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Comment Re:What it could help with... (Score 1) 408

First and last step of advice: go out in the real world instead of playing games all the time.

Not trolling, I'm serious. One of my friends used to play WoW every waking hour he wasn't working, and used to complain he didn't have a girlfriend. I guess he just expected one to knock on the door and jump him? He already made the choice to not have a girlfriend by avoiding the circumstances for getting one, but that didn't occour to him.

Comment Re:In 5 years (Score 1) 646

My newest hard drive is 3 years old (7200RPM, 750GB). All others are older, and are on almost 24/7. For example, a 40GB Maxtor drive reports that it has been spinning for ~58k hours, so that's ~6.6 years. Here's a report from speedfan. Oh, and the UDMA error count has been like that for a few years now.

And here's another report. This 120GB hard drive has been spinning for ~39k hours.

The drives are much older than the hours they have been spinning because a few years ago I used to turn off my computer at night, so the "Power on hours" number is lower than the age of the drive. Now, both these drives are on almost 24/7, I also have some newer and bigger drives, but none are younger than 3 years old, becasue 3 years ago I stopped buying new hard drives. I use LTO1 and 2 tapes for stuff I don't access frequently so I don't need more hard drives.

Comment Re:Silly scientists.... (Score 3, Interesting) 264

This does not show that the basic building blocks of life were made by entirely natural processes. This shows that a component of one of the building blocks of life can be made by natural processes. I don't think we can use induction, in this case, to try to say that since we uracil can be formed with natural processes, all building blocks of life can be, too. Not to mention the difficulty in getting "building blocks" or "components" to end up forming the actual thing that they are components/building-blocks of.

I'm glad they at least included this part, eventually:

Nobody really understands how life got started on Earth.

Comment Re:But other states could block... (Score 1) 1088

Under this idea the votes in Wyoming would be worth just as much as the votes in Florida.

Yes and no. One vote in Wyoming would be worth exactly as much as a vote in Florida in the sense that they both get you one step closer to being elected. But one vote in Wyoming would also be much more expensive because the cost of reaching people in an area that is so sparsely populated is so much higher.

I don't see an elimination of extra attention paid to some states/areas, but a shift from what are now the swing states to the population centers, where the density makes it much easier to reach people.

Programming

Submission + - Developing software in an appropiate environment 1

MonkeyCoder writes: Im the typical guy with some skills in computers but with no formal education. I usually develop software and test it later in the same computer, but im sure that this is not the right way to do it. So, what's the proper way of doing this?, should i get a server type of operating system to develop and several clients to test? or do i need to develop and test in the same type of O.S ? how are the real companies doing it? maybe a nice user can point me to a paper with some info about it :) cheers, MonkeyCoder
OS X

Submission + - OK, I admit it, Leopard has more "Wow!" th (zdnet.com)

A. N. Other writes: This has got to be what Steve Jobs and the gang from Cupertino were hoping for — A hardened Windows user who is dissapointed by Vista is WOWed by the new features contained in Mac OS X Leopard.

"Browsing through the 300+ new feature (well, OK, let's first admit that "new features" is marketing hyperbole, some of the features have just been re-tweaked and modified a little) I have to admit that I went "Wow!" more than once. In fact, I might as well come clean and admit that Leopard looks like it beats Vista in the "Wow!" department."

The piece goes on ...

"I've limited myself to ten features here but I could have easily picked a couple of dozen more features that sound interesting and useful and that made me utter a low "Wow!" It seems that being in a distant second place in the OS market is actually making Apple work hard to come up with new ideas and innovative features."

Security

Submission + - Internet Explorer Vulnerability Back From The Dead (raffon.net)

Clown of The Month writes: A vulnerability in Internet Explorer that was discovered almost 3 years ago by cyber_flash, is now demonstrated by security researcher Aviv Raff to automate an exploit of a new vulnerability in Adobe Reader. The old vulnerability allows an attacker to download and open an executable file in an application associated to a different extension. The new vulnerability allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code from remote when opening a manually downloaded PDF file. Combining both vulnerabilities, it is now possible to execute code from remote by clicking on a link in IE7, as shown in a video created by Raff.

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