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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:My last corvette (Score 1) 133

Corvette is no longer a sports car. Some would argue it never was, it was just a muscle car with better handling. But now it's a supercar, and it needs to be bigger. A smaller car doing the speeds it will do will be unstable. You need both some wheelbase and track, and you also need the wheelbase to be significantly greater than the track, or you will have a twitchy deathtrap.

If you live in the USA and want a sports car, the answer has been Miata since it was introduced. It used to be 240SX, but nobody knew, because Nissan is shitty at marketing. (You needed more power, but the stock "truck motor" used in the USA would do 300hp with a turbo on stock internals reliably, and there is a shitload of room for engine swaps in that vehicle.) The 240SX used to absolutely dominate autocross when it was in the E/SP class. Then because they won too much the SCCA moved it to D/SP where it had to compete with M3s and other shit with twice the power, which was some absolute clown shit. Nissan never brought us the S15 Silvia which would have been the post-1998 240SX, so the Miata has been the answer ever since unless you want AWD, then it's been Impreza. They still have a model or two with a stick.

Comment Microsoft disables explorer in explorer in win11 (Score 1) 21

When you load an Explorer window in Windows 10, the window loads and then it loads the stuff that's supposed to be in it. In Windows 11, in an apparent attempt to hide how the sausages are made from the user, it loads the stuff that's supposed to be in it before it draws the window. That way it's usable shortly after it appears. But what happens if you have a network failure? Now the explorer window no longer appears until after the network timeout passes, even if you open e.g. "explorer c:\". This means that you cannot use Explorer to load local resources during a period of network failure without waiting for at least a few minutes. If I want to open a local document I therefore either have to load it from within the application (which itself may have a variation of the same problem related to file dialogs not becoming usable until the network timeout passes) or go find and "start" it with the CLI.

While I'm complaining about stupid by-design fuckups in Windows 11, I used to use Notepad as part of my workflow in Windows 10. Not only does all text appear the same with no formatting, but it strips formatting, so if you paste something into classic notepad and then C&P it out later it goes without any of the text formatting. Sometimes this is exactly what I want. Windows 11's notepad breaks both of these things by supporting RTF, and by having a shitty autosave feature which you cannot disable. You can stop Notepad from loading its prior state on launch, but you CANNOT disable autosave. If a network share goes away while a document is open, NOTEPAD HANGS. If it doesn't come back before the timeout is exceeded, THE DOCUMENT IS UNLOADED. It literally just closes the tab, ALONG WITH YOUR CHANGES.

Microsoft has always been incompetent but this is well beyond the pale. This is beyond amateur hour level bullshit, this is a new low of incompetence even for Microsoft. And since their servers are pathetically fragile and need to be rebooted once a week or more for something simple like file services to even work reliably, this is causing me real life problems which result in less work being done.

Comment Do people seek out OSS intentionally? (Score 2) 42

I know I do, but I mean more specifically, do enough people seek out OSS to keep it around? I go looking for OSS solutions both to save money of course but also to be able to have the code so that I can update it if it breaks later. I have successfully done this several times despite not being much of a programmer, getting hints by googling compiler errors.

Comment PS2 was the last old school console (Score 1) 24

You might say it was PS3, because Cell, but most early titles mostly ran on the PPE and used the SPEs only for graphics, which is a lot like today's systems. The PS2's architecture was super interesting, being made out of multiple weird MIPS cores glued together with an ordinary one, and in weird ways. That generation is also obviously notable for being where the writing went up on the wall for highly custom consoles, with the PC-based Xbox. Even though Microsoft themselves built a fairly interesting console in the following generation — tri-core PPC is weird, even if in other ways it was not very extraordinary — since then everyone but Nintendo has built just crippled AIO PCs.

Comment Re:Around the truck? (Score 1) 87

It doesn't matter where they are stopped, within 10 minutes of a stop that lasts that long they must be placed 10 feet aft, (assuming you're on the right side as you're facing) 100 feet aft, and 100 feet afore. That means they're walking 10 feet aft and placing one, 90 more feet aft and placing another, 200 feet forwards so they're placing one 100 feet ahead, and then 100 feet back to their rig. I am admittedly not great at math, but this seems to me to add up to 300 feet, unless you've got two humans in the truck willing and able to place warning devices. In that case, each person only has to walk 200 feet, and I won't be so petty as to count both of their steps since nobody has to walk the full distance.

With that out of the way, let's have a more interesting discussion. There's no reason why a vehicle cannot have self-deploying reflective warning triangles based on radio controlled vehicles. It should be doable with vehicles wholesaling around $100. I think it would be most prudent to use tracked vehicles. It would probably cost more for something to pick them up off the ground again than for all three. And come to think of it, better to have four just in case. Alternately, how about a flare mortar? Wink wink for the many humor impaired out there.

Slashdot Top Deals

13. ... r-q1

Working...