Slashdot Mirror


User: level_headed_midwest

level_headed_midwest's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
994
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 994

  1. Re:Maybe... on Bounty For Booting XP on the Intel iMac · · Score: 1

    People want to run IE under WINE on Linux so they can visit sites that only work with IE while being able to use their OS of choice (Linux) since there is no native form of IE for Linux. Now if they were trying to run the Windows version of Firefox under WINE in Linux, that would be dumb as there is a native Linux version. I run an entire installation of Windows XP from within VMPlayer so that I can start up IE and view that one page that requires it or open that one out of 400 documents that does not show up 100% correctly in OpenOffice.

  2. Re:the blame game on State of WLAN Support on Linux? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Add the venerable Orinoco 802.11b to that list also. Works like a champ on my laptop.

  3. A few issues to address still on Cardiac Patch for a Broken Heart · · Score: 1

    This is a very good idea and autografts (tissue grafts made from the patients' own cells) have been used to replace skin on burn patients for some time. However, I see a few issues that need to be addressed:

    1. Proper muscle function. If the cardiac patch grows and replaces the dead tissue, it will not do much good if the muscle doesn't contract and pump blood like real tissue does.

    2. Scarring. The heart would have a large amount of scarring from where the ischemic tissue was removed. Also, the graft would need to integrate into the cardiac muscle around it and that results in scarring also. The scarring could impair proper functioning.

    3. Integration time and materials strength. The graft would need to be implanted into the heart and it must not leak or come loose from the first minute the heart is re-started. Sutures would likely not be enough to keep the heart from leaking blood around the graft and leading to congestive heart failure. Maybe a mesh patch material as they use for artificial blood vessels would need to be used to provide a seal to keep the heart from leaking blood AND as a framework to allow tissue integration. But those have their own problems...

    Once those issues get solved, I think the rest is smooth sailing. It will be very difficult to solve, but I am convinced that the world's biomedical engineers will find a solution.

  4. Re:Pretty dumb infosec tips, time for a list? on Is Obsolescence Good Computer Security? · · Score: 1

    4. dumb. I have an antivirus program installed, so I am safe.
    4. smart. Make sure you UPDATE and RUN that antivirus program regularly.

  5. Re:This sounds less like on UCLA Students Urged to Expose 'Radical' Professors · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have had experience with this. I had to take an English class whose theme was "War and Society"...and this was in the fall of 2003, not too long after the Iraq operation started. My instructor (a master's student) was very far to the left- about every day he would say, "Did you hear what happened in our illegal invasion of Iraq today? F*** Bush!!!" We had to write largely opinion-based papers and I wrote one that several who read it thought was pretty politically neutral. I turned it in and got a C-. I am not that great of a writer, but I do better than that. So I went and talked to him about the paper. He said that I needed to write what I thought, and being a naive young freshman, I wrote what I thought, which was a little right of center. Bad move: D-. So I asked him for advice on the next paper and what I ended up writing literally made me sick, but I wrote a very left-wing paper and got a B+ on it. He liked to see that he "helped me see the light" and so from then on, I wrote what he wanted to hear and not what I really thought and I did well.

    However, I got the last laugh as when evaluations came around, I wrote a very accurate review of his class that was about as flattering as a miniskirt on Roseanne. (That makes my cringe just thinking about it! Gaaah!) Next semester came and he was not listed as a staff member. I inquired why and I was informed that he was terminated due to bad evaluations. He was let go from his TA position and now had to pay $30,000/year to continue his grad classes. He didn't have the money, so he quit school.

    So the moral of the story is that you have to be *tenured* to pull that crap off in the classroom. Otherwise, it just might catch up to you.

  6. Re:Liberal academics on UCLA Students Urged to Expose 'Radical' Professors · · Score: 1

    I think all 4 parent posters hit the issue right on the head. Academics as a rule tend to be liberal and thus tend to attract and hire other liberals. Conservatives tend to work in business and thus tend to attract and hire other conservatives. Like tends to beget like.

  7. Re:Too True on College Students Lack Literacy · · Score: 1

    Actually, it is. I take it that you have never taken an engineering, math, or physics class or have not done so since about 1950. If you have, you'd understand exactly what I am talking about.

  8. Re:Eduflation? on College Students Lack Literacy · · Score: 0

    Yo dawg, I aint's havin' NO trouble wid' my langidge, foo!

  9. Re:It is frustrating... on College Students Lack Literacy · · Score: 1

    It's all a conspiracy to get you to fork over more money to go to grad school...

  10. Re:Too True on College Students Lack Literacy · · Score: 1

    Have you ever listened to a professor lately? THEY can't put together a sentence worth a darn either. For example, I heard this in my fluids class: "You take cylinder fill it water to x meet h and what pressure have you?"

  11. Re:Simple on When Should You Stop Support for Software? · · Score: 3, Funny

    I say first off code good, w3c-compliant HTML code that any browser should be able to render. Try to keep your website simple, elegant, and to the point. Keep the stuff that requires plugins to view (Java applets, Flash/Shockwave animations, Quicktime movies) to a bare minimum as they will take much longer to load and to tell the truth, a bunch of flashy-blinky stuff gets very annoying very quickly. Also, not everybody will have the plugins to view them (for example there is no Shockwave for Linux) and the others might not want to have to go out and get plugins just to view your site.

    And as for testing- look at your logs and see what people use and use those browsers to test. One caveat to that is that lots of browsers can spoof their headers to appear as other ones, except for IE, which neither can nor would ever need to. Commonly, they will appear as IE 6.0 on Windows XP but the browser could actually be anything. So if you see more than the occasional hit by a browser other than IE or Firefox, you kind of have to assume that there is some spoofing going on and should test with those browsers even if the apparent share may only be 1% on your site. I know because I do it- my user agent string usually says Safari 1.2.3 on a Mac PPC or Firefox 1.0 on Windows NT 5.1 (XP) when it is really Konqueror 3.5.0 on i686 Linux. The rendering engine in Konqueror is very similar to the one in Safari so the pages that are for Safari will work with Konqueror just fine. Firefox's GRE is a bit different than Konqueror/Safari KHTML, but it usually works OK. Some web sites tend to have heart attacks when they see the real user agent string and scream "UNSUPPORTED BROWSER!!!" "UNSUPPORTED OS!!!" "DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!!! DANGER!!!" but with a fake one in place, it works perfectly.

    Which also leads me to say- don't check browser/OS version for your site unless you are doing junk like using ActiveX that *requires* IE on Windows. It is a pain in the butt and as my user-agent string experience has proven, useless. Just don't do it.

  12. When to stop support on When Should You Stop Support for Software? · · Score: 1

    The university I attend has a IT policy to EOL and stop supporting software that is more than two versions older than the most recent version. For example, they support MS Office 2003, XP, and 2000, but do not for Office 98/97 or earlier. I think this is a pretty good approach as you only have to support three versions of a product and the users can predict when their version will get EOLed.

  13. Re:Comparing single core G5 to dual core x86. WTF? on Intel Mac Performance Behind Hype · · Score: 2

    I understand that it is not really a fair fight, but they are directly comparing chips available in that specific model, and to the best of my knowledge, the dual-core G5s did not make it into the iMacs. If Apple wanted to see what chips were the fastest bar none, yeah, then they would put a dual-core G5 vs. a Core Duo.

  14. Re:This is always the case on Intel Mac Performance Behind Hype · · Score: 1

    Even quantitative enchmarks are notoriously very poor at giving a definitive answer of "yes, this is faster" that will hold true for everyone's usages unless the two things being benchmarked are not even in the same league, such as if you put my 2.2GHz P4-M up against a new AMD FX-60 or Pentium 955 EE. You more or less have to have butt time with the systems that you want to compare to see what is faster for you. For example, my usage entails keeping lots of office apps open at the same time and I also compile programs now and then. I have a laptop, so power consumption and heat are big issues for me. So, I pretty much ignore all of the multimedia, gaming, and synthetic benchmarks and look at power usage, compile times, and multitasking benchmarks. And then I use that as a *rough* guide to pick a CPU as there are a lot more factors to look at than raw performance. There are differences in the features of chipsets, the costs of the CPUs can differ, one might not be very available, etc.

  15. Re:Never trust an article with a (R) symbol... on Boosting Socket Performance on Linux · · Score: 1

    Linux IS a registered trademark, you know. Especially if you are an Australian...

  16. Re:GPL violators are at risk on Some Linux Users Violate Sarbanes-Oxley · · Score: 1

    How about we form a GPL Software Alliance and carry on like the BSA does?

  17. Why not sue the companies that violate the GPL? on Some Linux Users Violate Sarbanes-Oxley · · Score: 1

    Why don't the people who wrote the GPLed software sue the companies that are in violation if it for a lot of money? As it is right now, parties use GPL code as their own with about no repercussions, such as First4Internet did in its XCP rootkit. If OSS is even going to be taken as seriously by everybody, the OSS programmers need to sue infringement like Microsoft or SCO do.

  18. Re:I have always drooled over on Intel Loses Market Share to AMD · · Score: 1

    I have been running a Unix-based OS with a great GUI running on fast Intel hardware since about 2003. Mac OS does have some differences with the *nixes (such as Quartz vs. X11), but a Unix-derived OS with a great GUI running on x86 hardware is certainly not Apple's new or unique idea. Other firms even sold their *nix OS only on their own boxes (Sun comes to mind.) What I can say that Apple did differently was to market it to the general public- that had not been done much before.

  19. Re:Shift in importance from hardware to software on Intel Loses Market Share to AMD · · Score: 1

    That more or less happened about 15+ years ago when about everybody had 80386s and 80486s and could run 32-bit x86 code. As of a few years ago, you could get x86_64 chips, but they can all run 32-bit code natively.

  20. Re:Old software on The Debian System Explained · · Score: 1

    Some of the Red Hat variants also offer updates to the latest and greatest software pretty much as soon as it gets out of beta. SuSE has always been that way with updates to KDE and Gnome. I had KDE 3.5.0 literally hours after it was released. Same for 3.4.0 and 3.3.0. And they pretty much always work OK right off.

  21. Re:Shhhhhhhh!! on The Debian System Explained · · Score: 1

    You could always write your own distro. Do it in assembly language- that would certainly be unique.

  22. Re:Is Debian a fad? on The Debian System Explained · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I went through a different set of phases:

    Debian (Woody) -> SuSE -> Ubuntu -> SuSE.

    Debian Woody was NOT the right distro for somebody to start out on Linux with. I thought I had mis-installed it when all I got was a command line- I didn't know I had to startx. So I went to SuSE and ran with that for a year and a half. When my HDD crapped out, I thought I would give Ubuntu a try, and it stayed with me a couple of months. It was nice, but suspending was a ***** and OpenSuSE 10.0 finally became usable. So I went back to it. APT is wonderful, Debian-based systems are lighter, but the only distro that always works well with little dicking around is SuSE.

  23. Re:Pennies must go! on Earth's Copper Supply Inadequate For Development? · · Score: 1

    Hmm. I did not know that, only that the machines spat out my Sacajawea dollars.

  24. Re:Pennies must go! on Earth's Copper Supply Inadequate For Development? · · Score: 1

    Hmm. I did not know that any machines took the Susan B. Anthony dollars. They are not common anymore and worth more than a buck to a collector, so I have obviously never stuck one in a machine to try. And if they did, why the heck didn't the government make the Sacajawea dollars the same size, mass, and conductivity as the Susan B.'s so we could use them as a drop-in replacement in vending machines?

  25. Re:A Test to Verify the Numbers on Keyboards Are Disgusting · · Score: 1

    Toilet seats are generally nonporous and do not get used much. A few minutes of seat time a couple of times a day does not transfer nearly the amount of bacteria that hours of touching transfer to the keyboard. Also, our hands are much dirtier than our rear ends. The really bacteria-laced stuff goes *through* the seat and does not get on it. So toilet seats are not that dirty. The only parts of a toilet that would be are the flush handle (touched by hands) and possibly the bowl if it is not flushed.