running tractor-trailers loaded with spent fuel rods off the road while you're at it...i mean, that would certainly put a damper on transport...

  7. Re:the meaning of life on Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer · · Score: 1

    yeah, the earth is a supercomputer...the perfect analog simulation machine of the earth. same goes for the universe, as my physics/cosmology professor used to say. doesn't mean we can sit down at the console though.

  8. Re:About half a human brain worh of processing pow on Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer · · Score: 1

    yeah, so what?
    it's circuts are permanently laid out, burned into silicon. that's what IMHO makes us intelligent...not the raw processing power, but the abitily to dynamically reconfigure our networks on-the-fly. now, if somebody were able to build a few 100Tflop systems with neural networks and the ability to fuse the networks, decide what features to keep and lose, and repeat, THEN we're in trouble (sort of like the way the escaping robot 'learns', only with >100,000x the processing power.)

  9. Re:SETI? nah, no way. on Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer · · Score: 0, Troll

    haven't we been over this ad nauseum? yes, the total power of all the SETI computers is much much greater than ES, but that's all individual machines grinding away on their little chunks of data that they periodically download. for massive data-intensive numbercrunching like ES was designed for, the interconnects become as important as the processing speed. try running a whole-earth climate sim over the SETI network, where you have to constantly feed each processor a stream of data, and watch your performance drop by a few orders of magnitude. (disclaimer: IANA supercomputer architect, so everything i've said could be wrong, but i think i get the meat of the matter.)

  10. Re:"Inside" the Earth Simulator on Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer · · Score: 0, Troll

    i really like the design aesthetic of the cabinets, with the big red circles at the ends...remind anybody else of HAL, or pretty much every menacing intelligent supercomputer ever conceived? makes the ASCI systems look so boring, with plain metal cabinets...gotta love the japanese Way, everything has to look good on top of working good.
    now if they'd just backlight the circles deep red, and pulse the light along with the level of system activity...mmmm

  11. Re:What about the REAL fastest computers? on Inside The World's Most Advanced Computer · · Score: 0, Troll

    They are there as well. The classified computer project of the US government is named ASCI..

    well...ASCI is publicly acknowledged computers running classified apps/data. i wouldn't say it's totally unreasonable to say that the NSA/CIA/MI6/etc likely have some non-publicly-acknowledged system(s) hidden away somewhere that make ES look like a 8088. i don't have that much faith in my government to expect them to tell me everything they spend my tax dollars on.

  12. definition of an emulator? on LindowsOS Softens Microsoft-Compatibility Claim · · Score: 1

    err...correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't an emulator emulate (my english teacher would KILL me for that) one particular bit of hardware (in this context, at least) on a different bit of hardware by converting one set of machine-language instructions to a different machine language on the fly, ala VirtualPC (x86 on PPC)?
    WINE seems to me to be more a sort of runtime or somesuch - it doesn't actually emulate an x86 processor or anything, it just gives Win apps the right APIs and time on the processor.
    like i said though, i could be totally wrong. but how i love semantic hairsplitting.

  13. darwin and OSX on LindowsOS Softens Microsoft-Compatibility Claim · · Score: 1

    *sigh*
    dude...if you're running OSX on your PMac, you're running darwin...so you can run 14 OSes.
    although i suppose you could run darwin w/o the OSX wrapper...but why?

  14. Re:Licensing on LindowsOS Softens Microsoft-Compatibility Claim · · Score: 1

    i sort of doubt that, only for the reason that nobody's ever Seriously Tried to pull this kind of stunt before (WINE et al. are not Seriously Trying; they don't come preinstalled at wal-mart).
    if lindows takes off, i wouldn't be surprised if M$ rewrote their EULAs to specifically ban use on a non-M$ OS, though. bastards.

  15. i wonder how long... on Intrusion Detection For Your PC Case · · Score: 1

    ...before the *AA pushes to have all new PCs sold with some setup like this, so we can't screw around with the internals and get around their precious digital "rights" management hardware...

  16. Re:In other news ... on AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google · · Score: 0

    Emacs declares itself better than VI

    well of course it is, silly boy.
    emacs r0x0rs! vi sux0rs!
    sorry, had to say it...

  17. and the P4... on AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google · · Score: 0, Troll

    ...runs at 2.53GHz, so it MUST be the best

    'nuff said

  18. ah, the pleasures of a government job on 10-Gigabit Ethernet Standard Approved · · Score: 2, Funny

    that's the great thing about working at a national lab - in my office i have a gigabit network connection straight to the backbone (the advantages to being tech-savvy in a generally retarded department..."oh come on, the 100/1000 card is like $25 more than the 10/100...and it's not your money anyway"). wonder how long before they upgrade the network, those iso's take *forever* at 700KB/s...
    yes, i know i'm not pushing my connection at all @ 700K, and i know 10-gig ethernet wouldn't make a rat's ass of a difference, but i like to gloat (/. on mozilla 1.0 takes, oh, 0.981 seconds to load and render)

  19. no, it's extremely easy to destroy on Riding the World's Fastest Train @ 500 kph · · Score: 1

    no, all you need to do is crack a baseball-sized hole anywhere along the tube or vac system. let's say you have a maglev tooling along at 22,000mph (orbital speed) and you instantly vent the vac-tube. kinda like reentry...only instead of gradually slowing as the air gets denser, you're suddenly at full surface pressure. a body slamming into that much air that fast would probably vaporize instantly (IANA physicist, but c'mon).
    and don't even get me started on the logistics of keeping a 4,000 mile x 30 foot tunnel under constant hard vacuum...

  20. how are they going to liquefy that much helium? on Riding the World's Fastest Train @ 500 kph · · Score: 1

    up here at Brookhaven, when they want to run the RHIC (world's largest particle accelerator), they need to truck in a whole shitload of liquid helium, since our (fscking HUGE) LHe plant can only put out enough to fill 50% of the magnets, and it absolutely sucks power from the grid (i believe it's electric consumption alone when it's running at 100% is seriously pushing a gigawatt). RHIC is slightly over 2.5 miles (4km) around.
    there aren't any practical superconducting wires that will work at 77K (LN2 temp); RHIC uses specially extruded NbTi wires, which 'go' at 11K. so let's say somebody somewhere, europe, japan, usa, antarctica, wherever, builds a 200-km maglev track. where are they going to get the constant helium supply to cool the magnets? i suppose you could build LHe plants the size of ours and put them every 3km, but they'd have to be cranking at probably 70-80% 24/7 to keep the magnets full, and that's gonna hurt the power grid. let alone the riders, who are going to end up footing the power bill.
    and i don't think we can run the plants off lighting bolts, yet :) (jiggawatts!!)

  21. not bills on Microsoft's $40 Billion On Hand · · Score: 1

    scrooge's money bin is mostly filled with gold pieces, $20s i assume. he has very few bills in the bin, although plenty on hand elsewhere. makes sense, $20 coins in the long run take up less space than bills. don't you ever watch the reruns?

  22. Re:bankrupt the world on Microsoft's $40 Billion On Hand · · Score: 1

    last i heard, and i could be wrong, ultimately for every dollar injected into the banking system, nine come out.
    that means M$' $40B turns into $360B for all of us.
    that's a load of bank.

  23. what i find most impressive... on Solar Sail to be Launched This Year · · Score: 1

    is that the russians have the cash to send this up. I haven't heard anything about them borrowing for this project, and we all know how stellar an economy they have - shit, at this rate we (us) should be able to put a 300m sail up in less than a year, especially since it looks like this would take up maybe one shuttle payload. now going off on a tangent, what happened to the russian orbiter? haven't heard about that one in years...

  24. hmm on Augmented Reality: Enhanced Perception · · Score: 1

    am i the only one who find it a bit...strange and unnerving that the handful of people mentioned at the end of the article who wear wearables 100% of the time are called "borg"?
    suddenly thos wires popping out of the head don't seem quite so sci-fi anymore...

  25. holodecks&TV on A Timeline of the Future · · Score: 1

    Holodecks using box room lined completely with polymer screens...2018
    Holographic TV...2025

    erm...isn't that sort of backwards? i mean, wouldn't it probably work out just a little easier if we come up with say a 36" holographic TV, THEN line the room with them, rather than developing wall-sized holographic screens and then spending seven freakin' years to shrink them? food for thought...