Scott McGuire - Slashdot User

Comment I really hope it stops working (Score 2) 165

by Scott McGuire on Monday July 09, 2012 @08:39AM (#40590213) Attached to: How Huffington Post's Clever Traffic-Generation Machine Works

Headlines like that, and whole articles too, on Huffington Post and other sites have a kind of breathless, plastic insincerity that I find grating. They are like products designed by committee guided entirely by focus groups. I hope it only works at driving traffic to them now because the web is still new enough to enough of the public that the culture hasn't evolved defenses against this kind of manipulation. I'm imagining some earlier days of advertising where "9 out of 10 doctors agree ... " could make people think "Well, I'd better change toothpaste right now!" and I hope the Huffington Post style of writing will soon sound just as lame.

Comment Re:Has it really come to this? (Score 1) 233

by Scott McGuire on Thursday April 05, 2012 @09:49AM (#39584107) Attached to: Plantronics Helps Make Remote Workers' Lives Easier (Video)

Nailed it.

7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators 289

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 30, 2010 @08:36PM from the open-in-tabs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function. However, the calculators featured in this article are significantly more sophisticated with the ability to process difficult mathematical functions, to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, and much more. Occasionally, the calculator tool provided with an operating system did not engender any confidence. The classic example being the calculator shipped with Windows 3.1 which could not even reliably subtract two numbers. Rest assured, the calculators listed below are of precision quality."

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 23, 2010 @04:03AM from the love-the-gold-mylar dept.

krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."

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