Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment The middle manager's job is... (Score 5, Insightful) 179

The middle manager's job is to prove to his boss that all of his employees are actually doing something. The Emailed pdf serves as a daily reminder that "we are doing stuff."

Emailed PDF: "Just a quick reminder from the server that your employees are busy working hard, feel free to not read this."
vs
Dashboard: "Do my employees even do anything?? I guess I will go look that up."

strip everything down to "why do I still get a paycheck" and you will get to the answer, you never want to allow the big boss to think "do they even do anything?" Email is a preemptive strike against your boss's boss having to seek out that answer

Comment distributed setup plus 4TB mirrored filestore (Score 1) 287

I have all our media files on 2 fileservers (old desktops with big hard drives), then I have a distributed webserver with metadata stored on a cassandra cluster. All 6 desktops/laptops are members, so any of them can serve up a request for file lists/images/"channel" listings. This replaced a perfectly working setup with static xml files for metadata, but I wanted to learn cassandra.

I am trying to "embrace" the cloud so my eventual setup will be to have no dedicated servers at all, but to have the ragtag collection of active desktops and laptops in my house and have server type stuff I do now be more or less distributed (7 people live and use computers in my house)

Comment Re:Study evaluated sacharin vs glucose (Score 1) 294

it is amazingly impossible to find the ingredients online. the coke owned 'beverage institute' defends saccharin and lists a few example drinks that contain it.

It is hearsay at this point, but the DietCoke website used to list the ingredients... now they appear completely scrubbed from the internets.

Comment 50-80k is an insane estimate (Score 4, Insightful) 393

Tesla Model S is 69k, the model 3 is going to be less expensive and be less "premium" for lack of a better word. If your back of the napkin estimates don't TOP out at 69k then you have no basis in reality. The article sort of points this out and says an 80k price is "pessimistic" I am going to argue that it is psychotic, and invalidates everything else this soothsayer had to say.

Comment Re:The holders of the Keen IP are stupid.... (Score 4, Funny) 72

Bean with bacon megarocket paint-job DLC
Officially licensed NFL team helmets, 1.99 each
Sugar rush boosters, 5 for 99 cents
Tag your friends on facebook to send Keen a free life!!
You are out of lives, please wait 15 minutes for a new one to generate

You're right... Commander Keen would be great on mobile.

Comment Re:Bad definitions of series & parallel hybrid (Score 2) 51

Parallel = electric motor and gas motor are both connected to the drive train.
Series = only the electric motor is connected to the drive train.
Prius is a "power split" or a "series parallel" hybrid, which is a bullshit term that means "we are special and not just a parallel hybrid"

In the modern colloquial terminology, slang usage seems to to be
"Series" = "range extended electric vehicle" or "generater in the trunk"
"Parallel" = "doesn't work without gasoline"

In general, people don't care HOW a series/parallel/power split/monkeyass hybrid works... they just care about the "doesn't work without gasoline" part, which is the tough pill to swallow with modern "totally not parallel" hybrids.

Comment Re:Musk worship (Score 5, Interesting) 260

I get it, I really do, but the romanticism of the electric car is far more justified than the romanticism of the Prius. The Prius is a gasoline car that is good at using gasoline. An electric car is a replacement for gasoline, a Prius is an iteration on gasoline. If you believe gasoline production/use is bad, you have to believe that electric = good, while Prius = less bad.

as far as creating an affordable electric car, everybody agrees Teslas are too expensive, even Musk.... well, that is the POINT of this factory. Batteries suck, and our best batteries are horribly expensive, the only way to make them cheaper is to make more, faster. They have a 3 year plan for a $35,000 sedan. To go from $128,000 to $69,000 to $35,000 in 8 years is amazing, and that is where the "Musk Worship" comes from. Some of the first cars were electric, and since then incredibly wealthy auto manufacturers around the world have been telling us it is all but impossible.

Comment MSSQL (Score 3, Interesting) 729

I love the various different parsers MSSQL uses, and how very wrong things can go. Run this in SQL management studio and it will work fine... run it from the command line and it will give the below error. It will find \r\nGO\r\n and treat it as a block terminator... even if it appears in comments. This is the only command that it will find and execute within comments.

declare @var as int
set @var = 10
print @var
/*
this is totally in the comments
GO
*/
print @var
------------
output -
------------
10
Msg 137, Level 15, State 2, Line 1 Must declare the scalar variable "@var".

Slashdot Top Deals

"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra

Working...