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Comment You simply do not understand your own website (Score 5, Insightful) 2219

It's as simple as that - you do not understand WHY people visit Slashdot.

Nobody goes here to read amazing fresh news. It's safe to say what whatever "news" you put up have already been posted elsewhere at least half a day before. Your users come here for the discussions, to read what other Slashdot users think about the stories and to reply to those comments. That's why the comments are absolutely, 100%, the most important thing on the Slashdot website, and your beta site makes them much more annoying to read and reply to. Seriously, how can you NOT see that this will cause an exodus if it will go live? This is not a minor inconvenience people will get used to after a few days, it is a fundamental flaw, like replacing the juicy steak on someone's plate with a huge steaming turd.

Your website redesign is going in a completely wrong direction. Everybody is telling you that, you claim to hear it, but you ignore it. This won't end well.

Oh, and get rid of all that whitespace. I am using a 27" screen, not a portrait-oriented iPad, thank you very much.

Comment Re:No pictures please! (Score 1) 2219

Pictures on a pure tech site that posts news are not needed and take away valuable screen space.

Yup, especially if the pictures have nothing to do with the actual story, but instead are stock photography etc. If a story is about some new networking equipment, I do not need a large picture of a bunch of network cables above the story.

Comment Re:Bad Summary: Read the Article! Only HP Integrit (Score 1) 385

someone should edit the top post...

"...beginning September 2013, Hewlett-Packard Company will change the way firmware updates on HP Integrity and HP 9000 products are accessed..."

No. It's also standard Proliant servers. Read the mails quoted in other posts here. The summary just links to a mail received by somebody owning HP9000 stuff, that's why it only mentions HP9000 products.

Comment Re:Did you even read the notice? (Score 4, Informative) 385

The notice is about HP 9000 (read PA-RISC and HP-UX) and HP Integrity (read Itanium and HP-UX). HP 9000 was end-of-saled years ago and you know Itanium. The products are a dying remnant that some companies may be trying to stick to. Honestly, sometimes just people need to let go.

So if you're yelling loudly about your network or PC stuff not getting BIOS-upgrades, go back to fix your comments.
(What a coincidence, the captcha word is "extort")

No, it's just that the link went to the email received by a customer who is using HP9000 stuff. The change DOES also apply to the usual stuff like HP Proliant DL380 etc. For example, the mail I received today (as a Proliant user) was:

"Update: HP ProLiant Servers: Access to Firmware Updates & Service Pack for ProLiant

You are receiving this communication because you have been identified as a customer using HP ProLiant Servers and HP Services.

HP has made significant investments in its intellectual capital to provide the best value and experience for our customers. We continue to offer a differentiated customer experience with our comprehensive support portfolio. HP, as an industry leader, is well positioned to provide reliable support services across the globe with proprietary tools, HP trained engineers, and genuine certified HP parts. Only HP customers and authorized channel partners may download and use support materials.

In line with this commitment, starting in February 2014, Hewlett-Packard Company will change the way firmware updates and Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) on HP ProLiant server products are accessed. Select server firmware and SPP on these products will only be accessed through the HP Support Center http://customer.hp.com/r?2.1.3... to customers with an active support agreement, HP CarePack, or warranty linked to their HP Support Center User ID and for the specific products being updated. We encourage you to review your current support coverage to ensure you have the appropriate coverage to maintain uninterrupted access to firmware updates and SPP for these products. "

Comment Re:Murica Fuck yea! (Score 1) 635

- taking the car to the grocery store that's 100 meters from your place is just stupid.

How are you going to get the groceries back home, make 10 trips? I think I'd prefer to drive.

If you do not own a car, you simply shop more often. After all, it does not take as much time if the grocery store is only a couple hundred meters away. In other words, you go there, buy one or two large bags of stuff and walk home. And then two or three days later when you ate everything, you walk there again. This works well when you're single or maybe a family with one kid, you just have to plan accordingly "today and tomorrow I want to cook this-and-that, so I need two litres of milk, salad, two steaks, ...". Of course sometimes you still need to do that one large shopping spree to buy bulk stuff like toilet paper, mineral water/beer/..., heavier stuff like packs of flour/sugar/... and for that you usually also do not go to the small shop around the corner, but instead the larger supermarket somewhere else which has a parking lot etc. For example my mom, who lives alone and has no car of her own, either asks me to help her once every two weeks or so or just goes shopping together with a neighbour (who has a car). So yes, it of course is still more convenient to have a car, but you definitely can live without one if you just KNOW someone who has one and who can help you out once in a while when you need to transport the heavy stuff.

Comment Re:Space suits? (Score 1) 114

A couple of the photos show the explorers. My immediate thought was how ill equipped for the cold they look by today's standards. Then I started wondering about space suits. They obviously can withstand the cold and also have some durability for the elements given that on earth astronauts train wearing them under water. What are some practical limitations of space suits (perhaps modified to, e.g., not have to carry oxygen) that make them impracticable for working near the poles?

The major point against using space suits for arctic exploration imo might be that space suits actually are COOLING suits. They are designed to prevent the astronauts from overheating, because evaporative cooling (sweating) does not work in space. Also, the suits are pressurized and quite hard to move in, plus they are very heavy.

Comment Re:Don't just throw money away (Score 1) 804

The thing is, though, plenty of Nvidia's and AMD's consumer level gaming cards will run Revit just fine, and some of them will actually run it FASTER than their pro level cards. You can usually pick up a consumer level card for around a quarter of what you would have payed for the comparably specced "professional" level card. Autodesk isn't the only computer that does this, too. If you're at a big firm, it's probably a better use of time to just buy a standard, pre-built workstation, but if you're at a smaller firm, telling your boss you can put together four new Revit workstations for $10000 less than you'd pay if you ordered them from Dell will definitely score you some points.

Until you have a support case (which might not even be caused by the "unsupported" cards) while working on a big project, and the software support tells you "well, THOSE cards are not on our certified list, so first replace those, then you can come back to us with your problem". Had it happen a couple times with some departments here which used "unsupported" hardware (not graphics cards) to save money - if you give support an easy way out by letting them point at something which "clearly" could cause problems, they will take it. And the next time your boss will gladly pay the extra money just to avoid the headache.

Comment Re:Hard to believe (Score 1) 804

xeons already have a luxury tax...

and while it doesn't make that much of a difference in the total their case was 160 bucks.. motherboard 280 bucks.. going mATX really bites. and get this, 50-75 bucks for bluetooth and wifi(wtf??).

and then going for luxury taxed firepro's. 3400 bucks each. the point with going with the pc is that you can choose something else as well. heck, you get a monster of a machine just by going with two 1000 bucks gaming cards, if you don't need that bit switched on to make it a "pro opengl" card(or just nvidias "pro" cards, either way you would shave off a whopping 4800 bucks!! that's nearly HALF OF THE FUCKING PRICE for no practical performance loss - or heck, maybe even a gain).

it's their choice of parts that makes it expensive as hell, not the choice of where they priced them from.

*luxury tax here refers to paying for something someone just building a pc at home with their own money would never buy... something that is marked up just because some companies don't give a shit.

It's not really a useful comparison if you do not go for, as far as possible, the exact same specs on the PC side. What is the point in saying "well, our PC does not have the same components and it's slower, but IT IS CHEAPER!". They wanted to find out if Apple is putting the usual "luxury tax" on the hardware and it seems that this time, they did not do that - if you choose the same or very similar PC components (e.g. THE SAME graphics cards and not "ah well, just as fast in games and who cares about certified drivers and more RAM for professional software anyway" gamer cards), the PC will be more expensive.

Comment Re:legs (Score 1) 501

And when you use a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones while you concentrate on your work, so you don't hear all the noise, you'll be fine.

All the reviews so far mention that the new Mac Pro is about as loud as a Mac Mini, i.e. unless you are in a completely silent room, you will not hear it.

Comment Re:3DMark cheats, so no wonder it is cheated (Score 1) 188

OK, I take 8-cored Galaxy S4 and other dual-core phone, both 1.6GHz, then I get exactly same score in 3DMark.

Now, how stupid I was I paid like 3 times more for the galaxy S4!
I could get the cheaper phone that works exactly the same (at least 3DMark says so).

Well, it depends on how actual games behave. If they are programmed similarly and do not make use of the additional cores (which I guess might very well be the case, since devs usually do not spend much time on optimizing apps for hardware which is not widely in use yet), then yes - you COULD have just bought the cheapo phone and gotten the same performance in those games. Or the other phone which costs a bit more than the cheapo phone (but still less than the S4), which also has a dual-core CPU but a slightly faster GPU, which gives it a higher score in 3DMark than the S4.

Like I said, it depends. It would not surprise me at all if in actual daily use multi-core monster phones make no sense at all (yet), except for bragging rights.

Comment Re:The distinction is minor (Score 1) 223

Well, you have the power cable to the wireless charger :-)

I use the wireless charger for my Galaxy S4, and while it is nice to just put the phone onto the charger, I still have to plug in the CHARGER every time (since I do not want to leave the charger powered and in standby forever). So wireless charging is kinda pointless except for the "cool" factor, unless you do not mind wasting electricity.

Comment Re:This (Score 4, Insightful) 462

We should just abolish time zones altogether. There is no good reason anymore not to just use UTC "universally".

Point is, time zones or no time zones will not change that sometimes when you're in the middle of the day at your place, somewhere else people are already asleep, but at least with time zones it's obvious that when someone says "it's 8am here right now", it is about breakfast time there and not in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. So time zones give you additional information which you would not have with only one universal time for the whole planet.

In fact, only using UTC would just lead to "unofficial time zone tables" which you'd use to look up at what UTC time that guy on the other side of the world starts work: "oh, Bob starts work at 1pm UTC, so I still have to wait 3 hours before I can phone him". So it would be exactly the same as it is right now ("oh, Bob's place is x hours behind us"), just that you'd have to keep track of the time difference in some other way, because the UTC time would not give you that information.

The Internet

Why Is Broadband More Expensive In the US Than Elsewhere? 569

mrspoonsi writes "The BBC reports "Home broadband in the US costs far more than elsewhere. At high speeds, it costs nearly three times as much as in the UK and France, and more than five times as much as in South Korea. Why?...'Americans pay so much because they don't have a choice,' says Susan Crawford, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama on science, technology and innovation policy. We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight."

Comment Re:It's unfortunate. (Score 1) 699

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination

The right to self-determination overrides the state's desire to have total control over public health.

Period, full stop. Anything else is just oppression and a human rights violation.

If it's only about things like "I want to eat lots of fat food until I die from a heart attack", you're right. It's your choice. It is a stupid choice, but it only affects your own health.

Problem is that your choice about not vaccinating your children endangers the health of OTHERS, too. And since there are more of the others than of you, you lose.

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