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User: bdwlangm

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Comments · 21

  1. Re:Quantum leaps in speed? on Everything You Need To Know About USB 3.0 · · Score: 1, Funny

    I do not think the word quantum means what you think it does.

  2. Re:Is it me or is he sounding more desperate? on Roger Ebert On Why Video Games Can Never Be Art · · Score: 1

    But the tax code still isn't art, right?

  3. Re:What can be done? Nothing. on What Can Be Done About Security of Debit Cards? · · Score: 1

    Not that many retailers are using the chip readers yet here in Canada... Guess the USA isn't that far behind us after all.

  4. Re:Human deterrent on Ubisoft's New DRM Cracked In One Day · · Score: 3, Funny

    I think that's in great spirit, but unfortunately, it only takes one dick.

  5. Re:Is DRM socially irresponsible? on Ubisoft's New DRM Cracked In One Day · · Score: 1

    But does the Tyrannosaurus have the right to swoop down and eat your cowboy hat? I hope it does.

  6. Re:Too much time on their hands on Triumph of the Cyborg Composer · · Score: 1

    Composition != performance, humans can still perform the music live to us.

  7. Re:Nothing new on IOC Orders Blogger To Take Down Video · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They played video of him dying repeatedly on CTV here in Canada, I'm sure the American networks had it too. They linked video from their webpage. Is the IOC doing anything about that? I tend to think they should all stop showing it out of respect, but really the IOC aren't doing the right thing, they're just protecting the value of official Olympic coverage.

  8. Re:I'm Interested in the Opposite View on What Knowledge Gaps Do Self-Taught Programmers Generally Have? · · Score: 1

    1) in the real world 40% is not a pass

    Not at my school either, typically 50% is a pass, and you need an average of 65+ in required courses to stay in the program.

    2) why don't many school even mention source code control?

    Because it's unnecessary for the small projects you do in school and is orthogonal to the concepts they're teaching you typically. Also, it's very easy to pick up on your own.

    3) error handling is not an exercise left to the reader, it needs to be structured, organised, and it really helps if you know what you are trying to achieve with the error handling.

    +1 Insightful

  9. Re:Hmm on PA School Spied On Students Via School-Issued Laptop Webcams · · Score: 1

    Monitoring a person, their family, friends and the place they live is not the same as monitoring the computer. Giving someone permission to monitor my computer usage does not imply permission to monitor anything else.

  10. Re:Hmm on PA School Spied On Students Via School-Issued Laptop Webcams · · Score: 1

    And how are the IT workers not responsible? They would have known best the technical potential of the system. I have no sympathy for them. Aiding the administration in violating the rights of the students (see 4th amend.) is a serious offence. I'm usually willing to give people a break for not quitting jobs when they're asked to do questionable things, but monitoring students at home is way beyond questionable.

  11. Re:When do people get this on 86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory · · Score: 1

    The disk cache is part of the OS, not the application. If an application loads some images from your HDD it's the OS that decides to cache them in memory, independent of anything your app does with them. Because disk caching is transparent to the app, the OS can free cache whenever it wants to.

    Of course, historically IE would be a special case, as it was so tightly tied to the OS that the normal rules of transparent OS services didn't apply. Anyone know if this is still true?

  12. Re:Macs are great for small business though on Why Apple Doesn't Market Squarely To Businesses · · Score: 1

    So our Macs are vulnerable to a critical XYZ bug, and I see these were already fixed 3 weeks ago on all the Windows

    About that 17 year old bug...

  13. Re:Macs are great for small business though on Why Apple Doesn't Market Squarely To Businesses · · Score: 1

    Last place I worked had 25 employees (give or take) with Windows machines. We certainly didn't have a full-time admin, and it still worked very well. My doctor's office is also a mac land. Strangely one of the exam rooms had a PowerMac in it...

  14. Re:Seems reasonable on Call For Scientific Research Code To Be Released · · Score: 3, Insightful

    just wait until some amateur gets a hold of the code, runs it, and claims that all global warming data is questionable because this model has a bug or produces weird output

    The onus is on the researcher to demonstrate/argue that for the inputs given the code produces meaningful results. If you don't like that then stop doing research with computations? Idiots can always misrepresent you, no matter how you publish. Most of us understand that simulations are limited.

    Second, it will waste the researchers time releasing the code and then responding to questions when people are like "lolz this code blows"

    What makes you think that there will be more people trying out that code and not understanding it, than currently there are people reading the paper and not understanding it? Personally I'm not going to waste my spare time downloading complex simulations that I know nothing about and try to invalidate them.

    That being said, it should definitely be available as a part of the peer review process if something is really called into question.

    So make it available and reference it in your paper. No one's asking you to tell everyone on the planet about it.

  15. Re:Seems reasonable on Call For Scientific Research Code To Be Released · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If I find code that will cause heap corruption in your code (e.g. you wrote past the end of an array in C), then there is a bug in that code whether you do fluid simulations, or make 3D games. I worked as an undergraduate RA under some guys doing ocean modelling, and found several small bugs before I had the foggiest idea what most of the code was meant to do. Yes there will be many problems someone without your background can't find in your model, but that is not an argument for closed source science.

    A more important concern is that someone else who does have your background should have access to your code. That would be part of "peer review". Otherwise they're taking your computations on faith, with no way to reproduce.

  16. Re:Baguette on Europe's LHC To Run At Half-Energy Through 2011 · · Score: 2, Informative

    IIRC, the bird dropped its bread on something a little more innocuous sounding than a reactor. The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread.

  17. Re:Where is the Outrage... on Europe's LHC To Run At Half-Energy Through 2011 · · Score: 1

    I'll be outraged when this somehow costs me something. That said, even if I was helping pay for this, what they're doing hasn't been done before (at this scale anyway). It is a high risk investment by nature. If you never want to read about things going wrong, don't read about science.

  18. Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales on Game Industry Vets On DRM · · Score: 1

    And pirating because of DRM is fundamentally flawed is that it only affects the suffering devs, and not the publisher for whom the fault of including the DRM lays squarely at the feet of.

    Not playing/buying the game at all has exactly the same effect. If I'm not willing to pay for DRM'd content then the developers get $0 from me if I don't play, and still $0 if I do.

    I agree, the developers get the shitty end of this. But that's how it works. If a company has a poor business model and lose money, it's always the staff that get screwed. It won't help anyone in the long run to pay for content that comes with invasive DRM.

  19. Re:So what does it do? on AMD Publishes Open-Source "ATI Evergreen" Driver · · Score: 1

    [T]he nVidia binary-only driver will only get worse (binary bit rot has a half-life of say 1.5 years), while the ATI OSS driver will only get better with time and is not locked to yesterday's Linux kernel or X11.

    And yet my old laptop with an ATI Xpress still can't handle compiz with the open source drivers. I'd love to support the FOSS solution, but it is not adequate for my needs. In other news, the Windows 7 ATI driver has worked flawlessly for me

  20. Re:And this is how we die on Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar · · Score: 1
    While the 5% may be statistical noise, the 30% failure rate is not. The test in question (I've taken it, UW calls it the ELPE) is not designed to fail you for small errors in punctuation or grammar, but to indicate whether you have minimal competence in written English.

    Maybe composing in standard grammar has been deemphasized (obviously a bad thing) and replaced with more education on critical reading (obviously a good thing). We could fix this if we wanted to by deemphasizing critical reading (obviously a bad thing) and emphasizing standard grammar more (obviously a good thing).

    I would argue that to do critical reading at all you need some grammar knowledge, whether formalized or not. The ELPE does not test much more than that.

  21. Re:When girls can be raped in public with no 911 c on Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality? · · Score: 2, Informative