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User: meadowsoft

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Comments · 37

  1. Re:This legislation brought to you by.. on US House Committee Approves Anti-GMO Labeling Law · · Score: 1

    It's not a matter of if you can successfully impregnate a hippo by a human. It's whether the human will survive the ordeal long enough to be successful.

  2. Re:Intentional on Russian GLONASS Down For 12 Hours · · Score: 1

    From Wikipedia again:

    "...it happened in 2000 once the U.S. military developed a new system that provides the ability to deny GPS (and other navigation services) to hostile forces in a specific area of crisis without affecting the rest of the world or its own military systems."

    Perhaps the US is using such a system actively in the Ukraine region.

  3. Re:Down? Or encrypted? on Russian GLONASS Down For 12 Hours · · Score: 3, Informative

    It is called selective availability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability#Selective_availability My undergraduate thesis involved how to couple intertial senors using a Kalman filter to compensate for SA in GPS signals. Two years after my project concluded, the US disabled SA in GPS. I doubt that this recent "outage" was related to similar SA in GLONASS. Rather, perhaps it was indeed an encrypted transmission, or was based on a second independent synchronization signal only available to military assets used to put the scrambled transmissions back in the right order.

  4. Re: "More effective teleportation"!?!?!?! on Mathematical Breakthrough Sets Out Rules For More Effective Teleportation · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't you mean qubit optimistic?

  5. High degree of false positives on Iraq Swears By Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector · · Score: 1

    Since you can pretty much hit a landmine by walking into a random patch of Iraqi desert and throwing a rock, I don't find it surprising that any land mine sensing divining rod would have at least some random chance of success. I think that past research has shown that any tool that is picking arbitrary points on a grid will find positive results for "hidden" items (explosive or not) with a frequency of occurrence that matches the normal distribution. I encourage you to read The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow for a better description than I can give.

  6. Zanac anyone? on Should Computer Games Adapt To the Way You Play? · · Score: 2, Informative

    I seem to remember in the promotional materials for the NES game Zanac (by FCI) that the game was supposed to get dynamically harder the better you played. When I was playing, I specifically remember this being the case, and that I enjoyed the game more as a result. I used to be able to play straight through to the 10th (out of 13) levels without dying once, and then I would die multiple times in a row. As if sensing my desparation the game would scale back the number of baddies it was throwing at me, and then I could regain my footing, collect some powerups and move on. Then the game would throw more and more at me until I got to the unholy nightmare 13th level.

    Time to go dust this game off on the Wii...

  7. Re:I'm grateful on Photoshop Disaster Draws DMCA Notice For Boing Boing · · Score: 1

    Well, the Microsoft Tag concept should be used for SOMETHING, so why not this?

  8. Windows 9? on Choosing a Personal Printer For the Long Haul · · Score: 1

    Can I get this Windows 9 you speak of? I'd love to test if my HP Laserjet 4M will work with it.

  9. Re:It'll never happen on NASA Plans To De-Orbit ISS In 2016 · · Score: 1

    So you mean less people percentage wise and population wise were watching the moon landing than the Jacko funeral? So sad...

  10. Re:striped? on First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is not unique to Microsoft products. Databases have been doing this for a long time. Oracle Database has options for RAW devices and disk access, where redundancy is handled in the application layer by throwing more disks at the problem. You can also stack your layers of redundancy by using Oracle automated storage management to have multiple logical disks while at the same time using an array controller to provide a level of RAID redundancy at the physical layer.

    And a point about JBOD being useful for Exchange. In most Exchange environments I have worked with, replication happens at the appication layer, with huge portions of the data store being replicated amongst members of the Exchange Cluster, each with their own copy of the data. While expensive RAID/physical redundancy is a good idea, it is not critical as exact copies of the data store are available elsewhere in the cluster, and mailboxes can be failed over to those members.

    And for the people that want a full RDBMS or SQL Server under the hood of Exchange - this is primarily a performance concern. Exchange access to data stores has such a unique profile that ca be modeled to show specific performance profiles that would benefit from a customized data access layer, overall Exchange performance would be hampered by the inclusion of an RDBMS that was designed to respond to a multitude of performance profiles. When you have the luxury of understanding how your application accesses data, it is best to choose (or develop) the data storage subsystem that will reap you the best performance. Here is where I believe Microsoft has the right approach.

  11. Re:sure it is on College Police Think Using Linux Is Suspicious Behavior · · Score: 4, Funny


    I am the Command Line Interface Terrorism Master!!!
    </JAY>

  12. Whither OCFS? on Reasonable Hardware For Home VM Experimentation? · · Score: 1

    Any reason you want to go down the (multi)path of OCFS for a 3-node Oracle RAC? Why not just use RAW shared disks? You aren't going to see the difference in a virualization environment anyhow - your disk bottleneck will be the shared access in the Virtual disk controller. OCFS is really only useful when using real HBA's for FibreChannel or iSCSI.

    And don't forget to select "Enterprise Edition" when doing your Oracle install. Standard has a 2-node limit.

  13. Space elevator? on John Mather On the Building of the James Webb Space Telescope · · Score: 1



    Isn't the Japanese space elevator supposed to fix this problem?

    </sarcasm>

  14. Re:Pure speculation... on Meteorite Hunters Find the West Texas Fireball · · Score: 1

    Unless the asteroid in question is small enough that it falls into the "OMFG HOW DID WE MISS THAT?!?! WE'RE DOOMED!!!" category. I can have a small asteroid knocking on our doorstep (a few hundred thousand kilometers, astronomically speaking) and still not be able to see it with the vast majority of instrumentation in our arsenal today.

  15. Re:This "plan" only benefits registrars on ICANN Responds To gTLD Plan Comments · · Score: 1

    Obviously to document anything related to Cost of Living Adjustments? Important in today's economy, no?

    Or are you aware of a different type of cola?

  16. Re:Mac reliability on Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think you are missing the importance of a disaster recovery plan, with backups, for any mission critical hardware, regardless of vendor. Why didn't Mag have any sort of backup plan that was tested? Clustered hardware does not equal a backup plan - thanks for trying there.

    Was there in fact a schedule of backups of the operational system? This seems like a rubber band and duct tape operation to me.

  17. Re:You learn something new every day on F.E.A.R. 2 To Be Advertised On Cats In London · · Score: 1

    I believe that it all depends on whether or not you are using whole cats.

  18. Re:suddenoutbreakofcommonsense on Cambridge, Mass. Moves To Nix Security Cameras · · Score: 3, Informative

    While we are discussing costs, let me get this straight - $264,000 spent thus far, and there are only (6) cameras installed. At an average cost of $44,000 per camera I would $hitcan this program too.

  19. Re:First collision on Satellites Collide In Orbit · · Score: 1

    I encourage Slashdot readers to check out the Orson Scott Card novel "Ender in Exile." He proposes a novel approach to both account for the navigation around (through) space junk, even at the particle level, during space flight. And it is based on an engine that leverages concepts in the strong force. Provides near light speed propulsion as well as junk removal - and it serves as a darned nifty planet killing weapon. Triple bottom line.

  20. Tomorrow's Headline on 400,000 PCs Infected With Fake "Antivirus 2009" · · Score: 4, Funny

    "over 394,000 PCs report massive amounts of virus infections due to the accidental removal of Antivirus 2009"

  21. Re:I must be tired... on SpaceX Successfully Tests Nine-Engine Cluster · · Score: 1

    I read, "The Waco Tribune has short report about it, with comments by lolcats."

    I need either moar sleep or less internets.

    Fixed that for you.

  22. Re:Obama on Obama Launches Change.gov · · Score: 1

    I think that a politician doing what is the correct and right thing to do with regards to IT is DEFINITELY newsworthy.

  23. Re:Locked Away For 20+ Years on X-Rays Emitted From Ordinary Scotch Tape · · Score: 1

    The patenting of scientific phenomena is a shameful institution that needs to be stopped. A university is not supposed to be a for profit institution.

    You haven't heard of the University of Phoenix (www.phoenix.edu) then? Or how about ITT Tech? Any of this ringing a bell?

  24. Limited to scotch tape only? on X-Rays Emitted From Ordinary Scotch Tape · · Score: 1

    If not, we should add this to the list of uses for Duct-tape. I am also curious about if the stickiness factor were to increase, would the pulses or x-rays increase as well? What about other adhesive media?

    I'm all for this path for science so long as the technology stays out of the hands of TSA agents.

  25. Re:Point of failure on Working With 2 ISPs For Home Networking? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Another alternative would be the Linksys/Cisco RV082 VPN router. THat too has dual-WAN support, and makes a nice home VPN endpoint as well.