Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Musk is upset he can't stop Ukraine (Score 1) 44

Musk has directed Starlink to prevent the Ukrainian military from using Starlink to guide Ukrainian drones on reconnaisance and spotting missions. Once Amazon launches its satellite service, Ukraine will be able to use its service instead, and that infuriates Musk.

So you honestly believe that Amazon will have a functioning constellation before the Russia/Ukraine war ends? They don't even have a functioning launch vehicle yet.

Comment Re:This vaccine existed since March! Hurry up! (Score 2) 129

This vaccine development effort has already been far faster than any in history. It's understandable that to further accelerate it would meet some resistance. There's already some backlash from people who feel that these "rushed" are unsafe and are reluctant to take them.

Comment Main problem is with the design of the program (Score 1) 100

Face it, companies (and people) will take advantage of whatever free opportunities are made available. To assume that a company will take the high road and say "I'll leave this for someone who needs it more" is unrealistic. Don't get me wrong, some companies will, but there will always be enough that won't to suck up all available monies.

The program should have been designed to prevent these types of businesses from getting the money. I understand that there was an urgency to get *something* out there quickly, but this is too much money to have such a loosely administered program.

In other words, I blame Congress more than I blame Domio (or Ruth's Chris).

Comment In middle school I tried to collect every Asimov (Score 3, Informative) 145

I loved both his science fiction and his popular science articles. But the guy was just so prolific! By the time he published Opus 200, I was almost half-way there, but he was publishing as fast as my limited budget would let me purchase. And I shamefully admit shoplifting The Sensuous Dirty Old Man from a local bookstore as I was too young (and too embarrassed) to purchase it.

A personal favorite is Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. It was Wikipedia (in a very narrow genre) before the web existed. I would pick it up to check on a specific scientist only to disappear down a chain of linked articles and not emerge until hours later.

A brilliant man.

Comment Re:The inevitable result of "ready, fire, aim" (Score 4, Insightful) 155

The fact that they took half a year to deliver this cluster**** could be an indicator that no true "fix" is possible or that the performance losses of a true fix would have a far worse overall impact than just accepting random reboots.

You're assuming they spent half a year working on a fix. I think it's far more likely that:

2 months were wasted by engineers trying to convince management that the problem really was potentially very serious

2 months waiting for management to try to figure out who to blame and how to make sure it wouldn't reflect negatively on them or impact their departmental budget or personal performance bonuses

1.5 months for PR to come up with the best possible language to make sure they could paint the entire industry as being equally affected, while simultaneously the lawyers tried to find the largest possible scraps of TP to cover their corporate *sses

.5 months working on a fix

Comment Since when has Apple been about bang/buck? (Score 5, Interesting) 535

Depending on which side of the religious divide you occupy, people buy Apple because:

  1. It offers an unparalleled user experience.
  2. They're sheeple/fanboys and have to have it.

You've always been able to get more performance for less money, and yet they still sell. So what's the news here?

Comment Re:When will it be open-sourced? (Score 3, Interesting) 238

However, the real beauty of VMS wasn't so much it's architecture (though that had a lot of good points) but the incredible quality of DEC's implementation. Bugs were for the competition.

While I used VMS extensively and liked it in many ways, this is just silly.

When VMS 4.0 was released (the first version to include DCL command line editing), we had some unexplained crashes in our cluster. We eventually tracked it down to a bug in the command line editor (yes, it ran at least partially in kernel space). We had a local "competition" to see who could find the shortest number of keystrokes that would crash the system. The winner: 4. Yes, you could crash VMS 4.0 by getting an unprivileged command prompt and typing 4 characters (didn't even need to hit RETURN).

The bug was fixed in 4.1.

Slashdot Top Deals

The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst

Working...