Slashdot Mirror


User: Chirs

Chirs's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,303
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,303

  1. Is a UAV an "aircraft"? on Kentucky Man Arrested After Shooting Down Drone · · Score: 1

    Just curious...is a small radio-controlled toy considered an "aircraft" for the purposes of that law? I wouldn't think so, since as far as I know "aircraft" need to do things like file flight plans and such.

  2. Not quite that trivial. on Kentucky Man Arrested After Shooting Down Drone · · Score: 1

    As others have said, calling the police is not going to help. They can't exactly roll out a pair of RF direction-finding vans and triangulate the position of the drone operator. They might if you're lucky send some officers by in a few hours to take a complaint, and then most likely not do anything with it unless they get dozens of other complaints in the same area.

    What we need is a net gun that will disable drones without endangering people.

  3. might be a drone on Police Not Issuing Charges For Handgun-Firing Drone -- Feds Undecided · · Score: 1

    Some of these hobby systems have GPS route-following ability. I'd consider that pretty drone-like.

  4. 486 running DOS to drive a fusion reactor on What's the Oldest Technology You've Used In a Production Environment? · · Score: 1

    Back in 2000 I wrote some code to do some funky control systems stuff for a Tokomak nuclear fusion reactor as a research project. We happened to have a spare 486 with DOS and Borland C available that had a decent A/D and D/A converter board installed. This actually turned out to be really good for realtime code because you *knew* there was nothing else running on that system.

    I had to rewrite the drivers for the converter board because it couldn't give the performance we were looking for--the settling time for the A/D conversions was too long. I figured out a way to interleave the A/D and D/A conversions so that the hardware delay for one also provided the required delay for the other, essentially doubling the sampling rate relative to the stock driver.

    These days it'd probably make more sense to use an Arduino...

  5. Have you tried TeamViewer? on Ask Slashdot: VPN Solution To Connect Mixed-Environment Households? · · Score: 2

    For your main goal of being able to log into your parents' machines, have you tried TeamViewer?

    As for setting up VPN, I think you should be able to do it relatively inexpensively with something like a couple of consumer-grade routers running DD-WRT. The one at location B is set up as a VPN client, and the one at location A is set up as a VPN server. You might want to set up address ranges for DHCP at location B such that they're part of the network at location A but not assigned at location A. That way you can avoid needing to do NAT at location B as well as location A.

  6. same here on Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads · · Score: 1

    I'm up in the Canadian prairies...farming country. We've got a 1-mile grid road system here too, and we could probably get rid of some of them as well.

  7. access to fields... on Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads · · Score: 1

    If it's anything like around here, many of these roads could provide access to fields, not homes.

  8. roads for access to fields, not homes on Iowa Makes a Bold Admission: We Need Fewer Roads · · Score: 2

    I live in the Canadian prairies. Around here we have a whole grid of gravel roads (roughly every mile or so). These roads are not for providing access to homes, but rather for providing access to *fields*.

    Back in the day farms were a lot smaller than they are now. Since then there has been a lot of consolidation, so they could probably remove a bunch of roads going in one direction (north/south or east/west) but they'd have to leave the roads going the other direction to continue to provide access to the fields.

  9. there is some very reliable hardware out there on Open Compute Project Comes Under Fire · · Score: 1

    I worked on a telecom switch that ran processing on cards that had two CPUs in lockstep. If the output of the two ever differed the card was taken out of service and its last transaction was rolled back. Memory contents were stored in at least three places at any given time. The dataplane was inductively coupled to avoid the possibility of DC current damaging things.

    We replaced it with commodity hardware and smarter software. It wasn't *quite* as reliable, but it was a whole lot cheaper and the speeds ramped up much faster.

  10. the main benefit is flexibility on Open Compute Project Comes Under Fire · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't think I'd ever go to the cloud because it's cheaper or more secure or more reliable. The main benefit that I see is flexibility.

    If your loads are stable and known in advance, it's likely cheaper to buy hardware and staff people to take care of it. On the other hand if loads spike wildly from one day to the next the cloud makes perfect sense. Need a thousand cores of compute power right this second? Amazon/Google/Rackspace/HP would be happy to rent it to you.

  11. Re:take care of yourself and you will look good on Scientists Show Human Aging Rates Vary Widely · · Score: 1

    A restaraunt my wife frequents has completely separate grills and utensils for gluten free cooking. That's pretty much fanaticism.

    There are people with celiac (I know one) who are *incredibly* sensitive to gluten, so that actually sounds like a really great place for people with celiac to eat at. And even if it's not strictly necessary, it's an excellent way to avoid accidental contamination.

  12. I've personally fixed bugs on Intel Skylake & Broxton Graphics Processors To Start Mandating Binary Blobs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I did kernel hacking for 10 years. I've fixed bugs in Ethernet drivers and helped document (and work around) hardware errata. I've also had to deal with trying to rebuild Nvidia drivers when the binary blob was no longer compatible with the latest kernel source. Having open-source drivers is key for those of us that actually *do* work on this stuff.

  13. Could be a decent chip on AMD Launches Carrizo Mobile APU With Excavator CPU Cores, Integrated Southbridge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We'll have to see what the benchmarks look like, but it has potential at least.

  14. did you miss the USB microcontroller issue? on Intel Adopts USB-C Connector For 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3, Supports USB 3.1, DP 1.2 · · Score: 1

    Even without DMA accesses, a USB device can pretend to be a keyboard and type commands into your current session.

  15. as long as the frequencies are right, you're fine on LG Arbitrarily Denying Android Lollipop Update To the G2 In Canada? · · Score: 1

    I'm rocking a purchased-outright Moto G 2014. Works fine, no hassles, on a cheap no-data prepaid plan that does everything I need.

  16. look at the back legs on MIT Trains Robots To Jump · · Score: 1

    The reason why this thing uses the front legs for the initial vertical push is that the back legs are shorter than on most running animals. Notice when it's running that the back legs and front legs never overlap, while on an actual cheetah their back legs stretch forwards past the front legs in order to allow the more powerful hind muscles to do more of the work.

  17. not entirely true on D.C. Police Detonate Man's 'Suspicious' Pressure Cooker · · Score: 1

    Sometimes the bomb squad will use a directed charge designed to shake the crap out of suspicious objects, but without blowing them to smithereens. The idea is to ensure that it can't go off, while still leaving behind evidence that can be analyzed.

  18. did they damage the car? on D.C. Police Detonate Man's 'Suspicious' Pressure Cooker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    and if so, did they reimburse the guy?

  19. if you're not a coder.... on Mechanical 'Clicky' Keyboards Still Have Followers (Video) · · Score: 1

    For regular typing the "truly ergonomic keyboard" is actually really nice. Symmetric stagger but the rows are not straight...they curve to match finger length.

    For coding I found that the punctuation keys (the huge cluster by the right pinky) were moved around too much and it was hard to switch between it and a normal keyboard.

  20. most systems vulnerable, not as bad as it looks on 'Venom' Security Vulnerability Threatens Most Datacenters · · Score: 2

    There's a recent post on the openstack-operators mailing list talking about this, but the basic gist is that pretty much all versions of qemu are susceptible to the bug, but that in practice it's not quite as big a deal as it sounds.

    The thing to note is that the major linux distros by default enable something called "sVirt" which basically locks down qemu to using only the resources that have been explicitly assigned to it. This should make it hard (ideally impossible) to break out and compromise the host or other qemu processes.

    Also, on most major linux distros qemu doesn't run as root but rather as a separate user with lower privileges.

  21. I would qualify that... on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    Our medical care is second to none in quality and capability.

    I'd be willing to posit that if you can afford to pay at the highest level then you can get the highest level of care. According to the New York Times though the USA doesn't provide the highest-qualtiy health care in all areas:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08...

  22. There is private health care in Canada too on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 2

    Not sure what you're smoking. Canada has quite a healthy private health care industry:
    http://www.cbc.ca/news2/backgr...

  23. I usually wouldn't bother for a sore throat on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    Most of the time a sore throat isn't something you need to see a doctor about:
    http://www.mayoclinic.org/dise...

    In Canada we have a free healthcare phone number that you can call and talk to a Registered Nurse. They'll ask questions and clarify whether or not you should even both going in to see a doctor.

  24. another Canadian begs to differ on The Medical Bill Mystery · · Score: 1

    Sure I can. I can call up my family doc and book an appointment (generally within 1 week), or if I don't want to wait that long I can go to the local clinic and wait for the on-call doc to see me, or if it's really serious I can go to Emergency at the hospital.

    Now if you want to see a specialist then you might be waiting a while. But if the GP thinks your case is serious then they'll bump you further up the queue, and if it's really serious they can generally get you in right away.

    The biggest failing is in highly specialized stuff like pediatric psychiatry, or health care for really remote areas, but I suspect that would be an issue under most forms of health care.

  25. Is this Google's fault? on Google Can't Ignore the Android Update Problem Any Longer · · Score: 1

    Technically 5.1 is out and there's supposed to be an update coming for my Moto G, but it hasn't arrived yet. Arguably this is Moto's fault more than Google's.

    That said, from what I hear Android 5.0 wasn't all that stable, so it seems likely that a lot of manufacturers just skipped it in favour of waiting for 5.1.