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User: thogard

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  1. Wood Fireplace heaters on Air Pollution Causes 'Huge' Reduction in Intelligence, Study Reveals (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    A major new source of pollution in cities is wood fireplace heaters. People are switching over to them because of costs or they think they are green. They are so bad in some areas that cities are starting to ban them but the sales are increasing in many areas.

  2. In the days before System V, the sync call needed to be called 3 times. Once to write the data, once again to write the metadata (like atime and directory entries) and a 3rd time to write the the metadata of the metadata.

  3. Re:You can't always eject first on Mac on Slashdot Asks: Do You Need To Properly Eject a USB Drive Before Yanking it Out? (daringfireball.net) · · Score: 1

    I figure hat MacOS from 10.10 is doing something with a virtual file system that is screwing with normal behavior. When I do a "ls /Volume/USB" I often get "." and nearly every time I run "ls -ls | sort" I get "ls: .: Invalid argument".

    I've got a few Sandisk USB sticks that flash for about 3 seconds after OS X said the drive is ejected. I wish it would beep once but I expect the OS thinks the buffers are flushed and the USB stick is updating its metadata. If the drive is removed then, sometimes they never work again.

  4. There is plenty of room for improvement on The End of Video Coding? (medium.com) · · Score: 1

    One if the issues is getting newer ideas added to existing standards or even developing standards. I had found that grey coding (only 1 bit changes while counting: 000,001,011,010,110,111) graphical images helped with early compression and proposed that when png was being developed but it didn't go anywhere. Mapping color space was another idea because about 8 million of the colors in 24 bit RGB are brown or grey. 24 bit HSV was trivial to add to the analog section of VGA and would display far more shades of orange by using a few parts and dropping half the bit waste. That was a soldering iron at home type hack. Even the compression of usenet never quite got around to not rebuilding the Huffman compression tables for each message. The techniques now used for optimized jpg would have reduced the bandwidth of text groups by about half. It would have reduced the compression compute costs even more.

  5. Re:Fine the bosses and the shareholders... on Volkswagen Fined One Billion Euros By German Prosecutors Over Emissions Cheating (reuters.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can't fine a company. You can only fine its customers or low level employees using existing corporate laws which protect the share holders.

    The correct thing to do is force the company it issue a billion dollars in new stock and give it to the government. That is the only way to fine the share holders who have a responsibility to ensure the board is above board.

  6. The idea is the computer system knows the numbers and that gets reported nearly instantly when the election is over and then scrutineers check the paper ballots to verify it matches the info that the computer sent out. That sort of system would be very handy for preferential voting.

    I expect a secure electronic voting system is impossible but I would love to see it because like most automation, it could eliminate an entire class of useless middlemen - namely politicians.

  7. Technology looking for a solution? on California Begins Trial Rollout of Digital License Plates (caranddriver.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Too many people in IT think its about the Technology but IT is about the Information.

    The project seems to connect registration with the tag yet most places let you type in a tag number and pay online. That is an expected information flow.

    I also wonder how these will work in accidents. The tag numbers are usually the way of identifying the owners of the cars.

  8. Re:Manufacturers bear brunt of responsible cleanup on Europe Plans Ban on Plastic Cutlery, Straws and More (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Straws are common because of the common take away cup need the plastic top for its structural integrity. Mc Donnalds did quite a bit of research with Lily-Tulip (Ray Kroc's former boss) to develop what is currently used world wide. While they are thinner now than they used to be, they usually can hold their liquid in when tipped over if the lid is properly put on and not punctured with a straw. One of the early requirements was that glasses that were dropped from table height didn't cause too much of a mess.

  9. Make sure you firewall understands Zones for IPv6 on Ask Slashdot: Which Is the Safest Router? · · Score: 1

    If your going with IPv6, make sure you firewall understands zone concepts. Using address ranges is a very bad idea when IPv6 is used as things can change and testing becomes nearly impossible. For home use you might have a zone for your gaming systems, a zone for your work computers, a zone for guest wifi. Also make sure that it can cope with things more complex than the "Trust/Untrust/DMZ" model which was fine before multi-port routers and VLANs.

  10. If your keyboard is broken, you can't go and buy an Apple keyboard if you work in any industry that has mandatory security audits as all their new keyboards are wireless only and won't pass unless you work in a faraday cage.

  11. Gravity Probe B? on 'Father of GPS' Receives the IEEE Medal of Honor (eetimes.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The main article mentioned it but he was also involved in Gravity Probe B which was what he was working on when I meet him.

    He was heavily involved in fixing the relativity issues in the Navstar system and might have been the key person on that.

    Dr Draper's project was the key in developing many of the early advances in making the integrated circuit and digital processing. In the days before Apollo, NSAS had a problem where they would measure the altitude of a rocket with pressure and radar altimeters in the rocket, altimeters and radar in chase planes as well as using radar and optical tracking from the ground. They spent months trying to figure out why the error was increasing over the downrange distance for all the techniques. The ground station would report the lowest, and the chase planes reporting slightly higher with the closest one reporting lower than the rocket. When they flew the 1st inertial guidance system a young engineer pointed out the error they had been looking for was a result of the earth being round compounded with speed of light issues.

  12. Re:With new innovations like... on Apple's Redesigned Mac Pro is Coming in 2019 (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Wireless keyboards are major issue if you work in an industry where security compliance is a requirement. Wireless keyboards are a security fail for PCI-DSS and HIPAA.

  13. He seems to like complex devices on Donald Knuth Turns 80, Seeks Problem-Solvers For TAOCP (stanford.edu) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would love to see a short story written by him about the connections between pipe organs and computers. Until the invention of the steam locomotive, organs were the most complex devices ever made. Many of the terms of CPU/ALU parts came from the pipe organ such as register, buffer and accumulator. There is a reference in one of his books that he was going to use the royalties from TAOCP to buy an organ.

  14. Re:As any DBA knows... on Why Airports Rename Runways When the Magnetic Poles Move (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    By the time you can see the runway, your aren't looking at the wobbly compass. If you can't see the airport, your using ILS (nor GPS or VOR or NDB) and don't care what the compass says either. It only matters when you are very far away and if your using that, you better know what the adjustment factor is down to a 1/2 degree.
    And it doesn't work at all in way too many places. Rural areas with iron ores or near parts of Lake Michigan or much north of the US border and it all starts to be very useless. The same is true for many other parts of the world like the entire west cost of Western Australia.

    I've been arguing that it should be pure north for decades. It isn't just the runway numbers they need to fix from time to time, they also spend a fortune readjusting VORTAC stations as well.

  15. The zip code is because gas pumps are the easiest thing to put card skimmers in. Having a separate PIN (aka zip code) for them keeps your real PIN for ending up in the hands of hackers.

  16. Re: In before Fractal of Bad Design on Which Programming Languages Are Most Prone to Bugs? (i-programmer.info) · · Score: 1

    There's a lot irrational hate towards Pascal whose sole flaw is using verbose keywords like "begin/end" instead of the concise "{ }".

    There is a deeper problem than the names that is related to that in the early days of C, "{" was "create a new stack frame", where "begin" in Pascal was "create a new name scope block" as C keeps its local variables on the hardware stack and Pascal used to keep them in what would now be called heap memory because the real hardware stacks were very small.

  17. Re: I know this isn't politically correct on UK 'Faces Build-up of Plastic Waste' (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Cleaning of glass bottles went away after someone poisoned people with Cyanide in Tylenol bottles.

  18. Re:I know this isn't politically correct on UK 'Faces Build-up of Plastic Waste' (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    The can deposit laws are currently reducing the total percentage garbage being recycled. Most of the research compares different areas over time or fail to consider how many cans get imported to a region for a deposit that was never paid. It turns out that cans and glass bottles can pay for mixed recycling sorting and turn a profit. That allows other things like paper and metals to be effectively recycled. Where I live, if the state passes a container deposit law, the curbside recycling collection contracts are void. That means a majority of recycling will end up in the landfill.

  19. Re:Good can we ban all street lights now? on Night Being 'Lost' To Artificial Light (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Public safety? I suspect bad public lighting is killing more people than it is saving already. Street lights are the main reason why the most common drug to treat breast cancer doesn't work in about 10% of people. It turns out that humans need about 2 hours of real dark per night or else there can be deadly consequences. There are also strong links between light pollution and prostate and skin cancer.

  20. Why does it matter? on Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020, Report Says (phoronix.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    BIOS and EFI should only hand the boot loader an bit of RAM and boot image and enough extra stuff to load anther few megabytes off the boot source. I don't care if you call the BIOS something else like UEFI . Everything else should be up to the boot loader and the OS. I don't need the BIOS (or its successors) to test all the memory, just the 1st gig or so. If it is booting off disk, I don't need it to know about the network. I don't need it to know about the video or even the keyboard unless there is a problem. I only need it to know about NVE if I'm booting off that. The OS should rescan all the hardware and ignore anything provided by the BIOS.

    Excessively complicated BIOS is a security risk not matter what it is called.

  21. Cutting down on tax payer expense? on Honolulu Now Fines People Up To $99 For Texting While Crossing Road (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    A few weeks ago I noticed someone with her phone up to her face but had a white cane. She was obviously legally blind but was using the phone to be able to see where she was going. Perhaps they should add an exception.

    I've wondered why countries that have universal medical coverage don't have the types of laws. As the 24x7 phone users start to get old enough that falls results in broken bones, walking while using a phone could be very dangerous and expensive.

    I've also noticed that people using their phones while walking tend to walk much slower than others which increases congestion which results in more expense.

  22. Bad assumptions about the source of the miner on Google Engineers Explore Ways To Stop In-Browser Cryptocurrency Miners in Chrome (bleepingcomputer.com) · · Score: 1

    Many web sites are loading thousands of Javascript modules which they often load from untrusted sites. What happens when someone starts sending patches adding a bit miner for their own account into existing code? That is happening right now.

  23. Before the IBM bios was clean room reverse engineered, every vendors version of MS DOS was different. Tandy and DEC were two examples.

  24. Perligata is an interesting language in that it can change the way you think about coding which means it is worth looking at.

    The first issue is that it uses Latin suffexes to determine L-values and R-values. "last=next" in most languages would become "lasto da nextum" or "da nextum lasto". That can get interesting in cases where there are more than one L-vaules in a statement and is related to some of the things that can be done in the inner statement in a C for loop.

    The naming of some of the functions are somewhat entertaining. x=int(y*abs(sine(z))) would be something like "xo da decolla yum multiplica priva oppone zum." translated "lvalue X is lopped off y times striped from the oppose of z"

    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." --Alan Perlis

  25. Start by breaking systems that shouldn't use it on US Studying Ways To End Use of Social Security Numbers For ID (securityweek.com) · · Score: 1

    A simple solution for now would be just to add 4 or 5 digits to the new SSNs that are issued. That would break so many systems that others would have to address the real problem.

    Decades ago AT&T had a payroll system that couldn't cope with two employees having the same SSN. It turns out that the SSA has stated that the numbers aren't unique, only unique combined with a last name. If Mary marries Mr Smith and there is a Mary Smith with her SSN, they will reissue her a new SSN. There are millions of people who have been issued replacement SSN so far.