Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment SCSI drive in a musical instrument (Score 1) 272

The oldest hard drive I'm still actively using holds patches and sample data in a keyboard--a little 200MB SCSI drive. I think it may eventually outlive the keyboard itself. At one point in time, the keyboard itself also had the largest RAM of any computer I owned, at a whopping 64MB. When I was driving it back and forth from college, the keyboard was insured for more than the car it was in.

Comment Jeff Atwood had a good take on this (Score 1) 149

Any thread on SSD failures should include a link to Jeff Atwood's blog entry on the topic:

I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty.

Full post here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

Space

Double Eclipse Photographed, Sun, Moon, and ISS 159

The Bad Astronomer writes "The exceptionally talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a picture extraordinary even for him: the space station passing in front of the Sun while the Sun was being partially eclipsed by the Moon! He traveled all the way from France to the Sultanate of Oman to take this amazing shot. I have more information about the picture itself on the Bad Astronomy blog, but you should go to Thierry's website to see more amazing pictures he's taken over the years. They're simply jaw-dropping."

Comment When did we become afraid of everything? (Score 2) 225

I'm waiting for the day when some nutjob fashions a piece of doggie-poo looking substance out of brown-painted C4 with an embedded motion-sensitive detonator.

There, I've said it. Let everyone be scared of any stray pile of poop laying on a city sidewalk. Perhaps then, when we try to ban dogs completely, people may wake up and see that it's just not worth going through life terrified of everything.

Ugh.

Comment Re:Whole movie shot in single shot (Score 1) 295

While I found Russian Ark technically fascinating, it was otherwise very difficult to sit through because the viewer becomes aware early on that they are watching a visual gimmick unfold. Instead of paying attention to the plot, I was distracted by the single-shot nature of it, and how they were going to pull it off.

I'd liken this to experiments like Timecode which use similar gimmicks and long shots, but are otherwise slightly awkward to view.

Social Networks

Of 1.2 Billion Twitter Posts, 71% Are Ignored 192

destinyland writes "1.2 billion Twitter 'tweets' were analyzed over two months by analytics company Sysomos, who concluded that a whopping 71% of them got no reaction whatsoever — no online responses, and no Twitter 'retweets.' 'Only a small number of users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way,' the researchers conclude, noting that just 6% of Twitter's status updates ever get retweeted (while 23% get a reply). And among those status updates, 85% have exactly one response, while only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are more than three levels deep — where a reply receives a response which then generates a second reply." I am astounded by the claim that nearly three out of ten tweets actually do get any response.

Comment Billy Joel (R) (Score 1) 273

Billy Joel has, since a very early time in his career, a registered trademark on his name for the purpose of music. I'm pretty sure he's not going around suing parents who have the audacity to name their kids William Joel, however.

Look at the album cover of "Billy Joel (R) Greatest Hits" for an example.

Comment CMOS back-up battery (Score 1) 715

I seem to have had excellent luck with durability of the systems I integrate. Either that, or I'm hanging on to computers that are way too old... I've had to replace a CMOS backup battery button-cell in an old Gateway laptop and a Shuttle SFF system last year. My kids still use them to play old DOS games.

GNOME

Making Ubuntu Look Like Windows 7 473

DeviceGuru writes "Although it won't help Linux run Windows-specific software applications, this easy hack produces an Ubuntu desktop that looks and feels a lot like Windows 7. It's particularly suitable for reviving older PCs or laptops on which the main activities will be web-browsing, email, document writing, and streaming music and videos from from the web. The process installs a Windows 7-like GNOME theme on an otherwise standard Ubuntu 10.04 installation, although it might work on other Linux distros with GNOME and appropriate other packages installed. Naturally all this begs the question: why would anybody want to do this? Why indeed!" People have been doing this sort of look-and-feel swap-out for years; it seems best to me as a practical joke.

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Working...