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Comment Re:Safe to inhale? (Score 1, Insightful) 91

Asbestos is dangerous to your lungs because the individual fibers are long and sharp and stabby and your mucus lining cannot clear them. These are little metallic beads; I expect your lungs would clear them just like any other similar sized particle of dust or plastic.

But you go live in your protective bubble so you're safe from them. I don't mind.

Comment Death Knells of the complanent (Score 1) 30

When the technology we used was sold to MicroFocus, the joke was that they are the group that buys mature technology stacks simply to bleed the last bit of revenue out of them before they're completely worthless.

Broadcom has recently started showing the same traits, jacking up the costs of their recently purchased virtualization platform while they can before the product becomes a true commodity that cannot generate revenue.

Now it sounds like Oracle is following the same playbook. Oracle's Java platform has been commoditized. So has the RDMS. Most businesses are discovering they just don't need to pay the high costs Oracle charges.. so they're jacking up the costs for those that have not yet discovered that or are locked in for other reasons.. and doing it quickly before that changes.

What we're witnessing is the death knell of another formerly innovative company that got mired in bureaucracy and complacence. Farewell, Oracle; your time has come.

Comment Re:The gall of this guy (Score 1) 67

I just flew Basic Economy on United earlier this week. I could not check in online without entering my CC just in case I brought more than my personal item. Gave the gate agent an earful until he used his badge to verify my personal item's dimensions and proceed with the check-in.

Yeah, complain about the budget airlines while you follow their lead. Pound sand, Kirby.

Comment Re:And the reasons? (Score 3, Interesting) 26

To some degree. When Wiley (old, big publisher) bought Hindawi (young, fast-growing upstart Open Access publisher), they quickly discovered that the entire publishing house was infiltrated by paper mills. They retracted thousands of papers, and closed many journals. However, some of their own journals are also heavily infiltrated by paper mills, and those had far fewer retractions.

Conversely, another young upstart, MDPI, has very few retractions even though they also have a high number of paper mill productions, including some that they know about very well and have "investigated".

Wiley is obviously a much more serious publisher than MDPI, albeit more hesitant to clean their old house than the newer that they bought.

Computer science, by the way, has a far higher rate of retractions for academic misconduct than other disciplines, and it's not because it's so easily replicated, it's because it's rampant with fraud. I'll give you an example of ridiculous verbiage that somehow stays in the academic literature thanks to the non-efforts of IEEE and an academic community that will publish anything but read nothing. You don't need a replication study to see that this isn't a serious academic work. It's most likely a patchwork of plagiarised text that's been fed through some paraphrasing filters to avoid automatic detection.

But yeah, psychology is surely not serious and computer science is very smart.

Comment 4 frequency bands? (Score 2) 57

It will also use the same four frequency bands (2, 4, 5, and 6GHz) and the same 4096 QAM modulation across a maximum channel bandwidth of 320MHz.

Thank you, AI. Let's see how long this new "truth" hangs around.

Best I can figure, "2.4, 5, and 6GHz" somehow got translated to "2, 4, 5, and 6GHz." Please correct me if 4GHz is a band used internationally that I'm not familiar with, but everything I'm seeing says there are only three bands, the lowest of is known as 2.4GHz, not 2GHz, and there is no 4GHz spectrum allocated for WiFi.

The 4-band models out there generally have two 5GHz radios, one of which is dedicated to the backhaul/mesh network.

Comment Re:With service like that...walk away (Score 1) 87

As much as is possible, before I buy a piece of consumer network gear, I first determine if I can install OpenWRT on it. Doing so means I may forego the latest tech, but it means the service life is much more likely to extend beyond the OEM's support cycle.

My Nighthawk X4S R7800 (AC2600) was released in 2016 and is running OpenWRT 23.5. It is plenty fast enough for now, and even has a SATA port so could be a light-duty NAS when connected to a suitable external enclosure.

Comment I'm shocked (Score 1) 73

Having worked at a telecommunications equipment manufacturer, specifically on the CALEA subsystem testing team, let me say that I'm just shocked that a system designed for lawful intercept would ever be used for nefarious purposes. Shocked, I tell you. Nobody could ever anticipate something like this happening.

(for the emo-divergent, I should point out that the above statement is positively dripping with sarcasm.)

Comment Re:abd if you are in a noisy enviroment (Score 1) 235

Then close the windows, or ask the people in the car making so much god damn noise to shut up for 10 seconds.

But it's a nice day and I'm traveling at 65mph with the top down in my convertible. You want me to pull over just so I can tell the car to adjust the passenger side mirror?

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Thus spake the master programmer: "When a program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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