Slashdot Mirror


User: petermgreen

petermgreen's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
10,783
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 10,783

  1. Re:SCSI madness on The Almost Forgotten Story of the Amiga 2000 · · Score: 1

    Until you have to deal with an old machine that has one of the buggy SATA1 controllers that falls over if you plug in a SATA2 drive.

    Some drives had a jumper to force SATA1 mode but that has dissappeared on more modern drives.

  2. Re:"Issue on board" on Malaysian Passenger Plane Reportedly Shot Down Over Ukraine · · Score: 1

    AFAICT oil isn't such a big issue because it's routinely shipped around the world, so unless there is noone for russia to sell it's oil to oil sanctions between russia and europe won't change things much. Europe will pay slightly more, russia will get slightly less. Other countries and trasnportation companies will profit.

    Gas is the big issue because it has traditionally been moved by pipeline. Moving it by ship requires special terminals to purify and liquify it and special ships to carry the cryogenic liquid. The US currently has a glut of gas but moving that gas to europe will mean the building of more LNG terminals and ships which takes time.

  3. Re:Black hole? on Sony Forgets To Pay For Domain, Hilarity Ensues · · Score: 1

    IIRC 10 years is the max on com/net/org

    How it could happen is pretty simple, someone is working on a new service, they are in a hurry and just buy the domain with a company credit card or a small one time PO or whatever putting their individual work email address as the contact info. They register it for a few years, maybe even the maximum of 10. Maybe they set a reminder for themselves to renew it, maybe they don't bother as they think it unlikely the domain will stay in use that long.

    The project grows in importance but noone notices that the domain behind it is associated with one employee, then that employee becomes an ex-employee and their email is shut down

  4. Re:article summary didn't really summarize... on Telcos Move Net Neutrality Fight To Congress · · Score: 1

    The problem is what the customers purchased is generally a connection to the internet with no particular gaurantees about performance. If you want connections with service level agreements coverting performance to defined locations (e.g. major peering connections) you can get them but expect to pay a hell of a lot more than you would pay for a regular "broadband" connection.

    Since they never agreed to provide any particular ammount of bandwidth in the first place there is little to stop them taking away some of the bandwidth they currently give to "best effort IP" to reallocate it to premium services. Whether they do that statically by creating fixed bandwidth channels or dynamically through prioritisation doesn't really make a fundamental difference.

    When the "best effort IP" service is the entire service it's in the provider's interest to make it not suck so they retain customers. OTOH when they offer both "best effort IP" and premium services it's in their interests to make the "best effort IP" service suck so they can sell more premium services (which may or may not be IP based).

  5. Re:What we really need on Mozilla Doubles Down on JPEG Encoding with mozjpeg 2.0 · · Score: 1

    It exists, it's called JNG but support for it is poor :(

  6. Re:The future turned out to not be so cool on Mozilla Doubles Down on JPEG Encoding with mozjpeg 2.0 · · Score: 1

    I think the largest PNG file that I've been aware of was under 500KB.

    I'm sure i've seen bigger.

    A 1080p frame in uncompressed RGB is about 6MB. Afaict PNG gets of the order of a 3x ratio on photographic data so we are probablly talking a couple of megs of png if someone lifts a frame from a 1080p video.

    You should be able to download that in less than 1/6th of a second with 24mb.

    Unfortunately the intenet architecture doesn't handle short connections well. The TCP/IP stack doesn't know what the available bandwidth is so it has to be conservative initially. On high bandwidth but also high latency connections (e.g. user in europe, server in the USA or vice-versa) it often doesn't reach the full speed available before the transfer is over.

    I just took a screenshot of my dual-monitor desktop and it was about 125KB. And that's just saving it with MS-Paint

    This is pretty meaningless without knowing what was on the desktop at the time.

  7. Re:The frick? on Pseudonyms Now Allowed On Google+ · · Score: 1

    In the early days of google+ there were reports of people losing their entire google account (not just google+) for signing up to google+ under something other than their real name. I can see why people would be reluctant to take that risk (however slight) with their main google account (throwaway accounts are another matter).

  8. Re:What's the big deal about win8? on Leaked Build of Windows 9 Shows Start Menu Return · · Score: 1

    I guess a lot of people here have Win8 forced upon them by external circumstances, which tends to put everyone in a sour mood.

    Yeah, you want/need a newer version of the core stuff and you get a new and supposedly improved GUI shoved down your throat.

    It's hardly unique to windows, look at all the gnome2 users who got gnome3 shoved down their throat when they updated to to the new release of their linux distros.

  9. Re:You Can make a Rasberry Pirate Radio on New Raspberry Pi Model B+ · · Score: 1

    Looks like the NUC has the same issue most high end arm boards do, only one ethernet port :( looks like it may be possible to add a minipcie card but only by butchering the case.

  10. Re:You Can make a Rasberry Pirate Radio on New Raspberry Pi Model B+ · · Score: 1

    How small is small?

    Once you go up to mini-itx there are loads of options but I sense that is rather bigger than you want to be.

    The utilite standard and pro models (but not the value model) have dual ethernet but they are kinda pricy. Theres various hackable routers but they tend to be rather lacking in CPU power and storage (they make a Pi look postively high end by comparision)

    The other option is to use an external USB ethernet adaptor.

  11. Re:Just an opinion... on Elite Group of Researchers Rule Scientific Publishing · · Score: 2

    I just did some googling and it seems here in the UK a full time gabage collector would make about £12K per year (though it's paid hourly and in practice it may be difficult to find full time work).

    I'm just about to start a postdoc position on just under £30K per year.

  12. Re:News? on Child Thought To Be Cured of HIV Relapses, Tests Positive Again · · Score: 1

    They thought she had been cured because treatement had stopped and the virus had not returned as expected.

    Turns out they were wrong, the virus just took longer to return than expected.

  13. Re:What has a DMV got to do with draft notices? on Today In Year-based Computer Errors: Draft Notices Sent To Men Born In the 1800s · · Score: 1

    AIUI (I don't live in the US so their may be errors in this)

    To issue notices to register for the draft (there is no draft in the US at the moment but registration is still required in case there is one) you need two things, firstly a list of people with their addresses, secondly a list of people who have already registered for the draft. Then they can take the people who are in the first list and not in the second list and send them notices.

    So the question becomes where to get that list, why the DMV well it's kinda simple.

    1: most people drive and hence are issued driving licenses by their state's DMV
    2: driving licenses are used as ID cards
    3: you have a minority of people who don't drive, these people nevertheless need some kind of ID card, the states decided that it was simpler to have the DMV issue ID cards to people even if they don't drive than to set up a separate ID card department.

    So the DMV database is the closest thing to a "database of all people in the state" that is readily available.

  14. Re:Huh? This info was in a live database? on Today In Year-based Computer Errors: Draft Notices Sent To Men Born In the 1800s · · Score: 1

    AIUI they used the DMV (driver registration) database to send out these reminders. Is it really that surprising that someone born in the 1890s could have been driving up to say the 1980s and have active records in the driving license database continuing into the 1990s and 2000s?

  15. Re:What might have happened. on Today In Year-based Computer Errors: Draft Notices Sent To Men Born In the 1800s · · Score: 1

    One scenario: some systems have tables that use a separate field for storing the century.

    Why do you think they have that field? Why would someone design a database that is less efficient and encourages wrong queries?

    Most likely because someone previously fucked up and thought 2-digit years would be enough, by the time they realised they needed to fix that it was easier to add a new field than change the semantics of an existing one. Given that how accurate do you expect the data in the centuary field to be for old records?

    and in some databases they didn't even go as far as adding a century field instead just assuming that 2 digit years represented dates in a window arround the current date.

  16. Re:Fedora can be annoying.. on CentOS Linux Version 7 Released On x86_64 · · Score: 1

    Do network drivers, serial drivers, input drivers, storage drivers, filesystem drivers and so-on belong in the kernel? microkernel advocates would say no, most designers of operating systems that actually get used have said yes.

    I don't see how at least the low level part of a video driver is any different.

  17. Re:Obvious on The World's Best Living Programmers · · Score: 1

    IMO he was a lucky buisness man but not just a lucky buisness man.

    You get super-rich by both being in the right place at the right time AND having the skills to exploit that. One or the other is not sufficiant.

  18. Re:Failsafe? on Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit That Would Increase Pilots' Field of View · · Score: 1

    I'm sure people said the same about fly by wire when it was first suggested.

    Yes it will likely take many years of experimentation, risk calculation, arguments with regulators and so-on to turn this from a concept into an actual product but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be delivered at an acceptable risk level.

  19. Re: Failsafe? on Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit That Would Increase Pilots' Field of View · · Score: 1

    Yes there is some risk of a total hydraulic or electrical failure but nevertheless the benefits from having larger planes than are practical with manual flight controls were deemed to outweigh those risks. Similarly the benefits from having a stronger more aerodynamic airframe and better visibility under normal conditions may be deemed to outweigh the risks of total camera system failure combined with a situation that prevents landing on instruments or a hazard that can only be spotted visually.

    You will never reduce the risk of flying to zero, there always has to be some balance.

  20. Re:Is it really a single board computer? on New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory · · Score: 1

    The documentation for using the module on your own board is available from the B2B section of their site. The connectors are off the shelf parts from hirose.

    However while desinging and making a carrier for this will be much easier than designing with the imx6 directly it's going to be beyond most hobbyists. The connectors have a pin spacing of 0.4mm and massive numbers of pins.

  21. Re:So the Chinese have created a free market econo on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    laws in most countries would probably support the consumer if they tried to return an unopened product in a reasonable time window.

    At least here in the UK there is a lot of protection for consumers but far less protection for people buying stuff for buisness reasons. The tricky bit of course is distinguishing real consumers from failed scalpers fraudulantly claiming to be consumers.

    no idea if the same applies in other countries.

  22. Re:Why not limit them to one per customer? on Oculus Suspends Oculus Rift Dev Kit Sales In China · · Score: 1

    If the markup per item is high enough then it may be worth paying people to buy them for you even for a single item.

    Or depending on how exactly they are enforcing the one per customer limit just creating fake identities for yourself.

  23. Re:Just A Thought on New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory · · Score: 1

    Not likely to happen any time soon, these arm SoCs simply don't have the memory busses to drive the number of ram chips you need to get that much ram. Heck even the mainstream desktop platforms from intel/AMD pratically max out at 32GB.

  24. Re:Banana Pi, Cubieboard, ODroid, BeagleBone ... on New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory · · Score: 1

    It's difficult to tell for sure without benchmarking individual applications. Having said that some general points

    The odriod line like the Pi have USB based ethernet (though some odriod models have multiple USB busses from the SoC unlike the Pi) and no SATA ports, I'd avoid them for anything storage/network heavy. IIRC they are also lagging behind in terms of getting kernel support upstream. On the other hand when it comes to CPU power they are at the uppper end of what affordable arm boards offer.

    The IMX6 based stuff (wandboard, cubox etc) seems like a pretty good all round choice, make sure you get a model with SATA if storage is important to you.

    Most of the boards have some sort of GPIO but sometimes it's on awkward connectors or the software is immature. For some applications a board with a dedicated IO processor like the UDOO (or the arduino Tre when it's released) may be worth considering.

  25. Re:Not impressed on New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory · · Score: 1

    There is no such thing as a "generic arm board", there are a load of SoCs out there which while they share the CPU core design they are very different in pretty much every other way. The differences don't end at SoC level, there are many differences at the board level too. Most pins on a modern SoC are programable to multiple functions and if you want things to work then the important ones need to be programmed to match the hardware you have on the board. Enumeratable "plug and play" busses are they exception not the rule.

    If you have documentation than porting the bootloader and kernel is likely to be hard work but doable, without documentation it is going to be extremely difficult. In my experiance kernels intended for andriod often have problems running regular linux userlands and vendor kernels are often way out of date. Also a serial console is needed to debug/troubleshoot this stuff and most phones/tablets don't have an easilly accessible serial console.

    Once you have a usable bootloader and kernel then getting a generic linux system up and running is fairly easy. Of course if you want to use specific features of the chip (e.g. acceslerated graphics) then you will have more work to do.