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User: GGardner

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  1. 1/2 the size of a Cessna, but 3x the passengers? on JetBlue and Boeing Are Betting Big On Electric Jet Startup 'Zunem Aero' (theverge.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A Cessna 172 is 27 feet long, and carries 4 people, including one or two pilots. This thing claims to be 10 to 15 feet long, and carry 10 passengers + a pilot or two? How's that gonna work?

  2. Re:Prior art? on GM Dumps $500 Million Into Lyft (nytimes.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You are totally missing the point. The goal is to get $1B in funding to start a service called "nothing at all like a lawyer", were you get other suckers who are not lawyers to represent even bigger suckers in court, and you sit back and take a percentage of all transactions. If the not-lawyers get in trouble with the local courts, hey, that was their decision, and not really your fault. Profit!

  3. SPARC? SPARC? on Oracle Bakes Security Into New Chips (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Who is buying new SPARC machines in 2015?

  4. Re:Seconded on IBM Launches Linux-Only Mainframes · · Score: 1

    In 2009, the Register quoted z systems Linux mainframe pricing at $323,204 for a machine with five cpu cores, and no memory or disk: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

  5. And what might this cost? on IBM Launches Linux-Only Mainframes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I notice TFA has no mention of what the hardware will cost, or what IBM will charge for Linux on a mainframe, or even the model numbers of these two mainframes which are Linux only. And MongoDB on an IBM mainframe? Talk about a culture clash.

  6. Re:Good move Nokia on Nokia's HERE Maps Sold For $3.2 Billion To Audi, BMW and Daimler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think car manufacturers are less worried about the death of their navigation cash cow than they are terrified about not owning the magic google self-driving autopilot. Having your own map data is one component to the self-driving, or assisted-driving cars.

  7. Why does a drive commit suicide when writes fail? on Endurance Experiment Kills Six SSDs Over 18 Months, 2.4 Petabytes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The drive's media wear indicator ran out shortly after 700TB, signaling that the NAND's write tolerance had been exceeded. Intel doesn't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power is cycled. Despite suffering just one reallocated sector, our sample dutifully followed the script. Data was accessible until a reboot prompted the drive to swallow its virtual cyanide pill.

    Who thought this was a good idea? If the drive thinks future writes are unstable, good for it to go into read only mode. But to then commit suicide on the next reboot? What if I want to take one final backup, and I lose power?

  8. Do longevity tests account for crappy power? on The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy · · Score: 2

    CFLs, of all brands, have not lasted nearly as long as advertised at my house. I don't think I've had any last more than a year. However, the power at my house is terrible -- lights flicker and dim several times a day, and I completely lose power several times a year. All the computers are on UPSes, but it would be prohibitive to put all the lights on one. Old fashioned, incandescent light bulbs seem much more robust than at least CFLs, and I'm not too excited to test LEDs. So, do any of these lab tests which promise CFLs and LED that last for year test with real-world power sources?

  9. Re:What about Oregon and Washington? on Comcast Drops Spurious Fees When Customer Reveals Recording · · Score: 1

    How am I supposed to know, when calling a 1-800 number, where the call center is? It _might_ be in my state, in which case a different set of laws applies.

  10. Rangefinder handy for more than camera focusing on Overkill? LG Phone Has 2560x1440 Display, Laser Focusing · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know how accurate the laser would be for general purpose rangefinding, but if this device were available to apps in general, not just the camera, I could imagine all kind of interesting new apps one could develop.

  11. Re:You can come back with half the pay and no bene on Fixing the Humanities Ph.D. · · Score: 2

    Was she surprised by this outcome? What percentage of the previous, say, 20 history PhD students at her institution now have tenure track jobs? In the past 10 years, how many history PhDs has her institution matriculated? And how many tenure-track faculty have they hired? If the institution has graduated 50 PhDs in the last 10 years, and hired 5, you don't have to be a statistics major to see that there's a looming problem.

  12. Where did the money go? on Lessons From the Healthcare.gov Fiasco · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As a software engineer, I'm very curious about where this $400 million went. In all the articles about this project, I've never seen a breakdown of where the money was spent, at least at the granularity of people/hardware/software. Typically software projects spent most of their budgets on people, but a $400 M project that is basically a year old implies on the order of thousands of employees. That can't be right? Did they get dinged by ridiculous licensing fees from the usual suspects? Where did the money go?

  13. "STEM" is a useless grouping on New Study Suggests No Shortage of American STEM Graduates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's a huge difference in the job market for pure scientists (the "S" in STEM), and IT folks. The job market for someone with a PhD in, say Astronomy is terrible. Lumping these folks together with the legions of code hackers is ridiculous.

  14. Re:Me, too! on MySQL's Creator On Why the Future Belongs To MariaDB · · Score: 1

    Yes, but is that a Postgres problem or a MySQL problem?

  15. Enough about bandwidth, what about latency? on Google Fiber Expands To Olathe, Kansas · · Score: 1

    Bandwidth is nice and all, but for many uses latency matters more -- any numbers on what that will look like?

  16. Re:School code on Real World Code Sucks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm sure I've missed other ways academic code is bad.

    The biggest difference is that academic code is _short_. If your whole code base is 10k lines, it's easy to cover all the requirements in a clean design. If you are dealing with millions of lines, there's all kinds of oddball unforeseen interactions and requirements that pop up way late in the game.

  17. How do you get a SCADA system to test? on Researcher Finds Nearly Two Dozen SCADA Bugs In a Few Hours · · Score: 1

    So, if I'm a random security researcher, how do I get my hands on these SCADA systems to test them? They certainly aren't open source, and I'm guessing they aren't cheap. I doubt you can just type a credit card number into GE's web site and download one. How do they get one to look at?

  18. ObJwz on Search For "Foolproof Suffocation" Missed In Casey Anthony Case · · Score: 1
    ObJwz: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/07/mork-keeps-on-giving-when-the-database-worms-eat-into-your-murder-trial/

    That mork format was really something else. Whoever thought that having the browser history stored in an impenetrable format with no tools to read it should turn in their nerd badge.

  19. Re:Itanium 3 is a decent CPU on HP Asks Judge To Enforce Itanium Contract Vs. Oracle · · Score: 1

    And for high-end use, the Itanium is a genuinely useful CPU. Because the performance of a cluster is a function of the communication delays, very high-end clusters WANT to have very high-end CPUs.

    Note the above is certainly true for high-end HPC clusters, but running large Oracle databases on those kinds of machines seems kind of expensive for the performance you get. For Oracle (and other databases), the high-thread count Sparc T-3 / T-4 kinds of processors will give you much better performance at lower cost. Of the few ia-64 installations, I bet most are floating-point heavy HPC clusters, I wonder how many are running Oracle or VMS and "business" workloads.

    But what do I know, I've only been observing what actually works vs what the customers want for 35 years

    Of course, if customers actually wanted Oracle on Itanium, there wouldn't have been a lawsuit...

  20. So, let me get this straight... on More Court Trouble For Oracle: Now HP Is Suing Them · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The company that killed WebOS and seriously considered selling off their whole PC business line is desperate to hang on to their Itanium business?

  21. Re:next battle? on ARM Expects 20-Nanometer Processors By Late 2013 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ARM based chips will never be real Intel competitor, in the same way that Intel chips never were a real competitor for IBM z-system class mainframes.

  22. 70 tickets/month for 7,500 machines? on Munich Has Saved €4M So Far After Switch To Linux · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    The translation is a bit hard to read, but I can't believe any organization only has 70 trouble tickets in a month for 7,500 machines, regardless of the OS that is running.

  23. Re:It doesn't matter on Code Cleanup Culls LibreOffice Cruft · · Score: 2

    The real problem here probably has to do with shared libraries. If you have a function in a shared library with external visibility, the compiler can't remove it, unless it is doing whole program optimizations across all of the programs, and I doubt the LibreOffice builds are doing that.

  24. Typical Italian sense of time on OPERA Group Repeats Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results · · Score: 4, Funny

    Given my experiences in Italy, if the neutrinos arrived exactly when they were supposed to, Italians would consider that about 15 minutes too early.

  25. Re:Good programmers don't use StackOverflow. on Analyzing StackOverflow Users' Programming Language Leanings · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Virtually all of the questions asked there can be answered by doing the following: 1) Reading the documentation of the programming language, library or software in question.

    This is one reason there are so many JavaScript (perhaps actually DOM) questions -- where is the documentation to answer questions like "how do I do x, across every major browser versions which didn't really follow standards well"? If I'm programming in, say, Java or C++ with some framework where I control more of the environment, I can go to one place to answer questions, but there's no one definitive source for these cross browser problems.