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User: 140Mandak262Jamuna

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  1. There are only 48 bird species? on How Birds Lost Their Teeth · · Score: 1

    Very badly written article. The bad writing is not in the summary, it is in the original. There are about 4500 bird species. There are 48 orders. Species -> genus -> family -> order. All extant bird orders, and they took one sample species from each. The article has mangled the reporting of the original research.

  2. They did not floss, that is why on How Birds Lost Their Teeth · · Score: 1

    Birds have very poor oral hygiene. Eating worms and scratching the dirt and what not. And they never flossed. It was just a matter of time before they lost their teeth.

  3. Forbes has no standing to complain on Forbes Blasts Latests Windows 7 Patch as Malware · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Forbes faithfully parroted every Gartner study fully bought for by Microsoft, like the Total Cost of Ownership. It claimed Microsoft has reached a "utility" status and it should be considered a "widows-and-orphans" stock. It actively contributed to the culture of lazy CIOs choosing Microsoft because no one got fired for choosing Microsoft. It turned a blind eye to every illegal maneuver by Microsoft. Now, suddenly, it is blasting Microsoft? I think Microsoft is a lesser evil than Forbes.

  4. I like Picassa on Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Image Organization? · · Score: 1

    You organize the photos and folders any way you like. It does not modify any original photo or image file. Instead it scans the folders for new files, builds indexes such that you can view the photos either by folders, or by albums or by tagged faces etc. You can add captions to photos, and folders, search based on wild cards and then create an album out of search results. Has some other features like making collages out of selection, keeping a few albums synched with on line sharing, making slide show movies etc.

  5. Why can't they use eminent domain? on Judge Rules Drug Maker Cannot Halt Sales of Alzheimer's Medicine · · Score: 1
    There is already a well established practice by which the Government can show public interest, take over private property (after compensating the current owners) and use it for public purpose. In fact courts have ruled govt can even turn over the properties taken under eminent domain to other private parties! Why should the eminent domain be restricted to real estate? It can easily be extended to intellectual properties.

    So instead of making general law changes asking for broad restrictions to patented drugs, the government can make the case for specific patents, show the public interest, take it over turn to the generic manufacturers.

  6. Re:Windows doesn't stop it on Former iTunes Engineer Tells Court He Worked To Block Competitors · · Score: 1

    cygwin is not a linux emulator. It provides typical linux shells like csh or bash in windows. It also has a X11 server, most of unix utilities.

  7. Re:Ignored Niches on Apple's iPod Classic Refuses To Die · · Score: 1
    When they first broke into the music selling market, the entire music market was open, and the fastest way to make money is to sell music. A decade later most people who want to buy music, middle aged people nostalgic for their teenage music with money to burn, etc etc have been tapped out. They still have to show similar revenue, and revenue growth to satisfy the Wall St bean counters. When you have over 75% market share already, maintaining revenue and growth becomes increasingly difficult. At this point they want all new music to go into the rental model with continued revenue potential.

    Take a look at the Microsoft MsOffice market. It was selling perpetual licenses, and to maintain revenue growth it kept raising the prices. After reaching impossible for software prices like 500$ for a full office suite, 150$ for Excel+Word they could not sustain it anymore. Google stepped in with a low end Cloud-Office suite at 50$ a pop per year and made serious inroads into MsOffice monopoly. The first serious challenge, the first challenge to MsOffice franchise that got traction was GoogleDocs. We might laugh at the mickey mouse features of GoogleDocs compared to MsOffice, we might see OpenOffice and LibreOffice are far more serious implementations. But, on the ground, GoogleDocs had just two things going for it. Extremely good collaboration features and a tempting "it is just 50$, let us try it for a while" price. Now Microsoft is pitching OfficeLive365 as 50$ a year all you can eat buffet. It used to sell the entire suite for 50$ in the 1990s, student version perpetual license were 30$ as recently 2009. Now?

    Almost all the software companies want to go into subscription model, software as service, rent not own, model. All the media companies too. Price blue-ray disc at 25$, but stream HD rental at 5$. Rent, not own. That is the way all media and software companies are evolving into.

  8. Re:Ignored Niches on Apple's iPod Classic Refuses To Die · · Score: 2

    What are the chances something like you said has not already been discussed in the Infinite Loop? Apple does not want you to own and store your own music/media. It wants you to rent and stream all your media. It wants a cut from streaming service providers, and content providers.

  9. Why does it take for ever? on Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted · · Score: 3, Funny

    The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster."

    Back in my days, every mysterious signal from every star system follows a well rehearsed routine. People get beamed down, they see even more mysterious things happen and finally they get everything resolved and are back in the Enterprise in 46 minutes, all set up and ready to boldly go where no man had gone before. Come on, resolve it already scientists. Whats the matter with you lazy bums?

  10. There is nothing odd about it. on LG To Show Off New 55-Inch 8K Display at CES · · Score: 1

    If you double the length and the width of the rectangle you will get four times the area. There is nothing odd about it. Quadratic (and cubic ) relationships are very common. Typically the height of human beings and their mass follows a cubic relationship. The urban sprawl distance and the area of the city follows a quadratic relationship. It is not odd. It is just math.

  11. Selfish gene: highly misunderstood term on Study Explains Why Women Miscarry More Males During Tough Times · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Richard Dawkins' book the Selfish Gene is probably one of the most misunderstood book titles ever. Dawkins was too clever for his own good, and you need to read his entire book to get to what he means by that term. He most definitely does not mean "there is a gene that makes people/organisms selfish".

    He goes after the chicken and egg problem. Most people think of the egg as chicken's way of making a new chicken. But it is equally plausible, the chicken is merely the egg's way of making a new egg. We think we use genes to more copies of ourselves. Can we consider the genes are making more copies of themselves using us, the humans as a species, as mere replicating machine or incubator?

    The question he poses is, "Are genes our selfish way of making more copies of ourselves? Or we are merely replicating machines under the control of the selfish genes?". He takes half the book to make people understand the question. Then the other half to prove, indeed the genes are in control and we are mere replicators. Some of the genes we have in our bodies have copies living in other species, other genera. Some of them are 100 million years old. The genes as a whole are the selfish ones vis a vis the organisms as a whole. They survive. We don't. We as individuals, we as species, we as genus are dispensable. The genes, as a whole, are selfish compared to the animal bodies they live in. The Selfish Gene. Not gene for selfishness.

  12. Re:Sexual Harassment shouldn't cost us knowledge on MIT Removes Online Physics Lectures and Courses By Walter Lewin · · Score: 1
    It is not just the slashdot articles alone. Anything can be an opportunity to bash Obama. And you don;t have to twist anything. Just anything under the sun is an opportunity to bash Obama.

    Sun just came up in the East. Damn, have to get out of bed and go to work now. Thanks, Obama.

    Sun just came up in the East. Damn, I still don't have a job to go to. Thanks, Obama.

    See? it is easy.

  13. Oronyms are part of Tamil grammar. on Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I did not know it is called oronyms till I read about it today. But the pronunciation of a string of words differently to mean different things is part of grammar lessons in Tamil. The famous example I studied on eighth grade has the word "aarudhal" repeating throughout the poem, taking the meaning "six heads", "river on the head", "exchanged head" and "salvation" at different places.

    Most Indian languages are written exactly as they are spoken, no silent letters. They also have very strict rules about how the pronunciation changes when say, a "n" follows a "ga" or "cha" or "ta" or "tha" or "pa". In fact Hindi would reduce "N" to a dot, because the preceding consonant would unambiguously define the pronunciation of the n, even though n has three different glyphs representing the labial, palatal and the dental versions of it.

    Steven Pinker mentions some African languages using seven tenses instead of the usual present, past and future. Jared Diamond mentions some Pacific Island language that has words for "towards the sea" and "away from the sea", as in "there is a speck of dirt on your seawards cheek"

    The richness of the languages and constructs are astounding. And most of the 6000 languages of the world are moribund and are expected to go extinct soon.

  14. oh! my! a new algorithm!! on An Algorithm To Prevent Twitter Hashtag Degeneration · · Score: 1

    Is this "algorithm" manage the lines of people waiting to get ice in desert better? Would it cure world hunger too?

  15. OMG! Another salvo in the arms race. on Robots Modeled On Ancient Fish Help Researchers Study Origins of Extinct Species · · Score: 1

    So the arms race between Jesus Fish vs Darwin Fish goes up by one notch now?

  16. Corporate corruption is also a cause on Displaced IT Workers Being Silenced · · Score: 1
    The out sourcing decisions are often insane and it does not make any sense. Till you take into account possible corruption at the highest levels of IT management in huge companies.

    I know an Indian independent contractor who worked on contract for a large electric utility. He managed six warm bodies provided by some Indian company. His contract came from some company that had a contract with another company and the grand parent company was the vendor to the electric utility. Each was padding up his hourly rate. It was rumoured one of the shell companies that did no work other than to shuffle paperwork and skim 10$ an hour from each contractor was owned by a relative of the top IT manager of the electric utility.

    There are perverse incentives in the system to roil an smoothly working system, promise heaven and earth using some powerpoint magic, and deliberately trigger a crisis. Crisis means no bid contracts, crazy decisions and highly inflated costs.

  17. Is it really true? on How One Man Changed the Ecology of the Great Lakes With Salmon · · Score: 4, Funny

    The story sounds a little too fishy.

  18. Egypt? Bad choice on Man Caught Trying To Sell Plans For New Aircraft Carrier · · Score: 0

    He should have sold the CAD drawings to the guy who 3D printed the handgun. "Print your own aircraft carrier!" Second amendment! woot!

  19. Re:Entrapment is lazy policing on Man Caught Trying To Sell Plans For New Aircraft Carrier · · Score: 2

    He got his clearance just four months back, so they will say it is routine follow up. But definitely being saudi born played a role. FBI is in tough spot. Imagine they had left this guy alone and he turned out to be a mole or a spy. All the media would be asking "Why fbi did not connect the dots? Why alarm bells did not go off?". Essentially asking FBI why it did not do racial profiling. But if it does racial profiling then it is pilloried for that too.

  20. Re:Do something interesting on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Electronics-Induced Inattentiveness? · · Score: 2

    Yes. A proper root cause analysis is important here.

    Is electronics the actual root cause? I suspect not. Most of the issues the OP describes are pretty typical examples of stress/burnout.

    Or depression, anxiety about future, or a combination.

  21. India, Africa and South America would lead the way on Why Elon Musk's Batteries Frighten Electric Companies · · Score: 2
    In the developed world with a very reliable grid, it would take a while for rooftop solar to effect a break through. But where grid electricity is unreliable they will go solar much more voluntarily, even paying premium prices. Already in India almost all the homes have inverters and lead-acid truck batteries. They typically provide 10 hours of juice for one TV, two ceiling fans and two or three fluorescent lamps. Richer folks there routinely run portable gas generators, (that noisy smelly polluting Honda thingie) all night long when there is a power cut. There are folks who drive around the city in their air conditioned cars when there is a powercut. In those places rooftop solar with battery back up will fetch premium prices.

    It is very much possible the utility companies may be able to stymie and delay the solar adoption in USA, but rest of the world will pay premium prices, and pay off the installation costs of these factories. So when the dam breaks and they start flooding the market, there is nothing that will save the utilities.

  22. Re:Perspective on LinkedIn Study: US Attracting Fewer Educated, Highly Skilled Migrants · · Score: 1

    Most people consider 250K as high six figure income. (meaning high income + six figure income). It would not be 1% but still up there with the rest.

  23. Understanding the Indian retailers. on Indian Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Snub Android One Phones · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The retail sector in India evolved under very severe capital crunch. The retailer was the king in that environment. It was the retailer who takes the risk and orders goods to be sold, put up the money whether it gets sold or not. Unsold retail merchandise is never taken by the manufacturer usually in India. They borrow using a traditional chit fund system. They borrow at 24% to 36% rate of interest. Sometimes even higher than that. They usually operate at 40% margin, not counting the cost of capital. They cooperate (or collude, depending on your POV) and treat both customers and their suppliers with little mercy.

    Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them. They are used to hardball by retailer and any naive implementation of US level customer service will be gamed to death within two quarters.

    Google will do well to

    1 open its own stores,

    2 use its strength in access to capital,

    3 introduce products with differentiation so that you would not be using the same phone your driver is using,

    4 deliver superior customer service to those who play fair

    5 undertake price war for the in market above "servant maids and drivers and cooks" sector and below the "MNC executive, people rolling in black money" sector

  24. The key word is start ups. on Is a Moral Compass a Hindrance Or a Help For Startups? · · Score: 2

    Once you get to be too big to fail, you also become too big to jail. Banksters like Jamie Dimon would simply call the fed and ask it to call off this investigation or that probe. So it is beyond question lack of moral compass helps the big companies. It is when they are small people are debating about it.

  25. Do we need Nielsen to track netflix and amazon? on Nielsen Will Start Tracking Netflix and Amazon Video · · Score: 1

    These providers dish out individual streams! They seem to know what I might like and watch next!! Do they need Nielsen? That company's business model has gone kaput. The market has moved on.