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User: MarchHare

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  1. Re:Can the devs do it themselves? on Rust 1.32.0 Stable Release Includes New Debugging Macro, 'Quality of Life' Improvements (rust-lang.org) · · Score: 1

    Woops. Replying ot myself. Just realized my code prints the filename and line number of the dbg!() method itself, not its caller. I shoudl have parsed caller[0] instead...

  2. Did he Rust maintainers have to implement the dbg!() method, or could any Rust dev add their own? I know in Ruby I could have created my own:

    def dbg!(x)
          STDERR.print "#{__FILE__}:#{__LINE__} #{x.inspect}\n"
          x
    end

    Just curious, don't know how flexible Rust is when it comes to extending the language itself.

  3. "Small Gods", by Terry Pratchett on Slashdot Asks: What Book(s) Are You Reading This Month? · · Score: 2

    I've read 4/5th of it at this point, I'll probably finish it this weekend. It's a beautiful nice fantasy story. No need to have read any of the other Discworld novels, either.

    It's the story of a young apprentice priest in a extremely religious society, who meets the actual god of that society. The god has just re-incarnated into a small tortoise, and has almost no godlike powers left. And, the little tortoise can only be heard by the apprentice.

  4. Interactive daily diagram of sea ice extent on The Arctic Sets Yet Another Record Low Maximum Extent (nsidc.org) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Personally, I love this diagram. I bookmarked it a couple of years ago and I like to show it to people. Climate change is pretty obvious if you hide all the series and then reveal them one by one in chronological order.

        http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html

    (University of Illinois)

  5. For once, a video with some content. on Watch What It Takes To Lay Google's Super-fast Submarine Internet Cable · · Score: 1

    I've been made to click on tons of videos with poor content, or badly structured content. This one was pretty good, though. A nice overview of something I know little about, with good narration too.

  6. Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty on What Keeps You On (or Off) Windows in 2013? · · Score: 1

    Well, what about that lab? What do they do with Windows? I tried a quick Google search but all the results I got were related to cold fusion research and the infamous Pons & Fleischmann affair. That poor department, I bet it must be difficult for them to do proper research nowadays and get it seen in its true light, because it must be constantly drowned by all the (continuing) coverage of that fiasco!

  7. Re:because desktop linux is a toy and novelty on What Keeps You On (or Off) Windows in 2013? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah, in science, it's usually rare to have serious development done on Windows, except for the occasional data acquisition station or for some control computer attached to a commercial lab apparatus. Just have a look at the Top 500 supercomputer clusters, most of them run a flavor of Linux or UNIX. I've worked for genomics companies and now I'm at a neurological institute, and all the heavy duty HPC pipelines are designed to integrate with such clusters, and the scientists themselves work on Linux desktops. We're shuffling terabytes of medical images back and forth, with large data trees on shared filesystems that are continuously updated by scripts in bash, Perl, Ruby, Python, and Java. If Microsoft had the power to force us to switch to Windows for everything, science would grind to a halt for 15 years while we re-code everything, and even then it would probably still not be as functional as what we have right now. There is great beauty and power in command-line processing, when done well.

    Does anyone know of any big science project that's all done on Windows? Really, I'm asking because I'm curious. As far as I know, in physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, medecine etc, any project that requires complex custom HPC pipelines are created on Linux (or UNIX). Windows? Never heard of one. But it might exist, I suppose.

  8. How about bricking them? on Apple Now Working With the NYPD To Curb iPhone Thefts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why not simply brick any device reported stolen? I understand it's done in other countries (or for other devices).

  9. Re:Lot's of information about Clojure... on Ruby, Clojure, Ceylon: Same Goal, Different Results · · Score: 3, Informative

    A slightly better way, IMHO:

        String.instance_methods.grep /sub/

  10. Re:Total energy on DIY Laser Pistol Shoot 1MW Blasts · · Score: 1

    Oh, and if the pulse is actually one kilowatt instead of one
    megawatt... the energy falls to 0.0001 joule... really, none
    of these amounts are enough to cause any visual damage
    to a steel plate.

  11. Total energy on DIY Laser Pistol Shoot 1MW Blasts · · Score: 2

    One megawatt is one million joules per second. The pulse
    lasts 100 nsec, or 0.1 millionth of a second. If you multiply
    the two, you get the total amount of energy for the pulse... ... 0.1 joule.

    That's about the same amount of energy as lifting a 100 g
    chocolate bar 10 cm vertically in the air....

  12. How does Sophos do this? on Sophos Free A-V For Mac May Kill Time Machine Backups · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He tried to open a quarantined file, once with the 'cat' command
    and once with vi, as root, and both times Sophos warned him and
    prevented him from proceeding. Now, the code for the 'cat'
    command is quite simple, it basically just does a open(2)
    of the file and then issues a series of read(2). My question
    is: Does Sophos actually intercept the system calls in order
    to make sure no application opens an infected file? If so,
    wouldn't that introduce a HUGE performance penalty on the
    everything happening on the machine, since these system calls
    are so crucial?

  13. Re:This has been known for some time. on Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional To Productivity · · Score: 1

    Well, you answered my question, then (in the other comment thread).

    Thanks. And greetings.

  14. Re:I don't even think it's that well-defined. on Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional To Productivity · · Score: 1

    Hey, are you Peter Seebach? If so, just a few comments above yours, I provided a link
    to your insightful (and funny) Hacker FAQ. I've always recognized myself in it.

    Have you ever considered reformating it to a more modern HTML document? It's simply
    that in its present form, it really DOES look like a text from 1999... it shows
    its age. :-)

  15. This has been known for some time. on Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional To Productivity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    See, for instance, section 2 (Productivity) of the Hacker FAQ.

  16. Re:Earth's Orbit? on How NASA Will Bomb the Moon To Find Water · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Your computation actually has some errors in it. The amount of energy required to increase the earth's speed from what it is (about 30,000 m/s) by 1 m/s is not the same as the amount of enery needed to increase it from 0 to 1 m/s (which is what you computed, except that you also made a mistake by a factor of 2).

    A better estimate (with same mass, but increasing the speed from 30,000 m/s to 30,001 m/s) yields
    1.7921e29 joules needed. That's 5 orders of magnitude greater than your solution.

    I once computed that to remove the top 1cm of topsoil or water from all the worlds land masses and oceans, and throw them out into outer space at escape velocity, we'd need to perfectly use the energy of 100 billions bombs like Hiroshima's. I wanted to see whether exploding a planet like the Death Star does in Episode 4 was realistic. It isn't. At escape velocity, the chunks of the planets would take 6 minutes to double the planet's volume (so the explosion would look very very slow).

  17. Re:Lesson of Life on Stupid Engineering Mistakes · · Score: 1

    What of they disagree? You need THREE engineers. And you must never let them talk to each other.
    And if possible they must work for different corporations.

  18. Re:I suggest shortening the phrase on Wireless Security Attacks and Defenses · · Score: 1

    I think it's a good idea, and if we start doing this here on slashdot too,
    it will make most of the discussions a lot more blah too. :-)

  19. Re:Obnoxiously Large Telescope on Canadians Plan to Build World's Biggest Telescope · · Score: 1

    How about... "Ludicrously Large Telescope" ?

    I always liked that word. Ludicrous. :-)

  20. Another shell? on A Guided Tour of the Microsoft Command Shell · · Score: 1

    Seems to me that most of what they brag about with Monad are things that have already been around for a while in other shells.

    As a side note, I program in perl for a living, and many years ago I found I would sometimes need to quickly test small perl constructs. So I wrote a "perl shell" that allows me to test them interactively. Here it is, see for yourself, I find it quite useful. If anyone's interested, I have a more sophisticated version with debug facilities, a command history etc.

    ---- save as "perli" in your ~/bin, then set mode to 755 ---
    #!/usr/bin/perl

    print "\nWelcome to perli, an Interactive PERL shell by MarchHare.\n\n";

    $0="-perlsh";
    $PROMPT="PERL> ";

    # not strict BY DESIGN.

    for (;;) {
        print $PROMPT;
        $_input = <STDIN>;
        if (!defined($_input)) {
            print "\nExiting.\n";
            exit 0;
        }
        eval $_input;
        print $@ if $@;
    }
    --- end ---

  21. Re:Is it an eeevil slogan? on Bill Gates Speaks Out · · Score: 1
    Speaking of slogans, I've always found it funny how in the late 80's these two computer companies were promoting their products with these slogans:


    Amiga: the computer for the creative mind.

    Apple: the computer for the rest of us.

  22. Gaming evolution... on 400,000 Additional DSs Available by Year's End · · Score: 1

    This makes me think: if the GameBoy Advanced
    (released in 2001) has the capabilities of
    the NES (early 1990s?) and the DS has the
    capabilities of the N64 (released in 1996),
    it means handheld technology is catching up
    with consoles with a delay of about 8 to 10
    years. Therefore, in 2012-2014, we can expect
    a handheld device that will have the power
    and versatility of today's GameCubes and
    XBoxes!

    But then, maybe the delay isn't that long,
    since the PSP is rumored to be more or less
    as powerful as the PS2...

  23. Re:economic recovery my arse on Tech Turnover Rate Lowest Since The 80's · · Score: 1

    Here in Montreal IT seem to be doing rather well. But my field is more straight 'computer science' than IT. All four major universities on the island are building new research facilities... I think that's a good sign.

  24. Re:I don;t know about 9 on The Ten Most Overpaid Jobs In The U.S. · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's a canadian unit of velocity AND mass. (So now that I think about it it's a unit of momentum). It's defined as the momentum of your average elk running at the average maximum elk speed. A football player with all his gear does about 0.2 elk.

  25. Re:One problem on Swiss Researchers Exploit Windows Password Flaw · · Score: 1

    XP is eXperience Points. AC is Armor Class. And HP is Hit Points.

    Oops. Wrong discussion. :-)