metoc - Slashdot User

Comment Sell more, ship less (Score 1) 249

by metoc on Saturday October 06, 2012 @04:20PM (#41570935) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Transporting Computers By Cargo Ship?

The risks you will face:
1) The obvious, it may be lost or stolen. Can you afford to lose family photos and you personal info?
2) Vibration. It addition to having your boxes roughly handled, ships will expose your gear to low frequency vibration for weeks on end.
3) Temperature. Most shipping isn't climate controlled, so you may get condensation.
4) Incompatibility. Chances are where you are going will have difference power, communications, space and environmental

Recommendation. Sell everything you can't replace and buy new at the destination. Almost for sure where you are going will have difference standards which apply to electronics, furniture, appliances and clothes. Backup everything twice. Leave a copy in the cloud, and one with friends/family.

Comment DJ license already covers this (Score 1) 349

by metoc on Friday June 01, 2012 @06:00PM (#40187189) Attached to: Canadian Copyright Board To Charge For Music At Weddings, Parades

Most of these events have DJs and commercial DJs are licensed, so unless SOCAN is double dipping his is a waste of a news article.

Comment Heavily threaded things like databases (Score 1) 464

by metoc on Thursday May 31, 2012 @08:46PM (#40175043) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Type of Asset Would You Not Virtualize?

Most database servers are already doing the same things that virtualization accomplishes. SQL Server 2012 as an example can support multiple database instances, each with multiple databases and will use every last resource available, and be more efficient than hosting multiple copies of in their own OS instance in VMWare.

Comment Boilers and elevators have mechanical safeties (Score 1) 171

by metoc on Thursday May 10, 2012 @05:54PM (#39959847) Attached to: New York City Pushes Plan To Prevent Cyberattacks On Elevators, Boilers

Most boiler and elevator design predates electronic/computerized controls so they have mechanical safeties.

Thumbs up to everyone who said networking them to the Internet is a DUMB idea.

Comment IBM Touchscreen used this (Score 0) 96

by metoc on Thursday May 10, 2012 @02:02PM (#39957363) Attached to: Disney Research Can Turn Nearly Any Surface Into a Touch Screen

IBM used to had a touchscreen monitor that used pressure sensors in the base to determine where the screen was being pressed.

Comment Sony would be perfect if it had better customers (Score 1) 329

by metoc on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @03:18PM (#36027606) Attached to: Favorite Sony Gaffe?

Sony actually believes that they have the best (engineered) products in the world. They simply cannot accept that their products can fail.
Therefore it is always the customer's fault. The only reasons they have warranties is because marketing makes them.

If you want to see how snobby they are go play with their BetaCams.

Apple, RIM, Google All Bid On Palm 117

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 15, 2010 @07:00PM from the face-palm-apple dept.

imamac writes "It seems HP was only one of many bidders for the struggling Palm. The others included Apple, RIM and even Google. You may now commence speculation on why the various companies wanted Palm."

The "King of All Computer Mice" Finally Ships 207

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @09:41AM from the there's-a-button-for-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The much-anticipated, much-mocked 18-button joystick mouse from WarMouse is now shipping. The press release features an impressive set of user quotes from game designer Chris Taylor, new SFWA president John Scalzi, and a doctor who runs a medical software company. Crazy or not, it's obviously more than just a gaming mouse."

Man Put On "No-Fly List" While In Air To NYC 300

Posted by samzenpus on Friday April 23, 2010 @03:24PM from the beware-the-list-refresh dept.

An unnamed man flying from Nigeria to New York City found out he was added to a no-fly list somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean, when the plane stopped to refuel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Officials won't say what he did or why he was added to the list after he had already boarded a flight. He was not immediately charged with a crime and Customs and Border Protection will only say that he is a "potential person of interest." From the article: "The man, a citizen of Gambia, was not on the no-fly list when he boarded the aircraft in Dakar, Senegal, said a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly."

Startup's Submerged Servers Could Cut Cooling Costs 147

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 18, 2010 @03:55PM from the alliteration-alternation dept.

1sockchuck writes "Are data center operators ready to abandon hot and cold aisles and submerge their servers? An Austin startup says its liquid cooling enclosure can cool high-density server installations for a fraction of the cost of air cooling in traditional data centers. Submersion cooling using mineral oil isn't new, dating back to the use of Fluorinert in the Cray 2. The new startup, Green Revolution Cooling, says its first installation will be at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (also home to the Ranger supercomputer). The company launched at SC09 along with a competing liquid cooling play, the Iceotope cooling bags."

Nearby Star Forecast To Skirt Solar System 135

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 12, 2010 @07:36PM from the we're-doomed dept.

PipianJ writes "A recent preprint posted on arXiv by Vadim Bobylev presents some startling new numbers about a future close pass of one of our stellar neighbors. Based on studies of the Hipparcos catalog, Bobylev suggests that the nearby orange dwarf Gliese 710 has an 86% chance of skirting the outer bounds of the Solar System and the hypothesized Oort Cloud in the next 1.5 million years. As the Oort Cloud is thought to be the source of many long-period comets, the gravitational effects of Gliese's passing could send a shower of comets into the inner Solar System, threatening Earth. This news about Gliese 710 isn't exactly new, but it's one of the first times the probability of this near-miss has been quantified."

Scientists Discover Booze That Won't Give You a Hangover 334

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday March 02, 2010 @02:58PM from the go-ahead-and-have-another dept.

Kwang-il Kwon and Hye Gwang Jeong of Chungnam National University have discovered that drinking alcohol with oxygen bubbles added leads to fewer hangovers and a shorter sobering up time. People drinking the bubbly booze sobered up 20-30 minutes faster and had less severe and fewer hangovers than people who drank the non-fizzy stuff. Kwon said: "The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage reduces plasma alcohol concentrations faster than a normal dissolved-oxygen alcohol beverage does. This could provide both clinical and real-life significance. The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage would allow individuals to become sober faster, and reduce the side effects of acetaldehyde without a significant difference in alcohol's effects. Furthermore, the reduced time to a lower BAC may reduce alcohol-related accidents."

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 02, 2010 @12:27PM from the new-perspective-on-an-old-tragedy dept.

longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."

Correlation Found Between Brain Structure and Video Game Success 110

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @06:50PM from the correlation-does-not-equal-yadda-yadda dept.

kghapa writes "Still want to argue that video games shrink your brain? While video games have been previously shown to stimulate brain activity and improve coordination skills, a recently published study has directly linked structures in the human brain with video game aptitude. And yes, apparently size does matter in this case. Quoting: '... each subject received 20 hours of training to play a video game specifically created for research purposes, called Space Fortress. It's basically an Asteroids-type arcade game, in which the object is to knock down and destroy an enemy fortress while dodging space mines. However, the game has lots of extra twists that require close attention. Some of the players were told to focus exclusively on running up a high score, while others were told to shift their priorities between several goals. The result? The subjects who had more volume in an area called the nucleus accumbens did significantly better in the early stages of training. Meanwhile, those who were well-endowed in different areas of the striatum, known as the caudate nucleus and putamen, handled the shifting strategies better.'"

Italy Floats Official Permission Requirement for Web Video Uploads 131

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 16, 2010 @06:04PM from the state-v.-man dept.

An anonymous reader writes with some bad news from Italy, noting that new rules proposed there would "require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry similar to that required by television broadcasters, drastically reducing freedom to communicate over the Web." Understandably, some say such controls represent a conflict of interest for Silvio Berlusconi, "who exercises political control over the state broadcaster RAI in his role as prime minister and is also the owner of Italy's largest private broadcaster, Mediaset."

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