Slashdot Mirror


User: mr_mischief

mr_mischief's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
4,341
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 4,341

  1. To quote the Bard... on Outliers, The Story Of Success · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." (Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5)

    It's quite plain to see that the author is talking about greatness. If he's well read, he should know the idea that some are bound to greatness by chance was written long ago.

    Explaining some of the happenings of chance that confer this effect is a useful goal. Perhaps knowing more ways to improve one's odds at greatness will allow more people to improve them. Perhaps it will even allow more great breakthroughs.

    We all in the modern world stand on the shoulders of giants. Some of us put that to better use than others. Some of us by chance are given different giants, too.

    Sure, a Chinese or Japanese child may have an easier number system to learn. A European or American child, though, has a much smaller and simpler alphabet. People born with safe running water and household electrical current live a life different from people who spend part of their time hauling water and burn candles or kerosene lamps for light. Which child do you expect to write the next great computer application? It's probably not one who has think about getting power to cook his food. It'll probably be a child who doesn't have to worry about power for his computer.

    Of all those who have most of the advantages of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet, how many actually take advantage of all of them?

  2. Re:Authentication on New Startup Hopes to Push Open Source Pharmaceuticals · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There was just recently a case in which the FDA quit accepting applications for approvals from a company. That company was found to be tainting studies, and was the only source of data for the drugs they wanted approved. See bio-medicine.org's coverage of that news item.

    If you have multiple sources and most of them are reputable, are you better or worse off than having one source with a unique incentive to put their own drug in the best possible light?

  3. Re:Drug Testing on New Startup Hopes to Push Open Source Pharmaceuticals · · Score: 1

    It's easy. The big drug companies can fund the trials if they want to manufacture and sell the drugs. They can't patent the drugs if they get the research from someone else. The big question is whether the big drug companies would rather invest in the research and reap the reward of an exclusive market or if they'd be willing to fund trials and sell the drugs if they have to share the sales but also share the expense of research.

  4. one (compound, recently coined) word: seasteading on Cold-War Era Naval Vessels Up For Grabs · · Score: 1

    Forget a naval museum.

    1. Anchor the barge out in international waters.
    2. Put a fancy hotel on barge
    3. Claim independence as your own nation
    4. legalize gambling, marijuana, and hashish
    5. ferry people to it in the ship
    6. wait for some pirates or a prudish navy to attack
    7. ???
    8. profit!

    The ??? in this case has something to do with fending off the invasion claiming you're not a legitimate nation, but it's still a ??? because I have no idea how you're going to do that indefinitely.

  5. Other coverage not yet /.ed on $100 Linux Wall-Wart Now Available · · Score: 1

    See also SlashGear's writeup or Legit Reviews coverage at least until the /. effect allows Linux Devices some breathing room.

  6. Re:I must've missed the memo on $100 Linux Wall-Wart Now Available · · Score: 1

    The small cheap notebook segment transformed the low end of the market and also made the smaller systems less expensive than the mainstream rather than more expensive. The mainstream of the market it didn't touch at all, really. The "UMPC" market was outrageously expensive compared to most notebooks, but the Eee-alikes aren't much bigger and are much cheaper.

    These little servers are smaller, cheaper, and sacrifice some power and storage at the very bottom end of the market. You can buy bigger systems just as cheap. You can buy other systems nearly as small. You can't really buy anything else as small and as cheap in the same unit unless you go down to the power of a Gumstix.

  7. Re:Neat... on DIY 1980s "Non-Von" Supercomputer · · Score: 1

    That is code written in Java that's being tested. It's not code running on a simulator for a 31-processor 8-bit SIMD machine written in Java.

  8. Re:The real 'atlantis' on Atlantis Seekers Given Thrill by Google Ocean · · Score: 1

    The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus would be likely places for such navigational aids. The Aegean Sea or Sea of Marmara would then be candidates. Santorini is commonly considered an Aegean island, although as is often the case the distinction between one sea (the Mediterranean) and the other (the Aegean) is blurry and the smaller could be called just a part of the other.

  9. "Private relaunch?" on Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Gee, Bob, we have the proof that this thing works. Why don't we sell it already?"

    "Well, Bill, nobody wants to buy it and grandfather in all the whining freeloaders and their data."

    "It's too bad we can't just drop all the data and start fresh."

    "Well, why not, Bill? All we have to do is say it's been lost and can't be recovered. We can tell the buyer what's actually happening so they don't think we're total IT rejects who couldn't figure out a data retention policy."

    "That's why I like working with you, Bob. You always have a way around the problem."

    Have fun with it. The names have been changed (one changed anyway and one added), well, because it probably has nothing to do with reality. It sure is fun to ponder, though.

  10. Re:Super bad for Servers on Apple's Mac OS X Update Breaks Perl · · Score: 1

    To be fair to Apple, it's considered good practice to not manage the modules provided by the distro with CPAN on Unix/Linux systems in general. Let the distro manage its own updates and manage updates of stuff you got from CPAN using CPAN.

  11. Re:Scripting Languages not good for most applicati on Apple's Mac OS X Update Breaks Perl · · Score: 1

    It's common practice in the Perl community to keep the production tools separate from the OS distro's tools. Not only can the OS break your stuff, but if you're not careful you can break parts of the distro that depend on Perl.

    Mandriva for one has many system tools that depend on a certain version. Fedora doesn't have this problem so much with Perl, but only because it does with Python.

    Don't let your environments intermingle. You can even deploy an application written in Perl with its own copies of the modules it needs in its own directory quite easily. That means if one project needs a newer version of something, you don't even need to update other projects using older versions. You can share easily enough, but you can keep them separate too.

  12. Re:Good luck getting their ID on Texas Judge Orders Identification of Topix Trolls · · Score: 1

    Usenet is still in use. You're no lexicographer. You're just an ass (likely a teenage one) with a need to think you're cooler than everyone else. Grow up some, and get off my lawn!

  13. Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI on BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith · · Score: 1

    There's probably nothing that can't be done from the Mac GUI these days with the right application. It'll just take longer and include more steps for many tasks than opening a terminal (one's on my quick launch bar on Windows, Linux, and OS X -- and there's usually one open the whole time I'm using the computer) and typing a command or two.

    Some things really are more convenient visually, and some things are more convenient textually. I'll take the visual route when it is more convenient, but I'll take the textual route when it's more convenient. Some of the best (IMO)applications have a visual method and a command-driven method for the same actions. Even Windows and Mac have standard keyboard shortcuts for many things that work across most applications.

    Some applications or window managers go farther, though. The text editors emacs and vim are two examples. MS Office, OpenOffice, and some others have macros even though they are mostly GUI-centered. The GIMP is a photo and graphics editing tool, but it has an optional textual interface. ImageMagick's tools are command-line because some things you can do to images are easy and efficient to do textually. FrontPage gets nowhere near the quality of HTML that a skilled designer can get by hand. Dreamweaver is much closer, but still misses the intent sometimes. Hand-editing the markup is still a good idea even if it wasn't started by hand.

    I doubt most GUI-only users even have a concept of tools like find, xargs, uniq, sort, curl, wget, nc, dd, wc, host, whois, lpr, diff, less, at, or grep existing or just how handy they are. Yet they're around for Unixes including OS X and Linux. They are also available for Windows as ports. If someone wants to use a computer without learning a CLI, that's fine. If they want to get the most out of their time in front of the computer, though, as little as half an hour a month with a command reference can make a big difference over time.

  14. Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI on BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith · · Score: 1

    They made the Mac communicate on pretty much the most basic level humans ever do. Only grunts, body language, and facial expressions are simpler ways to convey meaning. This makes it very easy to do easy things, but it makes it very tedious to do anything complex.

    Language is more difficult to learn than just pointing, which is why it takes people longer to master it. However, two people conversant in the same language only rarely communicate by pointing. The time invested in a language pays great dividends as you meet more people who can speak the same language.

    Language-based interfaces to computers pay similar dividends: they are more complex at first but communicate your intent more compactly than pointing.

  15. Re:Opera of the phantom on Phantom OS, the 21st Century OS? · · Score: 1

    You're still going to lose what's in the OS's write buffer in memory unless it has absolutely none. Synchronizing on every character typed would be a performance nightmare with most current drive controllers.

    If someone forgoes that standard ATA, SATA, SCSI, and SAS controllers and starts selling a flash drive with sectors that are byte-addressable from the OS, then that'd be a different story. You could probably sync the data after every character and maybe lose one or two of the last characters typed if anything. That's not what we have now, though.

  16. Re:Good luck getting their ID on Texas Judge Orders Identification of Topix Trolls · · Score: 1

    The very definition of a troll is someone who goes trolling (hence the word "troll") for an argument. Stating an outlandish opinion or making an obviously offensive remark about anything in general are just as effective as maligning an individual.

    If you haven't been on the Internet since at least the mid 1990s, then please don't even attempt to define terms that were in wide use before you were seeing them. Look them up. Try the jargon file for example.

  17. Re:BeOS: still my favorite UI on BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith · · Score: 1

    I don't really get the "language is archaic, pointing at stuff with a stick is modern" idea. My dog can point. Sometimes a GUI is handy, but in many situations the flexibility of the command line is just much more powerful.

  18. Re:BeOS Haiku on BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith · · Score: 1

    If there's no blood in my steak, I send it back. Were you meaning "rare" as an insult?

  19. Re:35 Seconds - Natively? on BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith · · Score: 1

    Haiku is, like BeOS, specifically a desktop-targeted OS. Boot times for servers don't much matter in general.

    As a side note, if you're running a big auto-scaling application cluster that boots machines automatically, it might. Hardly anyone does that, though, and so far as I know nobody does it in production environments yet.

  20. Re:How have the APIs changed? on BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith · · Score: 1

    You should consider having a separate dev and graphics box. Starting The GIMP or even X on a web server is just wasteful of server capabilities.

  21. Re:Good luck getting their ID on Texas Judge Orders Identification of Topix Trolls · · Score: 1

    One can be a troll without making false and derogatory claims of fact against others.

  22. Re:From TFA on Texas Judge Orders Identification of Topix Trolls · · Score: 1

    You can only build a radio station and broadcast your speech to hundreds of thousands of listeners around the clock if you are willing and able to spend the money to do so. Is your freedom of speech being abridged by not providing you your own network of radio stations?

  23. Re:Finally on Scientists Harvest Nano-Power From Hamsters · · Score: 4, Funny

    It wouldn't take nearly so many if you just burned the hamsters as fuel, but then you'd be better off to just burn the pellets instead of feeding the hamsters.

  24. Re:I didn't know Feinstein was a Republican.... on Senator Diane Feinstein Trying to Kill Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    It's California. They're starstruck by her celebrity. Nobody else has as recognizable a name for the ballot. Maybe Arnold will run for Senate instead of governor some day.

  25. Re:Opera of the phantom on Phantom OS, the 21st Century OS? · · Score: 1

    Yes, because the fucking article made it fucking abundantly fucking clear that the OS made the fucking RAM, fucking drive controller, fucking drive spindle, and fucking drive head need no power to write the fucking characters you just fucking typed.

    I'll tell you a little story now. There was this computer that wrote blocks to its hard drive only in 512-byte or larger sections. Under some circumstances, it even took 4096 or 8192 bytes to fill the buffer to write. This computer was called the IBM PC series (and compatibles).

    Now, if you think writing 512 bytes to disk every time you type a character is reasonable or that the last characters you typed get from memory to disk with no power, you're a fucking moron. No matter how often the fucking snapshot is, no OS can guarantee every last fucking character of a typed document is going to be written to disk in a power fail situation. Not one fucking OS. Get a fucking UPS, idiots.