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User: los+furtive

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  1. $99 MAME BOX? on OUYA Android Game Console Available In June · · Score: 1

    I'll be happy if it works as a good $99 mame box.

  2. Re:4 hrs a a week + time and half for calls. on Should You Be Paid For Being On Call? · · Score: 1

    Sorry, my numbers are way off. We were paid: 1 hour for every 8 hours with the pager that we were not already working so it added up to: 3 hrs per weekend day, and 2 hrs per day during the week, for a total of 16 hours per week for holding the pager, 17 hours on holidays :-)

  3. 4 hrs a a week + time and half for calls. on Should You Be Paid For Being On Call? · · Score: 1

    Worked as a software dev for a large banking firm in Canada. We were paid four hours a week just to hold the pager, and then time and a half for any calls we received, with 30 min automatically charged as soon as the pager rang. We couldn't travel out of the city when we had the pager, and had to limit drinking to meals.

  4. Why a net? There's no resistance in space! on The Space Garbage Scow, ala Cringely · · Score: 1

    Why a net? There's no resistance in space and no medium that needs to pass through the net! Make it a big metal cup like the back of a dump truck. Drawback would be increased payload for launch, but it helps remove a lot of the risks others are describing such as the net breaking or contents of the net breaking up into smaller pieces.

  5. Let me be the first... on First European Commander of the ISS · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...to welcome our European overlords.

  6. Re:Classic Cars on '09 Malibu Vs. '59 Bel Air Crash Test · · Score: 5, Informative

    They did: 09 Malibu and 59 Bel Air. RTFA and all that jazz.

  7. Re:...and the pursuit of happiness on Tech Or Management Beyond Age 39? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Getting happiness out of the job is a bonus.

    If getting happiness out of the job is a bonus, you've got the wrong job. Worse yet, your boss has the wrong employee.

  8. Re:SSD = Single Sided Disc on Samsung Mass Produces Fast 256GB SSDs · · Score: 1

    I didn't have one of those fancy punches, I used a leather punch instead, which made tiny belt holes. My disks look like they were nibbled by a cartoon mouse, but I'll be damned if it didn't work like a charm each and every time.

  9. Re:Fuzzy math on Samsung Mass Produces Fast 256GB SSDs · · Score: 2, Informative

    Seek time is next to zero for SSD drives (less than 1ms). There's no seeking because it's all in the register already.

  10. Burgertime? on McDonalds Files To Patent Making a Sandwich · · Score: 1

    Does Burgertime count as prior art?

  11. Re:You need only look at history on Blizzard Sues Creator of WoW Bot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been playing since a month after it came out, and I still play to this day...[I] find that it is enough amusement to justify $15/month.
    So you started playing in December of 2004? Why that's a total of $600 in monthly fees plus the cost of the software and expansion packs. Was Blizzard nice enough to throw in a free month after the first $500?
  12. Re:no surprise there on Apple's OS X Leopard In Depth · · Score: 1

    Further, your example isn't really demonstrating a "high performance GUI" because the bulk of it is being handled in hardware by the video card.

    You enunciate your words rather clearly for a guy who's talking out of his ass.

  13. Re:Are they really looking at the right places? on Evidence Found for Earliest Modern Humans · · Score: 1

    One interesting question that this idea that unusual evolutionary pressures were responsible for the appearance of human type intelligence is this: if that were true, why didn't it arise in the sea first? Not only does the sea offer natural selection pressures as harsh as any on land, life has been in the sea much longer than it has on land.

    I think that's a great question, and here's what I propose as an answer. I'd say that the ocean's playing field, as it were, favours simpler means of dealing with difficult situations than it does on land, and as a result, the potential need to evolve intelligence at levels the same as the human has never been necessary since simpler solutions to life threatening and life changing circumstances have been relatively easily available.

    For example, if a fish can't see over the seaweed it simply floats over it, while most mammals evolved means to either look over it, or hide under it. If food is scarce in one corner of the ocean, it's relatively simple to move to another part of the ocean (think of how great the range is for so many types of fish, whale, shark and turtle are) when compared to moving on land. Those are two examples of how the environment provides simpler solutions to the problems that natural selection depends on to foster dramatic evolutionary change. Of course there are still plenty of examples where the ocean environment has fostered dramatic evolutionary change, but most of those dealt with the loss of the environment itself (e.g. being stranded in a drying up lake) or the simpler predator/prey relationship.

    So as is often the case, it is the environment around us that has the biggest impact on natural selection, and the environment on land lends to more difficult scenarios for life to overcome.

  14. Re:Solid first! on Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM

    You forgot notebooks!

    Anyone who's trying to breath new life into a notebook that already has as much RAM as possible will get an awesome collection of performance boosts by switching to solid state:

    • a speed upgrade that in some ways is more noticeable than a CPU upgrade
    • savings in battery life
    • cooler temperatures
    • lighter weight
    • less likely loss of data when dropped
    • faster boot/resume times
    • quieter operation
    These are all features that pretty much every notebook out there can benefit from. The only remaining obstacle is cost.
  15. Mod parent up! on Help Make Firefox On Mac Suck Less · · Score: 1

    You just identified my biggest beef about FFox. If I said I wanted Flip4Win to open all my .wmv files then gosh darn it sure would be nice if FFox actually did that, instead of prompting me each time.

  16. Financial gain? on MPAA Makes Unauthorized Copies of DVD · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Those movies you can download or share on torrent sites? They aren't copied for financial gain either.

  17. Re:CSS on Preview of New MSN Hotmail · · Score: 1

    That's easy for them, the won't support Moz or the other guys :-P

  18. Re:Monorail... on Seattle Axes Monorail Project · · Score: 1

    What about us brain-dead slobs?

  19. Re:Gameboy Micro is sweet! on GBA SP Updated with Brighter Backlit Screen · · Score: 1

    Hehe, I was wondering about that.

  20. Re:Gameboy Micro is sweet! on GBA SP Updated with Brighter Backlit Screen · · Score: 1

    Yes. I've only been playing Zelda Pickin Cap (or whatever it's called) on it since I've gotten it and the text is very readable and it's it's very lush in colour. It is small though and I have better than 20/20 eyesight so you definitely want to test it out first, but my goal was to have something I could cary in my pocket without noticing, and it accomplishes that no problem. Even comes with a cute little pouch to put it in.

  21. Gameboy Micro is sweet! on GBA SP Updated with Brighter Backlit Screen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To hell with the SP. I just got a Gameboy Micro and it is sweet! It's the same size as my Nokia phone, and way smaller than my Mario Cement Factory Nintendo Game & Watch. The screen, while small is just brilliantly gorgeous. For those of you who have SPs you'll find the screen lacking in size, but for a guy like me who skipped the whole Advance series and was using the original Gameboy as my last portable (we'll ignore the fact I also owned a GameGear and Lynx) the screen size is just fine. It's a real classy device.

  22. Re:UI suggestion on IE UI Designer On His Switch To FireFox · · Score: 1

    You'd also have to change how the window manager works in the operating system of your choice in order to accomplish this.

  23. Re:ewww on Office 12 Exposed · · Score: 1
    Apparently it took you around a half-an-hour to type in this reply.

    I've got a lot of monitors, and a lot of work :-)

    ...the case stands that using brushed metals as a background is very, very old, and was the cheapest and most common original-web background

    I thought that was the wood panel background?

  24. Re:ewww on Office 12 Exposed · · Score: 1
    I used brushed aluminum on my first website about 15 years ago.

    That's amazing considering the World Wide Web wasn't released by CERN until 1991 and Mosaic didn't even take off until 1993.

    Get your facts straight.

  25. Re:apple in cell market on Apple's Strategy Behind iTunes Mobile Phone · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of cellphones that do what you asked. This isn't one of them. Get off my cloud :-)