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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Buy two... (Score 1) 190

backup

and

RAID1

Please don't take this the wrong way, but you don't know what you're talking about. RAID is not a backup, and backup is not RAID.

RAID is keeping going with a hard drive failure. Backup is where you can recover any file in your backup time frame. If in a RAID configuration you delete a file and suddenly realize three months later that you really should have kept it, you're out of luck. If your OS decides to crap garbage all over your disk, RAID will faithfully mirror that garbage for you. It's good to have RAID, but it's also good to have backups.

Comment Re: Understanding the Indian retailers. (Score 2) 53

Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them.

Is "class-conscious" some new euphemism for "assholes" that I haven't previously been aware of?

It depends. Is "I haven't previously been aware of" a new euphemism for "I have my head shoved so far up my ass that I've never noticed how societies work"? Because there is nothing new about this behavior anyplace. People were assholes about class indicators long ago, they are assholes about class indicators now, and they will be assholes about class indicators in the future.

Comment Re: When pet theories die... (Score 2) 137

Like it or not, the term "God particle" was created by Leon M. Lederman for a book he wrote. Now, Dr. Lederman has won the Nobel Prize for Physics, the Wolf Prize in Physics, and the National Medal of Science. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that given a choice between you and him...well, he's the one who is right.

However, to be fair, once you've won your Nobel Prize, I'll start paying attention to your opinions compared to his.

Comment Re:When pet theories die... (Score 1) 137

And yet, there are zebras.

On July 4, 2012, CERN director general Rolf Heuer announced that his team had detected âoea particle consistent with the Higgs boson,â and that the discovery was confirmed by two separate experiments (ATLAS and CMS). However, Heuer noted that additional data was required to confirm that it was, in fact, the so-called "God particle."

The article basically says we've found something new, but by running some more tests at CERN, we can pin it down better. Which, as we can see from the quote, is also the belief of the people who made the discovery.

Nobody is saying the particle isn't "Higgs-like", or that it's not a major discovery, or even that we're misunderstanding its role. But, and it's an important but, we've never pinned it down exactly. Which every article I've ever read in the last couple of years has said. Using Wikipedia (dangerous, I know), it uses "tentatively confirmed" for a couple of test and notes values are slightly off the prediction for branching levels. (A term that I gladly admit to knowing nothing about, but if it's being mentioned, I would think it must be important for the verification)

Comment Re:Alternative headline (Score 1) 429

Yes, clearly the two wrong acts aren't equivalent. The torrent user is just an inconsiderate asshole while this dude is an outright malicious asshole.

But can you do it as a car analogy?

The first guy is the kind of idiot who pulls into an intersection on a yellow light when there's not enough room to pull completely through. The second guy's a BMW owner.

Comment You've got it backwards (Score 2) 349

The problem isn't making sure code that worked on Windows 95 still works. It's code that wouldn't run in the DOS code tree, but will still run in the NT tree, and has code that prevents trying to run it on older systems...and, instead of checking for Windows_NT and proceeding, checked for Windows_9* and stopped.

And, for the record, on a Windows 7 box, the OS environment variable is still "Windows_NT". Somebody out there must have a 95 (or 98) box still running that could check if it shows "Windows_95". ("echo %OS%", but if you've still got a box that old, you knew that.)

Comment Gotta like the pro-level bullshit. (Score 1) 42

From the article:

Maguire, in conversation with Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore, likened the vehicles to planes rather than drones, a word that does carry some negative connotations.

Drone means there's no pilot; they take surplus/retired conventional planes, such as a Phantom and turn them into a, yes, drone. (And stick a Q in front of the designation so it's now a QF-4,)

Submission + - The Passenger Pigeon: A Century of Extinction 1

An anonymous reader writes: On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon was found dead in her aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo. When the first European settlers arrived in North America at least one of every four birds on the continent was a passenger pigeon, making them the most numerous birds in North America, and perhaps in the world. From the article: "But extinction apparently doesn’t ring with the finality it used to. Researchers are working to 'de-extinct' the bird. They got their hands on some of the 1,500 or so known passenger pigeon specimens and are hoping to resurrect the species through some Jurassic Park-like genetic engineering. Instead of using frog DNA to fill out the missing parts of a dinosaur’s genetic code as in Michael Crichton’s story, the real-life 'bring-back-the-passenger pigeon' researchers are using the bird’s closest relative, the band-tailed pigeon.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?" -- Lily Tomlin

Working...