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User: PolygamousRanchKid+

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  1. Re:software dev vs programmer on IT Jobs With the Best (and Worst) ROI · · Score: 1, Funny

    Well, now he is saying:

    Basketball players
    Basketball players basketball players, etc . . .

    I am no fan of the NBA, but if it lured Ballmer out of the IT industry, and keeps him out . . . I will love the NBA . . .

  2. Re:Way to piss off customers, Apple. on If You Want To Buy an Apple Watch In-Store, You'll Need a Reservation · · Score: 1

    At a price of $350, it's hardly expensive for a watch.

    It's not a watch. It's a fashion accessory. And nobody who is somebody would be caught dead wearing a $350 version . . . Apple is going after the folks who will dish out $10,000 for a watch: http://www.engadget.com/2015/0...

    $350 for a watch? How vulgar and ordinary!

  3. Re:Way to piss off customers, Apple. on If You Want To Buy an Apple Watch In-Store, You'll Need a Reservation · · Score: 1

    This is an excellent marking tactic. For that price, Apple wants to make sure that you get the feeling that the iWatch is "exclusive". Not every ordinary dweeb can walk into a store and buy one. It's like getting a membership in country club or other exclusive club. You're not just buying a watch . . . you are buying a legacy. That's how the ultra expensive Swiss watchmakers advertise their watches in The Economist.

    So, in order to sell it to dumb rich folks, you need to wrap the purchase process in a wee bit of prompt and circumstance . . .

  4. Re:No they don't on Chinese Scientists Plan Solar Power Station In Space · · Score: 3, Insightful

    transmitted to a collector on Earth

    . . . or fry Washington, DC or Moscow . . .

    Take a look at "Diamonds Are Forever" for all the details.

  5. Re:No it isn't on At the Track With Formula E, the First e-Racing Series · · Score: 1

    any innovation packed its bags and walked a decade ago.

    That's why F1 never really interested me: I don't want to watch a race where all the cars are the same. I would like to see a "no holds barred" race, where you could enter anything from a teenager on a skateboard with a jet pack, to the Mammoth Car. How about a Russian T-Series tank with a MIG Fighter engine mounted on it? (That actually exists. The Russians used it to extinguish Gulf War oil well fires).

    Now THAT would drive real innovation, and be a hoot and a half, as well, when folks came up with some wacky ideas, that went terribly wrong. Think of those old black and white film clips of the first attempts at powered flight.

  6. Re:Tax on Experts: Aim of 2 Degrees Climate Goal Insufficient · · Score: 1

    How do you get the entire world to agree on a tax?

    Convince the entire world, that someone else will have to pay the tax, and that the entire world will be exempt from it.

  7. Re:This is great! on Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Near Launching Presidential Bid · · Score: 2

    . . . you forgot the part about how she is going to lay off Americans . . . revoke their citizenship, and force them to leave the country, and try their luck elsewhere in the world.

    She also ditched the old concept of "The HP Way". I'm guessing that she will change the "Pledge of Allegiance, to the Flag" to "With Freedom and Justice . . . for the Rich".

  8. Re:SpaceShipTwo on Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen · · Score: 1

    "Hi, welcome to your flight to Hell! Our flight attendants will now show you our emergency procedures!"

    "There is no life vest underneath your seat. If you would like one, they are available for rent for this flight for an extra $50."

    "If the cabin loses pressure, oxygen masks will fall down. However, oxygen will only flow through the mask, if you have purchased our oxygen plan, also for $50. First, pay the flight attendant. Then put the mask on yourself. Then share the oxygen with any infants or incapacitated passengers next to you . . . "

  9. Re:SpaceShipTwo on Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen · · Score: 2

    This isn't retail.

    Oh, with these cheap, low cost, discount fliers today . . . yes, it sure feels like retail!

  10. Re:And what good would it do? on Why the Final Moments Inside a Cockpit Are Heard But Not Seen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The last thing you would have seen on the Germanwings video, would have been a piece of black tape being pasted over the camera lens.

  11. Re:ITT: pretentious anons who didn't read the arti on Material Made From Crustaceans Could Combat Battlefield Blood Loss · · Score: 1

    Read the article? I get the feeling sometimes that people here don't even bother to read the summary.

    And sometimes, not even the title.

  12. Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? on IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market · · Score: 1

    AIX is full of "hacks" or "modifications" in the TCP/IP stack to greatly improve the performance on POWER architecture on MP systems. Have any of these made it into mainstream Linux? Are they even valid on Intel architecture?

    For instance, when running a benchmark on an AIX POWER system, try increasing the load, and see if your results go up. It can happen, that you increase the load, the CPU utilization climbs, but you benchmark remains the same. Well, you might be hanging in spin locks. AIX supports instrumented locks, so you can check this with the lockstat command.

    Another potential problem is that two many global variables are located in the same CPU cache line. So you can pad single variables, so that they are in separate cache lines. Or, even worse, you have one global variable that is being constantly updated by all processors, and is constantly causing cache invalidation on the memory bus. Then you need to do a hardware memory bus trace, with an HP logic analyzer that looks like something out of Hentai Porn. Then you need to write up a patent or something:

    https://patents.justia.com/patent/6430659

    So I'm just wondering if all this poop will be done for Linux on OpenPOWER . . .

  13. Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? on IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but Linux on POWER today runs on Big Endian. See another post in this thread about IBM intentions, but Red Hat has not announced support for Linux on Little Endian yet. That one hurts.

    Linux on OpenPOWER doesn't exist yet . . . or does it . . . ?

  14. Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? on IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market · · Score: 2

    AIX was pretty cool way back when, when they introduced 64-bit support. The processor was 64-bit. However, you could run a 32-bit kernel or a 64-bit kernel. And you could run a 32-bit process or a 64-bit process on either of the kernels.

    So what does some poor chump (i.e. me) who is tasked with writing a device driver for AIX need to do? Well, first #ifdef the code, so you compile different stuff, depending on if you are building a 32-bit or 64-bit version of the device driver. Then you needed to add simple "if" statements in the device driver, to check if you were running a process in 32-bit or 64-bit mode. Then according to the mix, you would have to thunk the addresses, when copying the data from user space into kernel space.

    Fun stuff. I can't believe that I actually did this in a former life . . .

  15. Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? on IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market · · Score: 1

    Only a moron would forget to use ntohl and htonl, and only a moron product manager would allow such a stack to be sold.

    Unfortunately, if there is one thing that the IT Industry does not lack today . . . is a shortage of morons.

  16. Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? on IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market · · Score: 1

    It's your own code you'd mainly have to worry about.

    But, alas, I always seem to get called in to debug code from other folks.

  17. Re:Tent Cities on Ikea Refugee Shelter Entering Production · · Score: 1

    A lot of places in the US have homeless "tent cities" where local homeless populations live

    Perfect, for the next "Occupy" demo crowd.

  18. Re:Bad name on Commercial Flamethrower Successfully Crowdfunded · · Score: 2

    Well, if you have a shotgun that you don't care much about, you can buy some "Dragon's Breath" shells for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

  19. Re:Won't everything need to be recompiled? on IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market · · Score: 1

    A simple recompile won't do it . . . some programs, like your TCP/IP stack have dependencies on Endianess. IBM's POWER has been traditionally Big Endian. Linux is mostly Little Endian. There are C macros, ntoh() and hton() that do the required byte swapping for you . . . if you remember to use them! I have seen code that would run fine on a Big Endian machine . . . but would fall over and die on a Little Endian machine.

    Sorting out all these problems is painful grunt work. Although, at one point, IBM tried to port AIX to Intel64. It was called Monterrey, or something like that. So IBM does have experience in doing this. It's just a question if they will fork out the dollars required to do this. And if the people know how to do this have been laid off.

  20. No, but he should be forced to dress like a woman, on odd or even days, depending on whether his birthday is odd or even.

    That is my simple and effective cure for sexual diversity in IT. Half the time men will be forced to dress as women, and women be forced to dress like men. Hey, presto, when someone from the government comes to do a headcount, he or she will find an equal number of men and women. Problem solved.

    Jesse Jackson can be placated by having a whites wear black face and blacks wear white face policy, as well.

    The most fun would be the Native American Indian role: You get to turn your cubicle into a steamy, smoky sweat box, while consuming hallucinogenic Peyote.

  21. "Ditchin' the pSeries down here, boss" on IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market · · Score: 2

    So, is IBM going to ditch making their own POWER pSeries, and totally go for the ARM model of just licensing the technology for OpenPOWER . . . ?

    Just like in the PC world, folks stopped buying IBM built PCs, when cheap clones were available. What would be the advantage of buying an IBM built OpenPOWER system, as opposed to a much cheaper Chinese built clone . . . ? Maybe the IBM system will have some kind of "secret sauce" . . . ? Like a MicroChannel (har, har).

    At any rate, somebody is going to have to invest a lot of money to make sure that Linux runs well on OpenPOWER, in order for this to succeed.

  22. Hell Bill Joy is a senior partner.

    . . . and if anyone wants to file an editor gender suit . . . Bill Joy wrote vi . . .

    That one would be a hoot and a half in court. None of the jurors would really understand what it was all about, and the court case would be finished, before emacs loaded.

  23. Re:Supersymmetry ? on Dark Matter Is Even More of a Mystery Than Expected · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    If there is a vacuum in space, would their need to be a corresponding antivacuum?

    There is an antivacuum in the universe . . . more specifically, in my apartment.

    At least that is what my cleaning girl claims . . . when she tries to vacuum here . . .

  24. Re:Chicken chicken Chicken? on Hoax-Detecting Software Spots Fake Papers · · Score: 1

    No, I think it was Buffalo, and not Chicken: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

  25. Re:hmmm on Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC · · Score: 2

    it would be better to build, oh I don't know...a train line instead?

    No, skip the roads and train lines . . . go straight for the flying cars!