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Comment Viewing Launches (Score 3, Interesting) 23

I was in Florida to speak at Orlando Hamcation and went to see the DISCOVR launch at Kennedy Space Center. I paid $50 to be at LC-39 for the launch, an observation tower made from a disused gantry on the Nasa Causeway between the pads and the Vehicle Assembly Building. A crawler was parked next door! A hot sandwich buffet, chips, and sodas were served. It was cold and windy! I watched for a few hours and unfortunately the launch scrubbed due to high stratospheric winds.

The next day, Delaware North Corporation, which operates tourism at KSC, decided not to open LC-39 or the Saturn 5 center for the launch. This was the third launch attempt and I guess they decided most people had left. I was annoyed.

The closest beach was going to be closed in the evening, it's a sensitive ecological area. I ended up seeing the launch from Jetty Park. This turned out not to be such a great location, the tower wasn't visible at all and the first 10 seconds of the rocket in flight were obscured before we saw it over a hill.

What's a better viewing location?

Comment Re:Going my own way (Score 3, Informative) 196

That's the thing. This definition includes Pluto but it also includes Ceres, the largest asteroid. It also includes Eris (of course since Eris is even larger than Pluto, any definition of a planet that includes Pluto must also include Eris). And it includes at least six to eight Kuiper Belt objects like Quaoar (the scrabble world whose name I've almost certainly misspelled). Plus a couple of scattered disk objects like Sedna which seem to just be out there in weir, random-looking orbits would also have to be included.

And this list would only grow as better telescopes and better survey techniques are developed. Here I think is the real reason that Pluto was demoted. Because it's easier to take it off of the list of planets than to include dozens of small, icy worlds.

Comment "Hack?" (Score 1) 107

Isn't the very point of this player's system, that the player serves the interests of the disc's publisher over the interests of the users, where the users' needs should always yield whenever there is a conflict? That's not a mere technicality; it's the very essence. From the spec's pov, this is desirable operation. Nothing has been subverted.

Twitter

Twitter Adds "Report Dox" Option 101

AmiMoJo writes Twitter announced that its abuse-report system, which was recently refined to simplify and shorten the reporting process, has now expanded to allow users to report content such as self-harm incidents and "the sharing of private and confidential information" (aka doxing). The announcement, posted by Twitter Vice President of User Services Tina Bhatnagar, explained that December's report-process update was met with a "tripling" of the site's abuse support staff, which has led to a quintupling of abuse report processing. Chat logs recently revealed how Twitter is used by small groups to create vast harassment campaigns, thanks to sock puppet account and relative anonymity.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Web Dev on the Mac 1

I've been working on a little side project. I would like to have an app where people can read updates that I send out. It seemed like a fun way to learn more about programming mobile apps and it's something I could actually use if I can get it to a decent state.

I'm keeping it simple. I decided the app would just be an rss feed reader. And that meant I need a feed. I want it to be very specific to my app so I decided the way to go would be to just create my own back end for cre

Comment IR5 (Score 1) 132

because after all, it's not like they can be taken utilized without a legal key

Who you trying to convince, there?

Win7 had such a flawed, easily circumvented activation system that many suspected MS did it deliberately just to get market share on a new OS post-Vista.

You can literally keep using Win7, fully functional, forever without a crack (note that the tool mentioned in my subject line doesn't "crack" or install anything, it just automates a few steps you can run, from the command line purely by hand, on a stock Win7 box).

Comment Re:About time... (Score 1) 158

Minimize the amount of work necessary to complete your work. (emphasis mine).

Some of us aspire to a bit more than shuffling tasks from our in-box to our out-box. Some of us want to produce functional, resilient, maintainable code. Some of us want to actually understand how it works, not just trust that it works. Some of us want to write code, not the compiled equivalent of shell scripts that do nothing themselves but pass inputs and outputs between different external blobs.


I'm paid to build. I don't get paid to pat myself on the back.

I get paid to meet an SLA, not just to say "well it compiled, didn't it?" and throw my hands in the air with vague complaints about bugs in library X. If I build some fragile piece of shit out of a dozen other fragile pieces of shit all held together by spit and string, I haven't done my job, no matter how quickly I did it.

Yes, "not invented here" counts as its own problem; it surprises me to hear that its opposite can count as a problem, though, because why does any organization with that culture employ programmers in the first place?

Comment Re:file transfer (Score 1) 466

It's a machine before the TCP/IP and Internet times.

And?

I remember the joy of using machines back then, and that convinced me of the awesomeness of Linux... Flat memory? Every device (with suitable physical capabilities) can act as storage, or network or an input method? Awesome!


The "right" answer here, pull the drive. The second choice, install Linux to a FAT partition and tell it to use either SLIP or PLIP to talk to the outside world, then just transfer the files via RSync. Simple as that.

Comment Re:GNUradio? (Score 1) 135

Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.

Microsoft

Microsoft's Goals For Their New Web Rendering Engine 166

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has put up a post about explaining what they wanted to accomplish when they started working on Project Spartan, the new web browser that will ship with Windows 10. They say some things you wouldn't expect to hear from Microsoft: "We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for. We needed a plan which ensured that our customers have a good experience regardless of whether they browse the head or tail of the Web. We needed a plan which gave enterprise customers a highly backward compatible browser regardless of how quickly we pushed forward with modern HTML5 features." They also explain how they decided against using WebKit so they wouldn't contribute to "a monoculture on the Web."

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