Slashdot Mirror


User: homm2

homm2's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
36
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 36

  1. Re:Not a fan of Odroid on Odroid C2 Challenges Raspberry Pi 3 On Hardware But Not Ecosystem (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    Maybe not to you, but I enjoy having the choice.

  2. Here you go. Including a power supply and a case it's $53.85. Shipping via USPS Priority is another $6.75, so $60.60 total. And that's shipped from these blessed United States by a company that actually cares about the community. You're welcome.

  3. Re:Blatant Advertisement on Raspberry Pi 3 Is a Nice Upgrade, But Alternatives Exist With Faster Performance (phoronix.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    I own both a Pi and a C1+ and you're right that it's hit and miss, but Kodi works perfectly fine. If you're trying to run software that nobody has ever compiled for the Pi, it's usually easier to compile it on the C1. Due to the Pi's unique hardware, it can be really difficult to get certain projects to run. The best example of this may be Android, which runs just fine on the C1, but on the Pi there are only experimental versions that don't have hardware acceleration and can't run most apps, let alone something like the Netflix app.

    I'm really hoping that more people start using Odroid, because except for the tiny community it's actually really nice.

  4. Re:Inspection Process on Iran Has Signed a Nuclear Accord · · Score: 1
    That is not within the current realm of possibility in terms of national politics in Iran. Even Iranian liberals are entirely in favor of Iran's ability to run a peaceful nuclear program.

    Since Iran is simply not going to dismantle their nuclear program entirely, we are back to the GP's question:

    And the alternative is?

    I would love to hear a realistic response, which I believe is "military force". Please just be honest that this is what you really want.

  5. Re:Who is using this? on Yubikey Neo Teardown and Durability Review · · Score: 1

    1) Very few websites supported it

    It's getting better, but this is still a problem. One option is to just set it up for LastPass and maybe Google. I agree that securing your online banking access would be a good idea, but very few bank websites support this.

    3) Too expensive - $18 - $50 each.

    If you just need a key for a desktop or laptop (no NFC), you can get a FIDO U2F key for $6. The downside is that LastPass doesn't support these yet (although they're working on it). Google already supports them.

    does it also state whether they allow a backup key?

    Yes, both LastPass and Google allow you to associate multiple Yubikeys with your account. So it's no problem to add your spouse's key to your account and vice versa, or to keep a backup key in the desk drawer and have that associated with multiple accounts.

    How would you use it with an ipad or iphone?

    Unfortunately, the iPhone 6 still isn't supported for use with the Neo, although they might add it in the future. I don't know about the iPad, but my guess is no. Any Android phone with NFC should support it already.

  6. Re:Nothing. It is a stupid system on Examining Costs and Prices For California's High-Speed Rail Project · · Score: 2

    In terms of their estimates, the jump from $36 billion to $68 billion was unfortunate, but I see it as the difference between an unrealistic estimate and a more realistic one. The earlier estimate did not take the full cost of grade-separated tracks into account.

    Another thing to keep in mind here is that this isn't simply an LAX-SFO train. It's a plan that will upgrade commuter and metro trains in both the bay area and SoCal and will connect both of these areas with cities in between and Sacramento. So you're getting a lot more than a single track out of that $68 billion.

    I agree that there's a danger of money being siphoned off, but this project will proceed in phases and involves many different contractors, so that spreads the risk out some.

    As for all of your ideas about streamlining airport access and waiting times, I agree with most of what you said. By the way, improved public transportation access to LAX is currently being planned, which is a good thing. But all this still isn't a replacement for the CHSR. The I-5 and CA-99 already have heavy traffic, not to mention the permanent gridlock around the I-405 and I-10 anywhere within 10 miles of LAX. Future population growth will only make these problems worse.

    You make some good arguments, but then totally undermine your credibility by name-calling anyone who responds to your posts. I thought we were having a civilized discussion?

  7. Re:Nothing. It is a stupid system on Examining Costs and Prices For California's High-Speed Rail Project · · Score: 1

    As to airports being shit, what is easier... buying land in a strip from LA to SF, hiring thousands of engineers, laying hundreds of miles of precision track, buying lots of bullet trains, running power and maintenance access to the track because bullet trains are electric, dealing with the political NIMYism crap, and then maintaining this uneconomical monstrosity in perpetuity... or fixing the airport so the TSA doesn't waste our time?

    Funny you should suggest this comparison. A report suggested that building the roads and airport expansions to replace the CHSR would end up costing between $158 and $186 billion. CHSR is currently budgeted at $68 billion.

    If you choose the bullet train it means you're clueless or it means you're a corrupt politicians sucking off the federal tit.

    Which would never happen when it comes to road or air infrastructure, right?

    And there's no reason why the innards of the airport have to be so fucked up. So, unfuck them. Any twat could do it.

    Let me fix that for you: Any twat with tens of billions of dollars could do that.

    1. You get a Federal security pass... I forget what they're called, but they cost about 50 bucks and require you to go to a federal building and get interviewed by some government people. And when they conclude that you're not a terrorist, they give you an ID that lets you bypass the TSA pretty much entirely. So if you hate the TSA, you get one of those.

    2. Just like rush hour, you understand when the airport is really busy and when it is not. Try to time your movements around that. It isn't hard and it isn't especially inconvenient. It requires that your plane take off an hour early sometimes if you need to get out of a really busy airport before it locks up.

    3. If you travel a lot with any airline, they put you on their frequent flyer program. And pretty much all of them get you preferential treatment from that airline. That means not waiting in lines, access to special luxury waiting rooms with full service bars and no screaming children, and of course when it comes time to board you tend to get on the plane before or immediately after they get the handicapped people on the plane.

    These solutions either have their own caveats or they wouldn't work for millions of casual travelers.

    And here is the thing I really really like about airplanes - They go EVERYWHERE. Your train is point to point. Utterly inflexible. My plane... Goes ANYwhere.

    Sure they do. But then you need adequate road infrastructure to connect to the airport. The airport itself takes a huge tract of land and then you either need to decide to have it located far away from a city (to save on land costs), which requires more road infrastructure and is inconvenient, or spend vast sums to buy up expensive land closer to the center of a city. The rail line distributes these land purchases more evenly across rural and urban areas.

    For fast passenger transport over long distances, nothing competes with airplanes. Nothing comes even remotely close.

    Yes, but over medium-range distances trains make a lot of sense. Nobody is talking about building an HSR line from LA to NY.

    Many other commenters have given good reasons why they prefer travelling by train. For me, if given a choice between a plane or a train that takes one hour longer, I would choose the train every time. The seats are huge (compared to flying economy), the restrooms are larger, the aisles are wider, bringing luggage is both easier and cheaper, I don't get groped in security, there aren't any long lines. Trains, including the CHSR, get passengers right into city centers.

  8. Re:Why is it even a discussion? on Republicans Introduce a Bill To Overturn Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Well, in many or most cases it isn't for lack of trying. In the Senate they still have to contend with Democratic filibusters and even if they can overcome that, they still need to deal with presidential vetoes. They still (unfortunately, from my perspective) have a chance of pulling that off to derail the Iran negotiations.

    If they don't stop net neutrality, that will be why.

  9. Re:Unfortunately, it's still on piano on "Open Well-Tempered Clavier" Project Complete; Score and Recording Online · · Score: 2

    I like what Glenn Gould had to say about this. Late in his life, Bach reviewed a "Silbermann" piano, which may not have shared much in common with a modern grand piano, but was still an evolutionary step in that direction. In the end, the instrument met Bach's complete approval. Gould makes a number of other really good points.

  10. Amazing on Microsoft's First Azure Hosted Service Is Powered By Linux · · Score: 2

    20 comments in and no mention of hell freezing over? We've come a long way folks, we've come a long way.

  11. Re:Rationale on IRS Warns of Downtime Risk As Congress Makes Cuts · · Score: 1

    I agree that the IRS should be able to do much more with the budget it has. It is far from efficient. On the other hand, we should probably be more careful with cutting spending on the IRS than most other government agencies. This is because cutting in the wrong areas will cost much more than you save. Cutting enforcement by $1 may cost $6 if Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is to be believed. I would also guess that a budget item for modernization efforts may be a similarly foolish place to look for cuts.

    I lived around the corner from a major IRS processing facility in Fresno, California for many years. I can assure you that the neighborhood and the entire metropolitan area around it look nothing like these 5 counties (I've been to Fairfax County and Arlington County).

  12. Re:Sorry, but again, NO... a resounding no.... on IRS Warns of Downtime Risk As Congress Makes Cuts · · Score: 1

    Speaking of utopian, I seriously think this is misguided. Most starve-the-beast libertarian types are not really interested in your civil discussion. The only people who would "wake up" are those who already know that the IRS needs to be funded.

    What works is what makes great political soundbites and I'm sorry to say that most Americans would love the sound of "we're shutting down the IRS". The political right in the US is already completely convinced that the problem is with spending and the left usually just dithers about trying to find a compromise. Most people don't know much about the budget. Heck, most people can't even tell you what party controls the House or Senate. An informed, civilized discussion like you're proposing simply isn't possible.

  13. Re:Love how he had all these great ideas on Obama Unveils Plan To Bring About Faster Internet In the US · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm so tired of hearing the supermajority myth yet again. Here's the timeline:

    July 8, 2009: Al Franken was sworn in as the 60th senator to caucus with the Democrats.
    August 25, 2009: Ted Kennedy passes away, removing the supermajority (59 / 99 votes is less than 3 / 5)
    September 25, 2009: Paul Kirk is appointed to temporarily fill Ted Kennedy's seat, returning the supermajority to the Democrats
    February 4, 2010: Scott Brown is sworn in to Ted Kennedy's former seat, thus removing the supermajority for the Democrats for good

    That adds up to about 6 months of a theoretical supermajority, and that includes part of a summer break and a long winter break when the Senate was not in session. A large number of Democratic Senators were also "Blue Dog" Democrats, meaning that they voted with Republicans quite a lot. But despite all of this and the Republican's use of every procedural delay and obstruction tactic in the book, this brief supermajority still managed to pass the most important health care legislation in the last 50 years.

  14. Re:Producing them is one thing on Samsung Claims Breakthrough In Graphene Chip Design · · Score: 1

    How did this get rated +4, insightful? Transistors are not fundamentally thermoelectric devices.

    Thermal issues are very important in modern semiconductors, but the switching action of a transistor is not achieved by heating them to change their conductivity. Transistors function by altering bandgaps at the junctions between different semiconductors (or differently doped regions of silicon).

  15. Re: Sweet. on Freedreno Graphics Driver Gets PRIME, Render Node Support · · Score: 0

    Doesn't the new Nexus 7 have a Snapdragon SOC? So this development should be relevant to quite a few people, right?

  16. Re:KDE 4.9+ is rock stable and better than 3.x on What's Going On In KDE Plasma Workspaces 2? · · Score: 1

    I guess I'm a biased KDE user, but I prefer KDE apps in many or most instances. As another commenter noted, Gwenview is stable, fast, and reasonably powerful. As for photo-editing apps, most people may prefer Gimp, but I think Krita can hold a candle and even has a few features that Gimp doesn't (see this comparison).

    Other examples of (in my opinion) superior KDE apps include Dolphin (vs Nautilus), Kate (vs Gedit), Kile (a LaTeX IDE, Gnome has nothing comparible), Kmail (vs Evolution), Okular (vs Evince), and K3B (vs Brasero).

    There are definitely some Gnome apps that I find better as well, including Inkscape (vs. Karbon) and the newsgroup app you mentioned, Pan. I should add that not all of these are really "Gnome" apps, but they all use GTK.

  17. Re:While Grayson can be entertaining on Florida Congressman Wants Blogging Critic Fined, Jailed · · Score: 1

    The particular study that Rep. Grayson was referring to when he made these remarks claims that they "calculated approximately 44789 deaths among Americans aged 18 to 64 years in 2005 associated with lack of health insurance". The study goes on to say that this was in spite of things like free emergency room treatment and community health clinics.

  18. Re:I got a bit stung on Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala · · Score: 1

    I can confirm this; I also didn't have sound until I ran update-grub and rebooted.

  19. This isn't the only technical problem with Ares I on Early Abort of Ares I Rocket Would Kill Crew · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is only the latest in a long line of technical problems with Ares I, to say nothing of all the delays, cost overruns and other management issues.

    First, they discovered an oscillation issue from the SRB that could cause damage to the upper stage and the orion capsule. Last year, they found out that with a slight wind gust, the vehicle might collide with its launch tower.

    Incidentally, both of these problems and the current one are all related to the SRB. President Obama needs to do the right thing here and kill Ares I before it has the chance to kill anyone.

  20. Re:Maybe it's just an occupational hazard. on Early Abort of Ares I Rocket Would Kill Crew · · Score: 1

    You're absolutely right that space travel is inherently dangerous and that shouldn't necessarily deter us from engaging in it despite the risks.

    However, that shouldn't excuse the disaster-waiting-to-happen that is Ares I. Particularly when there are better, cheaper, and safer alternatives. In particular, a recently released study finds that EELVs would absolutely be a safe, cheap alternative to the Ares I.

    We definitely need to take risks in space travel, but not stupid dangerous risks of strapping humans to SRBs that cannot be controlled or turned off in any way and have a history of failing spectacularly.

  21. Re:The Air Force is right. on Early Abort of Ares I Rocket Would Kill Crew · · Score: 1

    Sadly, this doesn't really surprise me; I've heard similar horror stories about Marshall. They share a large amount of the blame for both Space Shuttle disasters. For Challenger, I guess you could blame Thiokol (now ATK) for their "innovative" O-ring design and for their insistence that flaws discovered with this design early on were no big deal. You can also credit many of the engineers at Marshall for finding these problems unacceptable and protesting about them, but in the end, nothing was done to fix the problem and Marshall was responsible for oversight of the SRBs. With Columbia, again, there's blame to go around, but safety issues surrounding chunks of falling foam was Marshall's responsibility. And again, there were good engineers at Marshall who knew about this problem (actually, since STS-1 everybody knew about this problem, or at least should have known) and there were people who were very concerned about it and trying to get managers to address it, but in the end, again, nothing was done. I look forward to the day when shuttle is retired and I don't have to hold my breath every time the damn thing flies, although I'm beginning to believe Ares I is not an improvement. Why oh why can't we just put the Orion on a Delta IV Heavy and call it good. It seems to me it would be much safer AND we could save tons in NRE costs. Is it perhaps that NASA has to keep all their contractors happy and give companies like ATK a slice of the pie for their SRBs?

  22. Re:I bet that the delay flights witch... on Endeavour's Launch Once More Delayed · · Score: 1

    The real reason NASA is so sensitive in calling off launches due to potential lightning strikes is more likely Apollo 12, where a lightning strike almost caused the mission to fail.

  23. Re:Luxuries Versus Necessities on Dvorak Slams OLPC As 'Naive Fiasco' · · Score: 1

    But is a computer a luxury anymore? Or is it a necessity? Aren't computers (and other digital devices) steadily becoming cheaper? Isn't the ability to use computers and develop software becoming a necessity, even in developing countries?

    Japan recovered quickly after the war in part because they had successful industries before the war. Around the same time, India was trying to emerge from a century-long yoke of colonial domination. You are correct about India's military budget, though.

    We need to realize that the digital divide is an infrastructure issue every bit as much as roads, sanitation, and clean water are. To do this, we also need to start thinking about long-term solutions. The Japanese know this, too. For example, it seemed foolish to a lot of people back in the 1960's when Japan decided to build a super-high speed rail line (the Shinkansen). It seemed like a luxury, when most of the country was still moving around with bicycles. Today, however, they are reaping the rewards, and in places like California, we are only now starting to realize how beneficial such a transportation system would be to our economy.

  24. Screenshots on Firefox 3.0 Preview · · Score: 5, Informative

    Screenshots available here.

  25. Re:MS Office costs a bit more on The Pirated Software Problem in the 3rd World · · Score: 1

    The software vendors in Cambodia are selling MS Office for the same price as OpenOffice, and they actually bother to put both of them out. That should suggest that MS Office isn't wildly more popular. And it's probably true, because, if you want OpenOffice, you go out and pay $2 for it, but if you want MS Office, you go out, pay $2 for it, and learn English so you can read the text in the UI.

    Khmer actually has a native version of both OpenOffice and KDE. This whole discussion of why Cambodia hasn't adopted open source software yet may shift in the coming years as people become aware that they can actually use software in their own language, which is a fact that most Cambodians are not aware of today, even though many of them have used computers in internet shops. It doesn't seem likely that Microsoft would ever translate Office or Windows Vista into Khmer, so I suspect that as the economy in Cambodia continues to grow, and as groups like the Cambodian government begin to create databases in Khmer, we will see a big move toward open source software. Of course none of this is to say that pirated software will disappear anytime soon in Cambodia ...