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User: mickwd

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  1. Not just 16x9 please on Foxconn and Sharp Team Up To Build $8.8 Billion LCD Plant In China (reuters.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If they're building panels for monitors, and they only produce them in 16x9, then my money is looking for a competitor that produces 16x10, or even 4x3 or 3x2 panels.

    My money, my decision.

    If my money remains unspent, so be it - I'll stick with what I already have, until it finally stops working.

  2. Re:Fuck Beta! on QuakeNet: Government-Sponsored Attacks On IRC Networks · · Score: 2

    When I went to uni, more years ago than I care to remember, I would return home from time to time at the weekend, and go out with the lads on a Saturday night. As it was a rural area, we'd drive to the nearest big town, visit a pub and then go on clubbing.

    We'd usually visit the same pub, but every few months the pub we went to would change.

    Why?

    We didn't go to the pub with the best beer, the best music, the best seats. No, we just went to the "place where everyone else went". From time to time, everyone in town would get bored with one place and move on somewhere else which then became the new "place where everyone went". That made it (for us, at that time) the place with the best atmosphere.

    What Dice needs to realise is that all that Slashdot is is one of the "places where everyone goes" for computer / techie discussion (OK, so it's not the only one, but you get my drift). This site has no value, other than being the "place where everyone goes".

    It won't be at all difficult for someone to set up Dashslot, or Slushdirt or whatever, with the same formula as traditional Slashdot, and once word gets around that new site will be the "place where everyone goes" instead of here. Slashdot will become the new Kuro5hin, a steep and tragic decline from former glories.

    And that new site might even have decent editing and Unicode support.

  3. Re:I am shocked shocked I tell you on NSA Officers Sometimes Spy On Love Interests · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Check out the this article and search for the section on Geoffrey Prime and read what he got up to.

    And remember his "data collection" was done on pieces of card, and was before the days that most adults/parents carry mobile tracking devices around with them so their locations could be known at most times.

  4. Re:An Extra Bit of Register on 64-bit x86 Computing Reaches 10th Anniversary · · Score: 1

    I'm very surprised someone from AMD would say this, given that they used to produce the AMD29000, which used to be rather popular in some niche areas. This used register windows, with 192 registers in total. Nice chip, back in the day.

    The Wikipedia article also says that parts of the 29050 design were used as the basis for the K5 x86-compatible chips.

  5. Re:Shining a light into the darkness, one last tim on Sir Patrick Moore Dies Aged 89 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Really nice comment from Brian May:

    "Patrick is irreplaceable. There will never be another Patrick Moore. But we were lucky enough to get one."

  6. Re:Ligntning is superior mechanically on Apple Now Shipping Lightning To 30-Pin Adapters · · Score: 0

    "That can still be ambiguous. Sure, after using it for a bit, users would learn by feel which way is the right way. But how do you know which way connector should go into the device without trial and error?"

    "There may be an arrow on the device to help you align it, but that's still only part-way there..."

    God help you if you ever get the chance to "recharge" a woman...

  7. Re:Deficit. on NASA To Face $1.3 Billion Cut Next Year Under Sequestration · · Score: 1

    It depends on whether or not you adjust the actual dollar amount to account for inflation (i.e. measure the debt in dollars for a fixed value of "dollar").

    This graph on Wikipedia does.

    People can judge for themselves the validity of adjusting for inflation (though I'm sure many here will be eager to tell everyone what they should believe).

    Your assertion to the previous poster that "You clearly have NO idea what you're talking about" was unjust.

  8. Better than usual from Phoronix on X11 Window System Turns 25 Years Old · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Surprisingly level-header article, given the source (Phoronix).

    I really do hope Wayland sorts out a good scheme for remote access. At the moment it seems to be just ignored.

    I wish people who set out to *replace* an existing piece of software would endeavor to replace it in its entirety, not just the subset of features that they happen to be interested in.

  9. Re:UK 2.0 on Raspberry Pi Revision 2.0 Board Announced · · Score: 1

    Great. Do you know if they've fixed the weather?

    And what about the motorway throughput? Is it really a driver problem?

  10. Re:A more fitting punishment on Apple Adds Samsung Galaxy SIII To Its Ban List · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd rather Samsung be allowed to sell its products in the US.

    No AND.

  11. Re:Strawman Argument - what the jury did say on Pinch-to-Zoom and Rounded Rectangles: What the Jury Didn't Say · · Score: 5, Informative

    Very interesting interview with the jury foreman on the BBC.

    Especially his statements like:

    "The jurors wanted to send a message to the industry at large..."

    "And in example after example, when we put it to the test, the older prior art was just that. Not that there's anything [wrong] with older prior art - but the key was that the hardware was different, the software was an entirely different methodology, and the more modern software could not be loaded onto the older example and be run without error."

    "And so consequently, when we looked at the source code - I was able to read source code - I showed the jurors that the two methods in software were not the same, nor could they be interchangeable because the hardware that was involved between the old processor and the new processor - you couldn't load the new software methodology in the old system and expect that it was going to work. And the converse of that was true."

    I hope Samsung's lawyers are watching.

  12. Re:Why not in Cambridge? on Can the UK Create Something To Rival Silicon Valley? · · Score: 1

    You don't seem much to like London or Nottingham either.

    Where *do* you like?

  13. Re:Why not in Cambridge? on Can the UK Create Something To Rival Silicon Valley? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Indeed. The area around Cambridge has also been known as "Silicon Fen".

    Or what about somewhere like Manchester - a big city with an important place in the history of computing, a large, well-regarded university, and a large pool of experienced, well-qualified people?

    But no, once again it seems to be London that gets the attention.

  14. Re:Notice the intolerance? on 'Wiki Weapon Project' Wants Your 3D-Printable Guns · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Me, I want more of this. I want plans to 3D print a fully automatic weapon. Just to watch the heads explode at the realization that the genie is out of the bottle and ain't going back."

    Yeah, won't it just be fucking fantastic when billions of people around the world can 3D-print gas centrifuges and the equipment necessary to extract uranium from seawater. Won't that be fun to watch.

  15. Re:Not too sure on this on Insurer Measures Driver Safety With Smartphone App To Calculate Premiums · · Score: 1

    "A car is always at its safest when stopped".

    Dangerous and wrong. A stopped car on a motorway, for example, is very dangerous indeed.

  16. I suspect that the point of the UK threat was: a) to piss off the Ecuadorians enough to make sure that they *did* grant him political asylum; b) to make sure that Assange stays holed up in a small building in London potentially for many years, severely limiting his ability to run Wikileaks for the duration.

    Well done on the Ecuadorians for making that threat public.

    It's a stupid threat for the UK government to have made, for the reasons so many posters have pointed out, and I'm ashamed of the stance the UK government is taking on this issue.

  17. Re:Would it *kill* you to read the article? on Fedora Introduces Offline Updates · · Score: 1

    "An OS upgrade has no business resizing your /var or root partitions. Period. Heck, you have to be pretty ignorant if you presume they're always local."

    An OS upgrade could conceivably slightly increase the amount of space used in /usr.

    But according to this little gem /usr should now be part of your root partition. Which you will now presumably need to do an online resize of - assuming you actually installed your root partition on LVM, with the appropriate infrastructure needed to support that. Presumably, non-local /usr is no longer supported - similarly with having /usr (which is read-mainly) on a small SSD and the rest of the OS on spinning media.

    Fuckup after fuckup after fuckup from Fedora these days. And an arsey attitiude from the likes of Poettering to go with it.

  18. Re:Besides the name and the Desktop... on Fedora 17 Released · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Moving every thing to /usr to make the filesystem more sane.

    Meaning that the system no longer supports /usr in a separate filesystem: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken.

    Of course, you can still use /usr in a separate filesystem from / if you boot with an initrd, but you now almost need half an operating system (busybox, rescue shell and utilities, perhaps support for lvm and/or RAID) just to boot your real operating system.

    Why would you want /usr on a separate filesytem? Perhaps you want it in LVM, so you can resize it easily if necessary (maybe to make room for installing a new desktop environment, for example), but don't want you root file system in LVM. Perhaps you want to periodically fsck /usr on boot, and fall into single-user mode if it fails. Perhaps you want /usr (which is a read-mainly file system) on a small SSD, and all other file systems (which are written to more frequently) on spinning disk storage. Perhaps you want to mount /usr over NFS. Not that I can still see many people doing this but it seems a pity to prevent something that has worked fine in the past - and in these days of "running applications in the cloud" it seems Linux will no longer run applications in the local network (ie. NFS-mounted /usr).

    Seriously, read the level of professionalism and maturity on that page. This is the level or maturity to which Linux slowly seems to be sinking. As a long-time Linux user and supporter I find this deeply disappointing.

    And what's the reason for all this? Because the udev developers can't wipe their own a{r|s}es, put their house in order, and properly sort out which files go where (or at least sort out what needs to be done to mount any necessary non-root filesystems, mount them, and then continue with any programs/scripts which use them). Instead, all of that gets pushed out to initrd (ie. oh no it's hard, let's give it to someone else to do). Seriously, they're like a bunch of 8-year-olds bragging to their friends that they won't clean their bedrooms, even when mummy thinks they should.

  19. Re:Putting his money where his mouth is on Richard Stallman Falls Ill At Conference · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Notice that the post you are replying to (several paragraphs long and containing a number of links) was posted the very same minute as the story.

    Not the first time such a thing has happened to today with posts that seem to be putting forward a particular agenda.

  20. Re:Nothing new? on Software Engineering Is a Dead-End Career, Says Bloomberg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Strange, isn't it?

    If it was surgery, you'd probably pick the surgeon with 20 years experience over the one with a couple of years experience to operate on you.

    If is was a builder you were employing, you'd probably prefer the one with 20 years experience over the younger one to build your house.

    And whatever Zuckerberg says can probably be ignored, because you just know he's the type that, when he's getting on a bit, will be saying that age and experience are what counts.

  21. Re:Common knowledge? on Documentation As a Bug-Finding Tool · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So let's get this straight: you just sacked 60% of your developers for not following certain rules?

    That 60% of your developers had properly been informed that certain rules were important enough to follow that breaking them would probably mean dismissal, and then went ahead and broke them anyway?

    That there was no process in place of informal verbal warnings / formal verbal warnings / formal written warnings that could have been followed before sackings?

    That this wasn't discovered before it was widespread enough that it became necessary to sack 60% of your developers?

    That you have decided you'll be more productive in future with only 40% of your new development workforce having any experience of your software whatsoever?

    Your company has BIG problems.

  22. Re:The problem is chicken little on Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "What he's saying is that with the US economy in the state it's in now, it's a choice of certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation, & suffering..."

    Why is it that the USA can seemingly find enough money for a recent war in the Middle East, or a recent war out in Asia, or even spending billions and billions on a new security agency, but spending a similar amount of money on something different would cause "certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation & suffering".

    Not that I think a similar amount of money would or should be spent, just pointing out the ridiculousness of that claim.

  23. Re:GW on Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming · · Score: 1

    "You lost all credibility when you said "banning the light bulb"."

    http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/09/368

  24. Re:Who cares? on 1366x768 Monitors Top 1024x768 For the First Time · · Score: 0

    Then why has a certain computer company just released a certain high-profile device with a 4:3 screen?

    Presumably that's why Apple so doing so badly at the moment, and other hardware manufacturers are doing a roaring trade.

    Doubly hilarious throwbacks and inflexible old fossils, indeed.

  25. Re:LOL ... on 1366x768 Monitors Top 1024x768 For the First Time · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm starting to look round for a replacement for my current 15.4" laptop, because after a few years heavy use, bits are starting to fail. It's got a great 1680x1050 screen, and I certainly don't want to spend money to trade down from that.

    I'm another guy who likes lots of vertical screen space.

    Although there are hundreds of new laptops out there, all proudly showing off their processor / RAM / disk specs, ones with a decent vertical screen resolution are few and far between - unless you go for a 17" screen, which means lugging around a larger laptop, which I don't really want. Yes, I know I can plug in an external monitor. But then it's no longer portable, is it?

    Pretty ironic that general-purpose (portable) computers are now seemingly stuck with 16x9 screens, designed for the passive consumption of media, whereas an iTablet device aimed more towards the passive consumption of media (than a general-purpose laptop is) comes with a super-high-res 4x3 screen. That same iCompany is one of the few who also sells laptops with high-res 1920x1200 screens, albeit 17" (and pricy).

    No wonder *other* tech companies are having a hard time flogging kit.