Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment What a pointless law. (Score 3, Insightful) 267

Anyone with half a brain will have already switched to LED for commonly used lights to save on electric costs on just pure economic terms.

There are a few applications where the soft heat from an incandescent is what is needed more than the light, and now these are banned. Think about warming animal cages for chicks, small mammals, reptiles. Think about toys like Easy Bake oven. I had planned to use them in a home made wood worker drying kiln. Heat lamps in baths and showers.

How about the grain of rice sized bulbs used in model railroads or doll house miniatures. The list goes on. There are also high temp environments where LEDs are not likely to survive like ovens.

Be smarter about who you vote for - elections have consequences.

Comment I'd like a microwaved steak - said no one ever (Score 0) 373

Electric is not the silver bullet answer to everything. For driving pleasure would you rather drive a throaty V-8 muscle car rumbling down the road or an EV? Its like would you rather have your steak char-grilled or microwaved?

Aesthetics aside, sourcing enough raw materials for batteries for EVs globally will be a problem. One country has already bought up virtually all the production mines. Also these EV lithium-ion batteries don't work as well in the cold, there is insufficient infrastructure for on-the-road charging, some states like California can't handle the electrical load as it is on hot days after 4pm with solar efficiency wanes without adding 20 million EVs to the mix.

Comment Exidy Sorcerer (Score 1) 523

I bought my first computer - an Exidy Sorcerer Z80 in 1979. It had an 80 character screen and used ROM cartridges for word processing and spreadsheet work. I initially used an old TV with a signal converter but quickly switched to a 9 inch monitor. Also the cassette tape drive storage was replaced by 3 Exidy 315KB 5.25 floppy drives. The printer was an MPI dot matrix. Later I added an S-100 bus and a pair of 1/2 high 8" floppy for an additional 2MB of online storage so I could play Infocom games and ran CP/M operating system. The S100 bus increased memory from 48 to 56KB (the last 8KB were Rom. I also added a 512MB ram drive for faster program operations - but don't lose power before unloading any data in it. For university work I also added a Diablo daisy wheel printer because a professor did not want computer printed papers (he meant bad dot matrix). I got his ok to use the daisy wheel and my word processor - #winning.

Comment Black Mirror Social Score (Score 4, Interesting) 42

Black Mirror has a good episode of a dystopian society where people continuously social score each other. The result is that people start living for the social score to the exclusion of everything else.

Curiously China is doing something similar. Is this the beginning of the end for Coinbase?

https://nationalpost.com/enter...

Comment Document storage vs dynamic file system (Score 1) 209

The system looks ok for storing static files and documents, and perhaps the vast majority of files on any computer system are just that. Where the file system excels is in dynamic sized files that grow like log files or data files where you append or update data. The document storage system would likely have to load, update and rewrite the whole file for random access operations.

Perhaps a system that has a small file system for dynamic files and document storage for the largely static bulk of files?

Comment Massive vote fraud may invalidate entire election (Score 1, Troll) 203

There are 1000's of sworn affidavits being collected as evidence as well as direct evidence of the most massive organized election fraud ever. With 26 state's elections affected, none of the states have certified their elections 2 weeks after the date. Any states who used the Dominion machines must carefully consider ramifications of certifying their elections given the the tsunami of evidence coming the forefront.

Comment Herd Immunity 20%? (Score 1) 431

If herd immunity is reached when 20% of the population is infected, the USA can expect about 64 million infections and a corresponding 2% fatality rate. The statistics are slippery because dying with Covid-19 is counted the same as dying from Covid-19. Numbers are also skewed because of the financial incentive to the medical industry to report more Covid-19 cases. The number of infections may also be significantly under counted due to many people being asymptomatic..

Comment I'm a Software Engineer and I'm voting for Prop 22 (Score 1) 194

I'm a Software Engineer and own a boutique consulting company. I like working for myself and have a small number of customers, but the AB5 is putting me at risk of losing my business because I'm being forced to be an employee of my customer when neither I nor my customers want that relationship. AB5 sweeps up many more independent gig workers than just the drivers, many of whom don't want it for the same reasons.

I drove for Uber for about 6 months during a rough time I had and worked out the problem described with not getting paid for much of the time or driving, so I quit Uber and did something else.

Slashdot Top Deals

3500 Calories = 1 Food Pound

Working...