feandil - Slashdot User

Comment Re:from TFA (Score 1) 921

by feandil on Thursday July 30, 2009 @10:21AM (#28881799) Attached to: UK's FSA Finds No Health Benefits To Organic Food

well, except that the reason so many people die of hunger has nothing to do with usage of fertiliser but much more with political instability. that and american food aid which destroys incentives for local food production

Comment Re:what does open mean? (Score 1) 197

by feandil on Thursday July 23, 2009 @07:26AM (#28793535) Attached to: Open Source Languages Rumble At OSCON

...without burdening the programmer with the manual management of memory allocation and pointers...

that's all nice and good for your web programmers, but when you have 80MB of ram available, in two different areas with different performance on each you are very happy to be able to do your own memory allocation. all these talks about "high level" language assume that everybody is only programming applications that do not need to worry about memory issues. but try to program an operating system or a video game without "worrying" about it, and we'll see where you go. the day they give these languages the same flexibility that C++ provides I will stop using it. until then, C++ is king, and scripting languages are useful, well... for scripting

Comment Re:everything is "for the children" (Score 1) 19

by feandil on Wednesday July 22, 2009 @11:34AM (#28782515) Attached to: Children Investigated For Laughing Too Loudly

it's not an assertion, it's a personal feeling. and if you can't see the difference, well, go back to your lab and your wrist games

Submission + - The Pirate Bay's Interesting New Business Model (afterdawn.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn on Friday July 17, 2009 @10:50AM

eldavojohn writes: After announcing the sale of The Pirate Bay to Global Gaming Factory X, it was unknown what would become of TPB. Details have arisen: 'According to Rosso, GGF plans to build a massive "storage cloud" on top of TPB that would use individual users as storage system's nodes. Apparently users can opt out for being part of the decentralized storage system, but then they'd have to pay a monthly fee for the service. More resources the user is willing to commit for the service, the cheaper the monthly subscription fee will be ... GGF's plan is to harness the resources users are willing to allocate to the cloud service and sell that computing power and bandwidth to 3rd party companies, essentially creating a service that could be used as a content delivery network (system that most large sites — including ours — use to deliver static content, such as images, software downloads and stylesheets, faster to the end user) or even as a web hosting cloud. As the service would use P2P technology, it could bring massive savings to ISPs, as the delivery of content to an end user would be provided from the closest possible "node", most likely from an user within the same ISP network.'

Comment Re:sanctions? (Score 0, Offtopic) 362

by feandil on Thursday July 16, 2009 @09:46AM (#28715893) Attached to: Lawyer Offers $1M For Proof His Client Could Have Done It; Oops

"third world commie countries like France" mod that as a troll please :-) define third world then, there are less poor people in France than in the US, there are less filthy rich of course, but with a better health system, better education system, I woudn't call that third world. and "commie" ??? the french president is more right wing than Obama, it's USA that is becoming a socialist country. and yes, we can all see how great the american legal system is, it seems that everybody on slahdot is so in love with american lawyers...

Comment Re:Oh god :( (Score 1) 215

by feandil on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @11:42AM (#28691833) Attached to: New Zealand Introduces Internet Filtering

yes it is. that's why we're humans and not animals, we take care of our own kind.

Comment Re:Governments love crime (Score 1) 215

by feandil on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @11:34AM (#28691699) Attached to: New Zealand Introduces Internet Filtering

people tolerate it because they're brainwashed. 60 years of television propaganda has its effect. and American propaganda is the most effective there has ever been, you were the first to introduce psychological analysis for product placement, and that very early.

Comment Re:Governments love crime (Score 1) 215

by feandil on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @11:32AM (#28691663) Attached to: New Zealand Introduces Internet Filtering

don't joke, we're going to get the same kind of law as soon as they managed to write it in such a way that it becomes constitutional. considering the constitutional council is mostly right wing conservatives it shouldn't take too long

Submission + - European companies want solar energy from N.Africa (latimes.com)

Submitted by thms on Monday July 13, 2009 @11:22AM

thms writes: "A consortium of 12 European businesses outlined an ambitious plan [on] Monday to build a massive solar power facility in North Africa that they said could satisfy 15 percent of Europe's energy needs by 2050." writes the LA Times

This so-called Desertec project involves, among others, Siemens AG, the re-insurer Munich Re AG and the Swiss-based electrical engineering firm ABB. The technology will not be based on photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, but on Parabolic troughs which collect heat driving conventional turbines, molten salt can be used as a heat sink to provide electricity in the absence of sunlight.

Estimated costs are around 45 billion Euros ($63 billion), with the entire project around 400 billion Euros ($560 billion).

Submission + - Microsoft vs. Google: Mutually Assured Destruction 1

Submitted by jmcbain on Monday July 13, 2009 @10:49AM

jmcbain writes: In an op-ed piece for the NY Times, Robert X. Cringely asserts that nothing good will come out of the ongoing war between Microsoft and Google: "The battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google's Chrome Operating System — a direct attack on Microsoft Windows. This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It's just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check."

Submission + - AMD Launches New 6-Core Instanbul Opterons

Submitted by

Ninjakicks

on Monday July 13, 2009 @10:20AM

Ninjakicks writes: "AMD is announcing three new Opteron HE (8425, 2425, 2423) and two Opteron SE (8439, 2439) processors today, with clock speeds ranging from 2.0GHz to 2.8GHz. The 55W HE branded processors are targeted at low power environments, like high density, power and thermally-challenged data centers. The 105W SE branded processors are designed for more performance hungry usage models. Due to the additional two cores, these new 6-core processors offer up to 50% more performance than current quad-core offerings at similar frequencies, and AMD also points out that all of the processors offer the same base feature set."

Submission + - Google Search treats Firefox differently 2

Submitted by free2create on Monday July 13, 2009 @10:19AM

free2create writes: Google is returning a different number of search results for Firefox than for Chrome, IE 7 and Opera.
I was searching for an auto part today with this string:
ford escort "replacing side view mirror"
Firefox 3.5 received 6 results.
One of the results looked suspicious so I used Google Chrome 2.0 to perform the exact same search again.
Chrome received 1100 results!
I also might add that these additional results were very useful and relevant.
I then used IE 7 and Opera 9.64 to perform the search again.
Again both received 1100 results.
I tried two other searches and Firefox again received one set of results and Chrome, IE 7, and Opera all received another.
For reference I tried:
Google Search: tree planting cold heat insects "dutch elm" cement Arlington
Firefox: 81 results
IE7,Opera,Chrome: 177 results

Google Search: "mountain climbing games"
Firefox: 143 results
IE7, Opera,Chrome: 148

For fun broaden the above search terms and see if you detect any other differences.
I disabled all my plugings in Firefox and still the results persisted. I even tried installing the User Agent Plugin for FF hoping to encourage Google to return the same results but that didn't work.

Are others seeing this behavior?

Submission + - True IT Confessions (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Monday July 13, 2009 @10:02AM

snydeq writes: "Backups gone bad, people with admin privileges who probably shouldn't, the wrong equipment unplugged — when IT pros make mistakes, they don't mess around. Entire buildings go dark. Web sites disappear. Companies grind to a halt. InfoWorld's Dan Tynan gathers up seven of the dumbest moves IT pros have been brave enough to fess up to, proving that when it comes to the dirty work of IT nobody is above fault — and that it's not just stupid users who are capable of bringing IT operations to its knees. 'In some cases, we've obscured their identities to spare them embarrassment; others, however, are perfectly willing to own up to their youthful mistakes,' Tynan writes. 'But don't laugh too hard. We know you've probably done worse.'"

Submission + - The largest ever phylogeny reconstructed

Submitted by G3ckoG33k on Monday July 13, 2009 @06:31AM

G3ckoG33k writes: In recent article, scientists have reconstructed the largest single analysis ever of the organismal relationships. Including a fantastic 73060 bacteria, plants, fungi, and animals in a single run; it took the computer 2.5 months complete the run. The analysis included both DNA and morphological data and good news is also that just about all of the groupings of organisms suggested by earlier authors have been substantiated. The summary says "It seems that, for phylogenetics, the only limit that remains is the availability of data.". So, given the all-time low prices for sequencing, we probably can recover all major evolutionary events within a few decades.

Can Bill Gates Prevent the Next Katrina? 380

Posted by timothy on Friday July 10, 2009 @08:01AM from the you-can-have-6-billion-guesses dept.

theodp writes "He once controlled the world's PCs. Now Bill Gates has set his sights on controlling the world's weather. And patenting it. On Thursday, the USPTO revealed that Gates and ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold have filed five patent applications that propose using large fleets of vessels to suppress hurricanes through various methods of mixing warm water from the surface of the ocean with colder water at greater depths. The idea is to decrease the surface temperature, reducing or eliminating the heat-driven condensation that fuels the giant storms. Hey, a guy can only play so much golf in retirement."

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