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User: FranTaylor

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  1. NOTICE the word "notice" on DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo · · Score: 1

    "notice any real difference between textures "

    The word NOTICE speaks to its appearance on the screen, which is INDEED affected by shading.

  2. more bad analogies on Net Neutrality Seen Through the Telegraph · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Two fiber optic cables carry twice the traffic of one while consuming virtually no more resources, and they can be upgraded without disrupting existing infrastructure.

    Go ahead and try to double the capacity of a highway without consuming more right-of-way or disrupting existing infrastructure.

    My ISP (Comcast) consistently delivers bandwidth far in excess of what they advertise.

    Your car analogy is really falling apart because the Internet is FAR less congested than our roadways.

  3. so clueless! on Net Neutrality Seen Through the Telegraph · · Score: 4, Informative

    "BadAnalogyGuy" is just so appropriate for you!

    "There is only finite bandwidth available to everyone and one guy in his parents' basement can slow traffic for everyone else. "

    "Shouldn't these users be forced to pay more for their extra usage or at least be throttled to the point they aren't causing physical damage to the entire system?"

    Apart from all of that, you don't even know what is being talked about here. We are talking about REGULATING, CENSORING, and EVESDROPPING activities.

    If you want to fix your Bad Analogy, you should compare this to allowing the turnpike authority to search the contents of every vehicle that enters their roadway, and also allowing them to steal and/or make substitutions for any cargo on any vehicle that enters their roadway.

    There, I fixed your BAD ANALOGY for you.

  4. huh? on DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Hardware tesselation is going to be the next big thing (it's been around for a while but this is the first time there's really been a universal standard for it). "

    Boy you are really living in some sort of Microsoft fantasy world.

    You can't tell the difference between "Microsoft" and "universal".

  5. Re:OpenGL on DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo · · Score: 1

    "to compare them is ludicrous."

    Really?

    You did it yourself. In fact you did it twice.

  6. wtf indeed! on DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo · · Score: 1

    "Direct X has nothing to do with textures"

    Please tell me how the data for the textures gets from the disk to the screen. Exactly what software manipulates them? What software renders them? What software is responsible for how the textures look on the screen?

    Quote from the article:

    "DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occlusion (HADO), full floating point high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and full screen resolution post processing. "

    Do you REALLY assert that these features have NO effect on the rendering of textures?

  7. Re:What progress! on DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo · · Score: 1

    Yeah, it's easy enough to pour it down the drain when you didn't even really earn it in the first place.

  8. What progress! on DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Yes Microsoft hired away all of the greatest talent in 3-D graphics many years ago and sequestered them in Redmond, working on hardware-tesselated dynamic water.

    Future people will ask how the US squandered all of its great intellectual talent, and the only answer we will have is that we spent it designing hardware tesselators so that video gamers could have photorealistic water.

    It is hard to imagine a more horrifying waste of resources.

    Microsoft Research has blown through billions of dollars and this is what we get for that?

  9. Not Surprised on Why a High IQ Doesn't Mean You're Smart · · Score: 1

    That you can project your own inadequacy onto others.

    My wife laughs at you and your feeble attempt at humor.

  10. Amen on Why a High IQ Doesn't Mean You're Smart · · Score: 5, Funny

    I know a guy in Mensa who was genuinely surprised that I stopped talking to him after he hit on my wife and tried to talk her into divorcing me.

    I don't think it's occurred to him yet that she and I actually speak to each other.

  11. Re:Choosing the correct abstraction layer on X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "X11 doesn't expose that kind of stuff."

    I'm not talking about the stuff that is exposed. I'm talking about the things that are NOT exposed. X11 runs great over the network because of all the things that they chose to NOT allow the user to do.

    Sure you can accelerate bit-blitting, that is really old school.

    Take a look at the fundamental model. When you move a window in Windows, the app is notified and it has to respond. Try moving the window of an unresponsive app, it does not redraw because Windows is asking the app to redraw it. When you move the window of an unresponsive app in X, the window redraws because X already knows what it needs to know about redrawing the window without having to make a trip back to the application.

    Those are the kinds of things that you DON'T expose. That way the driver and hardware are free to implement them as they see fit.

  12. Uninformed and wrong on X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "For whatever reason, Linux drivers have NEVER taken advantage of this, and that is why Linux often looks clunky compared to Windows on the same hardware."

    This is just BLATANTLY WRONG.

    All you need to do is read the feature announcements for the nVidia and ATI display drivers, which you apparently DON'T DO.

    nVidia's REAL target market is the folks who work at animation companies, and the hard-core data visualization people. Their products are designed to fly in THIS environment. This market is VERY HEAVILY tilted toward Unix. That is WHY you can get such EXCELLENT display support under Linux. The rest of us are just piggybacking off of this.

  13. Re:Choosing the correct abstraction layer on X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions · · Score: 1

    "it hasn't been long enough for someone else to come around and fix it?"

    It that is the case, then any such improvements are "tacked on" to the original design and by their very nature they are not going to be usable by existing programs, and they will not provide performance improvements to the system as a whole.

    That's not exactly my idea of a thoughtfully-designed system.

  14. What to make of ignorant flamebait? on X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "I also know that graphic displays and inputs are vastly different today than they were 10 and 20 years ago."

    Really what is so different other than the number of pixels on the display?

    "I suspect that X11 wasn't developed initially with today's needs in mind."

    Then perhaps you should read about the original goals of the X window system.

  15. Choosing the correct abstraction layer on X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you choose your abstraction carefully, you can hide expensive details from user space.

    In the short term it may not gain you anything.

    But if the abstraction lives and thrives, then much can go on behind the scenes to improve the situation.

    Java is another example of this: they carefully designed the language so that it would be possible to make vast simplifiying assumptions and implement optimizations that really improve performance without impacting the "other side" of the wall. Originally java was slow, but hard work behind the scenes means that your java programs run much faster now, without any extra effort on the part of the application developer.

    X Windows is a great example of this. Originally we had dumb frame buffers with no acceleration at all. And yet X provides an abstraction that allows lots and lots of hardware optimizations to take place.

    The Windows and OSX abstractions for the display don't provide an API that allows these sorts of optimizations to be done behind the scenes. We have incredible display hardware with awesome features that go unused in these environments because the display abstractions do not allow for them.

  16. I call BS on this story on IT Snake Oil — Six Tech Cure-Alls That Went Bunk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Artificial intelligence" - what's keeping the spam out of YOUR inbox? How does Netflix decide what to recommend to you? Ever gotten directions from Google Maps?

    "Computer-aided software engineering" - tools like valgrind, findbugs, fuzzing tools for finding security problems.

    "Thin clients" - ever heard of a "Web Browser"?

    "Enterprise social media" - That really describes most of the Internet

    As soon as I saw an opionion from "Ron Enderle" I knew this story would be BS.

  17. Fixed point sucks, too on Why Computers Suck At Math · · Score: 1

    Really what you want is to store numbers "rationally" as a numerator and a denominator.

    You get all the advantages of fixed point, and you can also represent fractional numbers exactly so that (1/3)*3 == 1

    If you use a proper language like Scheme for your calculations, it's just built in.

  18. What do you want? on Adobe Pushing For Flash and PDF In Open Government Initiative · · Score: 1

    Perhaps you know of a document format where the text in images IS searchable?

  19. USB 3.0 is not fast enough on USB 3.0 the Real Deal, SATA 6GB Not Yet · · Score: 1, Funny

    The inevitable 10 Gbit Ethernet dongles will be limited by USB speed.

  20. Not my experience at all! on USB 3.0 the Real Deal, SATA 6GB Not Yet · · Score: 1

    1. My USB hard drives run consistently at ~25 Mb/sec. I have several types from different mfgrs and they all have the same transfer rate. I also have several 100 Mb Ethernet dongles from different mfgrs and they are all quite capable of saturating the network.

    2. Not my experience at all! I segregate devices and hook them up to different hubs, but that's all.

    3. Not my experience at all! I have nVidia chipset motherboards and NEC PCI cards that do USB just fine.

    4.See #1

    You don't mention anything about operating systems. I run Linux and USB works great for me.

  21. The government runs pipes all the time! on Telco Sues City For Plan To Roll Out Own Broadband · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Municipality can run water pipes, sewer pipes, and gas pipes.

    Please tell me why the Internet pipe is any different from these other pipes.

  22. QA on Moving Away From the IT Field? · · Score: 1

    I moved from development to QA a few years ago. Pay is similar, much less hassle.

    Hey if you have a reputation for being critical and picky, why not get paid for it?

  23. Nasty on Arbitrary Code Execution With "ldd" · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is really nasty.

    Even running the binary as nobody may get you into trouble if you are running under X because the rogue code can talk to your X server.

    And of course the rogue code could print out its own prompt and fool you into thinking that you are typing at the shell. In this case you get owned when you type su and subsequently type your root password into the rogue code. You'd have to carefully inspect your running processes to not get fooled by this trick.

    Maybe the answer is for ldd to use a sandbox.

  24. the bug is not in ldd on Arbitrary Code Execution With "ldd" · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you had read the article closely you would understand that the bug is not in ldd, it is in the dynamic loader.

  25. Cats on Save the Planet, Eat Your Dog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They protect your food from vermin, and they decrease the demand for the poisons used to kill vermin.

    I lived in an old rented house and cats were the only way to keep the mice out of our kitchen.