Slashdot Mirror


User: Archimonde

Archimonde's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
430
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 430

  1. Re:Force her out! on Double Take: Condoleezza Rice As Dropbox's Newest Board Member · · Score: 1

    Nice cherry picking there. But you are still wrong though as you completely ignored the argument.

  2. Re:Force her out! on Double Take: Condoleezza Rice As Dropbox's Newest Board Member · · Score: 1

    For the umpteenth time: waterboarding is not torture. At most, it is "torture-lite" â" anything, from which the subject walks away without bodily harm, does not qualify.

    So if you don't consider brain to be part of your body, then yes you are right. And that certainly must be true because you don't have one.

    Asshole.

  3. Re:Yeah, you can totally trust your data... on 1GB of Google Drive Storage Now Costs Only $0.02 Per Month · · Score: 2

    That is nonsense. Everyone has limited bandwidth for a fact. Be it 256Kb/s or 20Mb/s or whatever.

    When an application starts to upload or download something and takes all your bandwidth all other activites which are depending on that bandwith come to a halt. That is certainly most visible in the case of upload as the upload bandwidth is usually lower than download.

    That is the reason why applications/services which are usually used in the background (as in dropbox, ftp, torrenting clients etc) all have throttling controls so they don't take all your bandwith so you can still stream internet radio, browse internet at acceptable speed etc.

  4. Re:Lame on Sochi Drones Are Shooting the Olympics, Not Terrorists · · Score: 1

    And for added security you could have a rescue parachute which you can deploy and the drone will not crash with all the elegance of a falling helicopter.

  5. Re:Write them down. on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Manage Your Passwords? · · Score: 2

    That's pretty much what I do during my contract on the ship. I don't have a wallet, but have a pocket notebook and there I write down the network configuration, some usernames/passwords for some servers etc (every ship is different). With time, I remember all of this stuff so I destroy the papers anyway.

    I never write down which credentials are used for what, this is what I know, and always add some logical sounding letters/number to every piece of information but in some way that I always know what is garbage and what is real information. If I lose the notebook I don't think anyone onboard would be able to figure out what information is used for what, and also what piece of garbage to remove. Even if someone would be resourceful enough to do it, I would still have a much better head start because I would notice that my notebook is missing and I would have plenty of time to change the passwords.

    All of this is much better than having a document on a usb drive with your password list which has to be decrypted every time you want to read it. Of course, all of the info and much more is stored on some document which is encrypted for safekeeping.
     

  6. Re:People are tired of the endless guilt trip. on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 1

    I completely agree with your point. I don't live in the States but I was wondering why can't you have all this stuff delivered to your house?

  7. Re:Epic expedition stories! on 100-Year-Old Photo Negatives Discovered In Antarctica · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I'm was planning to read this book too. I've read Shackleton's South, it is a bit dry, but epic nonetheless.

    I'm working on a expedition ship and went couple of times to the Elephant Island/ Point Wild/Valentine, and when you see it in person, I found it absolutely incredible that those guys survived there for many months. Simply unbelievable!

    And when you see the ice on the continent itself, it is breathtaking, looks like white desert with with steep mountains.

  8. Epic expedition stories! on 100-Year-Old Photo Negatives Discovered In Antarctica · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For anyone not knowing the expedition stories, even just by reading Wikipedia you can get the sense of how much those people went through. It is well worth your time: (warning: it is worse than tvtropes;)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_Age_of_Antarctic_Exploration
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_Expedition/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen's_South_Pole_expedition
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Trans-Antarctic_Expedition
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Sea_party

  9. Re:Hard to believe on What Would It Cost To Build a Windows Version of the Pricey New Mac Pro? · · Score: 1

    I never pay for Applecare, ever, and never mentioned it. I've never needed it, that's my point.

    That was my reasoning as well, and my last three laptops were Apple. On my one year old retina macbook pro discrete graphics card died and I only had 10 days before the 1 year warranty expired. Unluckily I was on a ship and I had to buy apple care online so I can get this garbage serviced. Exchanged motherboard when I got back home a month later, and two weeks later the same problem happened again. Also the display has the burn in problem, ^H^H^H, I mean "image persistence feature" and I'll get them to replace it as well.

    My previous laptop was second gen Air and was great and still runnning as new. But the moral of the story is that without my last minute purchase of applecare I would be hosed completely (I still had to pay for it though) as the repairs on this kind of computer are crazy expensive.

  10. Re:Yawn. on SSD Annual Failure Rates Around 1.5%, HDDs About 5% · · Score: 1

    SSDs have their place even if you don't want to acknowlede it. On my workplace we've upgraded 4 year old laptops with SSDs because those 60+ laptops were unusable how slow they were. An you know what happened after upgrade? Everything is flying fast on those laptops. That was much better upgrade than boosting ram from 4 to 8 GB (max supported) of RAM (we've tried that one, difference was miniscule).

    It just doesn't matter if the user is booting, rebooting, opening outlook, browsing, or whatever, evething is reasonably fast.

    And don't get me started on how my retina macbook pro with 16GB of RAM and a SSD is fast. It is ridiculously fast in day to day work. I absolutely don't have to wait for a computer to do something. When you get used to this kind of speed and responsiveness, when you get back to a relatively fast computer (good cpu, board, ram etc) with a normal HDD the difference is astonishing as everything seems to be dog slow. And the other poster is right traditional HDD is the biggest bottleneck on the whole system bay faaaar.

  11. Re:Duh on Israel Airport Security Allowed To Read Tourists' Email · · Score: 1

    I was there recently. Nothing much to see though. Just a lot of flat land, cold wind and sea, and some penguins. There are a lot more nicer countries to visit though.

  12. Re:You've never tried Windows 8 then on Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share While Windows 8 Passes 1% · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If it runs so well, how do you explain that those metro programs are total pigs in terms of running them? I have a fairly fast computer with SSD and even microsoft's metro apps take 10 seconds to open. On the same computer, photoshop takes 3.5 seconds to open. It just painful to watch those those full screen loading screens for applications which are gui-wise not much complex than win3.1 programs.
     

  13. Re:Why are we wasting money on this? on NASA DTN Protocol: How Interplanetary Internet Works · · Score: 1

    You are not thinking creative enough. You can have a 3D printer which of course can print spare parts for itself and have say a robot who can gather materials etc. Of course, the printer can print another 3D printer and another robots so we can infest the Mars in no time.

    The only problem is that the printer which can print its own parts must be complicated and of course converting raw materials to printable ink is nigh impossible.

    But in any case, imagine the possibilites! It isn't logically impossible, there are technical difficulties but not impossible barriers.

  14. Re:This is ridiculous on Blizzard Sued Over Battle.net Authentication · · Score: 1

    You are right on. Blizzard locked out my account because I was changing geographical zones too much (I'm a seaman, working on a cruise ship). So they said that I had to change my password. And to do that you have to receive a text message with a code on your mobile phone. This part didn't work even though the phone number stored was completely ok. So I couldn't change the account's password.

    Then you have to open support tickets which I did, and the same day I've received a mail that they are not going to unlock my account nor delete/change my mobile phone number because they cannot verify that it is the real person contacting them. And I've sent them my national ID card scan. Basically they didn't even read my support ticket. Then I've opened another ticket and a day later some guy unlocked my account because this guy obviously read my e-mail and it probably helped that I've sent them a scan of my ID and passport.

    But of course, the SMS text message functionality was still impossible to disable because I couldn't receive a verification code sent by a text to disable that "feature". Then I had to open another ticket and some guy disabled that shit.

    Then couple of days after this events I've received a mail from Blizzard that I should purchase and authenticator to avoid problems like this. Fuck them! I've given them like hundreds of dollars and they give me shit like this and locking me out of my own account which has a very secure password.

  15. Do something like this on Ask Slashdot: Ideas For a Geek Remodel? · · Score: 1

    I did it at my own house. It doesn't cost nothing extra, it is just your imagination on what to do with your bricks.

    And one day I hope this is going to be visible from space;)

    http://imgur.com/a/rkQpO

  16. Re:Go Ballmer! on Australian Billionaire Plans To Build Titanic II · · Score: 1

    Smaller would mean that you couldn't pack all the modern amenities (shops, casino, et al) into it.

    If you've ever been to smaller luxury ships (Silversea, Seabourn etc) you would realize that the you can put evertyhing in relatively small amount of space. It is just a compromise between ship's size, number of pax cabins and their size (consequently the number of passengers), and public areas. In other words you can have a small ship, all the amenities your passengers would want, a great choice of restaurants etc and big cabins. But you wouldn't have as much passengers as a full QM2.

    And on the other hand, in these times it would be next to impossible to fill up QM2 sized ship with wealth passengers. That's the reason small and luxurious cruise ships still exist (and hopefully they still will;).

  17. Re:hahaha on Apple Switches (Mostly) To OpenStreetMap · · Score: 1

    And preferred method of transportation is a bomber, during the night...

  18. Re:Ptheh. on Did the Titanic Sink Due To an Optical Illusion? · · Score: 1

    On a cruise ship all watertight doors can be closed remotely from the Bridge in 60 seconds max.

    There are different types of WTDs and some are kept closed all the time, some are closed when in navigation, and some are closed in navigation when there is a higher than normal chance of having a problem (fog, rough sea, manouvering in/out of port etc).

  19. Re:Two-handed phone? on Nexus Prime, And Ice Cream Sandwich, Go For a Video Tour · · Score: 1

    No sane business plan ever targets "the majority". That's an excellent way to set yourself up for failure. Every marketing strategy first targets a very small group and then new strategies are created to target the next group.

    You're missing the parent's point and generalizing too much. I'll give you a counterexample. Nokia Ngage and N9. They targeted a very small group and they didn't hit pretty much anything.

    For example, even the first iphone targeted very specific users. Later it expanded with each iteration. The first iphone didn't have 3rd party app support and the iOS App Store wasn't available yet. It wasn't until 1.5 years AFTER the initial announcement of the first iphone that the itunes App Store was released.

    First iphone didn't target very specific users. It targeted as big the market share as possible. I know about that 1% share of the smartphone market but everyone knew back then they are going for much bigger share in the future. After couple of years the phone didn't change much even if you include the apps. Apps for mobile phones then were almost non-existent. Of course you had some apps on other phones but that wasn't used much anyway.

    So if Google wants to have a flagship phone it would be natural to target as big market share as possible. Pigeonholing themselves by introducing a huge phone doesn't help them in any way. Of course you can release a big phone as an experiment and that is fine by me, but introducing something as a design template (as nexus one and samsung's nexus were) which is destined to be used by potentially very small market share isn't a good strategy.

     

  20. Re:Firefox 4 on Investigating the Performance of Firefox 4 and IE9 · · Score: 1

    There is somewhat similar to what you are requesting. Try Neat Bookmarks.
    But well, I'm still using Firefox 4 RC. I just hate missing a proper bookmarks sidebar, find w/o pressing ctrl+f, and most of all, it is not owned by google.

  21. Re:An interesting question. on Is Apple Turning Into the Next "Evil Empire"? · · Score: 1

    That is patently false. My brother has an iphone 3G (with newest iOS) and it is a fucking slideshow. If it were mine, it would be on the bottom of the ocean right now. When it was new it was great but now it is barely usable. Same with my friends' 3G too.

  22. Re:Spin much? on Apple Pulls VLC Media Player From AppStore · · Score: 4, Informative

    As a side note, I love VLC; it does a lot on the Mac mini hooked to my HDTV. It's absolutely essential on Linux. But the iOS version was not that great.

    The main feature of the iOS version was that you could drag and drop pretty much any unconverted/torrented video file to the iphone and VLC would play it.
    Try that with the default player and report the results please.

  23. Re:windows 7 on Windows 7 Trumps Vista By Reaching 20% Share · · Score: 1

    Not only that, but wifi settings* in vista are buried behind something like 15 windows. Win7's are behind around 5. That is improvement, but still far behind leopard where three clicks will get you almost anywhere.

    *or almost any other setting.

  24. Re:Windows 7 on Windows 7 Trumps Vista By Reaching 20% Share · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure about the others things you mention, but firewall was included (at least) since the original windows xp release. Service pack 2 only turned it on by default and added some polish. So relatively cautious men turned on firewall from the get go and didn't have much (or any) problems with worms.

  25. Re:OS X on MacBook Air on Comparing Windows and Ubuntu On Netbooks · · Score: 1

    I disagree with your second sentence.

    They were never called netbooks at first. They were called (sub/ultraportable) notebooks(1) and later some idiot invented "netbook" word which news sites like engadget and gizmodo propagated. And the name netbook is completely undeserverd because those kind of devices can be (and are) much more than simple internet dumb/thin clients. But the name stuck and my whole point is that it is laughable to put devices strictly under special names/definitions. As the definitions vary from person to person and change from time to time (as shown above) it is pointless to argue about them.

    (1) ss you can find at the first reviews, or at my MSI Wind U100 cleary using notebook words.