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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Also interesting ... (Score 1) 154

We eat desert at the end of the meal because long, long ago we found that when you were full, you could still eat something sweet. It was a way to cram in more calories so we could go longer without eating, work longer, shiver more, etc. Think northern European middle-ages.

This is not matched by culinary history. Sweet dessert at the end of the meal only came about in the mid/late 1700s in Europe as a result of changing ideas about diet. Interestingly, salads with oil/vinegar dressings also became common at this time

Sweetening things also became a lot easier around this point in history due to expanding trade and cultivation of sugar cane.

Middle Ages diet (for the rich, who had the choice) involved sweetening all kinds of things and overcooking almost everything as it was thought that cooking and digesting were related processes and that more cooking would make food less work to digest. So for example honeyed chicken porridge would have been a dish fit for a king!

None of that detracts from the rest of your post though

Comment Re:It won't work in the real world! (Score 1) 21

My reading of the article was that the primary goal was not to locate deliberately hidden material (although they might have aspirations to that in the future) but to pinpoint scattered or lost material. Their example being cleanup after Fukushima - using their detector to more quickly find concentrations of escaped material to clean up.

From your experience with detection systems, do you think that a real-world environment (town with buildings, or trees in to country) would also effectively frustrate any detection they might attempt? Or could that be allowed for in the calculations?

Comment Interesting, but not new (Score 2) 34

The summary makes it look like Microsoft is just adding or just about to add the feature. It was released in 19.08 (August 2019) - maybe earlier if you’re not on long term support versions.

And of course Lotus Notes had the feature for a long time before, along with quite a lot of other calendaring apps.

In my opinion, back to back virtual meetings are far less stressful than back to back physical meetings. Having meetings end with enough time to clear out of the room, be able to be polite to the next room users, and to get to the next meeting on time is very valuable. I’m not sure a calendaring feature is really needed to do this, but it does set expectations early.

Comment Re: I'll believe that it is safe ... (Score 2) 99

Whereas nuclear fission is still, at best case scenario, 10 years from commercialization.

I think you have confused fission and fusion. Fusion is the one 10 years or so from commercialisation - fission is the one in active commercial use all round the world - and formerly at Fukushima.

Comment Re:Drawn in order? (Score 4, Informative) 195

Ok, to answer my own question: I have found a video of the draw, they were not drawn in order, the draw order was 8 5 9 7 6 (10)

On the other hand, the draw video was clearly a computer rendering, not an actual physical machine with balls in it. A physical machine for a ball-based lottery, one of those ones made of glass/perspex has (almost) nowhere to hide any potential fraud. Displaying a fake one is I suppose meant to build excitement and make it feel like a game rather than just a set of numbers, but opens the system up to question when things like this happen....

Comment Drawn in order? (Score 1) 195

Were they drawn in that order, or are they re-ordered for publishing? If they were drawn in sequential order as well, the odds of getting that _permutation_ are much smaller than the combination calculation given. This doesn't affect your chance of winning, because order is only relevant for the powerball number, but changes the chance that somthing is wrong in the system....

Also, from a human point of view, ordering the numbers (if that's what happened) creates a perception that they are fake because we instinctively understand that the permutation is so unlikely (50P5*20)= 1 in 5,085,024,000 vs (50C5*20)= 1 in 42,375,200

Comment Re: that bastion of British luxury (Score 1) 114

Not quite- Bentley is what’s left of the RR car making company. RR make jet engines. When the car company was sold the name rights didn’t go with it (and the purchaser failed to notice!). The RR name rights for cars were then sold by the jet engine maker to BMW.

So one company has the name and another the heritage. I’m not sure which one constitutes a ‘bastion’....

Comment Re: Before all the downplayers pile in (Score 1) 305

I don’t know what part of the world you live in, but ‘Asian’ means different sets of countries (subsets of continental Asia) depending on where you are. For example in England it would include Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan; but in Australia and New Zealand it would include China, Japan, Singapore and Korea.

So if you say “Asians were better prepared” to a Aus/NZ audience they will think of Singapore’s SARS readiness work, existing isolation hospitals and pandemic protocols and nod their heads. If you said the same to a UK audience they will think of the current high case numbers in India and wonder what you are thinking!

Comment Re: Sounds like a personal problem (Score 1) 155

Microwave turntables are supposed to reverse. On most microwaves this is a design point. It means that after you stop something and start again for the next part of cooking it’s going the other way and is intended to avoid uneven heating. (Source: my microwave’s manual). I don’t know how effective that really is,..

Comment Successful integratoin? (Score 1) 103

I'm not sure that ltimate success necessarally depends on integration into multiple aircraft types - you could imagine a highly successful technology that only powered, say, light aircraft, or only agricultural planes, or only large commercial aircraft, It would still be successful and useful even if there were classes of aircraft that it wasn't suitable for.

Comment Not Zero Knowledge (Score 1) 22

It can’t be a Zero Knowledge encryption system to store the password. The entire point of a Zero Knowledge system is that the password is not stored or transmitted, nor is it recoverable at the remote end.

Most Zero Knowledge protocols that I know of are time-bound as well so you can’t just generate the token for a given use and dispose of the password. Besides, it’s a password manager, people will want the passwords back!

Comment Re:amd needs an e3 level cpu with ECC for systems (Score 1) 115

Supporting ECC memory may not be the same as actually doing error correction. Modern ECC memory just has an extra bit per byte to store the code used for correcting errors. The memory controller actually does the calculation and comparison work to implement the error correction. One can get motherboards that will work with ECC memory by ignoring the extra bits.

Of course your $50 board might really implement error correction - but it would pay to make sure before you shell out extra for ECC memory...

Comment Re:What is Swap Space? (Score 1) 201

Wrong. There will always be little bits of starup code, or bits of libraries, that aren't useful after a daemon has started. It's better for everything if those useless sectors are swapped out to disk.

Bits of code don’t need a swap file or partition to swap. As they are read-only the system can (and does) just dump them, and re-read from the original file if required.

This is important because it can be a reason for terrible performance on systems with no swap space configured. The system’s only kind of swap available is to drop executable code pages which it may then have to immediately re-load if they weren’t actually cold. This causes the disk to thrash, and performance declines suddenly and dramatically. The same system with some swap space would still have had performance degrade, of course, but typically more gradually, and with some more time for the user or operator to find and fix the issue.

Slashdot Top Deals

To program is to be.

Working...