Slashdot Mirror


User: dummkopf

dummkopf's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
112
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 112

  1. come on! at least there was a twist in the story! on Review: Blade II - Electric Boogaloo · · Score: 1

    you might say that the movie was somewhat inconsistent, but at least there was a twist in the story and not the standart hollywood crap where the bad ones wear black and the good ones white all the way to the end! in addition [warning: spoiler] the ending is not the usual hollywood romantica where the heroes live happy ever after at the end. finally: whoever goes to see blade II expecting an elaborate plot should be doomed to see the jason X trailer for 3 consecutive hours... blade II is what you watch a sunday afternoon (matinee -- it's not worth full price) when you need to relax from work.

  2. what is the best milk frother? on Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told? · · Score: 1

    while this is not computer hardware per se, it is still hardware and worth sharing: after having seen blade II with my wife, we went into the local cooking store (chefworks santa cruz) since my wife's milk frother, a piece of crap glass jar with a metallic mesh, had broken. we looked at the selections and of course they carried model A, the one she had and model B: a solar powered milk frother. uuuuuh! that sounds cool. does it also work? we ask the salesperson: "does this work"; answer: "yes, of course". "have you ever frothed milk with it?" ... [long pause] "no". solar powered piece of hardware did not make it home with us...

  3. why windows on the desktops? well... on Slashback: Bundestux, Kerberos, Blizzard · · Score: 1

    i guess the main reason to keep windows on the desktops is to ensure compatibility with the rest of germany's industry and political infrastructure. just think of word attachments and how linux applications "handle" them. [personal note: they handle them right, they don;t!]. think also the shock secretary bertha would have if she comes in one day and sees KDE on the screen and the braindead ms office paperclip is gone...

  4. geeks like sweets! how about swiss chocolate? on Gifts for Valentine's Day, 2002? · · Score: 2, Informative

    how about the best chocolates in the world? swiss chocolatier spruengli has the absolute best! check out www.spruengli.ch. you can also place online orders or via email. they ship worldwide via fedex, and believe me, their chocolates beat any belgian crap! that's what i usually get for my (geeky) girlfriend.

  5. programming and data analysis for scientists! on What Kind of Books do You Want? · · Score: 1

    as a scientist, i wish there where more books on programming for the scientist community. hello world! type crap and sorting a list in 127 ways is rather useless for us. things along the lines of parallel programming with MPI, high performance computing with C and C++, data structures for combinatorial as well as spin-glass problems (along the lines of LEDA) would be awesome. to round things up: efficient data analysis with perl, awk, and friends would be cool as well. finally a dictionary computer scientist -- physicist would be very useful sometimes...

  6. Re:still a long way to go... on IBM Builds A Limited Quantum Computer · · Score: 1

    oh i am not saying we did not "rape" that expression. i agree with you in that it is a misuse of that expression. BUT it is widely used in physics circles as i explained above.

    Assuming that everyone would understand the O-notation from physics was my fault. But being narrow minded and expecting that all functions called O(x) are for the O-notation is dumb. If we would have distinct names for all the functions and constant we have on the wolrd of science, we would soon run out of simple names...

  7. Re:still a long way to go... on IBM Builds A Limited Quantum Computer · · Score: 1

    well, as i explained before: physicists use the O notation to express orders of magnitude as well as asymptotic behaviors. what this means is that one can say O(log(N)) if you talk about an algorithm or O(10^23) if you address a macroscopic object. btw: at this moment, all physicists might consider you a moron. good night.

  8. Re:still a long way to go... on IBM Builds A Limited Quantum Computer · · Score: 1

    in physics we usually say O(10^x), x integer when we want to express that we have about 10^x of something. of course, in the purist sense of the O notation, that would be a constant, but hey, cut scientists some slack....

  9. still a long way to go... on IBM Builds A Limited Quantum Computer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    even though we can factor 15 == 3*5, we are still far away from useful quantum computer applications. the problem is that the coherence time of the atoms is fairly short and only O(10^3) computations can be performed before the system is decoherent. there are many interesting (but rather technical) papers about this subject and how to build quantum computers with quantum dots or any other solid state devices. you can get a glimpse of what is going on at the front of physics at http://xxx.lanl.gov/. just search for quantum+computing...

  10. Re:Negligence? on Another Gaping Microsoft Security Hole Goes Unpatched · · Score: 1

    maybe incompetence instead of negligence???

  11. !seineew era sreenigne epacsteN on Another Gaping Microsoft Security Hole Goes Unpatched · · Score: 1

    seems like microsoft engineers like to point out in several dlls that netscape engineers are weenis, as was just reported yet again on bugtraq. i guess the question is simple... what is worse: being a weenie or a loser who does not know how to code securely/properly...

  12. linux is the answer on Free Scientific Software for Developing World? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    being a physicist myself (theory/computational physics) i have noticed that the main trend is to get rid of the expensive sun workstations and geat cheap pcs with linux on them. while we can have endless fights of what distro is the best, it seems that (at least in america) redhat (7.2 is highly recommendable and available via cd) is the choice for most scientific groups.

    not only is it a free os, it also provides ALL the core tools you need to do research! for example you have TeX (+ several excellent text editors), the whole gnu compiler suite (and debuggers), excellent plotting tools for data and image manipulation (gnuplot, gimp, xgrace, ...) and many more. Institutions like CERN, or space telescope provide full packages with tools to analyze all kinds of data.

    there are a lot of other scientific applications you can get for free for linux if you are in an academic environment and which are awesome tools to use for researchers. i have seen many responses already with good pointers to different places (SAL, freshmeat, CERN, IBM Open DX).

    finally, once can also make computational clusters with linux -- really inexpensive ones!