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Comment Re:Suck it bitcoin haters (Score 1) 81

This was exactly my sentiment to reading recent articles on green energy solutions or digital open source currencies. /. used to be populated with true nerds interested in cryptography and novel solutions to problems. Now it's populated by pro-fiat trolls, anti-EV trolls, and even a surprising turn of very pro-State trolls advocating for fear and against scientific advancement.

Really, it's just trolls and the articles are just bait for the most part. It is disappointing. Gizmodo and Engadget were great for tech, but never insightful conversations or thoughtful treatments of OSS topics. But all of the graybeards have left, and a bunch of Woke folk are tooling around in their place, failing to comprehend how anything works, or why no one lines them. I'm saddened to see how toxic Slashdot (and the other sites) have become.

Comment Re: In Progress (Score 1) 106

Yeah, I live very close to RA and we have Frontier FiOS. $105/month for symmetrical 35 Mb/s business class fiber with a static IP. We've never had any issues with speed or Frontier (or Verizon FiOS before them). It makes me feel for everyone stuck on Comcast or dial-up, but 3 of our last 4 residences in the Portland metro area all had fiber, so I'm not sure where in Portland people are living that doesn't have fiber. Did Verizon only run it to the suburbs and skip downtown?

Comment Re:Mistake (Score 1) 479

Uhh, I hate to break it to you, but it's a slot machine. It -is- a scam. Lottery games should be played for entertainment purposes only and not investment. The same sort of entertainment you get from going to an arcade for hours on end: the thrill of pushing the buttons on the screen/controller.

They pay out a fixed percent, and the lottery commissions work extremely hard to ensure that the percentage is perfect. I can't imagine a casino being any less stringent, or being more fair, than a government-run lottery commission. On the flip side, most of those lottery machines run Linux, and watching a dmesg scroll across one of their screens is quite enjoyable, especially when you enter its test mode and play the ogg files on it that make up the background tracks, or watch the game load a series of png graphic sprites. That "Walk Like An Egyptian" song sure does get stuck in your head after a few hours of it though.

Comment Re:Duno why floppies never improved (Score 1) 505

The floppy did grow a bit, it was just too little, too late. Don't you remember the Superdisk LS-120 Zipdisk killer? It was a whole 20 MB bigger than an Iomega Zip100, and then Zip released their Zip250. So awesome I almost switched back from Zip because it was backward compatible with regular 1.44 MB floppies. Sadly, it was too late, I replaced my Zip drive with a 4x CD-RW as the Zip250s were coming out. Later the Zip 750 came out which beat out my 640 MB CDs but at too great a cost. I was almost sorry to see both those magnetic technologies react too slowly to optical media. Sure they had Jazz drives that offered gigabyte storage, but optical had won due to lower costs and nearly ubiquitous compatibility.

Now we see the wheel rotating again where Flash media is a better deal than optical media, and opitcs are reacting too slowly to electronic media. I mean, even if every PC had a blu-ray player, and blu-ray disks were only $5 each, I think at this point people would prefer the small form-factor, reliability, and reusability of their microSDHC cards in USB readers and Lexar Jumpdrives.

Comment Re:Energy is conserved by law of physics (Score 1) 238

You "rounded" roughly 304,059,724 people...to 3 million? I think you'd have to have over a billion people in the US before you could write off two orders of magnitude as a "rounding error". But yes, I agree, your estimate for being hurt by the reactor is correct enough, although 0/300 million does sound better to me. I'll toss my vote in for putting the next reactor in my city, please! Oh wait, my State had one, then decommissioned it at a freaking -loss-, and a 30 years later I get a check for $40 remunerating me for the trouble. While it worked it single-handedly generated 12% of Oregon's power. From a single reactor! Goodness I hate knee-jerk politics that interfere with our nation's ability to do rational things like operate its existing power plants.
Businesses

Oracle Fined For Benchmark Claims 81

pickens writes "Information Week reports that the Transaction Processing Council, which sets benchmarks for measuring database performance, has fined Oracle $10,000 for Oracle's ads published August 27 and September 3 on the front page of the Wall Street Journal which violate the 'fair use' rules that govern TPC members by 'comparing an existing TPC result to something that does not exist.' The ads said to expect a product announcement on October 14 that would demonstrate that some sort of hybrid Oracle-Sun setup would offer two-digit performance on the TPC-C online transaction processing test compared to IBM's 6 million transaction per minute result on its Power 595 running AIX and DB2. The TPC Council serves as a neutral forum where benchmark results are aired and compared. 'At the time of publication, they didn't have anything' submitted to the council says Michael Majdalany, administrator of the council adding that that Oracle is free to use TPC numbers once it submits an audited result for the Sun-Oracle system. Fines by the TPC are infrequent, with the last action — a $5,000 fine — levied against Microsoft in 2005 for unsupported claims about SQL Server. 'It takes a fairly serious violation to warrant a member being fined,' says Majdalany."

Comment Re:BSD? (Score 1) 153

Well, it isn't really a "GNU" project, it is GPLed, but I think Gnome would be better called a GNU project. Afterall, Gnome exists because of KDE's non-GNU-friendly license.

So if any of the DEs were to be labeled as BSD, I'd say it's KDE.

Just sayin', there's a fun history here, and thinking of KDE as a GNU project is a funny thought.

Comment I guess I just don't like reboots (Score 1) 461

I guess I just don't like reboots.
  • The new 007 "James Bond" isn't suave or debonair, let alone imposing.
  • The new Indiana Jones was a joke, and I don't look forward to seeing Shia LaBeouf wielding a whip and Fedora.
  • The new Batman, although intensely entertaining, just wasn't Batman anymore.
  • And of course, JJ Abram's gratuitous lens-flare, "rapid-zoom", and "camera shake" tour de force was best left on the cutting room floor and I doubt I'll watch another Star Trek: Cloverfield Edition coming from his portfolio.

Get off my lawn!

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