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Comment Re:It's a shame that no one cares... (Score 1) 64

Presumably they mean front page news on conventional news sites and newspapers. Spot-checking, it is indeed not on some front pages. cnn.com, for example, has it on their science second-level page but not on the front page. foxnews.com doesn't even have it on their "science: air & space" page. msnbc.com doesn't even have it on their "science & tech" page.

The article explicitly states that this is just about locating missing baryonic matter. The biggest mystery of dark matter remains. And this discovery doesn't seem to involve any new theories, just detecting something predicted within existing theoretical models.

Given that this is just a discovery within existing theories, CNN's approach seems reasonable. Worth noting on the science page, not worthy of their front page.

Comment Re: dipshit (Score 1) 134

I was around in the 80s and 90s. I remember the stories of how Bill Gates cheated, manipulated, and cast FUD to get Microsoft where it was. DR-DOS, which he kept from the market by making deals with manufacturers where they would get volume discounts based on units shipped, rather than units shipped with MS-DOS, so that systems with DR-DOS would cost more. Sybase, where he made a deal to share technologies from a joint venture, then walked off with their source code, which he sold as his own product. The "Linux is a cancer" campaign. Secret APIs to lock out third-party security products. It's possible to go on and on.

There are highly successful people inside and outside tech that I admire. Warren Buffett? Awesome person. Bill Joy? A light to the ages. Steve Wozniak? Delightful. Bill Gates? Living scum. Not because he's successful, but because that's what he's shown through his actions.

Comment Re:Fair play. (Score 1) 211

Studies have found that most actively managed funds at any given time fail to match their benchmark indices when you factor in management fees. That is, while the professionals who do the management might know more than you do, they don't know so much more that they can beat market averages by enough money to actually justify their fees. Which means that the best investment strategy is to stick with passively managed index funds. A side benefit of this is that most index funds have very little of any individual security, so you are unlikely to have a situation where your funds are heavily invested in your employer's stock.

Comment Re:There's a difference between news and opinion (Score 1) 94

Reread what I wrote, including the very end of the first paragraph/quote ("there is talk of increasing the levy"), and the second paragraph, which includes recent video and a transcript from Trump. It's not just about what Trump did in 2017. Trump has stated that he plans to increase the taxes and otherwise extract money from university endowments. The transcript says "we will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments". Trump said that in 2023, in this election cycle. And it's posted to Trump's own election website.

The statement in the article is objective, not biased. You need to actually read and do some minimal followup.

Comment Re:There's a difference between news and opinion (Score 2) 94

I am not a Trump fan, but don't see any specific policies or explanation of how they might make their financial problems worse

From the article: "Two Trump administration policies could further weigh on Ivies’ finances. One is a 1.4% tax on income levied as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on endowments larger than $500,000 per student at schools with more than 500 students. A few dozen schools have had to pay it and there is talk of increasing the levy."

In case there is any doubt, you can actually watch video of Trump, on his own site, talking about increasing taxes and fines on University endowments. He discusses it starting at about 0:37.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/a...

Comment Re:Stay in your lane, Netflix (Score 1) 23

netflix was originally a DVD-rental-by-mail company.

Then they basically created online movie streaming. Very successfully.

Then they started making their own content. Very successfully.

Then they expanded into renting games. At least somewhat successfully.

At some point, they shuttered the original DVD rental business.

Now they're looking at making games. They've had a misstep or two. But saying "stay in your lane" is silly when they've successfully forayed into other lanes before. And is doubly ironic when what you think of as "their lane" wasn't their original business.

Comment Re:The elephant in the room... (Score 2) 107

The EU mandated that Microsoft provide competitors with the same level of access that their own (competing) products enjoyed. Microsoft had at least three options on how to respond and stay in compliance:

1. eat their own dogfood -- make their own products use the same APIs that they were trying to get other companies to use

2. get out of the business of making these security products and let the ISVs figure it out

3. let the ISVs into ring 0

Microsoft could have gone with options 1 or 2, and then Crowdstrike would not have been a problem. They went with option 3. That's on Microsoft, not on the EU.

Comment Re:shocker! (Score 1) 54

the corporations are full of shitbags, news at 11

FTFY. Oh, and an offtopic educational link for you grocers and foreigners and others who don't understand English:
https://www.angryflower.com/24...
I see enough of that shit on Farcebook. Note, I've been staying away from /. for the same reason, the normals have taken over the site.

Comment Re:Make that PUBMTATMTBAOITS (Score 1) 53

That's why they changed it from "Unidentified Flying Object" to "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena". The one I saw a half century ago was certainly not a space ship, unless Douglas Adams was right about scale, because it was smaller than a basketball. It was bright and fuzzy, rode next to my car for a couple of miles until I crossed a stream, when it zigged at 45 MPH at a right angle and followed the stream.

I wondered what it was for years before I learned about ball lightning, which is what it had to have been. My guess is ball lightning is a lot more common up there where the fighter jets play.

Comment tradeoffs (Score 1) 359

As with anything else where there are multiple popular choices, there are trade-offs. There are reasons both options exist. For a home user, I would recommend software RAID, though.

1. Hardware RAID makes it easier and safer to RAID your boot device.
2. As others have said, hardware RAID ties you to a particular hardware implementation. That's fine if you have a data center with a lot of duplicate hardware and sparing, but not so good if you're a home user.
3. Hardware RAID limits you to the RAID levels that the hardware implements. Especially for cheap controllers and/or integrated controllers. Software RAID tends to be more flexible.
4. Hardware RAID offloads some of the work from the host CPU to a dedicated controller. For CPU-intensive workloads, that can be an advantage.
5. For certain RAID levels and hardware RAID architectures, hardware RAID can save you I/O bandwidth. The CPU only needs to send a certain amount of I/O to the RAID-card, which then can send more I/O to the actual back-end drives. For really large I/O workloads, software RAID is more likely to saturate I/O bandwidth.
This is not likely to be an issue for home users, though.

Bottom line: for home users, I would recommend software RAID.

Comment Re:First? What? Hello? Internet worm. (Score 1) 100

We had PC computer viruses that caused "major" damage by the mid 1980s. Internet connectivity was rare at the time. But they didn't need Internet connectivity, thanks to floppy sharing and even BBSs. I remember the Pakistani Brain Virus, in particular, as one that people feared; wikipedia says it hit in early 1986. PCs and their viruses were pretty widespread by the late 1980s / early 1990s.

Of course, viruses spread a lot more slowly in the pre-Internet days. So the more destructive ones would include some trigger date. People could continue to spread them, oblivious. Then -- boom!

Presumably the article author's use of "first major" is a way to generate interest and clicks. Seems to have been successful.

User Journal

Journal Journal: The old camera... 1

A while back I discovered that they’re selling photographic film again, so I bought a package of three rolls of 35mm Kodak color film. Not sure what I’ll photograph, but the Minolta 35 mm SLR takes a hell of a lot better pictures than my phone. Actually, than any phone—and any digital camera.
I got home, set the film aside (it’s a lot more expensive than the last time I used film) and looked for my camera, which hadn’t been use

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