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User: MachineShedFred

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  1. Only on Slashdot... on Apple and IBM Announce Partnership To Bring iOS + Cloud Services To Enterprises · · Score: 1

    Only on Slashdot would someone say that IBM wanting to get into the mobile game without starting from scratch = Apple not innovating.

  2. Re:PowerPC worked out for Apple ... on Apple and IBM Announce Partnership To Bring iOS + Cloud Services To Enterprises · · Score: 1

    Apple was loyal to IBM. It was IBM that didn't give a crap about making low power designs, which is why we never saw a PowerBook G5. IBM forced Apple to move to Intel, or to stop selling laptops.

    And PowerPC has seen it's fair share of design wins, including use in a lot of networking gear; to say nothing of IBM's successful P-series of UNIX servers.

  3. Re: So was the landing successful? on SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Blasts Off From Florida · · Score: 1

    What does anything he said have to do with liberalism versus conservatism?

    Congratulations on being the core part of the problem with the US Government - partisan blinders.

  4. Re:"An anonymous reader" on SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Blasts Off From Florida · · Score: 1

    Yeah. Because absolutely no technology came out of the Apollo program that benefited society in any way.

    Nobody went hungry because we went to the moon. Nobody died because we went to the moon. No less people were educated because we went to the moon.

  5. Re:"An anonymous reader" on SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Blasts Off From Florida · · Score: 1

    NASA has data that shows the Challenger crew was still alive when they hit the water. They were just all unconscious because of a lack of oxygen. Oh, and the rockets didn't explode in the traditional sense - the fuel tank ruptured causing LOX and LH to spill out forming a giant cloud, which was then ignited by the still firing SRBs. If you watch the film, you can see the SRBs continue to boost out of the fireball.

    A proper launch abort system, with a proper rocket stack (payload on top, liquid fueled boosters that can be shut off), would have likely saved the crew.

  6. Re:Nice but on IBM To Invest $3 Billion For Semiconductor Research · · Score: 1

    Besides the battery life to enable people to get through all day on a laptop without plugging in, or multiple days on smartphones as powerful as laptops of 5 years ago?

  7. Re:because: Republicans on Senator Al Franken Accuses AT&T of "Skirting" Net Neutrality Rules · · Score: 1

    You do know that Al Franken is VERY much a Democrat, right?

    The GP post was asking why Senator Franken was only accusing ATT and not Verizon / Comcast / Time Warner.

    Blaming the other guys isn't constructive, and only deepens the division without solving a damn thing. Stop it.

  8. Re:Come now. on How Japan Lost Track of 640kg of Plutonium · · Score: 2

    The mass difference between Pu 239 and Pu 240 is so insignificant that it is completely infeasible to use any current production isotope separation techniques (gaseous diffusion, centrifuges, etc.) and Pu 240 reacts to chemicals exactly the same as Pu 239, so you can't cheat it by using a chemical bath to dissolve the stuff you want / don't want (PUREX). There are experimental techniques, but they are so unreliable or expensive that it's cheaper and faster to just build a reactor to make the stuff if you're that serious.

    We're talking about national governments here. They don't need to clandestinely take some mixed-isotope garbage from a commercial reactor and recondition it at prohibitive expense and complexity for a weapon. They can just build a short-cycle reactor or one that allows adding and removing U238 slugs while the core is running and tell the UN to fuck off - seems to have worked out just fine for Iran (allegedly), North Korea, Pakistan, and India. The process is really quite technically easy after we figured out how to do it in the 1940s, it's just a matter of spending the money and having the feedstock fuel to begin with, which Japan has shloads of.

  9. Re:Come now. on How Japan Lost Track of 640kg of Plutonium · · Score: 4, Informative

    Except that "reactor grade" plutonium is unsuitable for weapons, and cannot have the undesired isotopes of plutonium separated out of it to make it weapons grade. There's a reason why the US built the special reactors at Hanford for weapons production - you can't just make material suitable for weapons in any commercial generating station.

    But besides that, yeah we should all duck and cover.

  10. Re:Sinking ship... on Rob Pardo Says Farewell To Blizzard · · Score: 1

    The biggest issue with pay-for-advancement is that the quality of player diminishes rapidly. I don't say this from some kind of elitist perspective, but it used to be that if you saw someone at max level with a good set of gear that was hard to obtain, you had a reasonable probability that they earned it through effort with a group of similarly skilled people.

    Now, not so much. As of the last time I logged into WoW (18 months ago) raiding has been watered down to being a weekly chore (in between collect 20 nonsense items daily quests and gardening) that you take care of in random groups, rather than something you actually made time to do with people you like, because it was enjoyable.

    I have enough chores to do in the real world, I don't need digital weeds that need digital pulling.

  11. Re:Embarrasment on Overkill? LG Phone Has 2560x1440 Display, Laser Focusing · · Score: 1

    Good thing that DisplayPort 1.3 supports a bandwidth of 32.4Gbps, and that the current DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2 that has been available since 2009 supports 17.28Gbps then, right?

    The bandwidth has been there for far better than 4K for quite some time. Oh, and HDMI sucks - you're paying for royalty-encumbered down-spec'd garbage from a litigious organization in comparison to the royalty-free VESA standard that is DisplayPort.

  12. Re:Maybe Moon not Mars on NASA's Orion Spaceship Passes Parachute Test · · Score: 1

    Here's the good thing about NASA's hardware: it usually has a docking port. Orion might be small, but so was the Apollo Command Module. However, once in orbit, you can rendezvous with something else that is already up there (or launched on the same rocket stack if you want to go 1960s mega-rocket) that has the supplies necessary for the journey, landing and stay. Then, when they blast off the surface of Mars, they rendezvous with another remote-controlled spacecraft following behind that is in Mars orbit, which has all the supplies necessary for the trip back, as well as a fresh booster filled with fuel for the return trip.

    The astronauts could even do the remote control of the second spacecraft for Mars orbital entry and docking from the first in order to get around the transmission lag time inherent in any Mars mission. After all, most astronauts are accomplished pilots, and they're all pretty smart.

  13. Re:Why bother? on NASA's Orion Spaceship Passes Parachute Test · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but your facts don't play with AC's narrative that each and every Republican is a bible-thumping science-denying women-hating redneck gun-waving racist who wants to fire you and your family in order to throw another nickel into the olympic swimming pool filled with cash.

    Just smile and nod, even if the smile is just a thinly veiled wince. And don't even think about explaining that the Democratic party has it's own extremist flank of tree-hugging tax-and-spend politically-correct welfare-state socialists that want to outlaw guns, cars, electric light, private education, and all religious organizations.

  14. Re:I am a drone pilot ... on FAA Bans Delivering Packages With Drones · · Score: 1

    To extend your example, a baseball offers a large surface area when it hits something which spreads the applied force across that surface area.

    Drones designed to carry any amount of cargo are likely to be pointy for aerodynamics, and have rapidly moving parts that do not present a large surface area in the direction of rotation (read: propellors or rotors) that will act like knives.

  15. Re:What the hell is wrong with the FAA? on FAA Bans Delivering Packages With Drones · · Score: 1

    Cool, so any drone flying over my house below the FAA controlled airspace is trespassing, and I can get some skeet shooting practice in?

  16. Re:I find this approach unsettling on Draper Labs Develops Low Cost Probe To Orbit, Land On Europa For NASA · · Score: 1

    Many of the 3rd stage boosters from Apollo are either in a heliocentric orbit, or smashed into the surface of the moon after the Command Module separated from them.

    Historically, we aren't very good at not littering bits of spacecraft all over the place when we do these kinds of things.

  17. Re:Who has the big red button? on Google and Microsoft Plan Kill Switches On Smartphones · · Score: 1

    In the case of iPhone, make sure the person you buy it from isn't an idiot and unregisters it from their iCloud account.

    There is lots of incentive for them to do this, like not having you reading all their messages and digging through their photos.

  18. Re:Yeah, I'll sit this war out. on Google To Take On Apple's CarPlay · · Score: 1

    Good thing Pioneer and Kenwood have already announced CarPlay head units for Q3 then, and I'm sure when we're talking about something Android based that isn't vapor, they'll announce that too.

    Don't need to replace the car, just replace the box in the dash.

  19. Re:Answer: Both on Google To Take On Apple's CarPlay · · Score: 1

    So that's exactly the same as basically every embedded car entertainment system ever. Auto manufacturers will love it.

  20. Re:Sigh. on Endurance Experiment Writes One Petabyte To Six Consumer SSDs · · Score: 1

    I'll see your incredibly small sample size, and raise you with "the company I work for has bought hundreds of Kingston SSDs, and we haven't had even one fail in the last two years."

  21. Re:It's gonna be funny when our cellphone Internet on EU, South Korea Collaborate On Superfast 5G Standards · · Score: 2

    Don't forget that the link speed between your phone and the tower doesn't make one single shit of difference if they don't upgrade the backhaul from the tower to the switching office.

  22. Re:Good for Business! on Portland Edges Closer To Google Fiber · · Score: 1

    Fred Meyer wanted to lease out unused space on their campus to a prospective company looking to open a call center in Southeast Portland (22nd and Powell) and the City wanted them to pay to install a traffic light and rebuild the intersection at 22nd to handle the "increased traffic." However, the anticipated traffic was still going to be less than it was 10 years ago when Fred Meyer was owned by an equity management firm and not a division of Kroger. So, kiss those added jobs and economic development goodbye, because the City didn't want to work with business to put in a damn traffic light - that building is still sitting empty, un-renovated, being used for storage of office furniture.

    TriMet loves to run bus routes that deliver terrible service out to places that they have no interest in serving, just so every business within a mile of the route has to pay the TriMet payroll tax. They've been doing this long enough that suburbs are considering opting out of TriMet and starting their own transit agencies in order to save their local businesses money and get better service at the same time. Trimet is now a pension organization that also happens to operate a bus and train service, poorly.

    These are two examples that happened in the last 5 years, or are continuing to happen.

  23. Re:Good for Business! on Portland Edges Closer To Google Fiber · · Score: 0

    Here's a recap of the Columbia situation: http://blog.oregonlive.com/por...

    There was a more exhaustive article in Willamette Week a few years back, but their website search sucks.

  24. Re:Good for Business! on Portland Edges Closer To Google Fiber · · Score: 0

    It's going to take a lot more than a fiber service to help Portland bring in business.

    The first step is to fire all the meddling council members that have their own pet agendas and screw any business that wants to locate in the city. See: Columbia Sportswear moving their headquarters from inside Portland to the suburbs after the City jerked them around over a piece of property they wanted to buy right on the river. See: exactly zero Fortune-500 companies headquartered in the City (Nike doesn't count - they're in unincorporated Washington County).

    Randy Leonard and Sam Adams being shown the door is a good start - toss the rest of them out, and start being less business-surly (note, you don't have to go all the way to friendly, just stop screwing everyone in every way possible).

  25. Re:Apple Actually Cares About Privacy on iOS 8 Strikes an Unexpected Blow Against Location Tracking · · Score: 1

    What I'm saying is that while it may be fun to trot out things like the "640K should be enough for everyone" to bust on Bill Gates that is an urban myth and he never said it. Instead, bust on him for things that he *did* do (like hire someone else to pirate CPM). Same for Apple and Jobs (I just have a somewhat better memory for the Microsoft end of things, hence using MS-centric example).

    The thing that is funny about the old days of Apple, is that people misrepresent what happened back then too. Everyone claims that Apple ripped off Xerox when they started working on GUI with Lisa / Mac, when one of the alumni of Xerox PARC (and a member of the original Macintosh team) says otherwise. Oh, and Lisa and Mac were already specified to be graphical bitmapped systems before Xerox allowed the Apple team to come in not once, but twice, mostly allowed because Xerox had given Apple VC money.

    Never mind that there is a massive gulf between research, and product development. Best example from this particular topic: the original Apple mouse. It went from being a tricky, finicky, expensive piece of lab equipment into a cheap, mass produced, reliable, and easy to use piece of equipment that everyone just accepts as always being there under Apple's development. More info including interviews, design sketches, and documentation here.

    For some reason, everyone likes to put research of an idea without actually turning it into something useful on a mile-high pedestal, but turning that idea into something that people can actually use to accomplish things doesn't mean shit. Research is important, but so is development of that research into a useful thing.