Slashdot Mirror


User: Yarn

Yarn's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
644
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 644

  1. Re:If...... on First Doom3 Tourney @ QuakeCon · · Score: 1

    Less Talk, More Beer.

    Kinda appropriate, as yet again I won't be at QuakeCon. Instead I will be in Dublin drinking Guiness.

    Have fun EJ

  2. Re:Why another technology on Xgrid Agent for Unix · · Score: 1

    Because Globus is a designed by committee PoS. Most big grid projects in the UK are rolling out Condor and/or Sun Grid Engine/N1.

    Unless Xgrid gets cross platform execution agents and submission agents it's unlikely to get much uptake in the academic world. SGE, Condor et al all support Mac OS X, as well as windows, linux, other unices etc. They also have useful abilities such as checkpointing.

  3. Re:Question on SpaceShipOne Flight Completed Successfully · · Score: 1

    Erp. Guilty as charged. I hope I don't have to hand my degrees back :(

  4. Re:Question on SpaceShipOne Flight Completed Successfully · · Score: 1

    It's still a matter of speed. Sure, at 100km maintaining that speed isn't (currently?) practical, but if you could, you could orbit.

  5. Re:Question on SpaceShipOne Flight Completed Successfully · · Score: 5, Informative

    it's not a matter of height, it's a matter of speed.

    Here is a nice orbital velocity calculator.

    Getting up to that speed is not the only problem, you have to loose all that kinetic energy before you land, unless you fancy spreading yourself thinly across a continent.

  6. Re:On a similar note... on Should Hardware Drivers be Region/Language Locked? · · Score: 1

    ASCII 2/3 is decimal 035, hex 23, octal 043, bits 00100011: prints as `#'
    Official name: Number Sign
    Other names: Pound, Number, Sharp, Crunch, Mesh, Hex, Hash, Flash, Grid, Octothorpe

  7. Re:A bit of an off-shoot... on 60GB iPod Coming? · · Score: 1
    It's in development. No published release date.

    PS: Grr:
    Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.

    It's been 19 seconds since you hit 'reply'.
  8. Netgear? Peh on Fiber To The Dorm Room · · Score: 4, Informative

    Get one of these babies SK 9844.

    Offloads damn near everything, vlans, checksums etc. Doesn't do IPSEC, but then if you're spending about 700 on a NIC you'd get a separate crypto accelerator for that.

  9. Re:Rio Karma on Microsoft, Sony Announce iPod Competitors · · Score: 1

    Yes. Be warned that (currently) the ethernet support merely allows you to upload/download files with a java application. Additionally the CPU can only sustain about 15mbit/s.

    I still think it's a great little device though.

  10. Re:Thanks a lot on Apple to Award Workgroup Clusters to Scientists · · Score: 1

    I have a dual G4 tower running 10.2 server (Inherited it from my predecessor). So far only downtime has been for security updates, which surprised me (coming from a solaris/linux background)

    Admittedly, the update probably didn't need reboots, but it doesn't really give you a choice. My reviewlet is: "Nice UI, a bit opaque". I'm not planning on replacing it, as was my original kneejerk reaction.

  11. Re:Apple and bioinformatics on Apple to Award Workgroup Clusters to Scientists · · Score: 3, Informative
    I'm network manager at the Genetics dept at Cambridge Uni. After mashing my network inventory scripts a bit I can give you a few stats:
    297 Total Unique MACs
    105 Apple
    58 3Com
    20 HP
    17 Intel
    12 Sun
    10 CompalElec
    8 Dell
    5 Sony
    4 Toshiba

    Dumped my database of all mac addresses into a text file, then:
    for foo in `cat temp|sed s/:..:..:..$//g` ; do grep -i $foo manuf ; done | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -ci | sort -n -r | head -n 10
  12. Re:Am I the only one... on More On The BBC's Codec 'Dirac' · · Score: 1

    2 digit :P

  13. Probably Phenol on Samsung's 17" LCD Gaming Monitor Rated · · Score: 1

    which is released from pretty much any electronic goods.

  14. Re:For what? on High-Temp Superconducting Tape · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Electrons are not bled out of materials as the temperature decreases. In semiconductors they do indeed become less mobile, increasing resistance, but in true conductors they become more mobile, as there are fewer lattice vibrations to get in the way (a simplistic metaphor, of course).

    At extremely low temperatures the electrons pair up, which leads to superconductivity in metals. The amount of power which can be transferred is very high. These pairs are very easily broken apart, which is why superconductors are not perfect reflectors, any light breaks the pairs. IIRC it also limits the power that can be transferred over a superconductor.

  15. Re:Rio Karma on Fourteen Digital Music Players Reviewed · · Score: 1

    It has 16M of cache, but I hear that it spins the hard drive up more than the iPod, to avoid gaps between songs.

    I don't walk or cycle with any music playing (I need all my senses to survive the trip to work).

    Other people on the www.riovolution.com* forums may be able to help.

    * Intentionally not linked.

  16. Re:Rio Karma on Fourteen Digital Music Players Reviewed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Price isn't the only reason to buy a karma. It also plays ogg and flac. The sound quality is slightly better than the ipod in my experience, and it can more-or-less eliminate gaps between songs in the same album. If you like crossfading it can do that too.

    The 15hr battery life is another big plus.

    The hard drive *is* a problem though. My one started making clicking noises, and I feared the worst, but it has got better.

  17. Re:Excellent on FCC Opens Wireless 3.6GHZ Band · · Score: 2, Funny

    I've always wanted to ping cows!

  18. Sounds like a RMS / Peak power confusion on Japanese Inventor's Motor Uses 80% Less Power · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I had a similar problem with a cheap VA meter (designed to run at 50Hz) when I made a HF transformer. At the low voltage side it measured 5V 1A, at the high voltage side it was ~500V, 100mA. I was young at the time and got all excited until common sense brought me down to earth and I tried lowering the frequency from 1kHz.

    As most meters are designed for a 50Hz sine wave, his pulsed system could very easily cause confusion.

    The acid test would be to run a conventional motor and the new motor from a fixed quantity of joules, e.g. a battery.

  19. Re:whatever jokes you guys make out of it on Sir Tim Berners-Lee Lauded For Web Efforts · · Score: 1
    Looks like someone's finally made a MegaHal bot that can post to Slashdot. Makes a change from one that just acts as an editor.

    PS: I pasted the parent into a megahal and here is the result:
    Does he want to fuck him in the vortex of an sg team while off world. It just couldn't be comprehended.
    Which makes as much or possibly more sense.
  20. Re:Photons on Can You Spare A Few Trillion Cycles? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm a physicist, but IIRC a rod (monochrome sensor) absorbs a photon 50% of the time, and from that absorbed photon outputs a signal about 50% of the time. Hence, about 4 photons to have a high probability of detection.

    The colour sensors (cones) are less sensitive. Whilst googling for the sensitivity of these I found a page detailing the sensitivity of the eye It needs about 500 to 900 photons/sec to actually register. However, I've already written about rods so I'm not going to delete that!

  21. Re:sjeng author wrote extreme vorbis encoder on Apple's Chess 2.0 Source Code Available · · Score: 1

    It's very impressive, but I don't think I could listen to it for any length of time.

    As for vorbis & ipod, I wouldn't bother. You can pick up a Rio Karma for less than an ipod. They're not perfect but they support Vorbis and Flac, in addition to the usual mp3 and wma. There *have* been hard drive reliability problems, so I'd recommend buying it from somewhere which also supplies an extended warrenty.

  22. I wonder... on Firewall Failover With pfsync And CARP · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What hardware would I need to do this on my 1000SX uplink. Admittedly, I've only peaked at 80Mbit/s so far, but I think even handling that will take some beefy hardware.

  23. Re:outlook 2k3 on Next Generation Mail Clients Reviewed · · Score: 1

    Mail.app is far more reliable with IMAP. Plays nicely with the rest of the OS too.

  24. I'd like to suggest a challenge on Programming Challenges for Mac Developers · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Get working on porting OpenOffice.org to Aqua! The current ETA is 2005

    It'd save me *so* much time having to run around ensuring people don't have illegal copies of MS Office on their macs.

    At least with my PC users:
    a) The OpenOffice.org interface isn't glaringly different
    b) They can't just copy the MS office folder between machines.

  25. Re:Automatic vision testers! hooray! on Cheap Fast Eyeglasses from a Desktop Fabricator · · Score: 1

    One of the lecturers when I did my optics MSc two years ago built a device which would allow imaging of the retina without surgical intervention. Being able to do this required measuring the properties of the cornea and lens to a phenomenal degree of accuracy.

    So, they decoupled the corrective bit (the expensive bit) to a simple abberation measurement. There's a bit of information here.

    It'd be great to link the two devices together.