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User: thogard

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  1. Re:Cost savings? on Why Do Gadgets Break? · · Score: 1

    We have a number of old Sun computers that keep doing their jobs. Our sparcstation 20's and sparcserver 1000 were all discontinued over a decade ago but they keep doing their job and its hard to find replacements with modern gear. Its clear we don't need massive performance (optimization is great) but all the new servers are in cases that take up more space. Half a decade ago we were buying X1 but they decided they needed to be in a bigger box. The plan had been to replace the SS20 with the X1 but it looks like the SS20s will outlive them as well as the newer machines. The ss1000's base price when it was new was $68,000 and while its very well built, its not built much better than the SS20.

  2. Re:Cost savings? on Why Do Gadgets Break? · · Score: 1

    Those are intended to be the same quality as the "new cheap IBM keyboards" from the mid 1980's. The IBM 3270 was even higher quality with lettering molding going all the way through the keys, hall effect sensors so there were no switches, different tactile mechanisms per row and different springs for different keys, indented locators on the F & J and real brass bell. Comparing a 3270 keyboard to the Xt keyboard is like comparing the Xt keyboard to the $2 keyboards that are common today.

  3. phishing happens because the banks don't care on Defeating Virtual Keyboards and Phishing Banks · · Score: 1

    If the banks did care they would form an international alliance to track down the cash flow and put quick end to it.

    Except they already have two internal alliance groups in place called MasterCard and Visa. If both of them changed their merchant agreements so that any connection to phishing or domain fraud would result in losing the merchant account, you would bet ever domain registration company and hosting company in the would be checking things a whole lot closer. Even network solutions wouldn't last more than 3 months if they couldn't take credit card payments.

    There is a simple solution to the problem and the infrastructure already exists. I know this because I used to work directly or indirectly with both card schemes.
    (if your from a bank reading this, get in touch with me and I can provide details on how you can push this, just follow the links or google for my name and you will find links to contact me)

  4. Re:US house construction? on Top Gadget of 2006 — The HurriQuake Nail · · Score: 1

    In the US most new brick and stone houses are veneer which is just a layer over a standard wood frame house.
    Even with older construction methods the floors and roof consists of a great deal of wood.

    Concrete is a lousy construction material if you have to deal with real heat or cold.

  5. Re:US house construction? on Top Gadget of 2006 — The HurriQuake Nail · · Score: 1

    Maybe its because nearly 100 millions houses have been build on wood frames and had no problems at all?

  6. Re:And you are missing another point on Top Gadget of 2006 — The HurriQuake Nail · · Score: 1

    The biggest hurricane area is Florida and there is the problem that there is no stone or clay to use. The best they have is concrete block and most houses used to be built of that upto the walls. They have nasty insulation properties so if you build a house out of concrete brick, you have to then build another wall inside so you can get some insulation properties. Its also real hard to build a roof out of stone or concrete in a way that its heavy bits don't go flying when they do get ripped off.

  7. Re:How is this different on Archiving Digital Data an Unsolved Problem · · Score: 2, Funny

    Knowing that there are 8 bits in a byte isn't going to do them any favors if they are looking at some of my programs that I have on punch cards.

  8. Re:That's not what "pine" means on Patches For Pine Going Away · · Score: 1

    There was a time when it stood for "Pine Is Not Elm"
    But I don't care since I never liked that newfangled mailer. I'll stick with elm.

  9. Re:Unsafe is safe, war is peace... on Life Without Traffic Signs · · Score: 1

    The roundabouts are where their flow improvement is coming from... not the lack of signs.

  10. Re:Why even use biometric??? on Successful Alternatives To Password Authentication? · · Score: 1

    There are thousands of bots scanning the entire net logging in to ssh connections as "bob" and giving a few password attempts.
    That has a few interesting effects. If it logs in, then someone has an account that I expect they can find a root kit for. The second issue is that it tends to lock out sysadmins so they can't login to fix other problems.

  11. Re:Time to pull the plug on Aggressive Botnet Activities Behind Spam Increase · · Score: 1

    Microsoft is well aware that their product is damaging innocent third parties and the class action suit that will happen will damage them more than all their competition combined.

    When swen hit my server (by name), Microsoft covered my bandwidth bill to my provider. The interesting thing is swen is still out there abusing my DNS server.

    The law in most countries says that Microsoft should recall their buggy software.

  12. Re:Bloated code has too many features? on OLPC Inspires Open Source Projects · · Score: 1

    HAve you checked how big standard programs are dynamically linked compared to linking them staticly? More and more programs are now larger using dynamic libs than if they were staticly linked due to the overheard of linking in 20 libraries and their entire tables of unused functions compared to just linking in a few hundred bytes of code. As an example Solaris 10 init now links in 800 times more code than solaris 7's init. That means if there is any problem in any of those libraries there is a risk to the entire system and you have to reboot if any of them change.

  13. I would like the music without compression on EMI Exec Says 'The Music CD is Dead' · · Score: 1

    Every new album seems to be compressed to the point where the music has no energy anymore. The compression I'm talking about is from an audio term where they up the volume till the little red clipping light comes on. Take an old CD (like Bat out of Hell or The Wall) and listen to it... it will have soft spots and loud spots... then listen to the "remastered" versions and you'll notice that they boosted the volume of the soft spots and killed the emotion of the music. More and more music is compressed even inside a track so what used to be a soft spot before a loud part is now all equal volume. Rap has mostly avoided this until recently because the vocal beat messed with the automatic systems but the newer compressors seem to be able to mess with that too.

  14. Bloated code has too many features? on OLPC Inspires Open Source Projects · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are quite a few open source apps that are full of code that no one ever runs at all but it rarely gets yanked out because no one is certain that the code isn't used.
    I would like to see a library that can be linked in like the profiler libraries that will record what functions get called in such a way that the data can be shared with others in a massively distributed profiling system so the data can get back to the developers so they can look at the data say "we have 3 million people using this code and not one of them ever used this feature...time to purge it"

  15. Re:I haven't heard this one in a while. on Apple Should Get Out of Hardware? · · Score: 1

    USB takes a whole bunch of processing power just to do simple things. A RS-232 port can be implemented with under a thousand transistors but the CPU used in most USB->Serial converters has more power than the CPU of the 1st GPS receiver I used.
    I want my serial ports back!!!

  16. Re:How is backwards compatibility a bad thing? on Apple Should Get Out of Hardware? · · Score: 1

    You can read your punch cards with a scanner and a bit of software. There are lots of programs to convert computer cassette tapes to different formats so you can load your old vic-20 and trs-80 tapes into emulators and a 8" floppy drive will work fine in your state of the art clone if you can find the right cable or are willing to make your own.

  17. Re:It's already happening on Human Species May Split In Two · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of purebreds out there in royal families all over the world. This theory comes form England where there is a theory that has been floating around for a long time that the beautiful people are rare because they sent all the hansom men off to war where they lead charges and died before producing any offspring. That theory was going around before WW2.

  18. Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary on A $200-Million Floating Nuclear Plant? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Thanks to the fine people at greenpeace, its illegal to do research on splitting the waste into short term waste and reusable fuel. Since no one can do any research or refine it, it just sits there being the boogeyman. While the pools do get warm, they aren't providing enough heat to be useful.

  19. Re:Speckle problem on Laser TV — the Death of Plasma? · · Score: 4, Informative

    The FDA has control of 21 CFR 1040 which is the US law that controls lasers. The basic test assumes that the laser emits its light out of a
    single small aperture and that the collimated beam expands. The cop speed lasers found a trivial way around that test even though optics that give an equivalent beam at 100 meters wouldn't be allowed. Some lasers are allowed for use in public but only for about 20 minutes according to that finely worded law.

  20. Re:Don't expect miracles on Laser TV — the Death of Plasma? · · Score: 1

    It never happens, even from a distance or the most confusing conditions, because the colors are just slightly off.
    Its not the colors the cause that, its the light intensity that causes that problem. The brain is great at adjusting colors on the fly but recognition appears to use the intensity receptors of the eye more than than the color ones. A TV picture is about the same between bright and off compared to the wide rage that the rods can cope with. There are also about 20x more rods than cones.

    When I 1st got a 24 bit RGB sun display system, I ran an experiment about how many of the 16,777,216 were different. Less than 200 of the colors would be considered to be Orange by most people and there were over 8 million colors that would be described as brown or grey. At that time I figured only about 4 million of the 16 million colors had any unique value. My proposal at the time was to dump the RGB DAC and feed it as a HSV into an analog circuit that would do the conversion and feed that to the RGB color guns. That would have resulted in double the usable colors and would allow enough shades of orange to ray trace a real looking orange.

  21. Re:CRT on Laser TV — the Death of Plasma? · · Score: 1

    A guy at the local swap meet in Melbourne was selling a brand new 15" LCD with a built in computer, hd, dvd and floppy for AU$219 (US $160). That computer and display is faster than most of the machines we use at work. A new smallish, slower LCD is about AU$120 or less.

  22. Re:Missing the underlying problem on One Last Spamhaus Warning Before The End · · Score: 1

    I think the sooner we convince the US congress that its being done by the terrorist and kiddy pr0ners then the sooner they will make it a federal crime. Spamers have stolen the usefulness of email from nearly a billion people and its way past time to get serious about punishing them.

  23. Re:So...get a new domain? on One Last Spamhaus Warning Before The End · · Score: 1

    The judge had an option. Thats why we pay judges a fortune. If they just blindly follow the rules, then we don't need expensive lawyers to be judges and could use any old cheap bureaucrat.
    At least this judges job will be up for a vote and I for one will contribute to any group that needs a bit of cash to run a campaign to get him fired.

  24. Re:Sizemography on North Korea Says It Has Conducted Nuclear Test · · Score: 1

    The Navstar (aka GPS) sats were built to locate the origin of EMP from a nuke.

  25. Re:hm on Creating Water from Thin Air · · Score: 1

    The trick might be to bond the salt to the membrane so that as the salt absorbs more water, it pushes it through the membrane where its easy to collect.