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User: PhilHibbs

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  1. Re:Urban Dictionary on The FBI's Jargon List: Internet Acronyms Galore · · Score: 1

    In the context of "smoking a fag", if you take "fag" to mean "homosexual person", then "smoking" might mean "setting fire to" or "shooting". As in, "let's go smoke some gooks", as you might hear in a Vietnam movie.

  2. Re:meaningless, unless the geothermal is new on Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting · · Score: 1

    The continents move over hotspots, which is why the Hawaii island chain exists. I don't know much about the Antarctic continental plate, whether it is moving or not, but it may have drifted over a hotspot some time in the last few million years.

  3. Re:where is west on Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting · · Score: 1

    Walk towards Greenwich and turn left.

  4. Re:Somewhat confused on Evidence of Protoplanet Found On Moon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I haven't read the Science article yet, but from the BBC report it seems that the differences between the isotope ratios in moon rocks and earth are still a lot smaller than expected. This would suggest the Theia hypotheses to not be true, contrary to what the title says. I'm going to track down the original paper, because this BBC article has me somewhat confused.

    The absolute terms "true" and "not true" are not appropriate for a hypothesis like this. There may be some parts of it that are accurate, but for instance the size, mass, velocity, density distribution etc. of the Theia might be wrong, or the physics in the simulation might be wrong, etc.

  5. Re:George Carlin called it on Plastic Trash Forming Into "Plastiglomerate" Rocks · · Score: 1

    There's no reason for anything. Life is just a bunch of stuff that happens, and one day it might stop happening if something big enough hits the planet, like the one that made the moon.

  6. Re:Whoa 1.3x on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    The most recent one was a custom SQL cursor in Oracle EBS. Add an index, refactor some correlated queries, and create a cut-down version of a complex view that it was using.

    Another of the examples a few years back was where I reimplemented an FTP process to retry each individual step instead of reverting to the first step on failure. Given that each step had about a 50% chance of failure on a bad day, and each script had about 20 steps, it meant that it was failing... (runs calc...) 99.9999% of the time. OK I'm exaggerating a little, maybe it wasn't 50%, and only a few of the jobs had as many as 20 steps, it was about 10 years ago and I forget the details so my ego may be filling in the gaps. But it did mean that we didn't have to have a guy sitting at a screen hitting "Retry" all day long, and we could get file sets deployed in a couple of minutes instead of taking all day. The FTP was being done by a proprietary tool, so I had to implement my own system to parse its manifest.

    And then there was that Excel spreadsheet that was massively bigger than it should have been. Everyone's system ground to a halt every time they openened it. No-one could figure out why it was so big, I spent an afternoon trying the obvious things and gave up. Then inspiration hit me, and I wrote some VBA to look at the number of "shape" objects in each sheet. There were millions of them. Someone had put boxes around a bunch of cells, those boxes had somehow been shrunk down to one pixel and replicated thousands of times, so a quick VBA procedure to delete all box shapes, and bingo, some people could do their jobs again.

    A lot of people don't realise that computers don't behave in the way that we expect - we have an intuitive grasp of the laws of physics, but information is not physical and does not obey the same laws. There are infinities and paradoxes and undeterminables that are hard to understand. Minds that can intuitively navigate this space are few and far between.

  7. BASIC-Assembler-BASIC loop on Ask Slashdot: Where's the Most Unusual Place You've Written a Program From? · · Score: 1

    3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?

    In order to write a BASIC interpreter, we needed an assembler. So my dad wrote one in GW-BASIC. Once our interpreter was sophisticated and stable enough, we rewrote the assembler in our own language (based on Acorn BBC Basic). Eventually we splashed out on a copy of MASM once we had a computer that was PC-compatible enough to run it (the Sanyo MBC 550 wasn't quite up to it, IIRC).

  8. Re:*Weirdest* place? on Ask Slashdot: Where's the Most Unusual Place You've Written a Program From? · · Score: 0

    Were you programming a Java Ringpiece?

  9. My dad and I did a lot of the design work on a BASIC interpreter for the PC while on a caravan holiday in France when I was a teenager back in the '80s.

  10. Re:Whoa 1.3x on Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift · · Score: 1

    I was recently brought in to a team to help with some performance problems, and I ended up speeding up one of the operations by nearly 100,000 times. But I accept that these gains are few and far between, I've only achieved 5-figure performance improvements a handful of times in my 30-year career as a programmer. Most of the time it's hard to get much more than double, as you say depending on how good the original development was. Sometimes I've managed to get 5-figure improvements on revisiting my own code, so I do have sympathy for the 'bad programmers', it isn't always easy to do a good job on the first pass, especially in unfamiliar environments.

  11. Re:It is not a zero day. on New IE 8 Zero Day Discovered · · Score: 1

    Has it been exploited? A zero-day attack is an exploit on the same day that the information is released. No-one has said anything about an attack. If it gets attacked today, it's a zero-day. If it's already been attacked, then it's an already-exploited vulnerability, there's no point in attaching positive or negative numbers to it. An exploited bug that never gets detected would be a minus infinity day attack!!!! Anyway that's a "zero-day attack", I don't know what a "zero-day vulnerability" is, the term doesn't make any sense. I think people are just saying "zero day" because it sounds cool.

  12. Re:Why do they call it a Station on As NASA Seeks Next Mission, Russia Holds the Trump Card · · Score: 1

    Because both "station" does not derive from "stationary", they both share a common root with the latin word "statio" meaning “standing, post, job, position”.
    And depending on your frame of reference, every "station" on the planet is moving a million miles a day.

  13. Re:Anticompetitive when its free? on Report: YouTube Buying Twitch.tv For $1 Billion · · Score: 1

    Your second sentence seems to contradict the first. Microsoft never made any money from Internet Explorer. Making money has nothing to do with monopolistic practice, in fact monopolistic practices lose money all the time in order to maintain a lock on a more lucrative market. It's pretty much the definition. If someone's losing money (e.g. manufacturing consoles at a loss) then they are doing it in order to gain market share (possibly to acquire or maintain a monopoly) in something else (e.g. console games).

  14. Re:All of Twitch is a 'Copyright Violation' on Report: YouTube Buying Twitch.tv For $1 Billion · · Score: 1

    Same way they deal with the corporate trolls that are presumably all over their existing gaming channels on YouTube. I subscribe to five or six different Minecraft channels, two KSP channels, I've watched several GTA V playthroughs online, all on YouTube, all legit, all generating ad revenue.

  15. Re:So, my bet: on Report: YouTube Buying Twitch.tv For $1 Billion · · Score: 1

    A "truly free market" is an anarchy, and the most powerful players will abuse their freedom to remove everyone else's freedom. Anarchy leads to feudalism. The only way that humanity has discovered to control the power of the powerful (and therefore to avoid feudalism) is to regulate it in a governmental structure.

  16. Re:Too little, too late on Microsoft Finally Selling Xbox One Without Kinect · · Score: 1

    You should learn how to read.

    No. Microsoft should learn how to communicate with their customers. It's their fault that everyone remembers a mythical ban on used game sales.

  17. Re:Screw other people on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 1

    What idiot would get into a machine that values there life less than others?
    Less? Who's suggesting that your life would be considered worth less than others?

    For any given algorithm, you can come up with bizarre situations that make that algorithm look silly, so I'm not going to attempt to pick your situation apart. And trying to code an algorithm for assigning blame and punishing it within fractions of a second is asking for trouble far worse than going for a quick minimum harm estimation. And a minimum harm algorithm will inevitably tend to favour the safety of the vehicle itself, as that is probably the easiest calculation to make. If there is no clear path to swerve into in order to gain more stopping distance, it will probably just stay straight as swerving reduces braking.

  18. Re:Screw other people on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Cars have to be designed with the interests of the road-using population in mind. If you want your car to disregard everyone else's interests in favour of your own, then you should not be allowed to use public roads as you are a dangerous sociopath.

  19. Re:Car driver ethics: What do I hit? on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 1

    New technologies will always be in the minority while they are still new, but that's the right time to start trying to get them right. We, as technologists, can influence and inform the creation of autonomous driving algorithms (we aren't all kids in a basement, some of us are grown-ups with important jobs). We cannot change the way that people drive, that's one for legislators and psychologists.

    And, the algorithm isn't written for you. It's written for the whole of the road-using population. No-one's going to write you an algorithm that makes your car aim for a group of fat people for a soft landing, sorry. And just how do you determine the person at fault in a fraction-of-a-second algorithm?

  20. Not stocks on Rand Paul Suggests Backing Bitcoin With Stocks · · Score: 1

    I'd back it up with the rack, or the guillotine.

  21. Re:This is how we lost "force feedback" on Zenimax Accuses John Carmack of Stealing VR Tech · · Score: 1

    Oh, I thought you meant those little wobbly things in Playstation controllers. I don't know anything about steering wheel controllers. Never really been interested in owning one.

  22. Re:John Carmack and his BFG on Zenimax Accuses John Carmack of Stealing VR Tech · · Score: 1

    Don't Zenimax own the BFG now though?

  23. Re:This is how we lost "force feedback" on Zenimax Accuses John Carmack of Stealing VR Tech · · Score: 2

    You're saying that with a straight face? Force feedback was a stupid gimmick, good riddance to it.

  24. Re:Lack of patents aside... on Zenimax Accuses John Carmack of Stealing VR Tech · · Score: 1

    Just what original work has Carmack done in VR? All this VR stuff is decades old, there's very little truly original work in an Oculus Rift and what there is was not done by Carmack from what I can tell (sorry John, you're awesome but not original in this instance), so this claim is double nonsense.

    How much do you know about John's work at Oculus? Just because VR has been done before, that doesn't mean that it can't be done better than before.

    Anyway, all of 3D gaming is ancient, I was playing Elite on the BBC Micro in 1984. Therefore everything that has been done since then is unoriginal and derivative of Elite.

  25. Re:Nitrogen? on Oklahoma Botched an Execution With Untested Lethal Injection Drugs · · Score: 1

    Crucifiction's a doddle.