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User: Dzimas

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  1. Re: Automated notice not necessary here on Comcast Drops Spurious Fees When Customer Reveals Recording · · Score: -1

    Actually, it makes no sense to have different recording laws at the state level, nor should "state meddling" supercede "federal meddling."

  2. Re:energy production is for niggers on Gas Cooled Reactors Shut Down In UK · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    See? This is what happens when an infinite number of monkeys sit down at an infinite number of typewriters to write an infinite number of masterpieces. It reads like an ode to Tourette's Syndrome.

  3. Re:Steve Jobs set the standard... on Silicon Valley Doesn't Have an Attitude Problem, OK? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The best hire I ever made was someone that a senior VP disagreed with me about during and after the interview. I saw the skill set and personality that was needed for our team and he didn't. Fast forward 10 years, and I found myself approaching the person I'd hired for funding to keep my little startup alive and allow it to prosper. Because I had treated that employee well, we were able to hammer out the framework of an agreement at our first formal meeting. It was the easiest pitch that either of us had ever been through. Behaving like a tantruming child simply because you have money and the illusion of power is the stupidest approach if you plan on being in tech for the long haul. Sooner or later, someone you've trampled or angered *will* be in a position to give a less-than-flattering opinion of you or shut you out.

  4. Limited utility. on Parallax Completes Open Hardware Vision With Open Source CPU · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I run a company that releases all its hardware designs and am a huge proponent of OSHW. This gesture has limited utility simply because the people who use MCUs in designs aren't typically interested in delving into the minutiae of how the processor that runs the system is built. They're more interested in open source circuits which have real-world applications -- a low pass filter for smoothing PWM signals, a nice clean USB power supply, and so on.

  5. To summarize... on PlayStation Now, Sony's 'Netflix For Games' -- Pros and Cons · · Score: 1

    "But the expense of using the service is excessive, blah blah" = "It costs too much."

  6. Re:They need exactly 63 999 employees on Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need? · · Score: 5, Funny

    They need exactly 63 999 employees

    You must work in the marketing department of a hard drive company.

  7. This is the third Blackberry with a square screen. on BlackBerry's Innovation: Square-Screened Smartphones · · Score: 1

    Both the Q5 and Q10 phones already have square screens, although they're extremely small because both units have kept the physical keyboard and traditional rectangular shape.

  8. Re:Who cooks at 800C ? on Nathan Myhrvold's Recipe For a Better Oven · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Lead melts at 327.5 degrees, zinc melts at 319.5 degrees, tin a bit less than that. You could have some serious metalworking fun in the kitchen -- get it up to 1200 degrees and you could liquify gold, silver and even copper. I seriously hope that the numbers in the summary were just an awkward conversion error, because the notion of your very own kitchen smelter is terrifying.

  9. Re:They where acting like the cable co / CATV on Bye Bye Aereo, For Now · · Score: 1

    Why should anyone pay a fee to re-transmit free-to-air TV signals? I understand that cable channels rely on subscription fees to stay in business, but we're talking about the major networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and PBS - that are broadcast across 94% of the United States at no charge.

  10. Re:Why should we care? on NRC Human Spaceflight Report Says NASA Strategy Can't Get Humans To Mars · · Score: 1

    A politician's speech is the best you can come up with to explain why we need to reach Mars? Oh, my. JFK was all hot and bothered to reach the moon because it would upstage the Soviets, not because it was a noble or even sensible endeavor. There are a number of good reasons why a mission to mars would be desirable: (1) it requires the development of long-range manned spacecraft, (2) it gets us out of low earth orbit, (3) (in the long term) it encourages the development of new forms of long-range propulsion and an important emphasis on interplanetary life support systems. I could scrawl down a few dozen more, but the *important* bit is that it encourages us to make tentative steps into the larger solar system. And -- once we can reach other planets and moons -- perhaps there's an economic opportunity to be found that drives further advances.

  11. Re:Sometimes the "idiot" isn't the problem. on A Measure of Your Team's Health: How You Treat Your "Idiot" · · Score: 1

    Yes, of course I presented the user feedback as you suggest. I also provided solid use cases to illustrate how things didn't match the way their business works and what could be done to dramatically improve it. The problem was simply that the project manager had chosen to build a technical house of cards and didn't have the budget or time to change course. When faced with clear evidence that the system simply didn't work for clients, the easiest response was to discredit and kill the messenger. That only preserves the status quo for a short while, though. In this company's case, it was a matter of about 8 more weeks before an executive review killed the project and eventually the entire division.

  12. Sometimes the "idiot" isn't the problem. on A Measure of Your Team's Health: How You Treat Your "Idiot" · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've had the delightful experience of being treated as the team idiot simply for declaring that the emperor had no clothes. It was one of those death march instances where a company decided to write a "version 2.0" of their extremely good program from the ground up. They brought in extremely skilled and expensive technical leads who developed a complicated new back end that was designed to be as "infinitely versatile" and then deployed a front end to match. The result was that they took a very good user experience and turned it into an arcane and slow -- but insanely flexible -- system. Client users absolutely hated the preview releases because they simply didn't let them do their work. I was the unlucky sap who had to provide feedback to the dev team. I decided not to pull punches and deliver a factual summary. The end result? The project lead declared that, "The consulting team simply doesn't understand how the system works" and proceeded to try to ice me out of the company. The organization ultimately failed because the project was such a mess. Unpleasant, but I'm glad I stood my ground and called a spade a spade. It took a while to regain my confidence after that, but my subsequent projects have all been successful and even award winning.

  13. Re: Does not matter on The World's Worst Planes: Aircraft Designs That Failed · · Score: 1

    No, it would have required the USSR to *pretend* to upgrade their air defences. The cold war is marked by repeated overestimation of Soviet capabilities and equipment, which resulted in trillions of dollars wasted.

  14. A long way up on Virgin Galactic Passengers May Just Miss Going into Space · · Score: 1

    50 km is 164,042 feet. That's a long way up. Only 543 people have reached an altitude of 50 km or higher.

  15. And battery life suffers. on The Feature Phone Is Dead: Long Live the 'Basic Smartphone' · · Score: 2

    My wife still carries a 4 year old Samsung feature phone with a slider keyboard. The reason? She doesn't like having to charge a handset every day or two. Her little phone will go for several weeks without charging, so she can just leave it in her shoulder bag most of the time. Her service is also dirt cheap because she doesn't have to worship at the altar of data -- she pays about $12/month. I really wish I could do the same and cut the strings; I'd probably save about $500 a year by going data-free.

  16. Re: Secretive Democracy Alliance Meeting on Figuring Out the iPad's Place · · Score: 1

    What those of us outside the USA find befuddling is that Americans truly seem to believe that the Democrats and Republicans represent a profound left wing - right wing split,when in the broader spectrum, both parties are profoundly right wing, with a heavy emphasis on capitalism and authoritarianism. Just because the current president is pushing the notion of socialized medicare doesn't mean that the country is teetering on the brink of a Marxist revolution.

  17. Some of the oldest trades become useful. on Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have a neighbour who is a weaver. She most certainly has skills worth sharing. The post-apocalyptic world would also need blacksmiths, potters, carpenters, farmers and so on. Not to mention someone capable of swinging a sword and lopping the heads off marauders intent on dragging off the young women and torching the village. The challenge is that scientists and engineers do not necessarily have the skills most critically required in the first decade or two of a new civilization, but their knowledge is critical to helping a society advance rapidly later. Hence, we'll need monks well versed in the scriptures of science.

  18. Re: "Is This News"? on How I Cut My Time Warner Cable Bill By 33% · · Score: 1

    I discovered that the backup systems for our local cell towers run about 8 hours before you lose phone service during a major outage. While that is a small comfort, the pots system continued to run for days because of more robust generator backup. I know which I prefer.

  19. doubtful. on How About a Megatons To Megawatts Program For US Nuclear Weapons? · · Score: 1

    Sadly, the military will strongly object, claiming they must retain the ability to annihilate civilization 50 or 60 times over. "To protect us."

  20. useless summary. on Whatever Happened To the IPv4 Address Crisis? · · Score: 1

    Dear Mother of the First Transistor and all that's holy, would it be too much to write a summary that actually summarizes -- "Remember the IPv4 crisis? It's still a problem, and we're going to run into trouble sometime this year." It's only a matter of time before tabloid-grade link baiting pervades every area of writing -- imagine the joy of reading summaries of scientific articles that conclude with, "Is there a statistically significant likelihood that your wife secretly prefers canoodling with carpenters rather than network engineers? Click HERE to find out."

  21. Re: maybe, but . . . on Can Electric Current Make People Better At Math? · · Score: 2

    As a child, I spent agonizing hours fighting to do long division and multiplication by hand. More often than not, I ended up with the wrong answer and came to believe that I "wasn't good at math" simply because of mild dyscalculia. It wasn't until I was older -- and allowed to use a calculator or PC -- that I discovered that my failures were simple mental processing errors ttjat could be overcome with help from technology. So, yes, on one hand I still stumble when performing elementary calculations by hand. On the other, I spend my days optimizing DSP algorithms. Thank goodness I have a computer to do the menial tasks.

  22. Re: 2014 won't be the year of Internet of Things on Why the Internet of Things Is More 1876 Than 1995 · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure what decade you're from, but my washer and dryer both have digital countdown timers and chime when they need attention. Same goes for the oven. I most certainly don't need an appliance that's designed to last 20 years to be infested with a wireless communication standard that will be hopelessly outdated in five years.

  23. Re: Give Me Mod Points Slashdot, I fight for the U on EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The beta design simply doesn't have the information density of the production version. Instead of scanning for interesting comments, I scroll until I get sick of scrolling and then back out to the next thread. This isn't a situation in which users are grumbling because they don't like change; it's an instance where the redesign has a dramatic negative effect on the UX. That's a potential site killer.

  24. Re:Why? on US Cord Cutters Getting Snubbed From NBC's Olympic Coverage Online · · Score: 1

    NBC affiliates broadcast free-to-air across the United States, so why should they limit online streaming? Geolocation technology is good enough that it is possible to figure out where I am in the country so that the appropriate local video stream could be sent to my computer of tablet, providing exactly the same experience as if I were watching on a TV using rabbit ears.

  25. Re:He hit the nail on the head... on Wozniak Gets Personal On Innovation · · Score: 1

    The only thing worse than a Grammar Nazi is an incorrect Grammar Nazi. It's a toaster = It is a toaster (correct). Its = neuter possessor.