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User: _merlin

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  1. Re:Code Name is Offensive on Intel Shows 48-Core x86 Processor · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Insightful WTF? If you get offended that easily, you'd better:

    1. Not come out from your basement, lest you see something being worth upset over
    2. Go running to mummy so she can make it better
    3. Or grow up
  2. Re:The way I see it on Apple Asks Judge To Shutter Psystar's Clone Unit · · Score: 1

    A warranty doesn't save you from the inconvenience of having a dead machine while you wait for the replacement parts to be sent out. I'd take a machine that works, so I don't have to fall back on the warranty, over one that fails regularly and needs to be fixed all the time. Off-topic, hard disk warranties are pretty much useless. A friend of mine got a Seagate hard disk with a five year warranty. It failed (taking some data with it), so they sent out a new disk. This one also failed, and needed to be replaced. After about five iterations he gave up. He never knew when the hard disk would fail, but he knew it would. The five year warranty didn't save him from having a b0rked machine while he waited for a replacement to arrive.

  3. Re:The way I see it on Apple Asks Judge To Shutter Psystar's Clone Unit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Prove that they weren't less reliable. You sound like someone who never had the dubious pleasure of dealing with these machines. It's personal experience, but every Power Computing and UMAX machine I ever had to deal with needed a new PSU within a year. The cheap RAM they used often failed within a few months. They were a pain to take apart, too - sharp edges everywhere. You get what you pay for.

  4. Re:The way I see it on Apple Asks Judge To Shutter Psystar's Clone Unit · · Score: 2, Informative

    None of them made better hardware than Apple. They often made faster hardware, but it was generally less reliable, ran hotter, was more difficult to work on, etc. The clones gave Macintoshes a bad name.

  5. Re:yep... on Ten Things Mobile Phones Will Make Obsolete · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You must have a pathetically weak wrist. A watch, like a ring, necklace, hat, or any other item of clothing, is very easy to become accustomed to for normal humans.

  6. Re:Rediscovering obsolescence on Ten Things Mobile Phones Will Make Obsolete · · Score: 1

    That would have been another TARDIS - the Doctor's TARDIS had a broken chameleon circuit, so it was stuck looking like a police box.

  7. Re:Rediscovering obsolescence on Ten Things Mobile Phones Will Make Obsolete · · Score: 1

    Sorry for being a pedant, but the TARDIS resembles a police call box - not a phone booth - and they've already been made obsolete by smart radio systems like TETRA.

  8. Re:A New Approach: Bait and Strike on Cyber Attacks On US Military Jump Sharply In 2009 · · Score: 1

    So you think killing thousands of citizens is an "ideal scenario"?

  9. What about the foundries? on Web Open Font Format Gets Backing From Mozilla · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why is this even news? It's all well and good for a browser vendor to endorse a font format, but it's absolutely useless if no foundries will release fonts in this format. As I found out the hard way, designing a good font is difficult, and best left to experts. Being able to make our own "open" fonts is a nice idea in theory, but in practice, it's more useful to be able to buy or commission fonts from professional designers.

  10. Re:Next release name: on Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released · · Score: 1

    I would've said Lesbian Lemur...

  11. Re:Its to do with people with the wrong keyboard . on ICANN Approves Non-Latin ccTLDs · · Score: 1

    Ever heard of wubi, cangjie or daiyi? There are plenty of stroke-based input methods where keys are assigned groups of strokes and you compose the character that way - no Latin involved. Then there's the zhuyin/bopomofo phonetic input used in Taiwan, which uses Chinese phonetics. Once again, not Latin involved.

  12. Re:What's old is new on How To Enter Equations Quickly In Class? · · Score: 1

    Those notebooks just aren't practical to use on your lap: the numeric keypad might be nice, but it means the main keyboard and trackpad are off-centre to the left. Also, an 80x120 tablet is too small to be usable for writing - it might be OK for a bit of photo retouching, but not much else.

  13. Re:Prior Art on Amazon Patents Changing Authors' Words · · Score: 1

    I studied with a guy who did something similar. He was pretty smart and got good grades, so people would always ask to see his assignments so they could copy them. So he'd do every assignment twice - first he'd do it properly, then he'd do it wrong. He'd let other students see the wrong version, and then hand both versions in, making a note of which one was right and which one was wrong. The lecturer could then identify any copies of the wrong version by the kind of mistakes they contained.

  14. Re:Advertising on Amazon Patents Changing Authors' Words · · Score: 1

    Why not change "Johnny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his Coke" into "Johhny nervously wrinkled his brow as he reached for his cock" - instant pr0nalisation, baby! ;)

  15. Re:The real problem... on Can Nintendo Really Be Planning Another DS Variant? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You're doing it wrong. I have big hands, and thick thumbs (Dutch/Indian), and I have no trouble using the DS Lite. In fact, if the A/B/X/Y buttons were further apart, I would find it hard to play games that require you to hold one button while tapping another, or rolling between buttons (e.g. Yoshi's Island). I thing the key is that you have use the buttons in the same way as you use the D-pad: by rolling your thumb from the central position.

  16. Re:AT&T Trouble Self Inflicted? on A Possible Cause of AT&T's Wireless Clog — Configuration Errors · · Score: 1

    That excuse comes out all the time, but it really doesn't add up. The big US cities have massive population density, and very poor mobile service.

  17. Re:Hmph on History In Video Games — a Closer Look · · Score: 1

    He's just getting the characters confused - the Poles were involved: they developed the first versions of the "bombe" devices used for attacking the Enigma encryption.

  18. Re:That's alright. on Amazon Hobbles Features For International Kindle · · Score: 1

    The whole point of the kindle is that it has wireless GSM access built in.... and sadly you can't change it to a local Euro carrier. There is no SIM card to swap. Nice try, though.

    If that's true (I don't know whether it is), then it violates the GSM standard and European open access regulations - to promote competition, you aren't allowed to sell GSM devices in Europe that don't have swappable SIM cards. (The US version is CDMA, and doesn't have a SIM card, but that's not what we're talking about here.)

  19. Re:We still live in the past on 125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich · · Score: 1

    What about the people in Antarctica, you insensitive clod!?!?!?

  20. Re:Saudi Arabia tried that on 125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich · · Score: 1

    The trouble is, for business purposes, you want to know the boundary of the area where people go to work at the same time as you. You also need to be able to easily know what the time is in any given location. For example, I develop stock exchange connectivity software. I need to know the time offset from Sydney (my location) to Hong Kong and Japan (location of stock exchanges my software connects to). With your system, you'd still effectively have time zones, but rather than remembering that business generally runs from 9:00 to 17:00 in any given time zone, you'd have to remember the universal times that business runs for each zone. It would be far more confusing.

  21. Saudi Arabia tried that on 125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's called Riyadh Solar Time - look it up. It last one year year before they realised how much of a pain in the arse it was. Also, Japan used to have per-city time zones in five-minute increments, and that was a real pain for doing business, or calculating journey travel/arrival times. Discrete time zones for relatively large areas are just more practical in general.

  22. Re:Article is doomed to failure, but PulseAudio is on PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's the biggest load of crap I've seen. So it uses system timers and its own buffer management? That's sure looks to me like an overly complicated way of trying to get around poor primary interrupt latency in the OS kernel.

    (That's one thing Apple got horribly wrong with MacOS, but fixed properly with OSX. MacOS didn't have predictable interrupt latency, and running any real-time applications was asking for trouble. How Avid, DigiDesign and Opcode succeeded is beyond me. However, OSX has the best primary interrupt latency of any OS right now, and the best audio stack. I really wish someone would leap-frog them to give them some incentive to make it better.)

  23. Re:Article is doomed to failure, but PulseAudio is on PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics · · Score: 1

    You're assuming content is available a long time before it needs to be played. This just isn't the case. I want my games to feel snappy; when I drag iTunes' EQ sliders, I want to hear the difference immediately; I want to hear my trading terminal beep as soon as a new instrument is listed on the exchange. Striving for the lowest possible latency is the easiest way to achieve this.

  24. Re:Article is doomed to failure, but PulseAudio is on PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's no particular reason you can't buffer up a few seconds of audio, yet make sure that audio is played exactly when the video calls for it.

    Yes there is: you don't want to be playing a game, and only seeing responses to your inputs seconds after you do things. Any noticeable input lag in a game ruins the experience. Ideally, you want no more than one frame of latency between reading inputs, running an iteration of your engine and getting it out to the display/speakers/haptics. Not all content is pre-recorded.

  25. Re:Chicago lost it because it didn't deserve it. on Did Chicago Lose Olympic Bid Due To US Passport Control? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Rio has pretty high crime, too, you know, and slums. I doubt Chicago's worse.