Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Garmin already does this (Score 1) 276

This is why I prefer female voices. Most of the gadgets I have can't reproduce lower frequencies very well, either distorting or removing them via a high-pass filter of some sort. Add in even a small amount of background noise and I can't pick the male voices out over the noise. I'd rather listen to a male voice, but with most gadgets it's not practical.

Comment Re:You know... there is life without cable. (Score 1) 447

Probably the most informative thing I've said on Slashdot in years and I forgot to log in. How's that for Karma? An additional tip - sometimes you'll even get some non-local channels unencrypted, depending on your carrier. I get TBS and some cartoon network that aren't available OTA, but some smaller carriers may even have more clearQAM content.

Comment Shatner's Music (Score 3, Insightful) 152

I'm a bit sad they don't mention his music at all. The first album he recorded was pretty terrible, but Has Been is a surprisingly interesting, and often very good, album. Throughout this article I was reminded of several of the songs on it, most specifically "Real." The album as a whole is pretty self-reflective and fairly humorous, so you get to see another iteration of Bill. Oh, and he doesn't try to sing, which helps a lot.

If you happen to be looking for something a little different and have an open mind, I'd say it's definitely worth a listen. It is definitely one of the most pleasant nearly-random musical finds of my life. Ben Folds had a pretty big hand in it, so fans of Ben may be more likely to appreciate it than others.

Comment Re:Why should they? (Score 2, Informative) 390

If I could get TWC to guarantee 3Mb/s with "up to" 10Mb/s (which, with TurboBoost or whatever it's called, they might as well call it "up to" 14 Mb/s, since I can hit that speed about as often as I can 10Mb/s), I'd probably be pretty happy with that.

As it is, it's not uncommon for me to be able to pull less than 700Kb/s down on my "up to" 10Mb/s connection, which is, in my opinion, disgraceful. 3Mb/s as a guaranteed minimum would actually be a blessing.

The issue isn't so much that they advertise the [generally unattainable] maximum; it's more that they don't advertise or adhere to any minimum speed or QoS metrics.

Comment Re:Well, that explains things. (Score 1) 1268

defiantly and proudly stupid.

I can't thank you enough for using that word in an appropriate context. That's probably the first time in 6 months I've seen defiantly on the internet and not wanted to murder the person that typed it.

Interestingly enough, as off-topic as I expected this to be, I was surprised at how on-topic it was, given the subject matter.

Comment Re:Ridiculous. (Score 2, Interesting) 422

Not sure if this was introduced with the P4, but I definitely learned the would-have-been-hard way that this throttling existed in those CPUs. I had a machine where the top two heat sink mounts pulled through the motherboard and I had effectively been running my CPU with no heat sink for several weeks before I figured it out. Every time I did anything remotely CPU-intensive, the system would slow to a crawl. If I let it sit for a while it would be fine.

I managed to reattach the heat sink, and that CPU is still working fine today. If this throttling were not included, I guarantee you that would have been the end of that chip.
Space

Sun's Dark Companion 'Nemesis' Not So Likely 306

TravisTR passes along a story about the death of Nemesis. "The data that once suggested the Sun is orbited by a distant dark companion now raises even more questions... The periodicity [of mass extinctions] is a matter of some controversy among paleobiologists but there is a growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years. The question is what? ... another idea first put forward in the 1980s is that the Sun has a distant dark companion called Nemesis that sweeps through the Oort cloud every 27 million years or so, sending a deadly shower of comets our way. ... [Researchers] have brought together a massive set of extinction data from the last 500 million years, a period that is twice as long as anybody else has studied. And their analysis shows an excess of extinctions every 27 million years, with a confidence level of 99%. That's a clear, sharp signal over a huge length of time. At first glance, you'd think it clearly backs the idea that a distant dark object orbits the Sun every 27 million years. But ironically, the accuracy and regularity of these events is actually evidence against Nemesis' existence."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Newspaper "Hacks Into" Aussie Gov't Website By Guessing URL 271

thelamecamel writes "According to the New South Wales state government, the Sydney Morning Herald, a local newspaper, attacked the government's 'website firewall security' for two days to research a recent story. The affected government minister said that the website was accessed 3,727 times, and that this is 'akin to 3,727 attempts to pick the lock of a secure office and take highly confidential documents.' The matter has been referred to the police, who are now investigating. But how did the paper 'hack' the website? They entered the unannounced URL. Security by obscurity at its finest."

Comment I'm a fan of [useful] comments (Score 1) 580

My employer has a very large, and, IMO very organized, but incomprehensibly so, codebase. There aren't a lot of high-level specs, and there aren't a lot of good comments in the code. There are a lot of times where I will be tasked with finding a bug, and I can see where the program breaks as well as why it breaks, but without knowing what it's supposed to do, it's hard for me to make the right fix. There are a lot of places where we have some 1500-line (don't even get me started on this) C++ function handling some enormous data structures (20+ member variables, of which roughly half of those are equally-large data structures) and there's basically no info on what any of it is really supposed to do (other than whatever function/variable names there are).

Whenever I'm not cleaning up other peoples' messes, I tend to focus on making sure it's obvious what I was trying to do and that the input/output of my function is well-specified, so if someone comes along behind me it's easier for them to locate the "true" problem by looking at the specifications than just finding a "problem" and trying to make sure it doesn't happen again with some quick fix. I also try to keep my functions as task-specific as possible and small enough to be somewhat comprehensible on their own while considering that we don't have unlimited stack space on our devices.

But, then again, I'm relatively new there. They might break my will eventually...

Slashdot Top Deals

You have a message from the operator.

Working...