jyujin - Slashdot User

Submission + - Former Valve Hardware Designer was 'Stabbed in the Back' (ibtimes.co.uk) 2

Submitted by DavidGilbert99 on Monday July 08, 2013 @08:08AM

DavidGilbert99 writes: Jeri Ellsworth has opened up about her time at games developer Valve and has hit out strongly at teh so-called flatpack management structure. She says that despite Valve's claims of a democratic structure, there is a layer of powerful management in place and when she was fired she felt like she had been stabbed in the back. "If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I am really, really bitter.They promised me the world and then stabbed me in the back."

Submission + - The Physics Behind Waterslides

Submitted by theodp on Monday July 08, 2013 @05:14AM

theodp writes: National Geographic takes a high-level look at the physics behind waterslides. A lot of science goes into providing a safe 60 mph trip down slides like Walt Disney World's 10-story Summit Plummet. "Safety is our number one concern," explains Rick Hunter of ProSlide Technology ("Engineered Exhilaration"). "We're thinking about things like, 'Are you going to stay on the fiberglass tube?'. It's really easy to do a computer model and look at curves and drops and forecast rider position and speed." If you're making your waterslide bucket list, BuzzFeed's got pics of 18 favorites from around the world. Any others worth checking out before summer's over?

Submission + - Wood nanobattery could be green option for large-scale energy storage (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Monday July 08, 2013 @04:47AM

cylonlover writes: Li-ion batteries may be ok for your smartphone, but when it comes to large-scale energy storage, the priorities suddenly shift from compactness and cycling performance (at which Li-ion batteries excel) to low cost and environmental feasibility (in which Li-ion batteries still have much room for improvement). A new "wood battery" could allow the emerging sodium-ion battery technology to fit the bill as a long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery for large-scale energy storage.

Submission + - Gorilla Glass: Smartphones Could Have Antibacterial, Anti-Glare Displays (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid on Sunday July 07, 2013 @09:53PM

MojoKid writes: It's not too often that upcoming glass technology is worth getting excited over, but leave it to Corning to pique our interest. During a recent talk at MIT's Mobile Technology Summit, Dr. Jeffrey Evenson took to the stage to reiterate what it is about Gorilla Glass that makes it such an attractive product (something well evidenced given the majority of smartphones out there today implement it), as well as to give us a preview of what's coming. Having pretty much mastered Gorilla Glass where strength, scratch-resistance and general durability are concerned, the company is now looking to improve-upon it (possibly for Gorilla Glass 4) by making it non-reflective and germ-resistant. Imagine your smartphone sporting this — you'd finally be able to see the screen regardless of how bright the sun behind you is. Unfortunately, it appears that it won't be hitting our phones or tablets that soon. The estimate is "in the next two years."

Submission + - Firefox 23 Makes JavaScript Obligatory (i-programmer.info) 3

Submitted by mikejuk on Monday July 01, 2013 @09:32AM

mikejuk writes: It seems that Firefox 23, currently in beta, has removed the option to disable JavaScript. Is this good for programmers and web apps?
Why has Mozilla decided that this is the right thing to do?
The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications. The idea is that if you provide lots of user options then users will click them in ways that aren't particularly logical. The result is that users break the browser and then complain that it is broken. For example, there are websites that not only don't work without JavaScript, but they fail in complex ways — ways that worry the end user. Hence, once you remove the disable JavaScript option Firefox suddenly works on a lot of websites.
Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML.
Is there an option to turn off HTML?
I think not.

Comment Re:Holy idiocy batman (Score 1) 267

by jyujin on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @12:22PM (#42945481) Attached to: Taking a Hard Look At SSD Write Endurance

That was exactly the intention. And I've written down that idea for a more focused article on desktop/workstation usage with consumer grade SSDs, just in case nobody else will beat me to it ;).

Comment Re:Holy idiocy batman (Score 5, Informative) 267

by jyujin on Tuesday February 19, 2013 @10:11AM (#42944059) Attached to: Taking a Hard Look At SSD Write Endurance

I specifically had SLCs in mind when I ran the numbers. As for the 100k writes I used my original calculations, I took those from this PDF here: http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheets2/16/1697648_1.pdf - see section 1.5, it lists "Endurance : 100K Program/Erase Cycles" As for the 1M write cycles: http://investors.micron.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=440650 - that one came out in 2008, so using it as a baseline for "newer" SLCs didn't seem that far off. I'll have to revise the article to include those links methinks...

Submission + - SSD Write Endurance Considered... Sufficient (ef.gy)

Submitted by jyujin on Monday February 18, 2013 @06:26PM

jyujin writes: Ever wonder how long your SSD will last? It's funny how bad people are at estimating just how long "100,000 writes" are going to take when spread over a device that spans several thousand of those blocks over several gigabytes of memory. It obviously gets far worse with newer flash memory that is able to withstand a whopping million writes per cell. So yeah, let's crunch some numbers and fix that misconception. Spoiler: even at the maximum SATA 3.0 link speeds, you'd still find yourself waiting several months or even years for that SSD to start dying on you.

Submission + - Determinism and Its Enemies Are Still Waging War over the Soul of Science (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead on Monday February 18, 2013 @03:44PM

derekmead writes: Wherever determinism appears, controversy attends, raising specters of days when colonialists, eugenicists, public health officials, and political idealists believed they could cure the human condition through manipulation and force. Understanding those fears helps shed light on the controversy surrounding a recent paper (PDF) published in the American Economic Review, entitled, “The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development.” In it, economists Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor argue that the economic development of broad human populations correlate with their levels of genetic diversity—which is, in turn, pinned to the distance its inhabitants migrated from Africa thousands of years ago. Reaction has been swift and vehement.

An article signed by 18 academics in Current Anthropology accuses the researchers of “bad science”—“something false and undesirable” based on “weak data and methods” that “can become a justification for reactionary policy.” The paper attacks everything from its sources of population data to its methods for measuring genetic diversity, but the economists are standing by their methods. The quality of Ashraf and Galor's research notwithstanding, the debate illustrates just how tricky it's become to assert anything which says something about human development was in any way inevitable.

Comment Re:The P.O. Box reinvented? (Score 3, Interesting) 92

by jyujin on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @05:37PM (#40910419) Attached to: Amazon Expanding Delivery Locker Service

I'm still stumped at how people manage to actually receive anything sent to their homes to boot. Maybe it's just me, but at my place nobody's at home in that rather... flexible... time span that delivery companies might decide to drop by... ... but then again I find it easier to just have the things I want delivered to either the company where I work rather than to some PO Box workalike where I actually drive by and pick it up.

Comment Re:Corporate benefits (Score 1) 165

by jyujin on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @05:08PM (#40910059) Attached to: Paid Media Must Be Disclosed In Oracle v. Google

Indeed, wouldn't expect an AAA to let down their corporate property, errrr citizens, errrr wait that hasn't happened yet.

Comment Biased media? By golly, however did that happen! (Score 1) 165

by jyujin on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @05:03PM (#40910003) Attached to: Paid Media Must Be Disclosed In Oracle v. Google

Not exactly a surprise, but I'd sure like to get my hands at the statistics afterwards...

Submission + - Amazon Kindle Book Sales Surpass Print In UK (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by

twoheadedboy

on Monday August 06, 2012 @07:52AM

twoheadedboy writes: "Book lovers are increasingly turning to e-books, and in the UK Amazon has announced it now sells more e-books than physical copies on Amazon.co.uk. Kindle books surpassed sales of hardbacks in the UK back in May 2011 at a rate of two to one and now they have leapfrogged the combined totals of both hardbacks and paperbacks. The same happened in the US not so long ago, largely thanks to the popularity of novels like EL James' Fifty Shades of Grey, which started out as an e-book before being released in paperback."

Submission + - Sci-Fi writers of the past predict life in 2012 (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Monday August 06, 2012 @05:31AM

cylonlover writes: As part of the L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text “time capsule” of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out.

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