Forgot your password?

Comment: Re:Fork Slashdot? (Score 2) 188

by dotancohen (#46172593) Attached to: Build an Open-Source Electric Car In About One Hour

That sounds good. I don't want it to be _my_ project, even if I'm coding it. I come to /. for the discussion, and I'll go wherever that discussion goes, even if I have to code it.

Can we get a list of things we want and don't want from the current and past slashdot incarnations? I'll draw up a plan and as people get interested I'll start assigning responsibilities and give access to the code. Everyone here knows how to work with Git, right?

Preliminary Wants:
1) Threaded commenting.
2) Limited modding

Comment: Re:Fork Slashdot? (Score 3, Interesting) 188

by dotancohen (#46171009) Attached to: Build an Open-Source Electric Car In About One Hour

Unfortunately something like 15 years worth of usernames and comments, because although the comments are still owned by each respective user I doubt the database is.

User comments could probably be taken care of on a limited per-user basis by scraping the user's personal page:

If a user opens an account on slashdotan and then _logs_into_slashdot_ via slashdotan (i.e. gives slashdotan his /. username and password) then I believe that the content could be legally scraped.

I'll go register the domain and see what I can code. Anybody who is interested can email me, my Gmail username is the same as my /. username.

Comment: Re:how many products? (Score 1) 298

by dotancohen (#46129151) Attached to: Price of Amazon Prime May Jump To $119 a Year

Nothing is decreasing in price. Please name ONE thing that is still the same quality as before but is lower in price.

Amazon Web Services.

Every few months I get an email that some aspect is lowering in price. Last week it was EBS: the price of storage just dropped from 10 cent/GiB/month to 5 cent/GiB/month. That, with always more and more features. The latest feature that has become widespread that I'm excited about is Virtual Private Cloud, where one can set up their entire virtual network infrastructure. VPC is free with EC2, which itself has a price decrease a few months ago.

Myself and my employer are _very_ happy AWS customers.

Comment: Re:No horns? (Score 1) 267

by dotancohen (#46129115) Attached to: When Cars Go Driverless, What Happens To the Honking?

Ok, let's assume in this wondrous future, you are being driven (can't exactly call it driving if you're not in control) on some country roads and you encounter a very large bull standing in the middle of the road.

Do you really think it a good idea to deliberately get into a competition of "who's stronger with their horns" with a bull?

Comment: Re:No real surprise (Score 1) 313

by dotancohen (#46124619) Attached to: Half of US Nuclear Missile Wing Implicated In Cheating

The rods are "safely subcritical" so long as the heavy elements (probably uranium in this case) remain where they should: suspended in the cast.

The term meltdown refers to the fuel rods actually melting. Gravity then differentiates the component materials: heavy stuff pools at the bottom. Once you have a pool of uranium there is danger of it becoming dense enough to become critical. There is even evidence of this having happened in nature.

Comment: Re:Isn't just the keyboards (Score 1) 459

by dotancohen (#46003515) Attached to: Stop Trying To 'Innovate' Keyboards, You're Just Making Them Worse

But unless it's IPS, rotating an LCD will shift colors because the viewing angles aren't the same for horizontal vs vertical. It also messes up font smoothing since the order of sub-pixels isn't the same (unless the OS is aware of that)

Still won't work for a laptop

It's really not so bad. I'm reading slashdot on my landscape monitor, but VIM is always open in the landscape LCD non-IPS monitor (23" LG) and it's fine. With a dark background and light fonts, there is no discernable issue of font smoothing, and the viewing angles are limited but more than adequate. When I do open an application that has a light background and dark fonts (such as a PDF) one can detect font-antialiasing issues but it really isn't a bother.

Comment: Re:tool? (Score 1) 124

by dotancohen (#45976805) Attached to: BitTorrent's Bram Cohen Unveils New Steganography Tool DissidentX

From the first lines of the first file on Github:

def x(m1, m2):
                assert type(m1) is bytes
                assert type(m2) is bytes
                return (int.from_bytes(m1, 'big') ^ int.from_bytes(m2, 'big')).to_bytes(len(m1), 'big')

assert x(x(b'abc', b'def'), b'def') == b'abc'

Maybe that was added after you posted. Note that it ostensibly has a 'test' (assert) but with functions named h(), x(), I find the code very unfriendly indeed.

Comment: Re:the root of the problem (Score 1) 1009

by dotancohen (#45948483) Attached to: Windows 9 Already? Apparently, Yes.



The same could be said of any Linux-based OS. The sad truth is that people prefer "familiar" over "good" and so are stuck thinking that they like Windows XP.

I don't understand how these people ever by a new car, especially if the wiper control or headlamp switch is in a different place.
