Comment Re:Answer ad put down 1060 west addison as address (Score 1) 143
Clearly a Sox fan...
Comment Quantum criminality (Score 1) 438
That's the beauty of Common Law: Everybody is simultaneously guilty and not guilty of some crime, thanks to judicial precedence.
Comment Re:Israel is part of other European associations (Score 1) 351
Israel is always the "Cowboy Neal" option in Eurovision.
Submission + - Best Practices For Testing A Site Redesign?
Petey_Alchemist writes: We recently decided to redesign our website. We hired a skilled designer, and all of our web people like his mockups. But office leadership wants some data as to whether our users will.
What are best practices for finding out what users think of a new website vs and old website? A/B test the entire damn site and hope to make sense of the metrics? Focus groups with photoshop mockups? Something else? How do smart organizations test new designs before / as they roll them out?
What are best practices for finding out what users think of a new website vs and old website? A/B test the entire damn site and hope to make sense of the metrics? Focus groups with photoshop mockups? Something else? How do smart organizations test new designs before / as they roll them out?
Comment Re:Set piles of clothes out (Score 1) 673
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1F1OpRxY-k
That should scare the living hell out of people if you have enough.
Comment Re:Isn't this already in practice elsewhere??? (Score 3, Funny) 179
...spanning the "afsluitdijk".
Cat just jump on your keyboard?
Appropriately enough, the language sounds like a cat expectorating a hairball.
Comment Units of measurement on "Mythbusters" (Score 1) 2288
What is even worse, is scientific shows like Mythbusters use BOTH systems. Usually they use metric, usually it's F but sometimes it's C. Weighs usually pounds, but they also have used (kilo)grammes. Distance is usually inches and feet, but when bouncing a baseball they were measuring the bounce in cm - while other parts of the same experiment were using inches and feet.
There is no consistency, and that alone can give rise to errors. It doesn't really matter whether one uses cm or inches, or C or F as long as it's consistent. Forget to write down the unit once, and it's guesswork that's left. Have a thermometer with both scales - oops which scale were we using again this time?
You write "(kilo)grammes," so it's possible you're watching it on UK television. The US and Europe (in countries that don't dub or lector) have two different voiceovers, and the European one translates all the US customary figures to metric. It's not as unnatural in the US broadcast.
It's still pretty jarring television; you're right about that.
Comment Hug bot (Score 1) 86
Comment "Containment vessel" (Score 5, Informative) 1122
Just to be clear, they are absolutely not implying it has melted through the containment, but, rather, the reactor pressure vessel.
Comment Re:Very sad news for Brevard (Score 0) 202
I have no doubt he died doing what he loved.
Skydiving.
It's not the fall that kills you; it's the sudden deceleration.
Comment Re:What does $1/W mean? (Score 1) 245
I pay about $0.10/kWh. (1000 W per Hour)
The figure in the OP is highly non-standard usage. In the US, only the kilowatt is a unit of energy.
Submission + - Indie band runs out of DVD; releases vids free (cpeterson.org)
Petey_Alchemist writes: I'm not a hipster, but one of my favorite bands is a little indie outfit called Beirut. They play Balkan folk — what I refer to as 'horncore' — with lots of beautiful, anthematic melodies and harmonies. In 2007, Beirut teamed up with a small film group called La Blogotheque to film a series of "Take Away Shows" where the band walked around cities in France playing their music live for people.
A movie and DVD was made of these shows, but the small run sold out years ago, and I couldn't find them anywhere. So I emailed their label, BaDaBing Records, to ask if there was any chance they could send me the original movie files.
To my shock, they not only agreed to do so, they actually sent me one of the remaining two copies of the original DVD and asked me to rip it six ways from Sunday and make it available, for free, to all of the fans who could not longer buy the DVD. As they wrote on their blog, "Consider it Christmas come early or Hanukkah come late. Consider it a gift from one Beirut fan to another."
While this isn't exactly unique — NiN, Radiohead, etc — I was just so touched by the generosity and enthusiasm of a small group of artists genuinely wanting people to experience something beautiful they had made without asking for anything in return, and I wanted to share that story with the Slashdot community. We sometimes get so jaded by corporate media that we forget there is another way for things to be done.
And if you're a Beirut fan, you can download an (authorized!) torrent of the ripped movies (plus images of the original DVD) here or kill my server via HTTP here.
A movie and DVD was made of these shows, but the small run sold out years ago, and I couldn't find them anywhere. So I emailed their label, BaDaBing Records, to ask if there was any chance they could send me the original movie files.
To my shock, they not only agreed to do so, they actually sent me one of the remaining two copies of the original DVD and asked me to rip it six ways from Sunday and make it available, for free, to all of the fans who could not longer buy the DVD. As they wrote on their blog, "Consider it Christmas come early or Hanukkah come late. Consider it a gift from one Beirut fan to another."
While this isn't exactly unique — NiN, Radiohead, etc — I was just so touched by the generosity and enthusiasm of a small group of artists genuinely wanting people to experience something beautiful they had made without asking for anything in return, and I wanted to share that story with the Slashdot community. We sometimes get so jaded by corporate media that we forget there is another way for things to be done.
And if you're a Beirut fan, you can download an (authorized!) torrent of the ripped movies (plus images of the original DVD) here or kill my server via HTTP here.
Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 164
This troll made a lot more sense 7 or 8 years ago when it wasn't much quicker and easier to install and maintain Linux than any other general use system.
Even if you factor out install time (since most people get their Windows and Mac systems preloaded), the time you spend maintaining your system very quickly tilts the balance back in favor of Linux.
Don't be that guy...
Comment glass of water (Score 1) 824
Oh for a mod point. I've come to look at the election process as voting for Coke or Pepsi when all I want is a glass of water. Transparent and no artificial additives.
People who like treated water and politics should not see them being made.
Comment Turbines Past and Powerful (Score 1) 338
In 1967 Parnelli Jones was on the verge of winning the Indianapolis 500 in Andy Granitelli's Pratt & Whitney gas turbine racer, when a transmission part broke too close to the end of the race to recover from. So impressive was his performance that rather than risk having the race taken over by non-piston machine, they re-regulated turbines requiring them to have no more than 14 square inches of air intake, effectively crippling their performance. Parnelli commented at the time that he thought they could adapt and win anyway.
The facts of history and of mechanics remain. Turbines are one of those things suppressed, whether purposefully or not, by a status quo threatened.
