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User: jhutchins

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  1. Not a killer fence, sorry. on High-Voltage Fences For Zapping Would-Be Copper Thieves · · Score: 1

    Typical domestic animal control fences carry a non-lethal charge of from 2,000 volts to 10,000 volts. It's not the voltage that kills you, it's the current.
    http://www.uwex.edu/ces/crops/uwforage/energizer.pdf

  2. Bogus News on Airlines Face Acute Pilot Shortage · · Score: 1

    There is no way that anyone with the 250 hour current minimum for commercial flight is getting a job with any company that an ordinary citizen would identify as an "Airline". 1500 - 3000 hours has been the practical minimum since WW II when veterans with that kind of experience became available. At 250 hours you are still paying for your own flight time. To build time in between you can become a flight instructor, but jobs such as utility survey (pipline/powerline inspector), traffic, and corporate pilot are heavily over-subscribed.

    Once again, a bogus "labor shortage" is being sold to us not because there aren't plenty of newly trained people eager to work, but because corporations are requiring extensive experience in the exact same position for "industry standard" wages that aren't any better than people with that experience are already getting.

  3. It's not that simple on Building a Traffic Radar System To Catch Reckless Drivers? · · Score: 1

    Just capturing speed is going to do very little to alleviate bad or aggressive driving. Speed can reduce reaction time and increase impact. It's often cited as a contributing factor in accident analysis, but often simply as a "check all the usual boxes" habit. ( http://www.tarcanfel.org/~hutchins/speed/speed.htm)

  4. Re:Do keep up, dear boy... on Interstellar Hydrogen Prevents Light-Speed Travel? · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Asimov's degree was honorary, for fund raising. He never worked as a scientist or engineer, he wrote.

  5. Remove the heat on Cost-Effective Server Room Air Conditioning? · · Score: 1

    Your goal is not to pump more cold air into the room, your goal is to remove the heat. More than one computer room has sized on the simple expedient of cutting a hole in a ceiling tile and lying a box fan on it, blowing up.

    Make a good hot-air removal system and your existing cooling should work fine. Whatever system you use will have a point of failure.

  6. Not trying very hard. on Where In the US Can You Get Just a Cell Phone? · · Score: 1

    Target? WalMart?

    Virgin Mobile has several phones that are just phones, no internet, camera, or mp3 player.

    Mine costs me a little over $5/mo.

  7. Garbage on Politically Incorrect Observations About Human Nature · · Score: 1

    What bothers me most about this exercise in ignorance and faulty logic is the absolute confidence of it's absurd assertions.

    All suicide bombers are islamic men? Except for the women, increasing in numbers: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/12 13_041213_tv_suicide_bombers.html
    Oh, and kamakazes in WWII - I don't remember Japan going Islamic.

    Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Cabinet Members have more male children? Since most of them take office when their children are in at least their teens, it seems mighty foresightful of them to arrange this in advance.

    Last I checked, you can't genetically inherit an acquired trait, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for the authors.

    This isn't science. It's idle speculation by someone who read some science, once.

    It's been "edited" by someone who didn't.

  8. Cisco on What Certifications are Valuable in Today's IT? · · Score: 1

    The ONLY certifications I see required in job ads are for Cisco. Yes, Microsoft certs are occasionally mentioned as well, but only when experience is clearly a preferred qualification.
    I have never seen a situation where paying for certification yourself would improve your compensation enough to cover the cost.

  9. Re:Not sysadmin but lots of other stuff... on Computer Job w/ No Computer Degree? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Eight years ago, you could do that, you could grow with a growing field. The field has matured considerably now, and I really doubt there's anything like the computer store - to - network engineer path still viable.

  10. Everybody skips adds on TiVo to Measure Ad-Skipping · · Score: 1

    People act like TiVo's the only way to skip commercials. Wrong.

    People have always skipped commercials. Is there anybody out there who honestly believes we're paying attention to the hemorrhoid cream add the six-hundredth time it runs?

    In the beginning, you actually had to get up and leave the room to skip commercials. You went to the kitchen for a snack or something. Then came the remote volume control - you muted the ad.

    If nothing else, I at least have a very good ability to just tune the noise out, not watch, not listen. I think most people do.

    Even good ads are annoying after a few repetitions, and the more frequent the repetitions, the more annoying.

    Do these fools actually believe there's a way to get us to watch the same ad over and over and over and over?

  11. Bull on FTC Declares Can-Spam a Success · · Score: 1

    Anybody struggling to keep a webserver running in today's climate knows this for the complete self-serving lie it is.

  12. Boot to non-default on The Boot Loader Showdown · · Score: 1

    It's a simple choice, really:

    Grub:
    1) shutdown -r now.
    2) Hover over console, hoping not to get distracted during the bootloader prompt. Maybe we need to bump that timout a bit higher?

    Lilo:
    lilo -r ; shutdown -r now => go get coffee.

  13. What might actually be news... on Gordon Moore: Moore's Law is Dead · · Score: 1

    ...would be a story on how many times Moore's law has been declared, by Gordon and by others. Ain't the first time, baby, it won't be the last.

  14. Hello? Hello? on FCC Approves BPL Despite Interference Concerns · · Score: 1

    Anybody who's ever tried to use "wireless" household intercom units that operate over the power wiring must be completely baffled about why this bogus concept just won't die.

    The level of noise on the average power circuit is far higher than that of ambient radio. Simply plugging a surge suppressor into another leg of the same circuit will knock the intercoms out.

    Nearly everybody who has any valuable electronic equipment protects it with at least a surge supressor. Anybody who's serious uses a line conditioning UPS. This is because of the noise, spikes, and other variables on power lines - not a good candidate for data transmission!

    Is anybody listening? Why won't this die?

  15. Well duh! on Time Warner Says Employees Must Use AOL Mail · · Score: 1

    Time Warner AOL has this huge business segment that has a huge amount of resources devoted to (wait for it)

    Managing Email!!!

    (Which is most of what AOL does...)

    So they want to eliminate redundant mail servers and the attendant infrastructure support costs.

    Do any of you guys actually ever see the bills for the stuff you use? This makes sense.

  16. Revolution & Totalitarianism on Apple Threatens Open Source Theme Project · · Score: 1

    Russian Revolution promises to empower the people, delivers totalitarian regime.

    People's Revolution in China promises to empower the people, delivers totalitarian regime.

    Apple Macintosh promises to empower the people, delivers ...

    Is anybody really surprised? If Apple spent as much time and money on R&D as they do on lawyers, they might really have a revolutionary operating system, instead of a 1984 operating system with color.

  17. Re:Stupid units: Foot, pound, ton, mach on NASA Prototype Plane Scheduled To Attempt Mach 5+ · · Score: 1

    We use Mach because when we get above about 450 MPH, the speed of sound becomes the significant point from which to measure your speed. Speed-over-the-ground isn't as important, it's speed-achieved-against-the-aparant-atmosphere that matters; hence if you can do Mach 2.1, you can theoretically do regardless of what the over-the-ground speed is, ie. find a better altitude and go faster.

  18. Welcome to real life, kid. on Getting The Most Out Of Co-Op Programs? · · Score: 1

    That's why they call it work. It's 99% bullshit and 1% eureka. Get used to it.

  19. Couldn't happen soon enough on The Extinction Of The Mom & Pop ISP Service? · · Score: 1

    Sure, some of these local yokels had personal tech support, but most had people even more incompetent than the big companies, and there's no way a small operation could afford the hardware and bandwidth redundancy of the big leagues.

    It was a bad idea anyway - route a call through the phone network to somebody's basement, where they route it back to a real carrier's facility, where it actually gets on the network. Dumb. Unnecessary.

    Same with having the foolish illusion that some Internet "Service" Provider is selling you broadband access. They're just pimping the telco's wires and taking a cut of the action. You're still buying the actual "service" from the phone company, only now you're paying a middleman.

    And no, they don't provide any realy tech support either - if there's a problem, it's the phone company who'll have to fix it, and you can just bet where in the queue requests from "competing" companies go.

    A lot of "Mom and Pop ISP's" started out as paid access bulletin boards, where they took content created on volunter/hobbyist BBS's and sold access to it. Bankruptcy couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of folks.

  20. What part of "Hughes" didn't you get? on DirecTV's Secret War On Hackers · · Score: 1

    C'mon, guys, we're dealing with the original dark organization here. These guys hacked the CIA, surely they can take a hack.

    Nice touch on the "game over" though...

  21. But Netscape REALLY SUCKS! on Will Browser-Neutral Web Soon Become Thing Of Past? · · Score: 1

    How can we, in good concience, pressure web sites to maintain Netscape compatibility when every release sucks worse than the last one!

    If Microsoft did one thing right in the browser wars, it was to go through the Mosaic code and do a ground-up rewrite that killed the bugs that had plagued it from the early releasees.

    Microsoft won, not so much because of bully tactics, but because people got tired of new "features" like pop-up windows taking priority over "don't crash my system".

  22. An anecdote for those suggesting local development on Open Source Library Card-Catalog Apps? · · Score: 2
    To those of you who suggest that some local library develop this:

    The Kansas City Public Libraries bought a commercial product from DRA years ago, but skimped on the professional support. They worked with it for years using only their own programmers.

    The result was so unusable that the technique used by the Librarians to find a book was:
    1. Look up anything close on-line
    2. Go see if what you're really looking for is close to that on the stacks.

    Now the catalog is so full of bad entries that even after years of "clean up" to work with the new, fully-supported DRA web-capable interface (See
    http://www.kclibrary.org) it's still a painful experience to try to find something. Multiple spellings for the same author are unlinked, some books under one, some under another. Some books in a series might be under one call number, while another book is somewhere else. (For instance, the second book of the Gormenghast trilogy is catalogged as the trilogy itself, and it's therefore impossible to retrieve volume 1 or 3.)

    This is probably more a result of stingy city budgets than any inherent problem with the job, but it shows how badly it can be done.
  23. A Bogus Story? on Censorware Blocking Methods Using Akamai · · Score: 1

    I checked this out from behind a firewall/netnanny (Microsoft most likely), and sure enough the Yahoo example (http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.yahoo.com/ ) works fine. So the storey's true...right? Then again, try pasting another Web page name there. Even try the example on peacefire.org using "sex.com" and it fails from here at least. Is this just a bogus story based on a wierd link to Yahoo?

  24. But Netware SUCKS!!!` on Open-Source Netware-Aware OS Under Construction · · Score: 2

    Half the problems attributed to Windows95 were problems integrating it with Novell networks. Who wants obsolete IPX traffic gacking up their network? Novell's never implemented TCP/IP properly, they did far worse than Microsoft ever did, trying to make it propietary and lock in that customer base.

    Want to triple the service calls for workstations on your network, at the same time acheiving a four-fold drop in system response time? Simply install Novell's Network Client on an NT Workstation.

    I worked for one of the best Novell shops in town, and my job was converting networks to NT and cleaning up the crap Novell left behind. I left to pursue NT, and the company stuck with Novell. Less than two years later they've folded.

    Linux does NOT NEED to be dragged down to the level of a Novell network. It can do everything Novell can do faster and better, except run propietary software that requires a Netware server. That's not software anybody needs.

  25. Dead of code bloat on Suck Says Mozilla Is Dead · · Score: 1

    The problem is, and has been, that since the Mozilla versions of Mosaic the programmers have been dashing off after "cool shit" instead of taking care of basic, functional buisiness and squashing bugs. I have yet to see a version of Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla that didn't have some essential basic feature that regularly crashed!

    Yes, IE gives me non-uninstallable blue screens of death. But since the MS team rewrote the base code, it doesn't loose it's mind when you open a history window or click on "back-forward-back-back".