Comment And yet, nary a one of these so-called visionaries (Score 1) 192
And yet nary a one of these so-called visionaries came up with a way for me to go back through time and blow my brains out all at once, huh?
Comment Re:Railroad is Union Pacific (more info) (Score 1) 34
Comment Railroad is Union Pacific (more info) (Score 1) 34
Progressive Railroading reports that Union Pacific is using those drones to survey for track "washouts" and such damage.
Washouts are when the rock and such underneath the tracks is washed away, especially where the track bridges streams and rivers. The rail road companies lay down large (1 yard or more) pipe for the streams to flow through, then building up sand/rock/gravel into a "road bed" to lay tracks on, to bridge these small streams and rivers. When that goes in major flooding, all you have left is rail and the wood/concrete "ties"... and that's not strong enough for heavy (several tons) of engine and track cars.
Houston isn't the only one that had that. New York's Metro North Railroad had washouts on it's Port Jervis line north of the NY/NJ border during Hurricane Irene in 2011.
Comment Some responses (Score 1) 82
I have three responses from sites that use Cloudflare. Essentially, their boiled down response is "We don't use those features that were affected. Cloudflare told us we weren't affected." One art site, Weasyl, just forced everyone to log off just to be safe.
Comment Re:I thought they originals were destroyed... (Score 1) 304
Won't matter what Lucas says. Disney owns the Star Wars franchise now. Lucas is 100% removed from it.
Comment First non-Amazon device was a Raspberry Pi. (Score 1) 109
Too late on the "Echo on a non-Amazon device": Amazon Echo DIY with a Raspberry Pi
Submission + - Docker Moves Beyond Containers with Unikernel Systems Purchase (thenewstack.io)
joabj writes: Earlier today, Docker announced that it had purchased the Cambridge, U.K.-based Unikernel Systems, makers of the OCaml-based MirageOS, a unikernel or "virtual library-based operating system." Unikernels go beyond containers in stripping virtualization down to the bare essentials in that they only include the specific OS functionality that the application actually needs. Their design builds on decades of research into modular OS design. Although unikernels can be complex to deploy for developers, Docker aims to make the process as standardized as possible, for easier deployment.
Submission + - PostgreSQL 9.5 does UPSERT Right (thenewstack.io)
joabj writes: For years, PostgreSQL users would ask when their favorite open source database system would get the UPSERT operator, which can either insert an entry or update it if a previous version already existed. Other RDMS have long offered this feature. Bruce Momjian, one of the chief contributors to PostgreSQL, admits to being embarrassed that it wasn't supported. Well, PostgreSQL 9.5, now generally available, finally offers a version of UPSERT and users may be glad the dev team took their time with it. Implementations of UPSERT on other database systems were “handled very badly,” sometimes leading to unexpected error messages Momjian said. Turns out it is very difficult to implement on multi-user systems. “What is nice about our implementation is that it never generates an unexpected error. You can have multiple people doing this, and there is very little performance impact,” Momjian said. Because it can work on multiple tables at once, it can even be used to merge one table into another.
Comment Win, Mac, Linux picks (Score 1) 352
Windows: PuTTY, followed by Cygwin's own terminal.
MacOS: iTerm. It what the Terminal is supposed to be.
Linux: rxvt-unicode. It's a classic terminal, but it's just a terminal. Nothing more, nothing less. XTerm is just too bloated.
Comment Someone forgot to tell Apple. (Score 2) 242
Someone forgot to tell Apple that they're not hashable... because that's how they're storing them.
But then, you don't use them as a key to encrypt, you use them to *verify* that you are you. This takes care of dumb people trying to break into your phone. The smart ones just open up the phone and try to read the flash and security EEPROM directly.
Submission + - Romance and Rebellion in Software Versioning (joabj.com) 1
joabj writes: Most software releases more or less follow the routine convention of Major.Minor.Bugfix numbering (i.e. Linux 4.2.1). This gives administrators an idea of what updates are major ones and might bring compatibility issues. As Dominic Tarr points out in his essay "Sentimental Versioning," a few projects boldly take on more whimsical schemes for versioning, such as Donald Knuth's use of successive Pi digits to enumerate new updates to TeX, or Node.js's punk-rock careening between major and minor releases. If you break convention, Tarr seems to be arguing, at least do so with panache.
Comment Microsoft. Where SaaS means Solitare as a Service. (Score 1) 296
TSIA.
Comment Cost... and charging... (Score 2) 688
The big thing is cost (which will go down over time with improvements in battery technology), but you also have to figure out charging as well.
The Tesla Model S has a 85 kWh battery bank. The average price for power is 10 cents per kWH in Maryland (even solar). So that's $1.20 to "fill up the tank" in raw power alone. Plus, it's not a quick fill-up.
That's not economical for a gas station. A rest stop or a restaurant (even a Royal Farm)? Drop in the bucket. So you'll have to dot rest stops with charging stations, seating and a lunch counter all over the place.... instead of gas stations. Well, that's a shift in thinking. And something the gas/oil companies aren't ready for.
Comment Have they gotten him out of the white room? (Score 1) 147
We definitely need to see him out and about.
Comment Remember the AIR Presidental Election Algorythm (Score 1) 676
If you remember the AIR Presidental Election Algorythm, you'll find that she has to get a damn good vice president, because she's no governor, no head of any college, nothing. She scores a 0, while Martin O'Malley scores a 88 (8 years Maryland governor).
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