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Comments · 349

  1. Re:Anybody using Ada? on Ada 2012 Language Approved As Standard By ISO · · Score: 1

    FYI: It hasn't been called "ADA" for some time, simply "Ada."

  2. Re:Guy is no dummy on The Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually, that sounds pretty smart to me.

  3. Re:Kudos on Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church · · Score: 1

    but I also expect that just about every culture finds it hard to hold their tongue when viewing another cultures funeral rituals

    This needs addressing. You say "just about every culture", are you sure you don't mean "individuals" or do you actually believe it is within the core components of every culture to dismiss all others as foolish?

  4. Re:Kudos on Anonymous Hacks Westboro Baptist Church · · Score: 1

    [citation needed]

  5. Re:The first programmer was Hero of Alexandria on Happy Birthday To Ada Lovelace, the First Computer Programmer · · Score: 1

    According to Wikipedia, Thomas Edison used the term "bug" with the same meaning in 1878. [1]

  6. Re:The first programmer was Hero of Alexandria on Happy Birthday To Ada Lovelace, the First Computer Programmer · · Score: 1

    The term "bug" predated this instance as well as digital computers by a large margin.

  7. Re:Another Young Idealist Casualty on Republican Staffer Khanna Axed Over Copyright Memo · · Score: 1

    That is mighty naive for 24 year old.

    I'd agree with you, but for a while I was that 24 year old. A massive "news" system has been constructed to only present Republicans as never wrong. Government corruption and is always "their" problem (with the Democrats being "they"), so much so that when a prominent Republican does ill and gets caught, they'll put a (D) after his name in the news blurb. Figures and charts are constructed that are completely misleading and do not match the data they're trying to represent.

    It no longer takes much self-deluding to remain within this sphere of ignorance, and many choose to never venture beyond the safety of it. Khanna messed up, he walked beyond the message and developed a real solution to a real problem, but it isn't one that benefits those who have architected the sphere and has put himself at odds with them. With any luck he'll be able to see it for what it is.

  8. Re:Who Cares? on Thorium Fuel Has Proliferation Risk · · Score: 1

    Nuclear winter is worse than global warming.

    They kind of balance each other out.

  9. Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? on What's It Like To Pilot a Drone? a Bit Like Call of Duty · · Score: 1

    What do you want? The US to come in and kill everyone involved? Would that make you happy?

  10. Re:Sorry kids... on David Cameron 'Orders New Curbs On Internet Porn' · · Score: 1

    finding a titty mag was better then finding gold.

    This only means that your friends sucked or found you to be untrustworthy. Porn was definitely easy to access and one's possession of it was of value to the group, but it was a physical contraband back then. The medium has changed, that's all.

  11. Re:I doubt this was entirely intentional on Lenovo UEFI Bug Only Likes Windows and RHEL · · Score: 1

    What are you talking about? You're declaring quite confidently of their motive, but I see no evidence that is the reason. Where is your confidence coming from? If these are regulations, which ones? Can you further cite where Lenovo would have to prevent modifications to an existing system, beyond merely getting licensing on the system they're bringing to market?

  12. Re:I doubt this was entirely intentional on Lenovo UEFI Bug Only Likes Windows and RHEL · · Score: 1

    Do you have actual evidence of this or are you making up a rationalization?

  13. Re:The next time on USPS Reports $15.9 Billion Loss, Asks Congress For Help · · Score: 5, Insightful

    THANK YOU! I wish more people knew that Congress decided to make demands on the USPS that no company could ever meet. And to think that the Republicans frequently politic on "running the government like a business" yet they make actions to ensure the government business fails.

  14. Re:summaery cubed: fusion is a waste of time on ITER Fusion Project Struggles To Put the Pieces Together · · Score: 1

    The scientists don't trust the bureaucrats, they ask for assistance. What's the alternative?

  15. Re:Application and Screen on Different Machines on Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11 · · Score: 1

    Those are great solutions, but they're already been implemented. X already has server-side (where the display is) pixbuf caches, and the network may turn on compression.

  16. Re:Application and Screen on Different Machines on Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11 · · Score: 1

    You say things like True Type Fonts and anti-aliased lines are eye candy? I sit a console constantly day in and day out, these things make the experience far better than it would be with simple X primitives.

    New GUI concepts are constantly being developed. The system you want to create would be similar to taking Motif and making that the network protocol. As soon as some new widget is created and gains popularity, you're either stuck in the same situation you are now, or constantly revising the protocol to account for every new class of widgets.
    To address your other concerns: Have you ever used VNC or RDP on a headless remote? It works just fine.

  17. Re:Application and Screen on Different Machines on Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Keith Packard has been working on X terminals since 1983 and worked on the original X reference implementation . Since Keith has been there since basically the beginning of the project, you're completely off base with your accusations of a lack of understanding. I don't care who wrote line 1 of XFree86; I trust this man more about the operation of X and its shortcomings.

    Bandwidth is very much a concern as well. All the toolkits render locally to X pixbufs and transmit them across the line. In particularly graphics heavy systems, such as GIMP, these pixbufs won't compress as well, so line compression won't help as much to cut down on bandwidth concerns.

  18. Re:Application and Screen on Different Machines on Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11 · · Score: 1

    Latency isn't the only problem, bandwidth is. Modern graphical toolkits, such as GTK and Qt, render to X pixbufs and transmit those across the wire. That's a lot of data!

  19. Re:Application and Screen on Different Machines on Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi Bill,

    You have a good point, but unfortunately the X system is fundamentally flawed at the technical level for the purpose you describe. When X was originally developed, graphics were simple aliased lines and bitmapped fonts. In the modern computer environment, this has presented itself as a grave hindrance to the usability of X.

    Modern applications depend on graphics toolkits, such as GTK and Qt, which render in to X pixbufs and finally those are rendered on the display. The process by which this happens depends upon copying these toolkit-rendered images from buffer to buffer several times, quite needlessly to fit within the X framework. This is moreso true over a network connection. The very nature of modern programs has progressed way beyond what X was intended and optimized for. It is like trying to use a MUD infrastructure designed for textual interaction as the basis of a modern GUI framework, it simply isn't the right tool for the job.

    An anecdote, this weekend I decided I was going to work from home. So I ssh into my work computer (6 miles, 20+ Mbps connection), and fire up an X forwarded my graphical editor session. Things were slow, but not unusable until I did something that caused a series of tooltips to be rendered. The session locked up for 2 minutes before I killed it. I then fired up a terminal-based text editor and got to work. X's network transparency was not beneficial. But there are many network protocols that have been designed for the purpose of remotely operating modern GUI applications such as VNC and RDP. These have been designed from the ground up to provide the functionality we expect on today's systems.

    And before I finish my tirade, I, too, was a die-hard X fan until I decided to see what the Xorg folks had to say. Keith Packard (a lead developer on Xorg, inventor of Cairo and much more that you depend on when you fire up your workstation), has been a hard proponent of Wayland. He's given many talks outlining the design failings of X and how Wayland resolves them. I recommend you google "Keith Packard Wayland" and see what you find.

    Regards,
    oursland

  20. Re:Signal isn't chaning, the noise floor is on Ask Slashdot: Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time? · · Score: 1

    The algorithms the GP are talking about are tied to the hardware, not simply the firmware the CPU runs. Things like beamforming, adaptive arrays, and diversity antennas are things that can drastically alter the performance of a wireless router without altering the communications protocol, but they depend upon hardware configurations that are not in the WRT54G.

  21. Re:The good side on Steve Ballmer: We're a Devices and Services Company · · Score: 1

    Apple likes to slap their Apple logo (ad) on things, it doesn't mean they built any of them. More likely Made in China than Made by Apple. But that goes for most hardware.

    Microsoft, like Apple, does design hardware and for peripheral devices they did a damn good job. For example the Microsoft Trackball Explorer is a solid design with a demand that has pushed this retired device to a price of $225.

  22. Re:I reject your patent, M$. on Microsoft Patents 1826 Choropleth Map Technique · · Score: 1

    That's a great argument against ever trying to improve the status quo.

  23. Re:I left Linux for OS X... on Ask Slashdot: What Distros Have You Used, In What Order? · · Score: 1

    Many distributions of Linux do not have a corporation backing them. With that in mind, Apple is far less ethical than, say, Debian.

  24. Re:Everyone needs to start somewhere on Why Non-Coders Shouldn't Write Code · · Score: 1

    I imagine that selection bias is present with that 80% figure.

  25. Re:Soul-crushing? on High Tech Companies Becoming Fools For the City · · Score: 1

    Not everyone's parents let them have a job before age 18. Some people had to stay home and watch the younger siblings while both parents were working their second jobs.