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Comments · 478

  1. Re:But You're Missing The Main Objective on Using the USPTO Against Itself · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    Why are my tax dollars being wasted on proprietary stuff like HP-UX when they could be running BSD or Linux for free?

    One has to pay for the hardware in any case, so I presume you are refering to the cost of the OS? I got my copy of HPUX 10.20 without charge... Remember the Y2K unpleasantness? At that time, HP was offering HPUX 10.20 upgrades free to anyone with a 700-series workstation. Maybe they are charging for HPUX now, but it was free at one point.

    Now whether you or I actually _like_ HPUX is another matter :-) Personally, I despise their "depot" package system. It sucks the snot out of a dead dog's nose...

  2. Re:SETI on Slashback: Hagiography, Oracle, Fusion · · Score: 2

    And boy that just sucks, I have about 2200 results sent in from Seti, about 29,000 hrs of computer time (at least with my machines). This guy only has 92, and he was the winner..

    I find this strangely appropriate. After all, what are the chances of SETI turning up clear signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence? Slim? Very slim? Miniscule? And here is some fellow that won, in spite of the odds :-) (Sure, you could find similar examples in the form of lottery winners...)

  3. Re:Bringing downt he price... on White LEDs for a Brighter World · · Score: 2

    You're half right - Actually the ballast is also there to limit the current flowing through the tube.
    ...
    a high voltage kick is produced, which is placed across the tube, which fires it.

    Except that the problem is that the voltage required to maintain the arc inside the tube is a lot less than the voltage to start the arc, so you need to regulate the current through the tube to stop it from blowing up.


    That sounds about right. I remember doing my own experiments with fluorescent tubes. My own goal was to produce a circuit that had zero flicker and dimming control. These experiments were all with DC, of course. It is possible, but a real pain in the ass to control...

    If memory serves, a cold tube will start glowing somewhere over 200 volts, and have a nice medium-low glow around 300 volts or so. I think that the gas started ionizing pretty well before it hit 400 volts. The current seemed to be pretty much a linear function.

    Now a hot tube (filaments glowing) is a different matter. Once the gas started ionizing, the current goes WHAM! (96 point bold with a hundred exclamation points) and the voltage for full output is around 60 to 70 volts. I suppose that would be almost an amp at that point, a far cry from the tens or hundreds of milliams with the higher voltage cold cathode...

  4. Re:What if... on Trojans and Popups and Slimeball Business · · Score: 2

    The interviewer calls him "Mr. Bigott" and then:

    Frank Bigott: "Excuse me, but it's pronounced 'Bee-GOH'."


    Well, assuming that the sound of his name has anything to do with anything, the double 't' at the end prevents it from being silent. I assume that you are trying to apply French pronounciation rules here.

    My question is why the apparent joke about this name. I rememberback in 7th grade, one of my friends found a picture of a truck or van with "Fucker" painted on the side. It was a German company, I believe, but we sure had a lot of laughs over that one. Ha! Ha! Boy, isn't that funny! I think we all got tired of it by the time we were in 8th grade, though. Maybe it was a part of growing up.

  5. Re:Wont work on Solar Sail to be Launched This Year · · Score: 2

    Talk about Crazy Eddie.

    Show of hands: how many people actually got this joke?


    Who didn't? I suppose you could say it has a double meaning, since it could be refering to THE Crazy Eddie probe, or it could be just a general purpose crazy eddie idea. Now where did my fyunch go?

  6. Re:Other Possable Plates on The Perfect Plate for the Nuclear Family Car · · Score: 2

    Prostitution is only legal in a couple counties in Nevada - even then those counties COMBINED all have a population LESS than 250 people

    Just what the hell are yout talking about? I don't know about Storey county, but the
    census figures for Lyon county show 34501 for this county alone. Although the median family income is only $33k, the economy here is moving ahead pretty well...

  7. Re:Is it just me or... on Vint Cerf: 'The Internet Is For Everyone' · · Score: 2

    By 2008 we should have a well-functioning Earth-Mars network that serves as a nascent backbone of an inter- planetary system of Internets

    Anyone else finds it absurd to have a round trip time of almost half an hour?

    This does sound crazy at first when one looks at conventional TCP as the basic data transfer mechanism. Latency is a bandwidth killer, and the bandwidth delay product here would mandate enormous window sizes and low tolerance for errors. The latter could be reduced with forward error correction on a lower layer, but I supsect that many or most of our mainstream apps would need to be tuned for the latency.

    On the other hand, consider the UUCP, BBS, Fidonet, USENET, or other services we used to use (or still do). Those file transfer mechanisms are not well suited for interactive use, but are perfectly usable for bulk transfers. One obvious application here is for intelligent (preloading) web cache servers. Email would take longer to arrive, but would otherwise not suffer.

    I am intrigued with the possibilities of some of the P2P file sharing clients in this application. While Napster seemed to bring the expectation of immediate, almost interactive, file transfers, others like edonkey seem to have the idea of finding the desired files from an index, and having your client wait (possibly for days) until one or more copies are available for transfer. The current approach is probably well suited for the case of distributed copies where the peers are often off the network, but might be readily adapted to the extremely remote, high latency environment.

  8. Re:*WEAK* on 64kbps @ 40,000 ft. · · Score: 2

    Give it a try, hey, they even sell books at the airport's newsshop.

    BEWARE! The last time I tried this, I ended up with a truly bad novel by William Shatner. At least I hope he wrote it - I hate to think that a ghost writer could suck that bad.

    On the other hand, I read a good deal of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" while flying (as a passenger, of course).

  9. Re:Every time on eWeek: Apache 2.0 Trumps IIS · · Score: 2

    I would have to say quite the opposite about trying to admin an IIS machine, you want to change a simple setting? Expect to spend half an hour navigating menus till you find the setting hidden in some illogical unexpected location.

    Well, if you are in a hurry, that might be a real bummer. On the other hand, you could consider the menus like a kind of GUI "adventure" game, trying to find the magic icon to push so that you can go back to the great cavern (sorry, main menu) and activate the special option.

    I'm joking of course, but then again I do see a parallel between learning to navigate a GUI and the patient exploration of an adventure-style game. For instance, I learned just about everything I ever needed to know about OS/2 just by exploring all the possible system menus. That - and reading both OS/2 2.11 Unleashed and OS/2 Warp Unleashed :-)

  10. Re:And this is wrong why? on Internal MP3 Server? 1 Million Dollars Please · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't know about you, but when I power up xmms and listen to an mp3, I'm wearing an eyepatch.

    That reminds me of a copy program for the Amiga. "Illegal copies? No, sir, it's for backups..." And when you start it up, it has a (nauseating) animated gold background with the repeating song, "Yo Ho! Yo Ho! A Pirate's life for me!".

    :-)

  11. Re:it may take 1000 years to simulate on a home co on ASCI White Detonates The First E-Bomb · · Score: 1

    I thought the first and biggest E-Bomb was the Apple Newton.
    Faux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

  12. Re:One day in the not-so-distant-future..... on FCC Pushes Digital TV and Digital Restrictions · · Score: 1

    Well, eventually all those mergers will result in one global company.

    You must mean Central Services... Well, at least I will have a choice of duct styles and colors.

  13. Re:pushing MHz on Intel's 2.4GHz Pentium 4 Unleashed · · Score: 2

    Equally the V8 in my XK8 will easily outperform the V12 engine Jaguar used to use

    Cool. But I would sure love to have a ride in the XKEE that R&T reviewed about 30 years ago... I've heard good stories about the Jag 3.4 to 4.2 6-cylinder engines, and the thought of two welded end to end is just too fun.

    Unfortunately most of the O/S in common use tend to spend a lot of time in unnecessary wait states.

    That is one of my favorite thought experiments I like to bring up when someone asks how well a dual-CPU system might perform. In general, most people would expect to get 20% to 80% over a single CPU, but in certain cases where the first CPU was stuck in a wait-state swamp, I believe that more than double the original performance. Of course, a better solution would be to add a cheap, dedicated microcontroller to stand on top of the polling, but a $2 savings to the card manufacturer is more important than $50 of CPU upgrade to the end user (see: winmodems).

  14. Re:Carnivore is doomed.... on Carnivore Update · · Score: 2

    Unfortunately, no, you can't. Law enforcement is specificially exempted from the DMCA.

    In that case, perhaps a sympathetic judge or sheriff could deputise some prominent developers and users. I recall that some "cannabis club" workers in Oakland, CA were deputised as a formality so that they would be protected from legal harrassment in their marijuana dispensing duties.

  15. Re:ENOUGH APRIL FOOL'S ALREADY! on nVidia/AMD Merger Announced · · Score: 1

    That's "+5 Informative" ??! No it's not!

    If that's +5 Informative, then this is +5 Insightful! :P


    For the prank stories on April 1st, I think the crew should reverse the moderation point system :-) -2 insightful +5 flamebait...

  16. Re:What did he say? on Gateway Testifies To Microsoft's OEM Treatment · · Score: 1

    All four are real misstatements that I've encountered at least once in the real world.
    I doubt anyone else will see this, but your funny mistakes gave me the urge to start a web page for "Excrements of Style" :-)

    http://www.peckerheads.com/excrements.html

  17. Re:Ad - Counter Ad on Microsoft To Start Running Anti-Unix Ads · · Score: 1

    They could have a purple Mercedes or some other obviously nice quality vehicle. standing next to a Yugo ...

    And the fellow with the MS car can claim, "My Yugo is cheaper to fix than your Mercedes!"

  18. Re:What did he say? on Gateway Testifies To Microsoft's OEM Treatment · · Score: 2, Funny

    Errors like this are pardon parcel... ...nobody expects a slashdot post to win the pullet surprise...

    Hey, that's a pretty funny way of making a point. Did you just invent these, or did you get them from some humorous reference ("Excrements of Style"?)

  19. Re:Don't feed the scientologists on Google Relists Operation Clambake · · Score: 2

    Take away their gravy train by not using earthlink.net or going to any movie with a scientology actor in a main or even bit part.

    Are you talking about that "Sky Dayton" guy? I remember going to a presentation at ISPCON where he was going to give a presentation on building an ISP. The room was pretty well filled, and when he was introduced, most of the audience gave him a standing ovation. What the hell!? I was thinking, "who the hell is this prick, anyway?" He sure had not done a single thing to earn the first shred of respect from me, or even recognition for that matter.

    Getting back to the Elron issue, I just checked www.overture.com for the keyword scientology, and unfortunately the highest paid clicks were 16 cents. Bummer. But as one of Jack Vance's characters noted, there is always strakh (honor) to be gained in slaying sea monsters. And for what it's worth, these monsters are about a dollar poorer (7 clicks).

  20. Re:No..No.. [e^(pi * j)] + 1 = 0 on Simpsons Guide to Math · · Score: 1

    In computer science, it's (int) 3 / (int) 22.

    Can you remember the string "113355"? If you split it into 355/133, the result is even closer to pi.

  21. Re:A little help please on Microsoft Case Enters Crucial Penalty Phase · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Either it delves into it or not. Delve - to make a careful or detailed search of something. So this makes a careful search, slightly??

    I think the meaning might be "the delving (of other issues) touches ways in which the states..."

    the states in legal conflict with Microsoft would like to see Microsoft constrained legally going forward.

    Yes, this is a mess. Here is how I parse it:

    (...the states (in legal conflict with Microsoft) would like to see [the issue of] (Microsoft constrained legally) going forward).

    In other words, "the states would like to see the issue (Microsoft constrainment) move forward."

    I agree with you that the poster (Timothy?) could have been a bit more obvious in his grammatical constructions.

  22. Re:slashdotted allready on Encryption For All Sponsored by German Govt. · · Score: 2

    And something else is new: "Adele" (adele@gnupp.org), an exercise roboter for practising the procedure of encryption and decryption as often as the entry-level user will need it.

    Cool! This could make it very easy and comfortable for a beginner to get the hang of using encryption. It might be inconvenient or embarrassing for some to send many test messages to friends, so this would make it easy (even fun?) This could also help new users get acquainted with with the idea of key servers.

    This is an excellent idea, folks :-)

  23. Re:Floppy disks are so 1992 on Linux on a Floppy: Intro to Mini Linux Distros · · Score: 1

    You call IDE vulgar, but you use floppies?

    &lt politician&gt Well, uh... LOOK! OVER THERE! &lt/politician&gt

  24. Re:Floppy disks are so 1992 on Linux on a Floppy: Intro to Mini Linux Distros · · Score: 2

    We have cheap burners, media that costs no more, if not less than floppy disks, and BIOS's that boot from CD as a standard feature.

    It is still not common to find a motherboard with a BIOS that will boot from a SCSI CDROM. That is why I still need a floppy drive from time to time. Am I just choosing the wrong motherboards? Or are you just talking about IDE CDROM drives? (IDE? How vulgar!)

  25. Re:Huh? on Fair Software Installation · · Score: 5, Informative

    What the @##$% is new.net?

    They are the new version of Alternic. Remember them? They set up their own root nameservers in order to sell their own top level domain names. In order to make it work, they had to persuade ISPs to use their root nameservers instead of the official ones.

    New.net has apparently learned from the Alternic episode. No, they didn't learn the part about respecting the official DNS structure. They learned that getting all the ISPs to agree and cooperate is not very practical.

    So instead of changing the DNS system from the top down (Alternic), they are trying to change it from the bottom up, starting with your Windows computer. In my opinion, this is just as sleazy, no! even more sleazy than the tricks USR pulled to get dialup customers to force the ISPs to buy overpriced X2 access servers.