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User: curious.corn

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  1. Re:BTX cases? Did they finally fix those case wire on Intel's BTX Form Factor Launched Today · · Score: 1

    Yes and where are the headers on the motherboard? Yeah, you name it: smack in the middle of the mobo! Probably they wanted to play a 50/50 chance to where the case manuf. would want to place the plugs so they made it a hassle for all parties! smart... infact the cooler unit header is uselessly way to the edge of the board to the point that it gets into the drive's way... applause!

    While I like the idea of thermal zones (Powermac), external CPU fan intake (iMac G5) I'm not particularly impressed by the overall result, they should have copied better. IMHO, the mountain begat the mouse.

    PS. I hate to sound like a bloody mac zealot but things happen to prove such positions... and don't get me started on the Spotlight live search (of BeOS kin) or the Dashboard thingie (that I suppose will make better use of Desktop real estate than the blue slab in Longhorn)... ;-)

  2. Re:Skins and Alpha Channeling? on The Real Story of Audion · · Score: 1

    Yeah, it was the single most cool feature I've noticed in BeOS back in the days I played with it. That, together with the capability of _PLAYING_A_BLEEDIN_DIVX_ on my old iron Mendocino 300A totally filled me with everlasting SPITE for goddam Microsoft and it's assasination of BeOS. I mean, they could have bought it and given the world a decent Windows experience... no, they killed it... drove it onto the ground... wiped it out of existence... grrrrr... M$ I hate you. Today I see Pentium4 laptops kneeling to the ground loading Windows XP, 1.5 k$ machines unable to run a bloody presentation and generally behaving like a 486 DX2 on WfWG! It there's a reason I sailed into unixdom was this: M$! sooner or later this is going to bite you in the ass... loads of people... anyone I know either hate computers (because they identify them with M$ Windows) or feel liberated by Linux when they try it (or macs, once they get over the stigma) Anyhow, in case the original poster wants to get some of that original feeling: try FF on a file on Quicktime DIVX, it'll behave like a tape recorder: time domain speedup & squeaky freq transpose... It feels analogue. Cool...

  3. Re:Amazing on U.S. Continues Opposition to Kyoto Environmental Treaty · · Score: 1

    The US is living off credit from the rest of the world. China is the single largest creditor and the US is more than thankful that the chinese govt. is keeping the yuan undervalued to boost the domestic growth (of course it sucks for the people over there but after all it's a fascist regime... it only cares for corporations and macroeconomic 'risiko style' calculations) Your economy is so thinly strung against social exploitation you couldn't pay the debt if asked; unless you drove another couple million people into poverty.

    As far as the infamous Governemt Subsidies go can you explain what the hell has your Government done to corporations in the past 60 years? I mean with all the tax cuts but most importantly Military Spending you've subsidized every single bullet fired into the friggin' air! Of course the commercial & civilian fallout has given some cool widgets to drive sales (amongs them internetworking) so does this prove that your Goverment isn't as Liberist as you thought or isn't Government Spending that bad after all (in any case you loose buddy)?

    Listen, our old Nanny states provide for schools that are as good as the privates (IMHO, and I've known both sides...); medical assistance is as good as it gets when there's good Management: it's shit in Italy but in the Netherlands I've seen another different story.

    Living on credit? Yeah, hello? Care to google docs on the italian debt? We've sold our clothes in the '80, drove our industry into the ground, spent enough money so that only my childeren will perhaps see a 60% debt/GDP ratio! Has it helped? Yeah... to get a populist ass hole elected PM...

  4. Re:Some mistakes... on The CPU: From Conception to Birth · · Score: 1

    such as? I've never been an ace in chemistry so I concede SiN, super-k could be high-k but what the hell... dovetail? well I remember some comments about the tapering edges of thin gate oxide features... BTW... I wouldn't mind some links; chip manufacture has always fascinated me.

  5. Some mistakes... on The CPU: From Conception to Birth · · Score: 3, Informative

    Although it's a neat effort to explain some engineering & physics to the avg case modder running XP & windowblinds (;-)) there's an initial nasty mistake:

    The new wafers are then taken and doped appropriately for the type of transistors that will be made out of them. Doping amounts to depositing other elements into the space between silicon atoms. This is what causes silicon to be the "semiconductor" that it is. Transistors today are made from "CMOS" technology, or Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors. Complementary means the interaction of "n" and "p" MOS

    No, no... doping is about getting impurities inside the Si lattice substituting some of the Si atoms. The whole concept is: electron energy levels of a single atom becoming thick bands for hoards of electrons to fly within; if the next band is empty & close enough to the last full band you have an "intrinsic" semic. Doping the crystal means to get other atoms (P) into the lattice so that their electrons are weakly tied and readily bumped into the conduction band (@ room temp); or you plug greedy B into the lattice so that it grabs an e- all for itself leaving some other Si without and a roaming Hole inside the last full band...Leaving doping atoms wedged inside the lattice without participating to the whole electron/lattice exchange doesn't do anything good, perhaps it just deforms the reticle creating all sorts of defects & a useless brick of solid sand

    Overall this article lacks a lot of geek factor... there's so many "cool" catchy words and processes like Silicon Over Insulator, Damascene Process, dovetail prevention, SiN and SuperK dielectric... bah, it could have been a LOT better... have a look in ars
  6. Re:saint pauly girl should have won! on Working iPod Halloween Costume · · Score: 1

    You're right! I mean... dressing up to be Paris Hilton... oh, my god! I hope for the guys' sake over there that she really got into the part ;-)

  7. Re:Valley Girl on Tom Tom GO Personal Navigator Source Code Released · · Score: 1

    Man, you made my day...

  8. Re:MySQL - I smell flames? on High Performance MySQL · · Score: 1

    I must be drunk... I got it the other way around; please forgive me and move along. Good night e

  9. Re:MySQL - I smell flames? on High Performance MySQL · · Score: 1

    Abortion is a woman's right Gun control means using both hands

    Those two statements don't fit the initial set while the other do; they're conservative/reactionary while the pattern is "cool lib/alt vs. ignorant blind conservatism."

    P.S. I'm all for the initial set... actually that's why I noticed what's out of tune ;-) ... and I own a mac... therefore I'm kewel ;-) and know better... ;-)

  10. Re:what is the point of RSS? on RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable · · Score: 3, Informative

    RSS feeds are xml. You can XSTL one and insert it into another feed or generic xml, html, native widget interface. You can, of course, code your own site specific parser to recognize the newsletter's incipit text patterns but it makes some work doesn't it? So essentially it's nothing new (like say, transportation or calculus) but it's much easier to deal with (like walking compared to flight or pencil & paper to that nifty CPU humming on your desk).

  11. Re:Regarding that brandname... on Can't Draw? You Need The Inkulator 9000. · · Score: 1

    In italian it's even worse... over here we say 'inculare', a mere 'c' 'k' substitution... nay, this software will raise quite a few eyebrows over here.

  12. Before we globalize investigative agencies... on Indymedia Seizures Initiated In Europe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... we'd better agree on what's constitutional and acceptable on a freedom & rights perspective. I've got the nagging feeling that some italian (I'm one, so I speak for my own county's perspective) office really wanted to do something that our own apparatus wouldn't allow without painstaking authorizations and outrage so, given the chance, they turned to a more "liberal" establishment (US) to get the job done without too many hassles. It stinks, as far as I'm concerned the responsibility rests in our turf for having done something we ourselves legislated to disallow (and it doesn't matter if it's business as usual for the US... everyone responds to himself... and that applies to nations too)

  13. Re:Nothing known, but political motivation possibl on Indymedia Server Raided by FBI · · Score: 1

    Hey, nobody ever said indymedia is an impartial news source!

    It's a self-proclaimed seattle, noglob thing; anyone can't say otherwise with a straight face, while FOX claims its a "just the facts" nobody ever raided its bloody servers or newsrooms! Thought-police raids are simply hateful; you can expect them in a godforsaken dictatorship somewhere in the 3rd world or China but it stinks when this shit happens on our "democratic" turf!

    No man, I was listening to the live raid in Genova Diaz High School on the indymedia mp3stream and it didn't mix well with my serenity; not after a kid called Carlo Giuliani was shot down by a young Carabiniere and platoons of fascists donning Police antiriot equipment were chasing down pacifists in Genova. The following months investigators said the idiot that killed... killed... killed... bullet in face... right under an eye... well, the official story is that the asshole fired a warning (panic) shot in the air and a stone deviated the bullet into Carlo's face (hey, remember the Kennedy comedy?) The most galling fact about this incident is that the idiot that killed the other guy was a drafted youngster who wasn't even supposed to be there, thrown into the mess because of poor planning and disastrous logistics on the security forces side... all this while that Berlusconi prick was hanging artificial oranges on the trees adorning the official photo site and asking housewifes to refrain from hanging underwear on the balconies because it would ruin the vista!

    I lean on the left and while I'm too disenchanted to sing the anti-corporate countergospel noglobs sing, this stuff knots my bowels; difficult to obtain VHSs and 4am tv footage reported chilling/chilean actions against protesting _Citizens_ (not friggin' black blockers... those were left untouched), the Diaz events, reported live by Indy; the Bolzaneto Human Rights violations performed by officers of the Italian Republic... AAARGH! I'm glowing!

    This stuff makes me sooo angry; it's some miserable FBI suit clicks his heels to get some conservative law & order drivel on the media before US elections! Ah, and the worst part will be the ultraleft/anarchos blowing their heads off for this taunt (and it'll be just what the bushites are hoping for to chill the security moms)

    Isn't all this sick? Back to the point: Indy isn't an independent news source, never was, never tried, never will. It isn't any better than FOX, cnn or Rai fwiw... raiding them is the usual jock vs. nerd persecution; hateful, silly and revelatory of the intellectual retardation of the perpetrators.

  14. Re:Users play a big part too on EWeek Details Linux to Windows Migration · · Score: 1

    In my (Windows) company, it's easy to tell an employee to download a patch or open a file, because they knew how to do by default, 90% of "computer people" in the company comes from a Windows background, so while working on a computer, they do things the Windows way.

    But they can just as easily open a diguised executable attachment and drive your whole network into the ground for a couple of days. Getting the user to perform system administration tasks comes with a cost... notably famous internet-wide incidents pretty well describe the trade off... ;-)
  15. Very smart unified heatsink. on iMac G5 Porn Roundup · · Score: 1

    as far as I can tell the cpu and the gpu share the same ducted massive heatsink. Am I the only one that thinks that this is the smartest idea in a while in terms of board design? PCI heatsinks and turbo-molexed-fan AGP cards are inevitably louder and bulky. Nice

  16. Re:This is pretty clever on Microsoft Releases A New Monad Command Shell Beta · · Score: 1

    Right, anyone care to build an XSTL processor into Bash (or zsh)... it's already quite bloated according to some people ;-)

  17. Re:huh?! on Bill Gates Gives $20M to CMU for New Building · · Score: 1

    Games driving PC sales? Oh man, you must be high on drugs! MS-DOS games were utter & total crap, mosly quick 'n dirty ports of the real thing released on the Home Computing Platform of the time: the Commodore Amiga. And don't let me on MS-DOS design simplicity; the 640KB limit quickly became a pain in the ass for everybody that used an i386. The Amiga was a Mac look-alike with unsurpassable A/V chipset; hadn't it been for Commodore's unpardonable management we would worship AmigaOS X rather than Apple OS X and Microsoft would still be yet-another-vendor selling a cute interoperable Office suite and VB for office automation, probably competing with today's incarnation of WordsWorth and the like... Get your facts straight, Mr. Thurrot.

  18. Looks like OsX on Fedora Project Considering "Stateless Linux" · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Although I've never used it, a Domain of OsX machines can mount and boot from remotely networked disk images. Also, a standalone machine (like a laptop) participating to an Apple directory will authenticate against the server providing "terminals" for domain users not present on the machine's local credential database. Domain accounts can be coupled to local accounts available when unplugged from the domain. Save for the first item I've experienced the setup and found it very simple to configure & use. The only kludge is the use of traditional UNIX perms (ugo) that doesn't quite fit the picture. Tiger should take care of that next year. I hope RH etc will make their system "drop in" compatible with the Apple solution (basically it's openldap); the only problem is that consumer i386 HW only has chesy BIOS rather than openfirmware which I think is used to simplyfy the remote booting configuration process.

  19. Re:The adventures of Greggary Peccary... on Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure? · · Score: 1

    It's rude to self reply but check this out; it's an exegesis on Frank Zappa's Studio Tan composition "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary"...

  20. The adventures of Greggary Peccary... on Do You Thrive or Crack Under Pressure? · · Score: 1

    Oh, here comes Greggery, Little Greggery Peccary, The nocturnal gregarious Wild swine... (and so on... you really should listen to the real thing...) FZ

  21. You can do the same with Apple Workgroup Manager.. on Longhorn Will Have Ability to Ban External Storage Devices · · Score: 1

    ... as of... today? (with pretty gfx too!) Just go to a user or group entry and select managed preferences... you can disable access to optical media (be it recordable or not) and external or internal HD... welcome to the preset Longhorn. (Note... I'm not an Apple shill... I'm a linux guy, but I happen to own a TiBook just for the sake of running Os X, wich is UNIX bliss). And BTW, this stuff is a rather trivial application of group/device-file membership tuning, you could do it yourself on a simple /etc/groups file. Yawn.

  22. Re:RTFA (Re:Umm, Paradox?) on Simulating the Whole Universe · · Score: 1

    Sorry but the universe is not homogenous on the largest scales. It is not so at the planetary, interstellar, intergalactic, intercluster, intersupercluster, inter-Great Wall scales. The basic cosmological assumption that the universe is homogenous has been falsified by observation. Of course someone can claim that it would be if seen at an even larger scale but at this point it feels improbable and scientifically questionable. I personally cringe on the "creationist" big bang theory but I won't get into that matter... let's just agree that data says the universe is not homogenous.

  23. Re:Just wondering on Apple Introduces New G5 iMac · · Score: 1

    probably for the same reason PC motherboards have capacitors right next to the CPU; capacitors clean the power supply for the CPU and putting them further away would make for wonderful striplines, just perrfect for cross chatter and random interference. In any case I suppose the hot PSU comes with a fan like the G5 CPU... that means air circulation... cooling... or perhaps you're just right, Apple engineers fsck'd up once again, you should send your resume and teach 'em some solif engineering principles ;-)

  24. Re:Not a negative choice on HP Linux Laptop Is A Winner · · Score: 1

    nope. I bought my powerbook because I wanted a UNIX machine that would do power management out of the box and have supported and actively developed no-hassle gfx quality. I came from LINUX land, loved it on servers, workstations but felt the pain on an i386 laptop. Tried various lnx distros on it, FreeBSD (which, btw, I totally respect and admire) and always hated to boot into w2k to get the portable performance (that's not just desktop experience... I mean battery endurance, standby on lid close) So after trying an ASUS laptop I got access to a powermac dual G4. Hmm... cute... mainstream apps ok... oh, look a UNIX console! ssh + X11! Uhh fink! Lemme try a PB... UNIX bliss... shure, there's a little difference (and I've never had access to an IBM mf, so when I'm talking UNIX someone might scoff at Yet-Another-UNIX-Poser) but I've learned to adore my PB. It's my LINUX playground that I want with a couple of pleasing Applish extras I happened to find on my way. To sum up... I bought an Apple because I wanted the UNIX experience precisely avoiding the Windows one. I didn't know sqat about Macs and would have bought an IBM Tp had it had the same UNIX support. I couldn't care less for the Apple experience, but learnt to appreciate it and frankly, now, I wouldn't go back.

  25. Re:I don't understand the focus on airline securit on Defending The Skies Against Congress And The Elderly · · Score: 1

    Care to explain this statement to a madrilenian?