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Comment Re:Release cycles? (Score 4, Informative) 1231

by Falstius (#29970822) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
That poll is not scientific (people who find the poll are more likely to be people with problems), and out of people who upgraded the success rate is 68%. It is listed as 35% because they count successful installs separately from upgrades. Checking the polls for previous releases, the numbers are pretty much the same as this one.

I still don't use a new Ubuntu release for at least a few weeks though. There is always a flood of package upgrades for a few weeks after a release.

Comment Re:What's the Difference Between a Computer Salesm (Score 1) 650

by Falstius (#29570589) Attached to: Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
I once was handed a hard drive that would work fine when first plugged in, and then fail after 10-20 minutes of use when it heated up, and then work again after cooling down. I set up a fan to blow over it and copied off all the data in several short bursts and told my friend to buy a new drive. I can see how lazy technicians at a chain might quickly give up when handed something like that.

Comment Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score 2, Insightful) 436

by Falstius (#29216979) Attached to: Astrophysicists Find "Impossible" Planet
It could be a case of selection bias. Hot, fast moving planets are probably easier to detect than slow, cold ones. I don't think Kepler has much fear that this will disprove his work, his equations are based on geometry and are definitely correct (or can be corrected by general relativity). A problem in the model for how fast stars eat planets is more likely.

mmm ... planet. Tasty.

Comment Re:Dumb question... (Score 1) 184

by Falstius (#28428971) Attached to: Intel Demos Wireless "Resonant" Recharging
This technology makes the very short range technique used in transformers work over a medium range (on the order of the coil diameter), but it is not and probably can not be a long range technique (like lasers). I only say probably and not definitely because I have studied science history.

Comment Re:Dumb question... (Score 1) 184

by Falstius (#28428871) Attached to: Intel Demos Wireless "Resonant" Recharging
This is magnetic coupling taking advantage of the resonant frequency of the system and is strictly a local effect. Radio's are electromagnetic radiation, which is where electrical and magnetic fields sustain each other will travelling through space indefinitely. The energy in the oscillation of a radio wave does not decrease with distance, it just gets spread out over a larger area (or absorbed, but that isn't relevant to this).

Comment Re:Stupid... (Score 1) 925

by Falstius (#28405763) Attached to: US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan
And yet, every developed country with single payer (government run) healthcare spends less of its GDP on health care and achieves better results. Amazing. The reason of course, is that there is no real competition now but there is lots of profit for insurance companies; and bad performance due to screwed up fee structures that encourage expensive procedures instead of cheap prevention.

Comment Re:While there may be "newer" languages (Score 1) 794

by Falstius (#28297279) Attached to: Should Undergraduates Be Taught Fortran?

Personally, I think FORTRAN should be taken out and shot. Godawful unmaintainable code is the norm , and there is nothing you can do in FORTRAN that you can't do in a cleaner environment like C++. People only still use FORTRAN because they are used to it, and it will not go away until all the old fucks die.

A lot of that has more to do with who wrote the code than the language. The new C++ analysis code coming out also tends to be "godawful". And FORTRAN95 supposedly has a lot of modern features, so new code can be reasonable. As the article you quoted points out:

Finally, there is no need to be a religious extremist; these days, procedures in different languages can be intermixed (which will only become easier). Different subsets of applications can be written in the most appropriate language, e.g. Java for the web, and all can be glued together in a PYTHON framework. On the other hand, it is also possible to misuse almost any language: C++ includes C, and Fortran still has the GO TO function.

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