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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:We don't make money from peering or colocation (Score 1) 238

I'd choose Google fiber with Google monitoring my usage in an open way that I actually somewhat trust, over time warner or comcast both of which monitor my usage in the exact same way but lie about it constantly while charging me more for less service in return.

It's not even what I would call a choice, it's a no brainer.

Comment Re:Why is twitch popular? (Score 1) 142

I can't answer for anyone else why exactly video game streams are currently the top grossing form of entertainment in the US *period* - but the fact is they are.

Err, that was supposed to be just "video games" not "video game streams" there.

The streaming aspect is just a subset of the whole video game industry. There is still plenty of pie for that to be a nice slice of, but it's far from the top taken alone.

(Thanks slashdot for not letting me post a correction for for-ever after the original post! Will beta at least accept more than one hit per hour?)

Comment Re:Why is twitch popular? (Score 1) 142

I can't answer for anyone else why exactly video game streams are currently the top grossing form of entertainment in the US *period* - but the fact is they are.

Grand theft auto 5 alone pulled in more money this year than any given form of entertainment. That includes movies, TV, books, you name it.

The various styles of game recordings (walk throughs, lets plays, streams, etc) taken as a whole compete quite well against other established forms of entertainment as well.

Asking if people are so depressed they resort to (games|tv|movies|books|education|workaholics|.*) seems a stupid question, and one you already know the answer to since you do the exact same thing yourself when bored. Why are YOU so depressed with life you do the things you do in your down time?

I see no problem with gaming taking off like it is, and it is far from wasted in "the real world."
Gaming is currently only one or two notches below porn at pushing the edge of technology right now, and with the current state of tech research I can honestly say it is welcome.

Comment Re:Somebody needs to buy... (Score 1) 222

*snip*
They would literally explode before the popcorn does if they couldn't run away and chimp their phone or play a game or pretend their life was so important and announce it to the world.
You might as well ask a baby not to poop while you're holding it.

You may have better luck asking the baby with a large cork.

That or perhaps replacing the exploding popcorn in the microwave with the soon-to-be exploding baby.
Just don't confuse which was which when you sit down for the movie!

Comment Re:Microwave trays (Score 2) 222

Finally, there is still substantial research going into probes inserted into food so as to provide feedback to the driver logic (dynamically or for capture into programs which take food type mass as variables) and whether non-invasive probes can provide useful dynamic feedback every time the oven is in use.

I myself just recently discovered the existence of non-invasive probing (a feature included in a microwave just purchased by a friend last month), and while very impressed with the concept, was less so with the outcome.

I'm not sure if there are different non-invasive methods on the market, but this particular model somehow ended up using the water vapor released during microwaving to obtain its feedback.
In cases where it couldn't read anything (seemingly for foods that don't release much vapor) it wouldn't kick in, but when it did the foods still seemed to be more crisped on the outside while colder on the inside.

Certainly an improvement over cheap-o walmart microwaves on sale these days, but I guess I'm spoiled.

My microwave is a hand-me-down from my parents, who purchased it within the first year I was born.
It is a 35 year old GE brand, sporting a VFD, a "new solid state!" tag line on the front panel, and inside is a 1/4th inch headphone jack for use with a metal probe.
I've only ever used the probe once for cooking a turkey, more as an experiment as I usually use the oven for that and prefer including stuffing - but was amazed how even from outside-in the meat ended up cooked.

I assumed such research already took place long ago in-so-far as wired probes were concerned, but your comment makes me wonder if a newer model microwave still using a wired probe would have substantial improvements...
I realize the reliability will be next to crap, but such is most all products sold these days sadly :/

I'm not exactly "seriously shopping" for a new microwave, but the realist in me knows my current one likely won't last as long as I do (I hope anyway!), and as friends replace their current units so frequently I'm often reminded I'll eventually have to deal with and be in that situation myself too.

Comment Re:Not the phone (Score 1) 243

I like how they list "unlimited wifi" as a feature of all their plans. XD

Usually that refers to the carriers fixed hotspots around town that one can pay by the hour or whatnot for access. If you have a cell package with them, use of the hotspots does not cost extra nor on a timer.

Personally I don't spend much time in McDonalds and the like, let alone spending time there on the Internet, but for people who are this feature is aimed at them.

Of course any access point that is open or you have access to is always available.

Comment Re:Congressional fix? (Score 1) 217

Don't blame me for firefox spell check. But to answer your question, no I am very bad at spelling, which is why I only questioned that "fix" for a few seconds instead of not at all as would be usual.

Why would you suspect I am not familiar with what it entails however? Was that the multiple times I described it in detail that threw you off? Or was it your inability to look past a couple letters being swapped around that clearly had no effect on your understanding of my point?

Since you seem OK making such assumptions, I'll take the safe route and answer my own question with a likely incorrect but still comical answer.

Comment Re:Congressional fix? (Score 1) 217

The big businesses want to kill net neutrality because that will let them crush any new start-ups, and ensure that they maintain control of what we watch for generations to come. Sites like Netflix never would have gotten off the ground without net neutrality.

The big businesses are trying to get rid of regulations, and you've twisted it around to say that we need to ...get rid of regulations.

SHH!!! I dont know about you, but I personally am really looking forward to the $50000/month checks these businesses are arguing they must pay me and every other land owner for the right to run their cables and such through our yards!

At this point I don't care which side the companies want to argue for - I just plan to hold them to it across the board.

They can either give us net neutrality regulations and keep imminent domain regulations as well, or alternately, they can say none of that regulation should exist, because net neutrality will harm their bottom line and they want to cut us all checks for the privileged of actually having this cable network they want say-so over.

So even if we lose the net neutraliy battle, at the rates I plan to charge them for a cable troff I can safely say we will still have won the regulation war (and I'll never have to work another day again!)

Perhaps the biggest advantage in favor of that option is by following both lines of logic to their ultimate conclusions. Both will end up fucking up most of the remaining first world features this country still has left, and fuck it pretty equally bad.
If the ISPs insist on destroying world altering infrastructure that has been built over the past 200 years no matter which path they go down, we can at least shore up our retirement funds at their expense!

I say it's a win-win for us, and the ISPs argued yesterday this would be a win-win for them too (before they thought things through, which while unlikely, still technically may happen)

Comment Re:Congressional fix? (Score 1) 217

Now, back to my question.... which way will things tilt, and how much will the public interest matter.

OK, I'm willing to grant that the public mostly doesn't understand, let alone care about, net neutrality.
I'll also go along and grant that companies such as ISPs don't see regulation as good, and that is a point against net neutrality in their case.

So lets follow such a setup to end game. Lets revoke imminent domain regulations as well!
This should be pretty easy comparatively.

a) I can't see many, if any, individuals seeing this move as a bad thing in any way. Especially so once explained that imminent domain is the only thing keeping comcast and time warner telecom from paying you a monthly rental fee for running their wires on/under your land.
Being able to charge each utility $10000 /month is a hell of a lot of missed income for us!

b) The ISPs are already starting off with a negative score in attempting to argue for keeping imminent domain regulation, after all the quotes and talking points they have put out stating how awful and destructive such regulation will be to them.
I personally wouldn't want to see them go out of business, so we should get rid of the regulations and have each and every land owner charging them extra rent in order to not have them go under.

(No I don't understand how spending more than $0 saves them money - but I don't care either, it was their claim, and not my place to explain how their finances work. Otherwise we might have to grant that the ISPs are lying about their finances)

Comment Re:Oh! (Score 1) 114

Wow, I think I just felt two brain vessels pop from the sheer concentration of stupidity and lies.

So you can get your so claimed non-existent caching servers right here
https://www.netflix.com/openco...

You could also get free peering agreements with netflix, with more info at that same URL.
If offering free peering is being assholes about things however, I'd hate to see the cruel names you throw out at netflix when your own ISP tells you to go fuck yourself with your netflix peer...

If your ISP can't afford the internet bandwidth for one copy of a stream, in order to send that cached copy to each and every one of their customers an infinite amount of times... Well hopefully you can see why the ISP would get the blame here.

Also you really should do something about the guys in your home holding a gun to your head and forcing you to demand netflix send data to you. Would you like us to contact the police for you?

Comment Re:Wasn't allocation always the problem? (Score 1) 306

Sadly a surprisingly large number of core routers out there won't even propagate a /24, despite being the official minimum. A lot still dropped /22's and smaller, some even dropping /20's.
I can understand end point routers doing this, as Cisco RAM isn't exactly cheap and in the end that normally would only actually effect the users at that one end point. But I was surprised how many were actually backbone routers! (I'm looking at you cogent)

Back in 1996 or so the ISP I worked for had to get a /20 just to avoid all that crap, which arguably was more than overkill (we did dialup, webhosting, and "low speed" colo aka T1 speeds)

Ironically, a couple years after that ISP went out of business, ARIN still didn't revoke the IP block or ASN despite being a year behind on payment.
The contacts were still in my name (apparently being the last sysadmin to bother updating them) so after checking with the founder I ended up making the payments and keeping the IP block myself for another few years.

I relinquished the /20 back to ARIN in 2007 mainly due to the shortages, and they reallocated it to another company not 3 months later (their standard at the time was to not reallocate for at least one full year)

There are still days when I wonder if I should have kept it... But at least I can say I did my part as a good netizen.

Comment Re:Tmux (Score 3, Informative) 136

Here it is in nicm@'s words:
"In particular, being able to share a single window between multiple terminals, with other windows in the same session but entirely separate. Adding this to screen was implausible"

Perhaps I am still misunderstanding the features of tmux (most likely in fact), but to say that is implausible to add to screen is misleading to say the least, since I have been doing exactly that in screen for nearly a decade.

On one terminal, either start a new screen session or -r to a detached session.
If starting a new one, try: screen -S LetsShare

On a second terminal, run: screen -list
You should see a list of screen sessions and their status (attached, detached, multi, etc)
If you used -S on start that will be the name, otherwise it's some tty.host.number string.

Now on that second terminal run: screen -x

Try to adjust both terminal sessions so you can see them at the same time. Type in either, watch in either. They are shared seemingly matching your tmux description.

You can change permissions per terminal so others can't type but will see everything you do (aka tutorial mode) using ^a *

Also for split/multiple windows showing on the same terminal, use ^a S (control-a capital-S)
To switch between split windows use ^a tab
Close a section of split window with ^a Q

The status bar problem is true and pretty annoying. I fixed it myself with a line in ~/.screenrc but of course I have to pretty much install that user config file on every new system I use which can get annoying.
If you want an always-on status bar showing window numbers and titles (^a A to change the title), add this to .screenrc (and hope slashdot doesn't munge it!)

hardstatus alwayslastline "%{= wk}%-Lw%{= BW}%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw %-=%{= BW}%H%{-}%{-}"

Note the two "BW" bits? That's background blue and foreground white, and applies to the window with focus. Change B to R for red for example (production vs not-production in my case)

Here is my whole .screenrc file for copy/paste purposes: http://pastebin.com/kMkuFXi9
No splash screen, always on status bar, 10k line scrollback history for copy/paste (^a [ and ^a ] ), and auto-open three windows with preset titles and commands running in them.

I don't mean to knock tmux in any way at all, having not used it (and I do plan to check it out now) - but hopefully these screen tips help out others here.

Comment Re:easy! (Score 1) 393

I find it interesting that there are people who believe in the simulation argument, but discount the existence of God. The Programmer would be an omnipotent and omniscient being who exists outside of this reality, and created this reality. That is the definition of God.

As an atheist who also happens to believe we are in fact living in a simulation, let me be the first reply to say - that is an excellent point!

The mind that created the universe simulation would perfectly fit the literal definition of God, and I suppose in that sense I'm not truly an atheist either, since such a mind would be a strong likelihood given the assumptions we are already making are true.

But then thinking a moment and recalling what we currently know of our observable universe, with all of the matter and energy out there that must be kept track of in such a simulation, it's fair to also think that us teeny tiny human energy structures are /nothing/ compared to that, and barely nothing in the grand scheme.

Any such mind that is able to simulate all of this wouldn't have any reason to care about me personally, any more than you care about the fate of a single specific atom in your body.
There would be no reason to lay praise or prayer upon such a mind, nor any reason to expect any special treatment over any other equally small structure that is another human.

That still tells me that even if I am factually wrong about the existence of such a God, my behavior and actions in this life so far are still perfectly aligned with how I have behaved and acted. No harm done :}

Comment Re:The bug is asking for the wrong fix (Score 2) 266

Windows doesn't support multihead well (at all, for multiple sessions, without something like Citrix intermediating the process), but it also doesn't screw up on where it put the internationalization translation tables and the dispatch routines and the usability.

Actually it does, frighteningly well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

You are quite correct however, this is a painfully ridiculous situation with the input handlers in Linux.
Multiseat and multihead seems so perfectly fitting as something Linux should be doing, but it fails miserably from the start due to the input handlers.

The real kick in the teeth bit about the Windows solution? You have to pay a full OS license for each seat/head configured!
If your goals are anything more complex than "I just wanted to see if it would work" then this licensing detail makes Windows pretty much the worst OS for such a use case, despite being the only OS that handles it correctly at the input layer.

Comment Re:No problem (Score 5, Interesting) 423

Where I work a good number of the surface mount assembly lines are run by windows 2000 and XP.
The screen printers still run DOS. Many of the electrical testers and chip programmer rigs need XP or lower as well.

As most of these setups require custom PCI IO cards, visualization isn't an option either.
(Though I am happy to have found an ISA to USB adapter that works well under visualization)

When "a pc upgrade" involves replacing a quarter million dollars in hardware and finding the time to eat the cost of downtime over three running shifts, even I couldn't justify the cost of doing so just to get a newer OS (that will still be windows and still go EOL at some future point!)

My solution is to segment older OSes on the network. They can reach the SQL server and occasionally the file server as needed.
NO email, NO internet, NO intranet, no random transfers between there and other networks.

Everyone has Win7 desktops for office, outlook, and firefox. There is no need to even treat the XP systems as computers anymore. They are now appliances.

With the SMT line PCs not even showing a desktop or letting the operators exit the controller GUI, and the test hardware being locked to a list of approved executables (More for QA actually), the likelyhood of an infection requiring a reinstall is next to nill.

That leaves hardware failures. I have full drive images to restore once the HDs fail. On a more serious failure, the entire rig is considered failed. Either time to pony up the $25k for a new system, or we do without.

As long as you get your desktops upgraded, there is a lot less you need to use XP for, and most attack vectors can actually be completely blocked without effecting any work flow what so ever.

Slashdot Top Deals

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse

Working...