Slashdot Mirror


User: dan+the+person

dan+the+person's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
342
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 342

  1. Re: As Frontalot says on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 2

    Definition of 'Quantitative Easing'

    An unconventional monetary policy in which a central bank purchases government securities or other securities from the market in order to lower interest rates and increase the money supply. Quantitative easing increases the money supply by flooding financial institutions with capital in an effort to promote increased lending and liquidity.

    http://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quantitative-easing.asp

  2. Re:As Frontalot says on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    how can we be sure that an exchange won't be hacked?

    Exactly. We can be sure traditional banks won't be hacked because they are regulated by the government appointed banking regulator.

    And if they had loose security that somehow the regulators missed and loose billions in wire-fraud? In most countries the government guarantees your funds to a certain extent. So the question becomes, do you trust your government? (or the government in charge of the foreign currency you are storing).

    This is the trouble with bit-coin. All currencies are based on faith. Faith that they will hold value (that the government wont print money), faith that they will be accepted for exchange (again, government mandated for most currencies). With bit-coin, to whom do you place your faith?

  3. Re:Not in London on How Safe Is Cycling? · · Score: 1

    What the hell are you talking about? 25% of morning peak road traffic in central london is cyclists, so there are allot of people that disagree with you.

    Nothing particularly dangerous about London, in fact i would say it feels safer than many cities because there are so many cyclists on the road you really feel that motorists will anticipate you such as being on the inside of them when they turn left. Watch out passing heavy trucks on the inside, same as anywhere else.

    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2013/jun/25/cyclists-quarter-london-vehicles

  4. Re:The Third World was first on California Becomes First State In Nation To Regulate Ride-Sharing · · Score: 2

    No it's when the US does something the third (and second) world pioneered. Third world didn't pioneer breathing. (though you could argue they pioneered human breathing if you believe we first evolved there. Of course back then it would have been the most highly developed and thus a first world continent).

    This ride-sharing is very common in the former soviet bloc too, though it's of the rather more basic wave-your-arm up and down at all the passing cars type technology rather than using phones.

  5. Re:Using Microsoft for a 5-nines SLA? Is that a jo on The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day · · Score: 1

    yes. software connectivity.

    this wasn't a hardware failure or site failure.

    Regardless, the guys assertion that only unix can do clustering is retarded.

    And a resiliant cluster doesn't protect you from software bugs. The same bugs exist in the same software installed on the other hosts.

  6. Re:Using Microsoft for a 5-nines SLA? Is that a jo on The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day · · Score: 1

    The exchange was running the whole time. You think the guys that built TradeElect haven't heard of clusters? Yeah they're probably running it on a single node dell box right?

    It was a connectivity outage numnut.

  7. Re:Old boards on Ask Harald Welte, "VIA's open source representative" · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you use the openchrome drivers instead of VIAs own drivers, then the MPEG2 acceleration, subject to hardware caveats[1] is supported by stock xine, mplayer, and myth. No need for special forked builds like viaexp.

    The MII board features a CLE266 chipset which is fully supported for MPEG2 hardware acceleartion

    [1]http://wiki.openchrome.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=HardwareCaveats

  8. Drivers Drivers Drivers on Ask Harald Welte, "VIA's open source representative" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    VIA has a history of releasing chipsets packed full of great video acceleration, but no drivers to make use of that acceleration, sometimes there are even no windows drivers either.

    Looking at the linux drivers for instance[1], there are big gaps, and it is disapointing to see no drivers to support the base MPEG4 acceleration let alone new features such as h.264 acceleration.

    I have an EPIA SP8000E and the MPEG2 acceleration (XvMC) implemented by the openchrome drivers is awesome, such a shame more than that cannot be supported.

    VIA has once again re-launched their linux drivers[2], and once again the support is very limited, only a small number of distributions, a small number of chipsets, and a small number of hardware features supported. Furthermore applications that can make use of these drivers features are almost non-existent

    Wouldn't it be better to work with the the established driver teams such as openchrome, who have broad distribution support, broad chipset support, and are broadly supported by applications, to add the missing hardware support?

    [1]http://wiki.openchrome.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=HardwareCaveats
    [2]http://linux.via.com.tw

  9. Re:Um, well... on Chipped Passport Cloned In Minutes · · Score: 1

    but it's not a replacement for old fasion visual inspection.

    I've been through airports in portugal where there is no human visual inspection. If you have a biometric chipped passport, you can go in a different lane where a machine verifies your image matches that on the chip.

    If you are going to effort of putting in a security system, at least put in one known to work.

  10. Re:lolwut on Ron Paul Campaign Answers Slashdot Reader Questions · · Score: 1

    Many years ago, on a certain presidential campaign (which one is not important; he didn't win), if you got a "personal" answer to your letter addressed to the candidate, chances are that I wrote it and "signed" his name with a machine that scrawled "his" signature with a felt-tip pen.

    You really can't expect a presidential candidate to personally answer all requests or even all media requests.


    You can however, expect that when someone from his team is answering on his behalf, they indicate that they are doing so, and do not engage in deception to make it appear a personal response was received.

  11. Re:Insider knowledge on How To Lose $7.2B With Just a Few Basic Skills · · Score: 2, Informative

    he wasn't using 'insider knowledge' i.e. information about a company that has not been made public, to trade in that companies shares.

    He was using inside knowledge of his employers trader monitoring procedures, to trade with his employers capital beyond his allowed limits.

  12. Re:...and requires accuracy to the nearest second? on Y2K38 Watch Starts Saturday · · Score: 1

    For starters, interest is often calculated daily instead of monthly.

  13. Re:Hmm... on Is the Dell XPS One Better than the Apple iMac? · · Score: 1

    Didn't notice the TV tuner[...]It's a vital point I overlooked.

    I wouldn't call 10 quid vital.

    http://www.ebuyer.com/product/123327

  14. Re:oh please... on IBM's Five Predictions for the Future · · Score: 1

    exactly. When i want to turn my dishwasher on is just after i have finished filling it. It is far more convenient to press the start button on the machine than to go and find my laptop. As for powering down, it should do that once it's finished, simple.

    the only intelligence I want in my gadgets it on the lines of smart machines that can detect the load and vary the power consumption and resource usage accordingly

    fisher and paykel have been making washing machines like that for decades.

  15. Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster on First Look At Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 · · Score: 1

    Even my dad has learned how to kill Acrobat Reader when it hangs his system, and let me tell you, he's the furthest thing from a developer.

    top is not an end-user application. Firefox should not have 'mozilla-top' on the Tools menu.

    If you want to close an unresponsive app on windows secondary click the app in the task bar and choose close. If it's not responding, windows will prompt you to kill it. Works similarly on Mac and KDE.

  16. Re:OpenFiler on Best Home Network NAS · · Score: 1

    In the poster's case, it seems as though getting a couple of SATA disks and using software RAID 1 should be more than adequate.

    In RAID 1, wouldn't he just end up with the MBR scrambled on both discs?

    raid1 is only going to protect against drive failure, not data corruption.

  17. Re:If you work in IT, you shouldn't support OLPC on Mass OLPC Production Begins · · Score: 1

    Yes yes, much better to keep the rest of the world poor and illiterate. That will really shrink our export markets and protect our jobs.

    Oh wait, now i've been layed off because because our sales just shrunk, whoops!

  18. Re:Question on Apple's "Time Machine" Now For Linux... Sort Of · · Score: 1

    Is this different to standard incremental backups?

    You do a full backup on monday, incrementals all week, then a full backup next monday. You keep one full backup for each week of the last month, and the first backup of the month for previous months.

  19. Re:I truly hope for the end of gcj/gij on Red Hat Joins Open Source Java Project · · Score: 1

    I truly hope for the end of gcj/gij

    I think there is still a place for gcj as a native java compiler. What's stopping them now compiling against the OpenJDK class libraries instead of classpath? Should be a huge improvement for compatibility.

  20. Re:Ubuntu To Do List on Ubuntu Dev Summit Lays Out Plans For Hardy Heron · · Score: 1

    On Linux, no end user really needs to care about what Java is, whether it comes preinstalled and what version.

    You've obviously never tried getting java to work in firefox on 64bit linux. It's a right pain the ass and the easiest way i found to get things working was unpack 32 bit versions of the apps in ~/apps/firefox and ~/apps/java. Getting multiple versions to coexist is otherwise painful with the way linux spreads things out over /usr/bin/firefox /usr/lib/firefox etc

  21. Re:Concerning this Gibi nonsense on Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives · · Score: 1

    No one in their right mind would ever measure units on binary hardware in powers of ten.

    Just because something is binary, it doesn't follow that it units abbreviations should be powers of two. So if people moved to GiB for power of two units, people would still use GB for power of ten units.

    There are plenty of things to measure in the IT context that use powers of ten, networking equipment always has used ^10 and disc storage uses it more often that not.

    Hence the need for separate unambiguous terminology.

  22. Re:Ubuntu To Do List on Ubuntu Dev Summit Lays Out Plans For Hardy Heron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's because the Linux filesystem layout comes from Unix, and that was made to be optimal for system administration.

    Meanwhile, the OS X filesystem layout which also comes from Unix, has been adapted to be optimal for users.

  23. Re:Summary missed the most part: Case on $200 Linux PCs On Sale At Wal-Mart · · Score: 1

    has nothing to do with being enviromentally[sic] conscious.

    In addition to what the parent said about low power, it's also the -D variant of the C7, this one comes with carbon offsets.

    http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c7-d/

    World's First Carbon Free Processor

    The VIA C7®-D processor is the world's first Carbon Free computer component, helping individuals and organizations reduce their Carbon Footprint. For every VIA C7-D processor sold VIA works with environmental experts to calculate the electricity used over the processors lifetime (assumed to be 3 years). Then from the amount of electricity used, VIA calculates how much CO2 emissions will be released into the environment mainly as a result of fossil fuel burning power plants, and then works with regional offset organizations to "offset" that amount of CO2 through projects such as:

            * Reforestation: Planting trees in different areas around the world that absorb (or sequester) CO2 as they grow.
            * Alternative Energy: By promoting alternative energy such as Solar power, power plants don't need to burn as much fossil fuels reducing the amount of CO2 released into the environment.
            * Energy conservation: Efforts to help reduce the amount of energy used, meaning that power plants don't need to burn so much fossil fuels reducing the amount of CO2 released into the environment.

  24. Re:SCO used to be really good. on Investment Firm Bids to Buy SCOs UNIX Operations · · Score: 1

    They are not going to be breathe any life into SCO. They are going to tear it apart and sell off what they can

    In other words, the are going try and breathe life back into those parts that look like they might have a chance of survival.

    Better than everything going down with the ship.

  25. Re:Macs on 'Hybrid' HDD Technology To Allow Data Access Without Booting · · Score: 1

    Isn't it about time Apple caught up with the rest of the computer world and started supporting it via USB so they could actually interoperate with non-Applers?

    Ever noticed how firewire cables have the same connector on both ends, but USBs cables have different connectors?

    USB is master / slave aka host / device, not peer to peer like firewire.

    So it's impossible to do. The laptop would need to act as a USB device requiring an extra chip on the motherboard and another connector.

    Isn't it about time the rest of the industry caught up with apple? All my PCs came with firewire...