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User: CanadaDave

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Comments · 413

  1. Get a Miele on A Keyboard Vacuum that Sucks? · · Score: 1
    I recommend getting an expensive Miele vacuum. They are made in Germany and they are a nice piece of vacuuming technology. It has enough suction to remove all the crap in my keyboard without removing the keys or anything. I also use it to clean out my tower. It can reduce my motherboard temperature by a few degrees Celsius.

    I do not work for Miele or its affiliates

  2. Digital - Analog on Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told? · · Score: 1
    Just my two cents...

    Some guy tried to tell me I had to convert all the equipment in my house to digital. His reason was that signals could not be converted back from digital into analog. He said that "once they've been converted to 1's and 0's, then that's it! they can't be converted back into analog. So if you don't get all new digital equipment now, you're analog stuff will be obsolete soon!"

    So I asked him how those 0's and 1's ended up producing audio signals, video signals that we could see and hear. He didn't really have any answer for that, the guy was clueless. I can't even remembe what I went in there for, but this guy was trying to sell me the store, and I never went back.

  3. Re:Slashdotted already on ACM Programming Contest Results · · Score: 1

    28.8 shared connection. LOL. Whereabouts do you live? Or should I say what time period do you live in?

  4. Tuxracer on Sony's R&D- Linux and PS3 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    So what this boils down to is that we will be able to play Tuxracer on the PS2. Yawn. Or we can play Nethack, if you don't mind being the laughing stock of all your PS2 playing friends.

  5. There's a good reason why they chose Utah on Utah, the New Red Planet · · Score: 1
    It's because of all the crazy Mormans in Utah. The Mormans are so strange, they closely resemble beings from another planet such as Mars. Or did the Mormans come from space in the first place? If the Mars astronauts can deal with the Mormans they encounter on their ground mission, then they can handle any being they may find in space.

    Are Mormans allowed to use the Internet? If any Morman reads this, can you tell me why we haven't been getting the Church of Latter Day Saints TV commercicals in Canada anymore? What happened? I always loved those ads when I was young.

  6. Re:Slashdotted already on ACM Programming Contest Results · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'm going there (UW) next year for grad studies, and I had a really good impression of the university when I went there to talk to some potential research supervisors. In fact I carried on non-school/research related conversations with all 3 profs that I visited. About the school work being harder at Waterloo than other schools, I'm not sure if I agree with that. Perhaps the students there work harder, but I don't think the program could be much harder than any other school. There are lots of rumours like that about schools that aren't usually true. Waterloo is a large percentage engineering and math/sciences so a large proportion of the university is whining about how hard their programs are. At other universities, a much smaller proportion of students are complaining about their courses, while the Arts students are talking about how easy it is. This is how certain sterotypes are created.

    About knowing your exam schedule a semester in advance, that is ridiculous. I've been at UBC for the past 5 years and we are always told when our exams are about 2 months before, not a semester. And that is only the exam schedule draft. The final schedule comes out about a month before.

  7. Re:Slashdotted already on ACM Programming Contest Results · · Score: 1

    I think the fact that they like to pirate stuff is a good sign that they may start getting involved with open source software. That's what turned me on to open source stuff in general. I hated paying for software because I am cheap. I was always a pirater, but now I don't have to, because Linux provides me with a legal way of using free software, and I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong. So as long as they develop a moral conscious, they may switch to open source stuff. And it is a good sign that they won the contest, it's just too bad contests like this don't get more publicity to kids. Instead all kids see are sports athletes and entertainers, which are far worse role models than programmers.

  8. Re:Slashdotted already on ACM Programming Contest Results · · Score: 1
    Congratulations Waterloo! Just proves that Canada is one of the best software programmer producing countries in the world. And Toronto was not far behind at 18th. So it looks like Canada had 2 teams in the top 20 and the United States had 4 teams in the top 20? Did I count that correctly?

    Not bad for Canada, a country with 31,081,900 people, compared to the USA, with about 286,686,848 people.

  9. Re:PDF on ACM Programming Contest Results · · Score: 1
    WARNING: the above link contains a PDF link!

    Your browser may not be able to handle this, and may produce an error message, or worse yet, it may display a blank screen. It gets worse...some browsers may show garbled text!!!!

    You have been warned. I think this should be used as a standard disclaimer before every PDF link?

    The following lines left intentionally blank

  10. Re:PR sham... nice try... on 2.56 Tb/s Transmission Record · · Score: 1
    I am somewhat of an engineer, and I know for a fact that half the things you see going on at a show like OFC is crap. Engineers are constantly creating crap demos whose main objective is not to prove that something does what it claims to do, but that is LOOKS like it does what it claims to do.

    I believe they MAY have demonstrated error free 40 Gig/s modulation, but they may have had to use a very bandwidth-costly FEC (forward-error correcting) protocol in order to reduce the errors. So their effective data rate may have been only 10-20 G/s.

  11. KDE3 on RedHat 7.3 beta (skipjack) is out · · Score: 2, Insightful
    That's nice that they have KDE3. I wish Mandrake had slowed down their 8.2 schedule so that KDE3 final could be included. But they don't like changing release dates, so I can wait.

    What are the cool new features included in 7.3? I guess it's mostly a bug fix release, but their must be some changes. Any improvements to the Redhat configuration tools? I've always liked Redhat better in general, I'm not sure why...but I liked Mandrakes drak tools so much, I switched to MDK.

  12. Re:Linuxconf on RedHat 7.3 beta (skipjack) is out · · Score: 1
    Why'd they take linuxconf out? I mean couldn't they just leave it in and let people install it if they want to?

    Personally I use Mandrake and I think the Mandrake tools are better than Linuxconf for most things. When Mandrake tools don't do the job I go straight to the conf files using vi. Go Mandrake!

  13. PR sham on 2.56 Tb/s Transmission Record · · Score: 1
    I don't mean to be negative here, but there are some things to question here. First of all, 40 Gig/s modulation has been very challenging thus far, and I know for a fact that 20 Gig/s has been achieved, but 40 Gig/s is still a ways off. This is according to one of the founders of JGKB photonics, which I talked to recently. They are trying to achieve 40 Gig/s using a slightly different type of modulator (single channel, linear polarized modulation) as oppsed to a Mach-Zehnder interferometer style modulation, but supposedly 40 Gig/s in general is far off, according to him.

    Secondly, they don't mention the effective data rate on the receiving end of the transmission. They had zero errors, according to the article, because they used forward-error correction. Forward-error correction adds on more bits, to correct for errors. So they've given us the "bit rate", not the "data rate". So although they may have still set a record if you included only the data rates of this record and all previous records, it is still somewhat of a PR sham. Note that the article was written by Lucent, not a third-party news agency (not that it would be any more credible, but the news person may find holes in their "breakthough" if he/she knew enough". Very similar to the Intel "breakthrough in transistor design article" where Intel makes many claims about their new transistor, even though none of these improvements in design have ever been implemented together (although they make us believe that they have).

  14. Hard to beleive... on Killing Rats with GPS · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...that they sprayed enough pesticide on a small island to kill all 100-300 rats. Either they killed them all, as well as every other living organism on the island that is roughly the same size as a rat, or they didn't kill every rat. Rats are decently sized, it's a lot different than killing insect pests. Insect pests might require a few ppm (parts-per-million) pesticide in the air, but the kill a rat, hamster, gerbil, mouse, bird, anything of that size, would require much much more "pesticide." They must have required quite a lethal dose to get all 100-300 of them, as the article says. Not to mention the fact that the dose would have to be increased to take into account that a lot of the particles will attach themselves to plants, trees, etc... which are above ground. This will not contribute to airborn particles, and will not be able to kill a rat (unless they are of the mutated tree-climbing variety!) So the bottom line is, the dosage must have been huge for this small island. Or else there are still some rats around which have survived. They have probably started mating already. I think bringing in some owls might have been a smarter idea.

  15. Re:The Meanest Geek, EVER on Chase the Rabbits · · Score: 3, Funny
    Isn't that the governor of Texas, Jesse Ventura?

  16. Group IV elements on Heat-Conducting Carbon Foam · · Score: 1

    This just makes me appreciate once again the amazing capabilities of the Group V elements in the periodic table. Carbon and silicon are two of the most amazing elements. Silicon has completely transformed our electronic world in so many ways, I won't even bother mentioning them all. And carbon, well just in case some of you don't know, is what Iron is doped with to create Steel! And we can't forget Carbon Fibre Composites, not to mention the future: BuckyBalls and carbon nanotubes. Probably the worst thing these two elements created were diamonds (which provide millions of dollars to the DeBeers empire every year from men around the world) and silicone gels, which have given us breast implants, which some may say is a good thing, but I think otherwise...

  17. Re:I am utterly amazed.... on Heat-Conducting Carbon Foam · · Score: 1

    I agree with your comment, but why don't you just increase your threshold so that you don't see those posts that are moderated down. I filter out score:-1 and score:0 posts, so I never have to see the "low-IQ" posts as you call them, nor the trolls. This is what is so great about Slashdot! It is moderated! But not by a supreme moderator, but by several. And if I understand the system correctly, anyone who gets their Karma high enough can become a moderator. It's a perfect system. The only people who get to see the trolls are the moderators, who frankly should only feel satisfaction every time they give a -1 score to a post deserving of that score. Peace.

  18. Re:Scientology = a bunch of wackos on Google Relists Operation Clambake · · Score: 1

    Is it possible to download that anywhere? Probably not, but just checking...

  19. What shortage are you talking about on Bandwidth Shortage And The Telephone Company · · Score: 1

    I don't think any shortage of bandwidth exists or will exist in the near future. At least on the physical network side. Or at least I won't believe there is a shortage anymore if anyone ever tells me that. I just bought 360 Networks and Global Crossing in the past year and they both tanked!

  20. Scientology = a bunch of wackos on Google Relists Operation Clambake · · Score: 5, Informative

    I went to the local Church of Scientology in Vancouver once. We had to do a research report on religion. Ironically, I chose Scientology (which isn't even a religion, although it worked for the purposes of this paper). I was actually inside the "church". I said I wanted to learn about it, and they took to the back into a little room. Quite scarry actually, they said they were going to show me a video. The lights went off, so it was completely dark. Then the movie came on in front of me on a gigantic projection screen. It all started off with spinning stars like you're spinning and travelling through space...weird stuff. Then there was some narration (I think it was supposed to be Ron L. Hubbard, or an imitation of him). Then later on, John Travolta said a few words. What a wacko he his. The whole thing was a gigantic brain-wash. After the 30 minute video I felt like I was really struggling to believe that it was all a joke. I knew it was, the video just really does a good job at brain-washing you though. But after I got home, and had time to think about it, I knew it was all a scam. So I'm glad that clambake is back up, to help expose the scam that scientology is. And even if you are curious, do not walk into a Church of Scientology! The people there are very convincing! Not just the video, but the people are very persuasive and they try not to be too pushy at the same time. They just give you a few tame brochures to read, and tell you to come on by if you have any questions. If you're not as strong as I was, you might get dragged in. Don't take the chance...

  21. Re:Cost and Uses on Conductive Concrete Offers Building Security · · Score: 1

    I think the website also said that this type of concrete would be just a "thin" coating on the top of regular concrete. I am not sure how "thin" but I think it says on the website. (I don't want to go back to that horribly designed website because it is so ugly). So for the icy-bridge example, the cost increase wouldn't be huge compared to the cost of the entire bridge-deck slab. I'm sure the same thing applies for walls in buildings.

  22. No more salt on Conductive Concrete Offers Building Security · · Score: 1
    The best problem this solves (besides saving people's lives by reducing ice-related car accidents) is that it would eliminate the need for salt on bridges. I don't know exactly what salt does to the environment, but I'm sure that dumping a lot of salt on the roads/bridges and letting it seep in to the ground can't be good for the ecosystem.

    It kills slugs too. Who knows what good slugs do for our environment? Haha

  23. Re:A great big Faraday cage on Conductive Concrete Offers Building Security · · Score: 2, Informative
    This is exactly the same concept. The conducting electrons in the conductor material in the concrete "shield" are all mobile, and arrange themselves with respect to the stationary atomic cores so as to set up electric fields which will cancel out the electromagnetic fields which impinge upon it. So no electric field escapes, or at least some of it will, some of it won't. The amount of attenuation is all a function of frequency. Cell phones in the GHz range are especially supceptable, whereas very long radio waves aren't attenuated as much.

    BTW, you could always just get whatever radio station you want through the internet (land-line).

  24. Re:There was shrinkage on North Pole is Leaving Canada · · Score: 1

    I think the most worthwhile thing to do up there is to do something like kayaking in the artic waters. It's a quick way to get around, and you see a lot of nice scenary and wildlife. On land it's kind of boring...besides, there are lots of neat towns on the coast anyhow.

  25. Long overdue on Shuttle SS50 Mini-system · · Score: 1

    Smaller desktops are long overdue. It's kind of ironic that my old 386 had a 17" tower with a lot of uneeded, empty space inside the box. Now my Athlon 1.2 GHz has a tower of the same size, but it now needs the space to cool it off. I think it's better cooling technology that is driving this change to smaller desktops now. But why hasn't this happened earlier? (Laptops have been around forever, and since I have yet to open one up, it's a mystery to me how they keep them so cool!) Anyways, a box like this and a flatscreen will definitely give me some more desk space than I have now. I hope this push towards smaller desktop boxes continues, so we can have something that is closer to "laptop-sized" for a decent price.