Comment Re:Megalomanic (Score 5, Funny) 290
Are you saying he should have released it under an Autistic License?
Comment But is there something to this? (Score 1) 397
No.
What business are you in -- product development or behavior modification? Hint: one of those is good for your bottom line; indulging in the other is deleterious to it.
If you're concerned about inadvertent consequences, make sure there are adequate warnings. After that, you're done.
Comment Re:theres more than one type of transistor (Score 2) 126
Sorry, I couldn't let this pass uncommented. Yeah, yeah, -1 Pedantic.
"one that requires voltage to keep it on, one that requires voltage to keep it off (P channel vs N channel FET's),"
The ones that need a voltage to stay on are enhancement-mode MOSFETs. The ones that need a voltage to stay off are depletion-mode FETs, either MOSFET or JFET. All of those come in N- and P-channel flavors. They're symmetrical other than for P-type having less mobility. (And thus being more tolerant of dirty processes, which is why MOS IC technology started out with P-channel. 17 volts across a chip just to get it to light up... Ugh...)
About those magnetic transistors... Lately DARPA's been making noises about 'destructible' logic. If all you have to do to deconfigure an FPLA beyond recovery is swipe a strong magnet across it... Is that what this is about?
Comment Do they really want to open this can of worms? (Score 2) 194
By the same argument, the studios like Warner are liable for every time they depict an existing vehicle. Do they have proof of licensing from the auto makers for showing a VW bug or a Mustang? How about some guy's tricked-out bike? And they've got deeper pockets to hit than some guy in a garage.
Comment Re:Correlation != Causation (Score 1) 203
Nahhh, read it again: as long as the sun doesn't have one (or, if it does, it's not naked), you're all right.
Submission + - High Frequency Trading: Far Worse then you Thought (economicpopulist.org)
Required Snark writes: High Frequency Trading is a software engineering disaster, according to a study by the Chicago Federal Reserve. As reported at The Economic Populist, problems include:
Industry and regulatory groups have articulated best practices related to risk controls, but many firms fail to implement all the recommendations or rely on other firms in the trade cycle to catch an out-of-control algorithm or erroneous trade. In part, this is because applying risk controls before the start of a trade can slow down an order, and high-speed trading firms are often under enormous pressure to route their orders to the exchange quickly so as to capture a trade at the desired price.
Another area of concern is that some firms do not have stringent processes for the development, testing, and deployment of code used in their trading algorithms. For example, a few trading firms interviewed said they deploy new trading strategies quickly by tweaking old code and placing it into production in a matter of minutes.
Chicago Fed staff also found that out-of-control algorithms were more common than anticipated prior to the study and that there were no clear patterns as to their cause. Two of the four clearing BDs/FCMs, two-thirds of proprietary trading firms, and every exchange interviewed had experienced one or more errant algorithms.
To sum things up, the well being of the entire world economy is now in the hands of greedy, incompetent corrupt insiders who will do anything to achieve a profit. The regulators are all off on a permanent vacation. (The Federal Reserve does not regulate HFT.) What could possibly go wrong?
Submission + - Heavy metal band does not support label's decision to prosecute pirates (icedearth.com)
hessian writes: "“It has come to my attention that Century Media is suing fans over illegal downloads of (among others) our latest album ‘Dystopia’. I felt it was important to clarify that we had no knowledge of this motion and were, sadly, not asked permission.
We all know the music industry is changing. We have been adapting to this model by embracing legal streaming services such as Spotify and by bringing our music to places we have never played before by touring our proverbial asses off.
As much as we respect that the labels are having a harder time selling music, we feel this is a misguided effort and want to make sure our fans know we would have not given our consent would we have been asked.”"
We all know the music industry is changing. We have been adapting to this model by embracing legal streaming services such as Spotify and by bringing our music to places we have never played before by touring our proverbial asses off.
As much as we respect that the labels are having a harder time selling music, we feel this is a misguided effort and want to make sure our fans know we would have not given our consent would we have been asked.”"
Submission + - Apple patents idea of using similar batteries in different things (overclock.net)
walterbyrd writes: "Here's an absolutely brilliant idea from Apple: imagine if you had a bunch of different gadgets, and imagine if they could all somehow be powered by batteries that were rechargeable and all interchangeable with one another. How awesome would that be? Super awesome! If only we'd thought of it a long time ago."
Comment This summer I hear the drumming (Score 1) 253
Four dead in Ohio
Comment Of course the water's rising there! (Score 1) 266
It's all the runoff from the BosWash.
Comment Re:how many more before we address the (Score 1) 225
It's okay, it's only Apple's CIDR.
Comment Why are we still calling these people DHS? (Score 1) 158
We should call them 'Stasi' and have done, as that's obviously what they're trying to be.
Comment Start by dropping back to dialup. (Score 2) 462
I've been through this, a few years back when our DSL took a hit and I had to keep our connectivity up anyway.
Living with a slow 56k modem link between your LAN and the Internet will:
- give you a reversible foretaste of what you're planning. Don't like dialup? You'll hate cold-turkey so much that you might not be at all productive.
- highlight your Internet time-waster habits, because the waits for those pages to load will become obvious. This is called "rubbing your nose in it". For anything that's not essential, you *will* find better things to do, or more efficient variants on the familiar. Setting your mail-lists to daily-digest, for instance.
- make it obvious what Internet resources you'll have difficulty doing without. Keep a log of the ones you keep going back to anyway: they're your reasons not to give it all up.
- change some of your Internet habits right there, because there is no instant gratification, instead you have to wait for everything to finishing downloading. You can dovetail some tasks into those waits, such as, getting a cup of coffee while Google News loads, or doing the laundry while waiting for all the new-format Slashdot comments to be visible, or going shopping while a YouTube video is being sucked in for local replay. You'll get impatient and get off your ass just to keep some momentum going because the Internet isn't doing it for you anymore.
You'll get used to prefetching bulky things you really want on hand, and using LAN storage to make it available for browsing. wget will get a lot of scripted use, particularly the "wget -c" option, because it can take most of week to get a CD ISO in. You'll learn to use local tooling to replace online stuff that isn't always there. Early on, for example, I set up a local wiki and a web calendar, to be visible to every machine on the LAN. Then I wrote CGI tooling to fill in my specific blanks. YMMV.
You will likely do a lot of scripting to automate fetching in things you really want or really need, and transferring out your responses. A cron'd mail-check every 5 minutes will keep up a dialup link that idles-out in 15 minutes. This might include bringing the link up in the wee hours to do downloads when nobody's likely to phone, and dropping it again, ready or not, when the phone line needs to have a phone ready for use.
Dialup will have you looking at your computer less as a source of consumed entertainment and more as a creative workspace. If that's what you're after, dropping to 56k might be enough.
Comment Re:Modern browser on retro OS? (Score 1) 211
The most recent Firefox you can use day to day on win98se is 2.0.0.19. Firefox 2.0.0.20 will install and run, but, in at least one ancient install I have to pamper, it won't run the next time you boot the machine without removal and reinstallation; you only get one good run per install (so make it good).
Comment Re:This is slashdot? (Score 1) 2254
Worse, it's New!Yahoo. Forced rollout of an Awkward New!Ponies look, theme-above-thought, CSS-uber-alles which I KNOW wasn't retro-tested because the topic bullet-list insists on masking the upper-left even of this TEXTAREA (Yeah, this is FF2, which is what this distro supports -- can't imagine how broken earlier browsers look here)... I know I'm pissing-and-moaning here, but seriously, this stuff's broken. I can't wait til http://www.alterslash.org/ has caught up with the changes so I can go back to reading Slashdot, because I sure can't here.
