Slashdot Mirror


User: trybywrench

trybywrench's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
400
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 400

  1. communicate from dreams on Next X-Prize — $10M For a Brain-Computer Interface · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I want a way to communicate with the outside world from within a dream. If you could get lucid dreaming perfected you could get a day's work in while your physical body is resting. Then when you're awake you have the day off. ...of course i'm sure this will just devolve into working during the day and when you're asleep too heh.

  2. British Museum on Martian Microbe Fossils, Not So Debunked Anymore · · Score: 1

    I'm not surprised the meteorites sat in the British Museum for so long before being given a good once over. There's so much crap in there it would blow you away. Their section on Egypt is bigger and better than the whole King Tut exhibit tour. hehe it's no wonder other countries are like "um can we have our stuff back?"

  3. take Discreet on Which Math For Programmers? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Set theory and graph theory come in handing when programming.

    Some variation of the "traveling salesman" problem, a graphing problem, shows up in every industry out there so it would be a good idea to be familiar with its nuances and the various approaches to getting it mostly right (i don't think it has been solved).

    Set theory is a good place to start thinking about just about anything. You'll probably also cover combinatorics, formal logic, and predicate calculas along with set theory which are also great tools to have when programming.

  4. does KSM mean the death of Xen? on Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released · · Score: 1

    If KSM puts the KVM module on par with Xen in terms of performance then I think the writing is on the wall for Xen's demise.

  5. Economics can never be modeled succesfully on What Computer Science Can Teach Economics · · Score: 1

    The problem with economics is the act of constructing a model changes reality. As soon as you take action based on your model, your model (and your actions) now become inputs to the system. You're doomed to forever chase a moving target, the more perfect the model the faster it becomes irrelevant. At best you can take some low hanging fruit with statistics preying on the ignorance of those less sophisticated. Goldman Sachs and the other HFT banks have this approach down to a science with the day trading crowd. GS's models are sufficient to trade in the noise of day traders and take them to the cleaners, that's why there's the saying "the fastest way to make a small fortune day trading is to start with a large forture". Modeling economics on a large scale though is a fool's errand.

  6. remind of a Cult of The Dead Cow tfile on Computer Failure Causes Gridlock In MD County · · Score: 3, Interesting

    back in the day i read a "tfile" by Sunspot IIRC that explained how to break into those boxes attached the stop lights at intersections and make every light stay green all the time. Not sure if it was legit or not but it sounded a little far fetched.

    As for the single computer, i bet a coke no one knows the root password, the system administrator is long gone and the programmers are very long gone. I bet the staff tried to power cycle it thinking it was just like a PC and now they've made the problem 3x worse.

  7. pregnant wife + fear on Nationwide Shortage In Supply of Swine Flu Vaccine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My 7 months pregnant wife works as a school teacher and has multiple students out with H1N1. I have never worried before about anything like I worry these days. Jobs, economy, foreign policy, health, the future, they all take on new meaning when you have a family. To quote Blink, "I guess this is growing up".

  8. It's the backup stupid on The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think the key here is was it only T-Mobile's data that was lost or was every customer of the "cloud" affected. If it was only T-Mobile's data than the issue is T-Mobile's backup policy, if it was "cloud"-wide than it's an issue with the "cloud" provider. In either case, I don't think you can paint the entire "cloud" concept as unstable. Cloud computing is really just a dynamic datacenter with all the usual weak links and issues present in a traditional metal datacenter.

  9. Re:Alternative Viewpoint on New OLPC Laptop 1.5 Dual-Boots Sugar, Gnome Desktop · · Score: 3, Insightful

    if i had mod points i'd mod you up solely for your last sentence. In addition to the politics, never underestimate the logistics problems. I bet only 10% of the over all project is actually engineering and software.

  10. Re:It's spotty on GMail Experiences Serious Outage · · Score: 1

    I'm in Texas and it just started working for me

  11. Happened in Dallas ISD too on Bug Means High School Students' Schedule Errors May Last Days · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My wife teaches Journalism at a low income high school in Dallas. A few days before school started she was worried about scheduling and so were her coworkers since an online system they're suppose to be using had no schedules in it. Her first day was met with 60 kids in one of her Journalism class, only 5 had orginially signed up. This is a very poor school ripe with gangs which have to be kept apart but with the scheduling farked all the kids were all mixed together. She was in tears on the phone with me worried that if a fight broke out she wouldn't be able to get out of her room since she has to cross the entire class to get from her desk to the door. Her school won't let her carry a concealed weopen, I want her to carry my pistol but I'm afraid if she gets caught with it there would be criminal charges filed.

    The second day she submitted about 200 schedule changes to the counselors and had managed to get her class size down to 40. Any known bad kids she just told to leave her class, they just leave school and never come back (the first week or so is the worst then the trouble makers just stop showing up).

    Today she showed 1/2 her students a video and tried to teach the other half, I'm guessing she'll do the same tomorrow but switch halves.

    As of right now next Monday is declared a "do over first day of school" and the schedules are promised to be fixed. No one believes it though.

  12. Re:already being done in nursing homes on Drug Vending Machines · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The issue is you need someone to do a sanity check and make sure no one mistakenly filled a hopper meant for Children's Tylenol with, say, Oxycontin. In the case of drugs coming to the pharmacy, our pharmacists physically examine each pill before it goes into the vial when they're counting them out. This is the drug wholesaler sanity check.

  13. already being done in nursing homes on Drug Vending Machines · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I work as a software engineer for a mid sized pharmacy chain. These things are pretty common wherever there's a large, consistent, patient population. Nursing homes use them as well as hospices, it's like an automated prescription filling robot where the rx is verified by a pharmacist at the very last step.

    Most mail delivery pharmacies use them too, the concept is called "central fill" where pharmacies transmit rx's electronic to a central facility that has a few very high volume filling robots. The pharmacists there verify like 60 to 70 rx's per hour. You'd think pharmacists hate an assembly line job but they're actually the most sought after jobs. No sick, pissed off patients to deal with.

  14. wow what an awesome idea! on ImageShack Hacked, Security Groups Threatened · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What an effective way to distribute a message, hack one of the worlds most popular image hosting sites and replace all the images with your manifesto! Every site with an image linked back to imageshack would be displaying your message. Instant.global.audience. I'm not justifying what they did and I'm all for the feds handing out a beat down, afterall, the law is the law but man, what a good idea.

  15. Re:Good. on Pickens Calls Off Massive Wind Farm In Texas · · Score: 1

    "Plenty people think they look beautiful, myself included."

    indeed. I live in Dallas and make the drive to Marfa ( far SW Texas) once every 6 moths or so to visit. One of my favorite parts of the drive is seeing the windmills as you get West of Abilene.

  16. wtf on Google Apps Leave Beta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they don't have a definition for "beta" then why was it there in the first place?

  17. Re:KDE is very usable on The Open Source Design Conundrum · · Score: 3, Informative

    this is called "sloppy focus" it's available on windows but you have to download and install the feature. It's the one of the first things i put on new windows installations.

  18. Re:Lithium, a limited natural resource? on New Lithium-Air Battery Delivers 10 Times the Energy Density · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's Bolivia that has all the Lithium. They are already freaking out about corporations raping their country for profit. IIRC Bolivia has started working on putting policy in place to keep from getting screwed over by large mining firms.

    "Like many other producers of crude oil, Bolivia finds itself in a frustrating situation regarding its processing and the refining of its raw materials. It finds company in the history of the incumbent automobile fuel source, petroleum. There is a great deal that the Bolivians could learn from the Saudis regarding what they should do with its lithium reserves and how to extract them. To achieve this, Bolivia will want to strive to find the answer to a number of questions with which the Saudis have dealt over the years, and continues to deal with, such as how wealth will be distributed if the commodity is nationalized, how to maintain a balance between maximum production and environmental stability, and what will stabilize the economy once the commodity is exhausted."

    http://www.coha.org/2009/02/lucky-bolivia-and-the-future-of-lithium-in-the-world-economy/

  19. Re:Double edged sword on New Lithium-Air Battery Delivers 10 Times the Energy Density · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm not sure that is a blessing or a curse. Burning down your house isn't worth having a longer lasting laptop;

    I know what you mean but you could also say burning down your house isn't worth having a stove. You just need to know that the battery can be dangerous and you should handle it accordingly.

  20. very cool tech on Wired for War · · Score: 3, Informative

    I worked on some of the technology back in college in the late 90's. I was part of a lab that participated in an international competition that was designed to further autonomous aerial vehicle tech. One year after the competition we were invited to a military symposium and got to see the real stuff. I remember something like the predator was there but called something else. There were a handful of other aerial vehicles but i guess the predator thing won out in the end.

    A couple of semesters ago I went back to school to finish my CS degree and started working in the same old lab from the 90's. Sensors and things had vastly improved and the bulk of the work was now being done on computer vision instead of autonomous flying. The aerospace engineer ace in the lab was planning to work for General Atomics, i'm guessing on the predator, after he finished up his degree. I worked on a target recognition and tracking system using the OpenCV library up until I formally graduated.

    It's really interesting stuff and I considered entering the field but I already have about 9 years in the healthcare industry and I can't bring myself to stop capitalizing on all my specialized healthcare knowledge.

  21. why not let authors charge? on Novell Ponders "Open-Source Apps Store" · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why not let authors of the software charge just like the smart phone apps? Sounds like a revenue source for Novell and a revenue source for software writers. There can be a mix of free and not-free software in the "store" just like Apple's.

    To answer my own question it sounds like Novell wants to leverage the "app store" hype and just put a front end on apt.

  22. Re:It depends on what you're trying to accomplish on Is Apache Or GPL Better For Open-Source Business? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I would say that when it comes to interoperability and standards compliance ( like a protocol ) then the GPL makes a lot of sense. With the GPL a business can't take the protocol, modify it, and then use market share to push their closed and modified version as the standard.

    My best guess for making money off open source is still support. If you provide pay-only features then you've got to be better than the very best programmer in the open source community. You'll always be in an arms race trying to introduce new features that customers will pay for faster then the community implements these same features in the open source version.

    With support you can provide a service that the open source community can't match which is basically a legally binding contract. Individuals would never buy the support and just head to the community for issues but a business will use the support contract as a hedge on the risk of using open source. The community has no contract and no obligation.

    Now making enough to live on is a whole other matter.

  23. Re:Anyone else hoarding gold? on Linux Flourishes In 200-Year-Old Gold Markets · · Score: 1

    I've been hearing a lot about gold hoarding on some financial sites. The boardies at marketwatch.com are especially into it but they're pretty nutty anyway. The most common advice I hear is to make sure whoever you're buying from can actually deliver the gold. Some gold sellers are selling paper gold which will be just as worthless in a major event. Gold in hand is what you want not the "promise to deliver gold".

  24. reminds me of those buzzards on Did Bat Hitch a Ride To Space On Discovery? · · Score: 1

    there's a YouTube clip of 3 or 4 buzzards circling the shuttle at lift off. You can guess what happens next. It looks like they get stunned before they're even struck, probably from all the noise. They flutter down to the engines and that's that.

  25. compare SQL to Code on Refactoring SQL Applications · · Score: 2

    I'd like to see some work done on the balancing act of how much to do in code and how much to do in SQL. My coworker can put SQL statements together that if printed on an 8.5x11 would fill the whole sheet if not run over. Me, on the other hand, I tend to break up huge sql statements into a set of smaller ones and then use code to do some of the work that could possible have been done in SQL. I don't have the time to find out what works best on my own but I do have the time to read about it.

    btw, how come tech books don't come on tape/cd?