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User: poot_rootbeer

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  1. Re:I've seen this first hand on Why IT Won't Power Down PCs · · Score: 2, Insightful

    None of these computers were in client facing positions, so effectively, they were insistent on wasting energy to advertise....to empty chairs at 4AM!

    Fixed that for you.

  2. Re:Stop making remakes on Early Look At the New Bionic Commando · · Score: 1

    A remake...of a 21-year-old game? Come on. Get some new ideas, for chrissake. The current crop of game-playing kids wasn't even born then, how could there be any demand for a remake?

    You may not be aware of it, but video games are no longer solely the domain of unpopular 12-year-old boys. A lot of those boys have grown up, are in their 20s and 30s now, and still play. And they have a good amount of disposable income available for the hobby, which both Sony and Microsoft have used to their advantage. You would not have seen anybody foolish enough to offer a mainstream console with a $600 price tag in the late 1980s.

    Some of those bys even have girlfriends, spouses and children now, who also enjoy gaming, which is one reason for Nintendo's continuing success.

  3. TURBO BOOST on Cinder Mobile OS Lets Users Send More Power To Slow Apps · · Score: 1

    What would really be great is if they would add this idea to desktop computers. Most of my DOS applications on my 80286 run just fine at the XT-compatible 4.77MHz CPU clock speed, but once in a while I think I'd really benefit if I could crank that up to 12 (or dare I dream, 16?) MHz...

  4. Re:But on Using Net Proxies Will Lead To Harsher Sentences · · Score: 1

    But, take things like libel, which in the US used to have truth as an iron-clad defense.

    Never.

    Libel is a defamatory act, and defamation is characterized by intent to harm. In many jurisdictions, a written statement which is factually true may still be considered libelous if it is misleading and/or proven to have been published with malicious intent.

  5. Re:Place I visited but never worked in. on Worst Working Conditions You Had To Write Code In? · · Score: 1

    Arrived at the place to talk with the developers and see if we could incorporate their software at our location. The atrium to the place was nice, wide open area with plants and all nice. Going into the halls they had robots running mail and physical items between room, then we got to the programming room. It was a big white room with 3 columns, and around 5 rows, of picnic type tables and two programmers on each table, each with their own computer. At the front of the room was a raised platform where the managers desk was sitting. Making it even worse was the manager, she would require that they get permission to go to the bathroom, get lunch, etc.

    On the plus side, they had free vending machines in the hallway kept stocked with all the Flavo-Fibes you could eat, and all the Reconst you could drink! Plus there was a well-known backdoor on the file server that allowed employees to scroll up cinemas while they worked.

  6. Re:Mountain out of Molehill on Sun's Phipps Slams App Engine's Java Support · · Score: 1

    If we now have a popular Java platform that only have a subset of the Core classes, it will cause a lot of headaches down the road, eventually fragmenting the "Java" platform.

    Good.

    No single platform should be or can be universal. The requirements for an application on an 8-core 64-bit server serving 10,000 users at once have nothing at all in common with a single-user application on a low-power pocket device; what's the advantage of using the same language to write both when fundamental design choices must be necessity be different?

    I thought Sun had understood this concern when the J2ME/SE/EE standards were established. If their position is now that every JVM must implement Threads, even the ones running on the hardware equivalent of a Gameboy Advance, then they've lost sight of pragmatism.

  7. Re:HTML 5? on Major League Baseball Dumps Silverlight For Flash · · Score: 1

    The whole point of using flash for video is to 1) prevent viewers from skipping over ads, and 2) prevent viewers from saving the streaming video to disk.

    3) provide a common cross-platform experience for all visitors
    4) prevent users from having to deal with "codec hell"

  8. Re:Will be interesting to see what happens to sale on Apple Shifts iTunes Pricing; $0.69 Tracks MIA · · Score: 1

    There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.

    I'm sure this is an idea that the record labels have never considered before. Never ever.

    The reason they would dare ask $1.29 for a download of a 30-year-old song like 'Barricuda' is because they think enough people are willing to pay that much that they'll make a profit on it -- and they barely have to sell any copies at all for that to happen, since the recording costs were recouped decades ago, and its constant rotation on Classic Rock radio already makes it a cash cow for them.

  9. Re:Surprising on Angry Villagers Run Google Out of Town · · Score: 1

    Your people deserve what they get.

    NOBODY deserves living under a corrupt or oppressive government.

  10. Re:sharing on Harvard Law's Nesson Says P2P Is "Fair Use" · · Score: 1

    "Open to the public" and "substantial number of persons outside of...family and friends" are the key things to understand here.

    Indeed.

    Playing a DVD at home when a few pals come over == not public performance
    Playing a DVD in the common room of a college dormitory building, all students welcome = likely not public performance
    Playing a DVD over the video projection system in a college lecture hall, all students welcome, non-students may attend by paying $5 = probably qualifies as a public performance

  11. Re:Finding Easter Eggs in the Legal Code on Harvard Law's Nesson Says P2P Is "Fair Use" · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It does, however, highlight the unfairness of a law that makes do distinction between commercial and non-commercial breaches of copyright.

    The damages (as they are) to the rightful copyright holder are identical whether the violator made a profit off the violation or not.

  12. Re:Maybe Japan's Prime Minister will get 20" rims! on Obamas Give Queen Elizabeth an iPod · · Score: 3, Insightful

    first, he gives the British PM a stack of DVDs (ultra lame). next, he gives the queen of england a friggin ipod

    The DVDs and iPod are not the gifts, they are the packaging. The real value of these gifts is of the content that's on them -- examples of the artistic and cultural outputs of the United States, which have been exported to the world.

    That most of this culture is available to anybody with $300 to spare is not an indictment of Obama's stinginess, nor of America's, but a celebration of our egalitarianism.

  13. Re:Yes on Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English? · · Score: 1

    You need to understand English to develop in programming languages where the syntax and reserved words are in English.

    So that covers what, SQL? And FORTRAN?

  14. Re:PostgreSQL on Locating the Real MySQL · · Score: 1

    Hey, maybe people have a reason to use MySQL - a product that only supports that db,

    Badly written software.

    or developers who aren't particularly familiar with what relational databases are supposed to be like.

    Badly written software waiting to happen.

  15. Re:Who really cares? on The Copyrightability of Twitter Posts · · Score: 1

    If you're going to twitter something meaningful, like hey I'm on the subway and its being delayed b/c some jackass jumped off the platform and I'm going to be late to (wherever). Then supposing you're friends are following you they will know... where you are and why you're late.

    Or, you could send a regular text message to only the friend(s) you're supposed to be meeting up with, so not to bother people not involved in the plans with your trivial minutiae.

    It's a hypothetical example; not like there's going to be a cellular signal down in the subway system, anyway.

  16. Re:140 Characters? on The Copyrightability of Twitter Posts · · Score: 1

    No, you are assuming that ".,?!" are used in the beginning of words or anywhere besides the end of a sentence or phrase. ...doesn't that mean that neither your sentence nor my response can actually exist?

  17. Re:isn't anything created... on The Copyrightability of Twitter Posts · · Score: 1

    isn't anything created automatically assumed to have copyright attributed to the author?

    Close. It's that anything creatIVE is automatically copyrighted upon creation.

    If you can tweet a poem that fits into 140 characters -- and I defy you to write a haiku that does not -- then it is protected by copyright. Absence of any context indicating otherwise, tweeting your friends that you "ordered a hamburger minus tomatoes, who even likes those" is not a creative work and thus not copyrightable.

  18. Doom III on Violent Video Games Can Improve Vision · · Score: 1

    It's true, after a weekend of playing Doom III, I found myself very sensitive to the difference in color between RGB #000000 (background) and RGB #010101 (enemies).

  19. Re:Tax Breaks for Corporate Media on Senator Proposes Nonprofit Status For Newspapers · · Score: 1

    If we let newspapers be non-profits we are giving a huge tax-break to Richard Mellon Scaife, and Rupert Murdoch, and Sun Myung Moon. All of the money these guy pump into their right-wing propaganda machines will be tax-deductible.

    Did you read the summary? Any paper that adopts non-profit status will not be allowed to have a partisan editorial viewpoint.

    How this would be enforced, and the definition used for 'partisan', those are open questions.

  20. Re:Actually, it's rather the opposite on With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35? · · Score: 1

    The sad truth of it is many of the grads for the last 15 years are junk [...] the curriculums now create people who think that the compiler, the runtime, and the OS are a black box.

    Funny. I got my degree 10 years ago, and CS majors had required coursework in each of those fields. The curriculum even included subjects which would more appropriately be considered electrical engineering -- one project was to build an entire RISC CPU in modeling software, starting at the level of individual NAND gates and building up from there. I can't claim my experience was representative of every graduate in the past 15 years, but neither would I claim none of us have sufficient understanding of computer internals.

    And what's wrong with that? 95% of the programming work that needs to be done IS writing reports for accounting. That 0.1% of the time where a new comm protocol needs to be developed, there's still some gee-whiz developer-savant capable of the task, and he's as likely to be a young college dropout as a grizzle-bearded oldbie.

  21. Re:Complete waste of time on New Lossless MP3 Format Explained · · Score: 1

    Also you can't have tracks longer than about an hour due to id3v2 size limits.

    I don't disagree that this "mp3HD" format is a bad solution in search of a problem, any problem, but would it really be a common problem if no track could be longer than ~1 hour?

    My well-over-60GB music collection only has one track that exceeds 60 minutes (that would be the 74-minute single-track album, Delirium Cordia by Fantomas). Maybe there are other use cases I'm not considering?

  22. Re:Been following this for awhile. on Strip-Search Case Tests Limits of 4th Amendment · · Score: 1

    The fact that something like this takes place in the United States of America is proof that this country is corrupt.

    The fact that something like this provokes outrage, and is subjected to thorough review by the court system as to its constitutionality, is proof that this country is NOT corrupt, at least not fully and irreversibly.

  23. Re:There's already a name for this... on Toward the Open Company · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the new buzzword for this is "crowdsourcing".

    I was thinking more along the lines of "abandonware".

    No longer interested in being the sole contributor to your yet-another-editor software project? Send out a press release touting it as a new paradigm in "Open management"!

  24. a base of data on "Slacker DBs" vs. Old-Guard DBs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "tools that tack the letters 'db' onto a 'pile of code that breaks with the traditional relational model"'

    If "database" were intended to mean only "relational database", we wouldn't have had any need for the latter term...

  25. Re:No thanks on New Service Aims To Replace Consoles With Cloud Gaming · · Score: 5, Funny

    It says the server will do the lifting to a thin client. The server is not just streaming binaries to be rendered on the client, the server is receiving input from and return video to be displayed on the client.

    A game console with all the responsiveness and graphical horsepower of an X11 terminal? How can it fail!!!

    This is really bad news for Nintendo.