Slashdot Mirror


User: skeptictank

skeptictank's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
276
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 276

  1. Re:That's Great But... on $1 Trillion In Minerals Found In Afghanistan · · Score: 1
    Don't forget:

    building infrastructure to extract the minerals from the ground.

    Any serious mining operations will require real roads that can carry heavy trucks, rail lines and locomotives than can carry millions of tons of ore from mines to foundries and electricity to power all the equipment associated with such industries.

    That kind of infrastructure is real wealth, the kind of wealth that generates new wealth. At least there is a reason now that the rest of world my care about the god-forsaken hell hole that is Afghanistan.

  2. New England tried to invade Canada Twice & Fai on Texas Approves Conservative Curriculum · · Score: 1

    Seriously, New England is the only place to surrender to France in the last 200 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Canada_(1775) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

  3. Not an appropriate turn of phrase on NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota · · Score: 1
    The U.S. government is pursuing the electronics question, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told the panel. "We're going to go into the weeds on that"

    That's not the phrase you want to hear when talking about real-time safety critical software.

  4. NHTSA - 635 Employees, $800 Million budget on NHTSA Has No Software Engineers To Analyze Toyota · · Score: 1

    The lion share of budget in most organizations goes to make payroll. The NHTSA's budget comes to $1.26 Million per employee. That ratio seems a little high, even for a government agency.

  5. I've never seen cards shuffled in a casino on Computer-Based System To Crack Down On Casino Card Counters · · Score: 1

    The decks, shoes or whatever always come "pre-shuffled" from some back room.

  6. Re:When will they get it??? on Sony To Encase Half the Star Wars: Galaxies Servers In Carbonite · · Score: 1

    At the time, the speculation was that the contract with LucasArts required the game to hit some minimum number of subscribers or LucasArts was free to license the Star Wars IP to another MMO developer. When it became apparent that the game wasn't going to get anywhere near the required number, SOE dumbed down the game and launched a media blitz in a bid to pick-up a lot new subscribers. The rest is history.

  7. I'm amazed SOE is still in business on Sony To Encase Half the Star Wars: Galaxies Servers In Carbonite · · Score: 1

    I played EQ on and off until 2004, when I finally had enough of SOE. SOE must be an integral part of Sony's plan for world domination; otherwise they would have let it crawl off and die the death it deserves.

  8. Interpersonal problems derail projects on Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    far more often than technical challenges. This incident provides an enlightening view into Linux development. Working for someone with the social skills of a 13 year old girl, who doesn't actually pay you, never ends well.

  9. Target Western Countries First on OLPC Set To Dump x86 For Arm Chips In XO 2 · · Score: 1
    Enough with the change the world by giving third world children netbooks that cost more than their family will make in 5 years. If you want to improve the lives of kids in places like Africa, build infrastructure. Yes its expensive, but it actually makes things better, not just provide a feel-good photo-op. If you really want to make a difference in education start in the western economies. Make the "edubooks" sell for close to $100 a pop (a blip in the cost to educate a child in a modern economy) and eventually the economies of scale will push the price low enough that even Niger will be able to afford them.

    Arm is an excellent choice for such an implementation. The power profile is good and the number of units that can be crammed onto a wafer mean that costs of fab can eventually go below $1 per processor, with high volume. The future of computing is a place where general purpose CPUs primarily function as controllers and routers for special purpose signal processors and stream processor anyway and x86 processors are overkill for that.

  10. Oh Bullshit, there is one reason its a computer on Why TV Lost · · Score: 1

    Because you can implement a TV from a computer, but not the other way around.

  11. First on Microsoft Update Slips In a Firefox Extension · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Post!

  12. Computers are cheap, Bandwith is not on Windows Is Dead – Long Live Midori? · · Score: 1

    That is the main problem with this business model.

  13. In spaceflight, cheap = failure on SpaceX Launch Fails To Reach Space · · Score: 1

    Just throwing money at it doesn't guarantee success, but the upfront engineering, process controls and testing is money well spent. Launches are expensive and failed launches are extremely expensive.

  14. Re:Poor choice of words on New Results Contradict Long-Held Chemistry Dogma · · Score: 1

    They also had a heliocentric model of the solar system by the 3rd century BC, but it was commonly rejected because it couldn't explain the lack of stellar parallax. When Archimedes computed the volume of the universe though, he used the heliocentric model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Reckoner.

  15. Make it smell like a skunk on Warning Future Generations About Nuclear Waste · · Score: 1
    No matter what you make it look like, people will excavate it if you make it noticeable. It would probably be better to leave it unmarked, since any kind of marker that will last for 10,000 years is gonna be valuable enough that people will loot it.

    If you make it permanently smell like a skunk, people will avoid it.

  16. EA: Do it Right and you can get 20 Million Subs on Knights of the Old Republic MMO Confirmed · · Score: 1

    Do this game right. Have plenty of content and iron out the bugs in beta. Make the game fun to play and provide end game content. It will get millions of subscribers on launch. Its better to push the release date back than to release something that is not ready - "you are what you are at launch". Dark Side!

  17. Really Bad News for this Game on Warhammer Online Sees Massive Content Removal To Make Launch · · Score: 1
    The only thing this game had going to differentiate it from WoW was the RvR content. Capturing capital cities is the ultimate goal of that RvR play. It appears that they are removing 66% of that, basically gutting the game. The removal of the classes is no big deal, 24 character classes is absurd - 20 is just slightly less absurd.

    I am increasingly getting the sense that Mythic doesn't a have clear sense of direction or vision for WAR. If they knew where they were going with the game and had a plan to get there, they would just push the schedule out. This move smells of desperation: get it out the door, collect some sub fees and hope they don't get a class action from the pre-release buyers.

  18. Coming up to speed on New Environment? on Same Dev Tools/Language/Framework For Everyone? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If this is a major factor when ramping-up a new engineer on a program, then your application domain is probably so easy that your jobs will be outsourced to Albania soon anyway.

  19. Good Plan for Bankruptcy on Same Dev Tools/Language/Framework For Everyone? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If all your company does is make websites(or web 2.0, cloud computing or whatever the buzz word is this month) this might be fine. If the company makes a variety of applications for different purposes or targets, then this is a really bad ideal. The engineers attached to the project are the people who should be making the decisions about the tools and languages that are used to actually make working code. Management above the project level is to far removed from the actual work that will have to be done to be making that kind of decision.

  20. Tasers and Algebra on Meet the New Chess Boxing Champion of the World · · Score: 1

    Most regular people would probably have trouble just remembering how the pieces move after a few minutes of fighting, with all the adrenaline pumping and your whole body in "I have no time for thinking" mode.

    Ahh the true zen of chess. I think combining tasers and algebra would be a better measure of neural fitness.

  21. Northy or Southy? on Hans Reiser Leads Police To Nina's Body · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I hear that Cal prisons are pretty nasty right now. The north calimexs are having a war with the south calimexs. Mrs Reiser could sell his services as an algorithm designer to determine the optimal kill order for G's on the other side; or they may just ass rape him to death.

  22. Humanitarian vs Environmentalist Death Match! on Freeze On US Solar Plant Applications Lifted · · Score: 1

    So your complaint is that environmentalists care about the environment, not people? I have a similar complaint about humanitarians. They don't care about the environment.

    I'm getting front row tickets for that. Let the hair pulling begin!

  23. Need to Detect Gravity Waves on Einstein's Theory Passes Strict New Test · · Score: 1

    That's the test that will prove GR once and for all.

  24. Re:It's all changing too fast on Intel Says to Prepare For "Thousands of Cores" · · Score: 1
    It doesn't change as fast as the marketing hype out of Intel would have you believe. This is the same old song and dance that Intel was doing back in 2000. "Software developers have to learn to do parallel programming, compilers have to become smarter, blah, blah, blah - now my dog is gonna jump over this pony." IBM and Motorola were talking the same in the 90's as they pushed RISC and the PowerPC architecture.

    Intel is pushing this because its the easy way forward for them. As processes become able to etch smaller features, its easier to just shrink existing dies and put more transistors on a wafer than it is to find creative uses for the space that opens up.

    About 16 general purpose cores combined with programmable logic arrays would actually open up a new realm of possibilities for software, but the yield would be a lot lower than what Intel can get with 100's or 1000's of redundant cores on the same die. IOW, Intel would actually have to spend money on design and improved manufacturing processes.

  25. Re:Growing Asparagus on Mars... on Mars Soil Appears To Be Able To Sustain Life · · Score: 1

    Once the atmosphere is thick enough sublimation won't be a problem. Eventually you have to leave the nest.