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User: Carnildo

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  1. Re:It's taken... how many decades? on Google Plans To Alter JavaScript Popups After Abuse From Tech Support Scammers (bleepingcomputer.com) · · Score: 1

    Opera's had a "Disable scripts on this page" button in the alert boxes for as long as I can remember.

  2. Re:Another breakthrough! News at 11! on Researchers Working on Liquid Battery That Could Last For Over 10 Years (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    Twenty-nine years ago, I read about a breakthrough in battery chemistry that would make the common NiCd battery obsolete: the new chemistry had four times the capacity, could stand ten times as many charge-discharge cycles, and had no memory effect.

    In the decade and a half that followed, I read about a number of other miracle energy-storage technologies: hydrogen, methane, methanol, and ethanol fuel cells; sodium, zinc, and lithium battery chemistries, and a number of other breakthroughs. None of them ever seemed to turn into an actual product I could buy, though.

    I kept following that chemistry I first read about in 1988, seeing it pop up from time to time in uses such as electric vehicles or laptop batteries, but never in a form I could make use of. And finally, in 2003, I was able to go to a store and buy a set of those NiMH batteries to use in my digital camera.

  3. Re:Great for 10% of the population on World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That's Cheaper Than Wind (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Nuclear power has ramp-up and ramp-down times measured in hours or days. Because of this, it is strictly a baseload power source, just like coal. For peaking power, you need hydro, natural gas, or storage.

    (Solar and wind are strange critters from a load-management perspective. They have the response times needed for peaking power, but not the availability.)

  4. Re:Too little too late on Pandora Has Announced Its $5 Subscription Service (recode.net) · · Score: 1

    I don't know where you're getting $10 from -- the music Pandora's streamed to me over the years would barely fit on a 128GB SD card, and I can't find those for less than $30.

  5. Re:I'd prefer long range on Researchers Make Low-Power Wi-Fi Breakthrough (networkworld.com) · · Score: 1

    Same way you drill a square hole!

    Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  6. Re:My kingdom for an easy software reinstall tool. on Linux 4.0 Kernel Released · · Score: 1

    May I recommend Gentoo? The list of user-installed packages sits in /var/lib/portage/world, so re-installing on a new system is a simple as copying that file over and running "emerge --emptytree world".

    (And then waiting a few days for compilation to finish, but then, if you weren't patient, why would you be running Gentoo?)

  7. Re:cost/gflop on GCHQ Builds a Raspberry Pi Super Computer Cluster · · Score: 1

    RPi: $35 per node * 64 nodes = $2240

    i7-4790: $500 per node * 64 nodes = $32000

    If you're testing cluster-computing algorithms, it doesn't really matter how fast your nodes are, but there are situations you'll encounter with a real networked cluster that you can't simulate on a single compute node, no matter how fast it is. It's much like how you can use multitasking on a single-threaded processor to simulate a multicore processor, but there are entire families of contention issues you'll never encounter.

  8. Re:Starting to feel old on Linux 4.0 Getting No-Reboot Patching · · Score: 1

    $ uname -a
    Linux snail 2.4.37.11 #2 Tue Dec 28 14:55:32 PST 2010 i586 Pentium MMX GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

  9. Re:What good are trains? on Mooted: An Undersea Link From Finland To Estonia · · Score: 1

    The Singularity is an interesting concept, but can it do Pizza over IP?

  10. Re:mooninites on Georgia State Univ. Art Project Causes 2nd Evacuation & Bomb Squad Call · · Score: 1

    If this camera is anything like the last one, it looks an awful lot like the sort of outsized firecracker that a teenager with access to a few pounds of blackpowder would make.

  11. Re:A sense of scale on Spire Plans To Use Tiny Satellites For More Accurate Weather Forecasts · · Score: 1

    Somebody is certainly missing a sense of scale.

    Traditional Earth observation is done using a small number of satellites at a large distance, traditionally in geostationary orbit (35,786 km away). Using a large number of satellites in low orbit (300 km away), you can use low-power transmitters and commodity cameras. Sure, without cooling, you lose the thermal IR range, but in return you gain a great deal of resolution in the other bands.

  12. Re: Relays, not exit nodes on Mozilla Dusts Off Old Servers, Lights Up Tor Relays · · Score: 1

    Let me ask you this, since you obviously didn't think about it...if Tor is so good at protecting privacy and traffic, how does the DoJ know what percentage of ANYTHING is going through it?

    That's easy: you set up an exit node and watch the traffic going by.

    Tor only promises to protect the data as it travels between your computer and the exit node. If you want protection after that, you'd better use SSL.

  13. Re:I actually warned the FBI... on To Avoid Detection, Terrorists Made Messages Seem Like Spam · · Score: 3, Informative

    You alerted them to actual spam.

    The purpose of the suffix was to evade simple subject-line spam filters, while the "word salad" was an effort to evade word-classifier spam filters by drowning out the "spam-like" words with "non-spam" words, or to poison the classifiers and render them useless by loading up the "spam" wordlists with words that usually appear in non-spam messages.

  14. Re:I've got an idea !! on SpaceX Landing Attempt Video Released · · Score: 2

    Parachutes don't have the accuracy needed to land on a barge, and splashing down in the ocean means complete disassembly to get the residual salt off all the parts.

    The Shuttle SRBs could do parachute recovery with ocean splashdown because they consisted of a small number of very large parts, and needed pressure-washing to get the fuel residue off anyway. Taking a liquid-fuel rocket apart is a much harder task.

  15. Re:I'm amazed on How Long Will It Take Streaming To Dominate the Music Business? · · Score: 1

    from your figures it appears your script is including the theoretical purchase price of music that Pandora chooses to play at you rather than just the musicyou actively selected. I mean it could play something you don't even like or would ever buy but your script would still include the cost.

    I've got statistics on that, too. Pandora is 99.65% accurate at picking music I like (by play count), or 98.03% accurate (by track count). Doesn't change the cost by much.

    What about the extra hidden cost of your internet connections themselves and the necessary extra bandwidth usage?

    The amortized cost of my Internet connection probably doubles the effective cost of Pandora, but even if the entire cost were added, it would still be many times cheaper than the iTunes cost.

  16. Re:I'm amazed on How Long Will It Take Streaming To Dominate the Music Business? · · Score: 1

    1) You can't listen to your music when you dont have an active internet connection.
    2) You're basically paying regularly/multiple times to hear the same music you could just pay for/download once.

    I've been running a script to track my Pandora activity for almost eight years. According to it, my "collection" of music would cost me somewhere between $22,000 (iTunes) and $150,000 (CDs) if purchased, versus $300 or so for a Pandora subscription.

    Yes, purchasing the music would let me play what I want when I want, even in the rare instances that my nearly-always-on Internet connection is down, but it's not worth a 75-fold increase in price.

    (21,934 distinct tracks from 11,050 albums by approximately 6,596 artists, for a total of 190,330 tracks played.)

  17. Re:"suspected pedophile" on UK Authorities Launching Massive Child Abuse Database · · Score: 1

    When they claim that there are "tens of millions" of images in this database, I wonder how many are of victims and how many are cartoons found on 4chan or scans of children's clothes catalogues and that sort of thing.

    I want to know how many are of teenagers. Reportedly the single largest source of child pornography these days is teenagers with cell-phone cameras taking steamy self-portraits.

  18. Re:The only solution I can think of on 81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not really. Random jitter can be dealt with statistically: collect more data, compute the mean, and use the mean where you would have used the exact timing.

    In order to defeat timing analysis through noise injection, you need to introduce a large amount of variation compared to the number of packets being sent; for any realistically-sized data transfer, this requires jitter on the order of minutes to hours.

  19. Re:Put the SMART stats to the test on Data Center Study Reveals Top 5 SMART Stats That Correlate To Drive Failures · · Score: 1

    Google did this about seven years ago. Of the stats, a drive with a non-zero scan error count has a 70% chance of surviving eight months, one with a non-zero reallocated sector count has a 85% chance of survival, and one with a non-zero pending sector count has a 75% chance of survival. For comparison, a drive with no error indications has a better than 99% chance of surviving eight months.

    Overall, 44% of failures can be predicted with a low false-positive rate, while 64% can be predicted with an unacceptably high false-positive rate. 36% of drive failures occur with no SMART failure indications at all.

  20. Re:Top #1 Indicator That Correlates To Drive Failu on Data Center Study Reveals Top 5 SMART Stats That Correlate To Drive Failures · · Score: 1

    If you go by Google's definition of failing (the raw value of any of Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Current_Pending_Sector, or Offline_Uncorrectable goes non-zero) rather than the SMART definition of failing (any scaled value goes below the "failure threshold" value defined in the drive's firmware), about 40% of drive failures can be predicted with an acceptably low false-positive rate. You're correct, though, that the "SMART health assessment" is useless as a predictor of failure.

    They did a study on this a few years back. It comes to about the same conclusions that Backblaze's study does, but with more numbers (and a larger data set).

  21. Re:OpenPGP on The Fight Over the EFF's Secure Messaging Scoreboard · · Score: 2

    The scorecard gives negative marks for both PGP for Mac and PGP for Windows, for both "Are past comms secure if your keys are stolen?" and "Has the code been audited?" Both negative marks are quite wrong!!

    I don't know about the auditing, but the negative mark for "Are past comms secure if your keys are stolen?" is quite right. They're talking about forward secrecy, and PGP doesn't implement it. The basic idea of forward secrecy is that even if all the long-term secrets (passwords, keys, etc.) involved in a conversation are stolen, the person who stole them cannot go back and decrypt the encrypted messages.

  22. Re:Offtopic: What is with the egregious clickbait on Using Naval Logbooks To Reconstruct Past Weather and Predict Future Climate · · Score: 2

    I disabled Javascript on Slashdot. The site suddenly became far more usable, and the clickbait ads went away.

    (I also disabled images, and the usability shot up again.)

  23. Re:In laymen's terms... on Physicists Resurrect an Old, Strange Dark Matter Theory · · Score: 1

    called it dark matter, where 'dark' is a fancy word for 'nobody knows what it is'

    Actually, "dark matter" was originally called "dark" because it wasn't hot enough to emit light (the Earth, for example, would be considered "dark matter" under this definition). Dark matter was originally thought to be things like stray planets, cold gas clouds, and the like. People only started looking for exotic dark matter once they realized there wasn't enough ordinary matter to do the job.

  24. Re:Spoiled much? on Will Fiber-To-the-Home Create a New Digital Divide? · · Score: 1

    You make a good case for increasing upload bandwidth, but other than WAN recovery (a full restore of a 1TB disk will take 18 days), none of those requires better than a 6.5Mbit symmetric connection.

  25. Re:I still don't see what's wrong with X on Lead Mir Developer: 'Mir More Relevant Than Wayland In Two Years' · · Score: 1

    X is optimized for programs that use a small number of colors to draw an effectively vector-based user interface on a raster display. It is very, very good at that, and provides a powerful range of tools for the job.

    Most programs use color-rich bitmap-based user interfaces. Doing this with core X functionality is painfully slow and difficult (think tens of seconds to draw a 800x600 JPEG), so everyone uses protocol extensions for this. Wayland is designed around bitmap-based drawing at the core.