Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Why are we still fighting with this? (Score 0) 105

This was known, and should have been exploited:

Although subjecting the cells to high heat could return memory, the process was problematic; the entire memory chip would need heating for hours at around 250 C.

The rover is equipped with heaters. There is some possibility that simply placing the flash closer could have extended the life of the memory.

Comment Heat duration and intensity (Score 1) 105

The article you link to is dated 2012 - the MER rovers launched in 2003. You do the math.

No, the article says that you either need low-intensity, long duration heat (which has apparently long been known), or high-intensity, short-duration:

Although subjecting the cells to high heat could return memory, the process was problematic; the entire memory chip would need heating for hours at around 250 C.

We are still buying flash that we can't fix because of the packaging. We're still shipping this unfixable flash in mission-critical applications. When does it get fixed?

Comment Why are we still fighting with this? (Score 1, Interesting) 105

If it was long-known that long-duration, low-intensity heat would revive failed flash, why did these rovers leave without the ability to do so?

And why am I not able now to buy flash memory that will heat itself to 800 degrees and heal itself?

And why isn't flash memory sold in ceramic housings that can stand me baking them in an oven for a few days to fix failed flash manually?

I'd like to buy hardware that works, or that can be repaired. That's not flash.

Comment Comfort Women Documentary (Score -1, Offtopic) 176

Sony, how about if you run documentaries on Korean Comfort Women at the same theaters?

While you are at it, you can make it a festival and run a few films on the Rape of Nanking.

It should have been blindingly obvious that a Japanese corporation should not have produced a film on the violent mutilation of a Korean leader. What were you thinking?

Comment Re:North Korea is one step ahead of you. (Score 1) 388

I'm not saying that I admire or approve of North Korea's internal affairs in any way, but it would hardly displease me if they turned their sights on MGM, Universal, or (dare we hope) Disney.

North Korea has never sold rootkit-equipped CDs in the US, and they have never lobbied congress to remove the right of free speech, unlike Sony.

Comment Welcome to the Windows Airline (Score 1) 233

I'm dating myself, but...

Windows [3.1] Airline ~ The airport terminal is nice and brashly colorful with friendly stewards, easy access to the plane, an uneventful takeoff ... then the plane blows up without any warning whatsoever.

Fly NT ~ Everyone marches out onto the runway, says the password in unison, and forms the outline of an airplane. Then they all sit down and make a whooshing sound like they're flying.

Windows Airline 95 ~ Windows Airline customers are bused to a new terminal at the far end of the airport. The plane shows up late, but everyone can watch a commercial while they wait where a sales man tells them that Windows Airline 95 is "just as good as a Mac Airways." When it arrives, most of the luggage has to be left behind, because it doesn't fit in the cargo bays. The pilot walks down the aisle, collecting an additional fee to buy fuel for the jet. Many of the passengers give up and walk back to the Windows Airline window.

DOS Airlines ~ Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again, then push again, jump on again, and so on.

Mac Airways ~ All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look the same, act the same, and talk the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are told you don't need to know, and everything will be done for you without you having to know, so just shut up

Air OS/2 ~ To board the plane, you have your ticket stamped ten different times by standing in ten different lines. Then you fill out a form showing where you want to sit and whether the plane should look and feel like an ocean liner, a passenger train, or a bus. If you succeed in getting on board the plane and the plane succeeds in getting off the ground, you have a wonderful trip ... except for the times when the rudder and flaps get frozen in position, in which case you have time to say your prayers and get in crash position.

Unix Airline ~ Everyone brings one piece of the plane with them when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they're building.

Mach Express ~ There is no airplane. The passengers gather and shout for an airplane, then wait and wait and wait and wait. A bunch of people come, each carrying one piece of the plane with them. These people all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing about which pieces really belong together. The plane finally takes off, leaving the passengers on the ground waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. After the plane lands, the pilot telephones the passengers at the departing airport to inform that they have arrived.

Amiga Air ~ A small private airline with lots of in-flight movies, snacks, and other luxuries to keep the passengers happy. Unfortunately, after takeoff, the plane has nowhere to go and keeps flying in circles until it runs out of fuel and crashes. The few surviving passengers, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster, ardently vow to keep flying the same plane once it's put back together.

Comment Dear Carly, no man will EVER vote for you. (Score 1, Interesting) 433

This wasn't used against you in your senate run (which certainly lacked any semblance of tact), but I GUARANTEE you that your past will resurface when you did things like this:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1005572/how-mike-capellas-castrated-carly

...Carly did not tell Capellas that the sad love affair between Heloise and Abelard ended up with the man in the affair being castrated... when Capellas found out he shuddered and said: "I'm glad I didn't know".

And this, as well as the "bad hair?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/09/carly-fiorina-open-mic-vi_n_606723.html

"God, what is that hair?"

Comment inittab weaknesses (Score 1) 581

Porting an HP-UX ServiceGuard system, I collapsed 40-odd services into runlevel 3 and 4. These became aliased essentially to ON and OFF for my operations people. This worked, but I would have appreciated granular control.

Inittab has a "respawn" function that lets init watch for your program and restart it when it dies - IF you don't daemonize. You also don't get the ability to launch as a non-root user (had to write a shim for that) or establish environment variables (had to script a shim for that).

I also wrote an /etc/init.d script to start any oracle instance mentioned in /etc/oratab with hard links to the script. systemd is not QUITE as flexible there, requiring me to maintain a separate service instance files for each ORACLE_HOME.

So yes, on the whole, I would have jumped all over systemd 5 years ago. As it is, I am even now looking forward to trashing all the glue I wrote.

That said, systemd needs a BSD-licensed multi-call binary like busybox.

p.s. Parent, it's PID 1, not zero. :)

Comment Android (Score 1) 525

It's hard to give him the benefit of the doubt when he strangled Nokia's Android handsets.

That was simply a bad business decision.

Google's control of Android is very loose, and it would be quite easy to fork it, as Amazon, BN, and even Nokia already demonstrated.

If Microsoft supported Android, and integrated it into Active Directory as a first-class mobile platform, it would immediately become the standard handset for corporate America.

Not doing so seems a standard case of NIH hubris.

Slashdot Top Deals

Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer

Working...