Slashdot Mirror


User: KingRatMass

KingRatMass's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
66
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 66

  1. Re:The Dollar Ain't Worth Much These Days on Apple Becomes the First $1 Trillion US Company in History (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    It worth a lot more than some currencies. Right now, Apple is worth 44,085,000,000,000 Iranian Rials.

  2. Hmm...I wonder what it could be.

    Perhaps it's just a Class 4 switch... Oh hell, no one is going to put on a tinfoil hat for one of those. So it must be spies.

  3. When iOS and Android first came out, they stripped out all of the crap, made things fit into smaller footprints, and started from scratch.

    At the time, Microsoft just said "hey, let's throw a desktop OS into a phone and then we don't have to change anything".

    Not even close... Windows Mobile was at 6.0 when Android and iOS came to market. The decision to use the same desktop paradigm they used was a design decision made years earlier with PocketPC. They did not simply port their desktop OS to mobile devices. They developed a new operating system for those devices, and then used a lot of the design elements of their desktop OS to make the mobile product look and feel similiar to the desktop product.

  4. From the Wired article: "He took a screenshot on his personal laptop and sent the image to a friend named Michael Nuñez" later... "Fearnow took another screenshot, this time with his phone." So the jury is out on who the actual owner of "his" phone was, it appears there is no question regarding the laptop.

  5. Re:How much Blizzard code ... on Blizzard Issues DMCA Notice to a Fan-Run 'WoW' Legacy Server (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm not sure where creating a program that interfaces with proprietary software, with no API or documentation, going purely via trial and error, stands in the copyright arena.

    Such a technique is called a "Chinese Wall", the concept was used by Phoenix Technologies when the cloned the IBM PC XT BIOS. Two teams work in parallel. One develops the technical specifications by reverse engineering the code to be copied, the second uses the resulting specification to make the new, duplicate code. That way the developers never have a chance to copy the original code. Periodically, the first team would review the second's work for accuracy and steer them in the right direction if they got it wrong.

    Phoenix was so cautious in this respect, the engineer they hired to write their BIOS code had never worked with the Intel 8088 or 8080 and had never seen any of IBM's codee or their technical specifications. All they worked from was the distilled version that the reverse engineering team fed them. Phoenix audited the whole process very closely to insure that any claims of infringement could be thwarted..

    As a result, IBM was never able to successfully sue Phoenix for copyright infringement. Because no matter how similar the two final products were, they were derived completely independently.

  6. TonyMac will steal code from legitimate developers and make it possible.

  7. Re:Dems hate wind power on R.I.P., Cape Wind (bostonglobe.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Not true, it was the ultra wealthy of Falmouth, Mashpee, Osterville and Hyannis. But the real driving force behind anti offshore wind was the cranberry growers. They are the one group that stands to gain the most by keeping wind onshore, since they own a vast majority of the land that is ideal for onshore wind from Route 24 to mid-Cape.

    Wind Turbines are an ideal match for bog lands. They have a small terrestrial footprint and they do not impede sunlight. Some growers have experimented with leasing underproducing lands for solar but that has a few pitfalls. It's only profitable when the price of electricity produced per acre exceed the price of cranberries that could be produced by that same acre. For every acre of solar, they lose an acre of bog. This does not present itself as a problem with wind. Almost all the land except the turbines foot print can be actively cultivated. For the turbine owner, it's a perfect match as well. They have a lot less work for site development. Since your talking about agricultural land that has already been cleared so effectively that nothing grows higher than six inches above the mean soil line. The access and infrastructure needed to facilitate construction is already in place by virtue of the growers having already created and maintained to facilitate cranberry cultivation. The town governments aren't complaining, since the turbines increase the land value, thus raising the property taxes and increasing town revenue.

    From a local standpoint, Cape Wind didn't benefit the local economy. If there were any generalized negatives, they've apparently been overlooked by towns like Bourne, Wareham, Middleboro and Plymouth. Wind development does not seem to be slowing in these towns.

  8. Re: He should really get a paramotor on Flat Earther's Homemade Rocket Launcher Breaks Down in His Driveway (desertsun.com) · · Score: 2

    There are flat-earthers all around the globe. Don't fuck with them!

  9. Re:But is it profitable? on Payphones Still Make Millions of Dollars (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    At $300 revenue per pay phone per year, do the owners of the pay phone make any money? Ultimately its the profitability of the pay phone service that will determine if the pay phone stays in use or not.

    You're thinking of a COCOT (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephone), not all pay phones were COCOT's. Most payphones were owned by the carriers themselves and not by the property owner.

  10. Re:I love Canada on Payphones Still Make Millions of Dollars (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    If I could find one... 33 Memory Pocket Tone Dialer and a 6.5536 MHz crystal! I would redbox the shitout that fucker... for nostaglia's sake!

  11. Re:Great research position on Bird Feeders Might Be Changing Bird Beaks (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    I can imagine that conversation....

    "So, you're a field researcher? What do you study?"

    "Great tits!"

    "Ah, you're an ornithologist?"

    "No... I'm Harvey Weinstein, you insensitive clod."

  12. Re: Of course it would be Android on Bill Gates Has An Android Phone. Has Microsoft Changed? (neowin.net) · · Score: 1
    WinMo 6.5 was MSFT's apogee in the handset market... there were several factors that all played into the slide from a 45% mobile smartphone marketshare to below 1%...

    1) The introduction of the iPhone, which rode the momentum of the iPod and really introduced the notion of a mobile app ecosystem. This made 3rd part developers happy. The fact the the hardware and software came from a single source made the carriers happy because they were no longer dependent on 2 sources for OS updates, MSFT and the handset maker. And it was billed as a device that would "just work", which for the most part, it did live up to that expectation.

    2) The introduction of Android, while fragmented and seemingly all over the map. It offered a far better licensing model for handset makers than MSFT was offering at the time. It's Linux roots gave it a very solid foundation from an OS development standpoint and resulted in there being more programmers able to work with the code to integrate,extend and update the OS for the handset makers.and for the carriers. The OS stagnation model of planned obsolescence was hurting carriers and handset makers. Reliance on MSFT for a bulk of the OS updates, having those updates filter down through the handset makers and finally through the carriers created a nice planned obsolescence path at first but it also bred a lot of customer dissatisfaction. The creation of the app ecosystem for the Android platform made it attractive to third party developers. The fact that it tied into Google's cloud strategy was also a key selling point.

    3) Point 2 leads to the next point, the exodus of the enthusiast market segment. There was a perverse symbiotic relationship between MSFT, the handset makers and the enthusiast community by 2006. This is most evident if you look at one of the most important enthusiast sites of the time, XDA-Developers. Virtually all the work being done there at the time was focused on WinMo 5 and 6. By the time WinMo 6.5 came to light, There were scores of early WinMo devices languishing without any OS updates. Thanks to the dedication of the core of the XDA members, WinM0 6.5 landed on a lot of these devices, much to MSFT's and the handset maker's amazement. The fact that there appeared to be elements in both camps that were secretly supporting these efforts perplexed and scared them. I believe it was the ROM dump scandal at MWC that drove this point home. The fact that a demo phone had it's OS dumped and ported so easily seemed to lead some executives to believe that WinMo was slipping away from them and that they needed to do something radical to stop that. The fact it appeared as if there were insiders supporting these activities bothered them greatly. So they ditched WinMo and pushed to WinPhone to stop this... and enthusiasts fled to Android, where there were far fewer hurdles in place to hamper development. OnePlus and Cyanogen are just a couple of entities that grew out of this.

    4) The mad rush to jump into the post-WIMP world led to the adoption of the Metro interface and a radical shift away from a UI that had grown slowly and incrementally of the years. It also marked the beginning of the end for the hardware keyboard/stylus based paradigm to a cheaper, touch only design.This was yet factor that slowed WP7 adoption and contributed to the market share decline. Those that didn't flee to iOS or Android clung on to WinMo and the devices running them, thereby stagnating the Windows Phone market.

    5) The decline of Blackberry, this one does not necessarily seem to factor in at first. Because why would the decline of you only major competitor hurt you? The first part was the fact that those ditching BB devices were not fleeing to MSFT, they were fleeing to iOS and Android. These departures affected other elements of the MSFT business, the enterprise application market segment. RIM's dependence on Windows Server and Exchange was good for MSFT. Losing the customers that were leveraging these technologies to Apple and Google hurt them across multiple market segments.

  13. In order to quailify as a BBS... on Air Force Gives 10-Year-Old Orbiting Satellite To Ham Radio Operators (arrl.org) · · Score: 1
    Will it run TradeWars???

    In order to qualify as a legit BBS, it has to have TW2002...

  14. Do you seriously not know whether nazi Germany invaded Poland or bombed Pearl Harbor?

    Have you never seen John Belushi's speech in the movie Animal House??? Rather than making some half assed attempt to demonstrate your perceived intellect, you should have taken 30 seconds to google "germany bomb pearl harbor"

    Your efforts to discredit the preceeding poster effectively sealed your fate and proved that in fact, you are the fucking dumbass.

  15. Re:Better suggestion on Silicon Valley's Latest Desperate Housing Idea: On A Landfill (siliconvalley.com) · · Score: 1
    Boston is really a great study on making dirt piles, digging big holes and filling them back in. Scrape down some dirt piles in the harbor and fill in that watery hole. Go a couple towns away and dig a bunch of big holes for stone to build buildings. When it comes time to dig more big holes in Boston, take all the rock and dirt to use that to fill in those big holes you dug for the stone.

    Little known trivia fact, the Quincy Quarry scenes in the movie Gone, Baby Gone were all done with CGI. The quarries were not filled with water during shooting, it was a 400ft deep empty hole. The water had been drained so that all the excavated dirt from the Dig Dig could be used to fill them in. When you've filled the holes until they won't hold any more, just make a big dirt mountain and drop a golf course on top.

  16. Re:They've really started branding their videos on The XHamster Wikipedia Page Is Suddenly Immensely Popular, and No One Knows Why (theoutline.com) · · Score: 4, Funny
    Fuck you... Pay for your porn then!

    Back in my day, we had to use Zmodem to download porn PICTURES. It once took two days to masturbate because mom kept making phone calls and interrupting my download. We sometimes had to wait 16 hours from the time we saw nipple until we got bush.

    Fucking ungrateful assholes... Get off my lawn!

  17. There is one KEY word missing in the Press Release on Ex-Admin Deletes All Customer Data and Wipes Servers of Dutch Hosting Provider (bleepingcomputer.com) · · Score: 1
    Allegedly

    The ex-admin allegedly deleted all the data... Until is has been thoroughly investigated and it can be proven, the company has made a potentially libelous statement. I don't know how defamation laws work in Europe but no semi-competent General Counsel would not have let a US corporation make such a stupid statement in a press release.

    Somebody could have used the ex-admin credentials, an external bad actor or someone within the company looking to cover something up. The company may very well be attempting to pull off an elaborate insurance fraud claim.

  18. Re:"skids"? on Keylogger Authors Manage To Infect Themselves 16 Different Times · · Score: 4, Informative
    skids = script kiddies.

    Next year they will just be s

  19. Re: APPLE Just do it this one time, and say that's on Apple: Terrorist's Apple ID Password Changed In Government Custody (buzzfeed.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry... One Hundred BILLION DOLLARS!!!!

  20. what... the.... fuck? on Phone Hacking Group Is Trading Fake Bomb Threats For Bitcoin (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    The term is Phreaking for fuck's sake! Jesus H Jumping Christ on a rusty pogostick... Who the fuck writes the summaries around here? This is the 21st century version of beige boxing a bomb threat, with a novel method of payment for the rendered service.

  21. Re:Seems to belong to X.ORG Foundation on After Years of Serving X11, X.Org Stands To Lose Its One-Letter Domain (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    The joke is on you... and everyone else. If you do a Google Street Map view of that address, all you get is a numberde wooded lot on a residential street. Which is supposedly also the home of Shiman Associates. Leon Shiman is probably some junkie from Cambridge that crashes on that empty lot.

  22. Re:How can we trust providers? on Comcast Typo Penalizes Wrong Customer For Data Usage (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Hello Brian L. Roberts! We know you are not a human, you're probably a dingo... Just like Tom Wheeler.

  23. What kind of Yahoo would spend $4,000,000,000 on monkeys and aadvarks?

  24. but hanging is forever ;-)

    Once they cut you down, you're no longer hanging... You're dead. Unless you're a Norweigan Blue parrot, then you are: resting, stunned or pining for the fjords.

  25. Everclear... 190 proof if available, 151 if not. The problem with H2O versus ETOH is the amount of dissolved oxygen. DO increases at temperature decreases. So that plays a factor in long term cold storage. Here's a link to a story of someone claiming to do a layup of some Tornado Juice.... If the stories are correct, that TJ has sat for a VERY long time... Maybe 20 years.

    Good luck with the qualitative bioassay... Remember, if you get confused, just listen to the music play.

    To the Elders... Thank You... For a Real Good Time!