Comment Take care (Score 1) 1521
And thanks. Congratulations on a job well done
Comment brick and "mortal" stores (Score 1) 443
Lesson among all brick and mortar stores: your selection will always suck compared to online stores. Figure out a niche for yourself such that your selection doesn't suck so much, or have an online presence that's useful. I've given up a long time ago on blindly driving to a freaking store in the hopes they'd have this one thing I need and lo and behold they don't. So then I drive to another store, and another, etc. And after two hours I'm like, what the hell is wrong with me, I could've ordered this online. More and more of your shoppers will have this thinking, especially as gas prices keep increasing.
Tips for a useful online presence: I can check if something is in stock before I get there? Sweet. Even better, I can actually pay for it now and you'll have it ready to be picked up when I get there? Double sweet. I actually still buy stuff at Best Buy for this reason. Instant gratification by being able to get something right now instead of waiting for UPS is still an enticing thing, so I am sometimes willing to pay some extra markup for that (but not too much, Best Buy can be horrid but catch a sale our have a coupon, and it's not so bad).
Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced 184
An anonymous reader writes "After showcasing Quake Wars: Ray Traced a few years ago, Intel is now showing their latest graphics research project using Wolfenstein game content. The new and cool special effects are actually displayed on a laptop using a cloud-based gaming approach with servers that have an Intel Knights Ferry card (many-core) inside. Their blog post has a video and screenshots."
World's First Transcontinental Anesthesia 83
An anonymous reader writes "Medical Daily reports: 'Video conferences may be known for putting people to sleep, but never like this. Dr. Thomas Hemmerling and his team of McGill's Department of Anesthesia achieved a world first on August 30, 2010, when they treated patients undergoing thyroid gland surgery in Italy remotely from Montreal. The approach is part of new technological advancements, known as 'Teleanesthesia', and it involves a team of engineers, researchers and anesthesiologists who will ultimately apply the drugs intravenously which are then controlled remotely through an automated system.'"
Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."
Supersizing the "Last Supper" 98
gandhi_2 writes "A pair of sibling scholars compared 52 artists' renditions of 'The Last Supper', and found that the size of the meal painted had grown through the years. Over the last millennium they found that entrees had increased by 70%, bread by 23%, and plate size by 65.6%. Their findings were published in the International Journal of Obesity. From the article: 'The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.'"
Food Activist's Life Becomes The Life of Brian 165
krou writes "After food activist and author Raj Patel appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his latest book, things seemed to be going well, until he began to get inundated with emails asking if he was 'the world teacher.' In events ripped straight from The Life of Brian, it would seem that Raj Patel's life story ticks all the boxes necessary to fulfill prophecies made by Benjamin Creme, founder of religious sect Share International. After the volume of emails and inquiries got worse, Patel eventually wrote a message on his website stating categorically that he was not the Messiah. Sure enough, 'his denial merely fanned the flames for some believers. In a twist ripped straight from the script of the comedy classic, they said that this disavowal, too, had been prophesied.'"
Comment Re:Easy strawmen to knock off?.. (Score 1) 881
Indeed, I think it is (was?) mandatory for US federal employees at a certain level to respond to any citizen correspondence, no matter how zany it might be. Remember my father way back when working as a physicist for the DOE having to respond to similar questions about particle colliders causing the end of the world or postulations about the flood in the bible somehow causing the hole in the ozone layer. There were some true
Being a scientist working for the government always got you weird requests it seemed, at least for him. Maybe it's not limited to government scientists.
After his retiring I remember either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel approached him about interviewing him as an expert for a show about atomic bomb tests causing cancer in John Wayne or something to that effect. He declined figuring they'd just make him look like a fool. Keep meaning to watch that program just to see what they came up with, assuming they followed through with it.
Comment Re:gofmt (Score 1) 831
Indeed, indentation style is serious business.
Back in my junior days I remember a team lead telling a junior colleague of mine, "Use tabs and I'll pull your scrotum over your head!!" Suffice to say I didn't use tabs for the next five years. Oddly enough though I've switched to tabs eventually.
Comment Re:Well, ain't that something. (Score 1) 83
I'm amused by the fact the site is dead already. The mirrors hardly matter when the main site is hosed. ("Service Unavailable").
My servers! The mirrors do nothing!!!!
Best Mouse For Programming? 569
LosManos writes "Which is the best programming mouse? Mandatory musts are wireless, and that it doesn't clog up like old mechanical mice. Present personal preferences are for: lots of buttons, since if I have moved my hand away from the keyboard I can at least do something more than move the pointer; sturdy feeling; not too light, so it doesn't move around by me accidentally looking at it." What would you recommend?
Financial Crisis Soundtrack 31
German musician Johannes Kreidler made a soundtrack of the global economic crisis composed by running financial graphs through SongSmith. It gets political in a few spots, but is bleakly funny.
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"Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm. Gag me with a smurfette." -- P. Buhr, Computer Science 354
