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  1. Re:just put a motor on the elevator itself on Engineers Develop 'Ultrarope' For World's Highest Elevator · · Score: 1

    The current approach uses a counterweight that balances out the empty mass of the elevator cabin. This drastically reduces the load the motor must carry, and thus the size of the motor. If you want to put the prime mover on the cabin you are going to have to solve a lot of scaling problems that the current approach avoids.

  2. Sounds not heard anymore on Ask Slashdot: Sounds We Don't Hear Any More? · · Score: 1

    The weird ticking of a tube driven TV warming up, or cooling off after it is turned off.

    The odd creepy voice and tones of WWV. (yes I know it still exists, but who listens to it to set their clocks anymore?)

    High speed paper tape punch.

    Keypunch terminal.

    Electromechanical adding machine.... chek.chek.chek.chek....chek.chek.-kathunk-whirrrr.
    Idle sound of an IBM Selectric.

    Speech warning module from a Nissan 200SX. It used a tiny stack of records on a common shaft, each with it's own double sided stylus assembly. "Dink! The Door is Ajar...Dink! The Door is Ajar...Dink! The Door is Ajar..." (No it is NOT.. it is a DOOR!)

    The rather tuneful sound of a Macintosh 400K floppy disk drive due its CLV motor drive.

    Dolby-C calibration tones on the leader of prosumer tape editions of albums such as Dark Side of the Moon.

    The odd fluttery sound of 16mm film audio when the playback loop collapses.

    Credit Card Slip Imprinter.

    CPU bus cycles of a 1MHz 6502 leaking through the front end of an AM radio.

    CB radio bleed-through on TV channel 4 or 5 audio.

    The eery duck squawk of CB-SSB transmissions.

    Air Raid siren tests in south bay area every few weeks. Sometimes the system would glitch and there would just be a 1/2 second "Blurp!" that floated over the crickets, and frogs in middle of the night.

    The heavy mechanical thunk of a VHF channel selector from a Tube TV.

    The howls of frustration when the power goes out in a large game arcade.
    The mixed electronic and electromechanical cacophony of power coming back on in a large game arcade after a power outage.

    An electromechanical jukebox changing records.

    A mechanical cigarette machine dispensing a pack.

  3. Re:Scum on Tesla vs. Car Dealers: the Lobbyist Went Down To Georgia · · Score: 1

    Mobile service techs are exactly how Tesla does it. I've met a couple of them through one of my clients. They used to work for high end auto dealers such as Bentley or Audi working in the shop. Now they drive a Tesla-badged service truck and perform on-site service almost exclusively. Both of the guys I spoke with said they love working on Teslas because even stuff that is traditionally a PITA (like swapping out major suspension components) can be done in the field with nothing more than a portable jack and a pneumatic wrench.

  4. Re:Guinness on No More Foamy Beer, Thanks To Magnets · · Score: 1

    There was a Pub in Boston that I had the pleasure of visiting in 1986 that had their Guinness flown in from Dublin. I was quite fond of Guinness at the time. The combination of it being served at room temp, and being astonishingly fresh had me thinking that I'd been drinking stale beer back home in CA. I didn't get to experience that again until I visited England in 2005 during a layover on my way to Russia. I gave up drinking Guinness after that. Here on the west coast it just doesn't taste right.

  5. Re:Just in time. on Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte 'Archive' Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    Seizegate -- from the late 80's and early 90's round of SCSI and PIDE drives that suffered from early spindle bearing failure and sticktion problems.
    Sleazegate -- ever since... for various sleazy tricks like selling 3 year warranty drives into channels where the case manufacturer would only warranty the drives for 1 year. Bad firmware... poor customer service on warrantee issues, PR games...

      I simply will not buy prefabbed external drives anymore. I buy an empty case and stick a 'who has the best quality record this year aside from Seagate' drive in the case.

  6. Re:Come on people, on Cisco Slaps Arista Networks With Suit For "Brazen" Patent Infringement · · Score: 1

    an AC probably trolled him in a reply. Most of us get emails from DICE when someone replies to a submission we have made... AC or not. I'm guessing the AC pissed in Hairyfeet's cornflakes.

  7. Re:Something is dodgy here. on Sony Employees Receive Email Threat From Hackers: 'Your Family Will Be In Danger · · Score: 1

    Anyone with slightly more than passing experience using a translation tool could bounce between English and Korean to get appropriately flavored Engrish.

    I'm leaning towards false flag on the emails. However if this is a Korean attack on Sony, then the goal is to utterly destroy their business. Flinging their data to the four winds as has clearly been done is going to cause a lot of knock-on effects that will result in Sony suffering a huge amount of pain over the coming months and possibly years.

  8. I turned it off on Virginia Court: LEOs Can Force You To Provide Fingerprint To Unlock Your Phone · · Score: 1

    I liked the convenience of finger print ID for logging into my phone, but after thinking on it for a bit, I realized a LEO, or a criminal.. (not much distinction these days) could physically force me to touch that little disk with a fingertip. Now I use a complex passphrase. It is a pain in the ass, but I feel better knowing that it would take a lot more effort for an adversary to cause me to give that up than a fingertip. YMMV.

  9. Re:It helps to actually use the thing. on How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor · · Score: 1

    OSX is actually worse than both windows and linux when it comes to backwards compatibility...
    No pre OSX apps (pre 2000ish) will run on the current versions of OSX...
    No PPC-only (pre 2006) apps will run on the current versions of OSX...
    16-bit windows dates from the early 90s, 64bit windows will run 32bit windows apps just fine.

    16bit windows/dos is now sufficiently antiquated that its possible to emulate the hardware entirely and get reasonable performance, emulating a ppc machine to boot earlier macos is doable but some of the later ppc apps designed for g5 class systems are likely to perform worse than the real hardware.

    I call bullshit.

    Rosetta performs no better than any of the freeware emulators you can get now. I'd argue that with the latest i7s, an emulator like PearPC can outpace a dual core G5 (real throughput, not theoretical throughput) even though PearPC doesn't really emulate the G5 CPU yet. On top of that all of the apps where that might matter have either been ported to x64, or have been replaced in the market by something far superior that runs natively.

    The current hassle over 10.7 - 10.9 sandboxing does create some grief, but that can be resolved by hosting 10.6.8 in a VMWare 6 instance, with the bonus of getting Rosetta back.

  10. Re:I think both sides are wrong on FTDI Removes Driver From Windows Update That Bricked Cloned Chips · · Score: 1

    AIUI the common mode CDC specification does not support some of the features that FTDI supports on their devices. FTDI supports aux GPIO.

  11. Re:Easy to solve - calibrate them to overestimate on Speed Cameras In Chicago Earn $50M Less Than Expected · · Score: 1

    I-5 to Anacortes, WA. Hwy-20 is all 55 MPH... lots of lights along that stretch and it has all the features you'd expect of a controlled access, 4-lane, highway.

  12. Re:Headline: "Force of nature gave life its asymme on Physicists Find Clue as To Why the DNA Double Helix Twists To the Right · · Score: 1

    It's also interesting because unlike the other two proposed mechanisms it is a result of the fundamental asymmetry in the weak force rather than an accidental boundary condition, so it implies that life everywhere is more likely than not to be right-handed, whereas the explanations involving magnetic fields will make a universe that's 50/50 right/left.

    TFA goes too far with this idea; which I think is confusing the issue here. While the article focuses on DNA chirality, I think that is going too far up the chain of evolution.

    There were most likely replicating molecules before DNA, and many of the building blocks for life were likely set long before DNA became the preferred genetic coding system.

    What this study says, in the bigger picture, is that the chirality of many classes of molecules in early life may have been influenced by this mild bias in the weak nuclear force. What that would mean is that organisms using building blocks of the 'wrong' chirality were --over the long term-- more likely to become extinct than their peers using the same building blocks with a different chirality. Over a couple of billion years that selection pressure would weed out organisms using the 'wrong' chirality because those molecules are more likely to break when exposed to low energy beta-decay.

    Now, whether this mechanism specifically influenced the chirality of DNA... there is probably no way to tell. This mechanism of chirality selection works up and down the entire evolutionary chain. And it doesn't just select for right or left... it selects the chirality that is least likely to break from this source of pressure.

  13. Re:Face Palm on The Site That Teaches You To Code Well Enough To Get a Job · · Score: 1

    ^^ THIS

  14. Re:How is that supposed to work? on The Site That Teaches You To Code Well Enough To Get a Job · · Score: 1

    My father and I had a rough time with my budding 'hacker nature' as you describe it. I was always tearing stuff apart to see what was inside. It pissed him off that in the process of exploring I would break stuff.

    In some areas, electronics, chemistry, he had some input. But he had no idea how to encourage me, or help me. He was trying to teach me Maxwell when I couldn't even get long division to cross check reliably. I felt like an idiot because I couldn't understand what he was trying to teach me. I was willful hot head and he was a hot head.

    Our 'bicycle incident' ended in a huge blowup when I was 13 that deeply scarred our relationship until I was in my late 20's. He flat out refused to help me rebuild my bike. I had no access to his experience, or to the correct tools. When my 20" sears special finally started falling apart after 6 years of hard use and abuse it was 'tough shit.' Then one night he did something really stupid he berated me about it. He told me I had allowed my bike to fall apart.

    I reminded him that he never even gave any suggestions for how I should go about maintaining it, even when I asked for help. I reminded him that I was not born knowing how to repair stuff, nor did I know where to find good materiel on it. The books in the library focused on 'real bikes' (10-speeds and early BMX stuff) I had figured out the basics.. oiling bearings, replacing tubes and tires. But what do I do about cracked forks, a stripped gooseneck, or broken coaster-brake retaining strap? How do I re-true a rim? He knew! Where's the guidance.... Dad?

    His response to that: A serious beat down.

    I gave up on bikes. I still don't like messing with them even though I like riding a lot.

    I also stumbled onto a mentor. Alton was a machinist who lived near by. That man could build almost anything out of metal, and repair everything else. He had the tools, patience and enough free time to teach me a lot... mostly by dragooning me into being an apprentice.

    From Alton I learned the Art of Hacking.

    Eventually my Dad got over whatever it was that set our relationship on a dark path, and I forgave him. By then, though, he wasn't really a guiding influence. If anything he helps me refine my teaching skills, because he wants to understand how wear-leveling on an SD card works... He knowns each cell in a FLASH array can be written to a few thousand times before they fail, and he knows better than I do WHY they fail. He wants to know how long to expect an SD card to last before he should replace it.

    So.. take the time to teach your sons and daughters what you DO know... Try not to avoid the subjects just because you are tight on time, and their sudden interest in something catches you off guard. Don't expect them to get it the way you did. Don't expect that you are a good teacher of the subject, just because you are good at it.

  15. Re:Bullshit on Secret Service Critics Pounce After White House Breach · · Score: 1

    One second is a long time, in combat situations. Mostly that 21 foot perimeter is about retaining a buffer space so that one doesn't run out of Perception->Prediction->Commit->Respond time by letting Red get too close because they only have a knife when Blue has drawn an appropriate ranged weapon.

    Having had some personal experience in this type of situation, (training and SoHK experience) I can say that 21 feet would not be enough buffer to react to a reasonably fit opponent with some training, even if the target has good training.

    YMMV.

  16. Re:Alright smart guy on Ask Slashdot: Is iOS 8 a Pig? · · Score: 1

    This!

      I still have a 2001 G4 Titanium that sees use. It is still my go-to when I need a ruggedized laptop. That thing has literally been around the world with me, and it still works just fine.

  17. Re:Wake me when chimpanzees invent smelting on Study: Chimpanzees Have Evolved To Kill Each Other · · Score: 1

    It took roughly 2 million years after we diverged from proto-hominids to develop smelting. Along that 2 million years our lineage passed through the development stages we see now in Chimps and other modern primates. Due to the physiological changes our line experienced through 2000 centuries our line has advanced in ways this planet has never seen before. And yet there are creatures following their own lines on this planet that, long before Sol turns into a red giant might have their moment and long after we have ceased to be the top of the planetary food chain.

    This planet has seen much more devastating disruption than Homo Sapiens, and were we to drive ourselves extinct there would be other organisms that show signs of getting to where we are in a very distant future.

    I don't worry much for this blue green ball. But right now, it sucks to be human, knowing what we know, and knowing what we don't know.

  18. Re:Recent claims by whom? on Study: Chimpanzees Have Evolved To Kill Each Other · · Score: 1

    add to this: Bonobos and Chimps can interbreed. The only reason they don't (very rare in the wild) is that their social systems are fundamentally incompatible, and their population ranges don't overlap much.

  19. Re:eternal June on Putin To Discuss Plans For Disconnecting Russia From the Internet · · Score: 1

    Erm, this was posted on April 1st... and the phone number has 840401 as the last 6 digits....denoting april 1st, and it also appears in the Posting-Version in two formats.

    Nice one AC.

  20. Re:What about Oregon and Washington? on Comcast Drops Spurious Fees When Customer Reveals Recording · · Score: 1

    In WA it is sufficient to inform the party that a recording may be made. I know this because I was Director of Operations for an inbound call center.
    The call flows announced at the beginning of the call, "This is Blah Blah Blah, your call is important to us. All agents are busy at this time, your wait time will be x minutes. This call may be recorded for Quality Assurance Purposes." Every call heard the entire greeting even if agents were available at the time the call was answered. I don't have a link but this was vetted by the staff attorney as best practice.

    Also, the agent who answers the inbound call, or places an outbound call, knows that all calls are recorded. It is part of their training. I don't think there is any way that an entity like Comcast or CenturyLink would have a leg to stand on if the customer records the call without announcement. However, IANAL.. YMMV.

  21. Re:Idiot drill makers on Fixing a 7,000-Ton Drill · · Score: 1

    Can't make your shit out of tungsten so when you hit a teensy 8-inch pipe you don't fuck the drill head up?

    They should be asking for a refund on their drill head. I've blown apart 8-inch pipes with 10 inch coring bits and did NOTHING to the bit, which itself was about 1/8th the thickness of the pipes inner walls.

    Mohs hardness scale, do you even, motherfuckers?

    The cutting discs(Tungsten) and the head face(hardened steel) are hardened materials.
    The the cutting face was not damaged at all AIUI. It was the head support and bearing assemblies that got creamed by the head chewing through an 8" steel, well casing which is much thicker than el-cheapo galvanized pipe.

    The damaged assemblies were designed to be supporting a much lower torque/vibration load cutting through relatively soft, water-saturated, landfill-slurry.

  22. Re:Looks ok to me on Chicago Red Light Cameras Issue Thousands of Bogus Tickets · · Score: 1

    In Seattle I challenged a parking violation with photographic evidence. The magistrate accept the evidence into the record. After some back and forth over the interpretation of the evidence, she proffered a deal.
    Magistrate: "I'll reduce the fine. $2.00."
    Me: "The evidence clearly shows I was not in violation."
    Magistrate: "You are more than welcome to take the matter up with a judge."
    Me: "So this is really about getting a conviction, not about justice."
    Magistrate: "$2.00. Take it, or leave it."
    Me: *fuming* "$2.00 it is. Have a good day, Your Honor. *bowing*

  23. Re:It's a question of mass production on By 2045 'The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,' and That Could Be a Problem · · Score: 1

    throwing transistors at a nebulous problem does not make that problem go away. We don't have anything approaching consensus on what Intelligence is let alone how it might be replicated when we can put trillions of transistors on a die. The canvas has gotten bigger; the features smaller, and we still struggle just to compile a viable application unit with no AI in in sight.

  24. This.

    That 10 line PID control loop requires carefully chosen and manually tuned constants to maintain loop stability. Those are constants are determined through empirical evaluation of the system being controlled and its performance envelope. To dynamically adjust those PID constants would require a lot more lines of code and a persistent dataset used to evaluate how effective any adjustments to those constants were over time. That is not AI. Not. Even. Close.

      At best it would be an adaptive control system, and they are easily fooled by subsystem failures, aging sensors and other issues that make the approach unsuitable for many applications. Because an adaptive control system that makes these kinds of changes to that 10 line PID control loop can easily paint itself into an unsafe regime.

  25. Re:govt is guilty on Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As an Accomplice · · Score: 1

    Sigh ... taught ... not 'teached', taught.

    wooosh