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User: FRiC

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Comments · 136

  1. Re:"It's not totally clear why that occurred" on Tim Cook May Not Know Why, But Samsung Is Winning in China · · Score: 2

    It's easier than you think you put warez on iOS devices. Just go to any shop and pay like 10 bucks, and the shop will login using their App Store account, and you can then download anything you want, and these shops advertise openly that they don't sell warez and everything is "genuine". The shops don't give out their passwords, so you just go back once in a while and let them update the apps, for free.

  2. Firmware upgrade? on One Cool Day Job: Building Algorithms For Elevators · · Score: 1

    They need to release some kind of upgrade for existing elevators. At my office building of 35 floors with Otis elevators. When an elevator is already stopped at a certain floor. Instead of opening the door immediately when you press a button, the elevator leaves immediately and you need to wait forever for another elevator to arrive since the other elevators think you've already left. The solution is then to press both up and down buttons, irritating the hell out of every one in the building.

  3. Thailand on An HTTP Status Code For Censorship? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thailand used to have a huge graphical image on a special server for censored websites. Any access on a censored URL would be forwarrded to that image. Apparently the load was so high the server would constantly crash, and eventually they deleted the image, so you get a 404 error. Now they got smarter and just display a text message telling you the website is censored by the government.

  4. Re:It's real? on Algorithm Glitch Voids Outcome of US Green Card Lottery · · Score: 1

    I live in Asia, and before the diversity visa lottery was made into

  5. Nothing about censors on Chinese Censors Crack Down on Time Travel · · Score: 1

    Since no one ever bothers to read the source, the original statement actually says TV dramas should not have plots that are pure fantasy, such as time traveling drama; made-up mythologies; or encourage superstitions, such as believing in fate or reincarnations. There's nothing in the statement about censorship or banning.

    Chinese TV have always been quite dry for me, since a lot of it are historical drama that talk about revolutionary heroes, but my Chinese friends love them, maybe growing up in China helps.

  6. Re:First Post on Chinese Censors Crack Down on Time Travel · · Score: 1

    It's your ears, or your pronunciation of C that makes them think you're saying she. Chinese people have no trouble pronouncing "C", since the (Mandarin) Chinese word for "west" is pronounced "C". If you have trouble teaching the C sound, just ask them to say west. On the other hand, there's no Mandarin sound that directly corresponds to "she".

    Since I speak both Mandarin and English, and I work with a lot of language learners and speakers, I discovered most Westerners have trouble differentiating Chinese people pronouncing C vs. She, while Chinese people themselves have no trouble. There are other examples of this in other languages too, it's as if the listeners' ears aren't trained to distinguish those sounds. It's just one of those strange things.

  7. Re:Intuit on Inducement To Piracy, Adobe Style · · Score: 1

    That's a lot like the Siemens PLC we have. The software on the PLC, the firmware on the PLC, and the PC software must all match. And different versions of PC software can't be installed simultaneously on the same computer. So we have a whole series of computers with different versions installed to support the different PLC's.

    And they charge crazy prices on "PLC memory downloading unit" to my company until I realized they're just regular CF cards.

  8. I'm fast on Reading E-Books Takes Longer Than Reading Paper Books · · Score: 1

    I don't know about others, but reading e-books on LCD screens is much faster for me since there's no pause in having to flip the page, just touch/press and go. I'm much slower when reading on the Kindle since the page refresh takes so long and I literally have to wait for the next page to come up. I really like the Kindle's e-paper display but the page refresh, the color inversion, and waiting drove me nuts.

    I don't quite understand why the Kindle needs to invert to black and back when flipping pages but the web page can scroll and update without inverting. It would have been really nice if there was an option to flip pages without the color inversion.

    Anyway, my favorite reading device right now is the iPod touch since it's easy to hold in one hand and "flip" with my thumb. I can read really fast and I've already read hundreds of books with it. It's not so good for technical reference though, probably an iPad...

  9. Other industrial devices on Will the Serial Console Ever Die? · · Score: 1

    Serial may be dead on the PC. But besides routers and switches, there are thousands of other industrial devices that still use the serial port. At my work place, we have weigh scale indicators that use the serial port, and we even have motor controllers that still use ISA bus cards. We looked into replacing those motor controllers, and the replacements use the *parallel port*, another dead port.

    I have a ThinkPad with the Ultrabay serial/parallel port adapter. No one's gonna care to pry it from my hands, but I'm keeping it anyway.

  10. Re:Switch Proxy Tool on Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Released · · Score: 1

    It's not that bad, since the URL bar and the search bar takes up almost the entire width of the toolbar area, it's usually so hard to see what the stupid persona image is anyway.

  11. It's not that old... on Getting a Classic PC Working After 25 Years? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At work we have PC's much older than that, running manufacturing equipment. If any of them break down, I have a whole room full of old PC's that I could simply search for parts. Eventually we'll run out of parts (the equipment need ISA bus to operate), but at this rate, we're good for another 25 years or so.

  12. Maybe there's less spam nowadays on A Look At Google's Email Spam Prevention · · Score: 1

    I used to have 20,000+ in my spam folder every day for years. Recently it dropped to the low 400's.

    But because there's much less spam, I actually check the spam folder quite often to see if there are false positives, and I almost always find a few. Makes me wonder how much mail I missed all this time?

  13. Re:We use Nod32 on Central Anti-Virus For Small Business? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't know about other people, but around where I work, the joke is that whichever computer has Nod32 installed, it also has tons of viruses installed. Nod32 never seems to work in real life, eventhough it consistently scores high in reviews and have lots of recommendations.

    (We use avira.)

  14. Duplicate plates? on Maddog's New Hampshire "Unix" Plate Turns 20 · · Score: 1

    Can plates from other states also use UNIX? When I was in school, one of my professors also had a plate that says UNIX. Maybe he sold it to Maddog?

  15. Re:is it really this bad? on New Mega-Botnet Discovered · · Score: 1

    Could be worse. I had an operation a few weeks earlier. While lying in bed waiting for the doctor to get ready. I heard keyboard sounds and opened my eyes to look, and the nurses were looking at their hi5 pages...

  16. Re:Already there on F-Secure Suggests Ditching Adobe Reader For Free PDF Viewers · · Score: 3, Informative

    Until Foxit Reader (at least the Windows version, no experience with other versions) can support Unicode, it will never replace Adobe Reader.

  17. Chinese puns on Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun · · Score: 2, Informative

    The youtube videos may be new to most people (and they're not new), but the grass-mud-horse and other Chinese puns are nothing new. I've heard them since I was a kid. (This is like why Canon's camera went from G7 to G9.)

  18. CAD by Excel on Holiday Art Executed In Google Documents · · Score: 2, Funny

    A few years ago, a newly hired engineer at work complained that he couldn't find any drawings done by the previous engineer that had just quit. I looked and the guy that quit had several thousand Excel files and his drawings were all done using tiny cells and cell borders. They were complex drawings of mechanical parts and some were even done in 3D perspective.

    The new engineer ended up spending the next few months recreating all the drawings from A3-sized printouts using a real CAD program.

  19. Next Slashdot story: on The Sounds of Failing Hard Drives · · Score: 3, Funny

    The sound of slashdotted servers.

  20. Re:Internet censorship on Thailand Bans Teen Info On the Net · · Score: 1

    Actually, when the YouTube ban was lifted, they unblocked ALL the sites. The banning just restarted again after the ICT Expo.

  21. Internet censorship on Thailand Bans Teen Info On the Net · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Internet censorship in Thailand is back in full force too, and all this happened right after Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia criticized the Thai government for Internet censorship during his keynote speech at the ICT Expo in Thailand earlier this month.

  22. Re:wrong way to eliminate accidental 911 calls on Worry Over VZW, Sprint Phones' 911 Alarm · · Score: 1

    112 is also the default emergency number for most phones / carriers, and can be dialed even if the keypad is locked.

  23. Re:Note who is not being sued.... on SanDisk Sues 25 Companies for Patent Infringement · · Score: 1

    This depends on which groups of people you're involved with. People in the computing industry often look down on Sandisk and their products, but photographers will almost only use Sandisk Ultra and Extreme cards. There are far more problems with Lexar than Sandisk when used with cameras, especially DSLR's.

  24. Re:Mailbox size jumped too on Free IMAP On Gmail · · Score: 1

    The capacity increased happened to both regular gmail and google apps. (apps used to be limited to 2000 MB but is now in sync with gmail.)

  25. There are paying Skype users out there... on EBay Admits To Bad Call On Skype · · Score: 1

    ... such as business users. I have hundreds of Skype Out contacts, and so do all of those people in my contacts list. However, due to Skype's expensive per-call surcharge and the recent outage, most are now looking for alternatives. I still use Skype for Skype-to-Skype, but otherwise I use one of the Betamax voip services for calling regular phones.