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User: QQBoss

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  1. Re:For sure! on Iran's News Agency Picks Up Onion Story · · Score: 5, Informative

    Errr, Glenn Beck hasn't worked for Fox News in over a year.

    I live in China, don't watch Fox News (or any other American television channels), and even I am aware that Fox/NBC/CBS/ABC don't run straight news shows during prime time- they run them between 5 and 7 pm or 10 and 11:30 or so, depending on the time zone, because running news during their most profitable hours would put them out of business. So why is Fox News unserious for running commentary at the times when they can maximize profits with other programs just as their competitors do with Monday Night Football, Law & Order, The Simpsons, etc...?

    Oh, wait, I misunderstand, you are comparing Fox News to MSNBC and CNN who run hard news with no shock-jocks during their prime time schedules like Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Rachel Maddow Show, PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton, Anderson Cooper 360, and Piers Morgan Tonight(*). Oh... wait... now I get it, you are saying that there is no serious news reported in the USA except for CNN Headline News! That's the ticket!

    * I had to actually search for all those TV show names, if some of them aren't on the air anymore, my bad.

  2. Re:Drones are dirt cheap and no pilot dies. on Air Force Foresaw Fatal F-22 Problems; Rejected $100,000 Fix As Too Expensive · · Score: 1

    I agree with your points, but lets add the following:

    Someone putting up 10000 drones has to have antennas for telemetry. It is infeasible of Iran or any other likely small antagonist only capable of asymmetrical warfare to defend the antennas unless they use most of the drones for that purpose, which defeats the purpose of having so many drones, since cruise missiles (or a sat kill or 2) will knock out a significant amount of all the comm links in the first 2-5 hours. An army marches on its stomach, everything else is C&C (command and control, not the game), and C&C is relatively easy to behead in asymmetric-only warfare countries with respect to anything high tech.

    And if Iran or North Korea has drones capable of acting completely autonomously AND effectively in a combat situation, what are the odds that the country they are fighting asymmetrically didn't have that capability first?

  3. Re:Don't care. on AMD Trinity APUs Stack Up Well To Intel's Core 3 · · Score: 1

    But apparently parent end user doesn't remember that Intel had a recall and replaced every CPU that an end user reported to them.

    For that matter, Thomas Nicely, the guy who actually did the tracking down of the bug, not you, isn't nearly as bitter as your message makes you appear, and chided Intel for destroying the remaining known defective chips because the defect just wasn't a very big deal to anyone not doing statistical analysis or because the likelihood of anyone doing divides of values like 4195835.0/3145727.0 in floating point while playing a game, using Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or even doing Excel was very, very low. The chance of them noticing was significantly smaller. Doesn't mean that the bug should have ever cleared validation (I have done validation for Motorola chips in my past life, so I have more than a modest knowledge of what is involved in catching things like this), but I think the anonymous coward doth protest too much. Chances are if you were one of the 1% of users who owned a Pentium of that era and were actually affected in a way that you were able to recognize, then you also knew about the recall.

    If you really thought that any CPU you owned prior (or since) that time hasn't had known errors in them and yet still shipped, learn how to read publicly available erratas. Those won't scare you, though, it is usually the ones only available under NDA that tend to be the frightening ones.

    And I say that as a person who has never bought an Intel CPU in a notebook computer until 2 months ago.

  4. Re:Wow on AMD Trinity APUs Stack Up Well To Intel's Core 3 · · Score: 1

    I am working under the assumption that English isn't your first language. If I am wrong, feel free to correct me.

    The mobile versions (ending in T, U, M, UE, and ME) of the Intel i3 series are spec'ed to consume only 17 watts or 35 watts at full load. If you can explain to me how a mobile AMD spec'ed to consume 35-40 watts "takes up way less watts than intel", maybe I can understand your meaning of "way less" better. The 55 watt version of the i3 is intended for desktops (and the web site the GP referred to was testing the i3-3225 which is one of the desktop models, regardless of your belief otherwise), not mobile solutions, but given that people used to put 90+ watt Pentiums into notebooks, it is certainly feasible to do it if an OEM was crazy enough to think that consumers no longer care about battery life.

    Regardless, the web site was also evaluating system power, which means differences in motherboard power consumption are being added on top of differences in CPU power consumption, possibly distorting any conclusions of CPU power consumption and perhaps leading your confusion.

  5. Re:And? on Scientists Say Organic Food May Not Be Healthier For You · · Score: 1

    Umm, you do realize that a "blind" taste test doesn't mean you have to poke out the eyes of the participants, right (because that would probably kill the market for scientists willing to do double-blind tests, after all)? Oh, ok, so you COULD blindfold them, but science should be fun, too!

    Unless there is a significant appearance difference between the two items to be tasted that the taster might be able to use as an identification method, all that blind tasting requires is that the taster not be able to identify which is which.

    Did I just hear a whooshing noise?

  6. Re:You had to have been there on The Struggles of Developing StarCraft · · Score: 1

    In the 1995, while working for Motorola, I was the assembly language geek asked to save 1 CPU cycle on a critical code loop that Sega promised a PPC console design win if we were able to succeed. The loop was only 16 lines of assembly code which their geeks felt was already maximally optimized based on their experience with an NEC chip. Later business considerations that were MGMT101 issues and not /. issues saw us lose the design win, but I was successful after about 3-4 hours (saved 2 clocks in the first 8 lines, lost one in the last 8, but a win was a win).

    But even by then, anyone who spent every coding moment worrying about 2 bytes or CPU cycles in EVERY routine was a dinosaur. Spending 3-4 hours to save one clock of CPU time in a loop is rarely going to provide a meaningful ROI.

  7. Re:Old story, or something new? on Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix · · Score: 1

    Crud, I lost a good reply to you by accidentally hitting the back button on my mouse.

    Probably was tl:dr and too lazy to type it all out again so: a Pentium-M@1.83 GHz would be a 2004-era Dothan. If you think, just because it has a higher clock frequency than the 2011-era E300@1.3 GHz, it is faster than the E300 even on single threaded apps, you haven't spent enough time learning/understanding computer architecture (To approach the E300, you need a 2007/8-era Conroe-L).

    Nor should you probably need to, but if I had to guess you probably aren't doing paying code development work on that machine, either, which was what this thread was talking about- not using 56K modems.

    (keep your eyes open for an Asus Aspire V5-531 on sale, I got mine for $302 including sales tax in Texas. Performance-wise, it does destroy a Dothan-class CPU in every meaningful benchmark, single or multi-threaded, but I have to admit I would kill for 1920x1200 at times and that isn't going to happen at the $300 mark, you are right)

  8. Re:Old story, or something new? on Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix · · Score: 2, Informative

    If your laptop can't handle more than 2 GB of RAM, it is so old that any $300 notebook that can handle 8 GB or more of RAM (and probably comes with 4 GB) will outperform it in every performance metric. And I just got 8 GB of low voltage DDR3-1600 cas 9 SO-DIMMS from newegg for $48. And if your DEVELOPMENT box isn't making you enough money to justify spending either of those two numbers, get out of the development business, because it should easily be paying for something 4x more expensive.

    If you aren't doing development, then don't worry about it.

  9. 20 m diameter particles? on Micromotors Race About By Turning Water Into Hydrogen Gas · · Score: 1

    "The particles, which are 20 m in diameter, are asymmetric..."

    Where I come from, 20 meter diameter anythings would rarely be considered particles!

  10. Re:Are these devices that important? on FAA To Reevaluate Inflight Electronic Device Use · · Score: 1

    I thought take-off and landing were the two phases of flight where most incidents occur because the plane is most likely to interact with the ground in an unexpected fashion at those times, given that there is little opportunity to correct. Funny that.

  11. Stop the nonsense on The Pirate Bay Launches Free VPN · · Score: 1

    It isn't a Pirate Bay VPN, they are just running an ad next to it. At least that is what Torrenfreak is saying.

  12. Re:Commies??? on New eBay EULA Prohibits Class Action Lawsuits · · Score: 1

    Soooooooo, 1847 (Mexican-American War)? Or would you include the Board of Inquiry that G. Washington initiated in 1790 to deal with a British major who was believed to have conspired with Benedict Arnold (he was convicted and hanged). Military commissions go back way before the Romans.

  13. News for nerds, huh? on Hurricane Could Make a Mess of Republican Convention · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mods, why was this allowed through the filters? It ain't tech, it isn't geeky in a technology sense (I will recognize there are hurricane geeks), and it is really just political trolling no matter how you look at it which I am willing to watch meaningful threads degenerate into but having it start off degenerate is a waste at every level.

    Timothy, you suck for posting this.

  14. Re:NAS on Ask Slashdot: Stepping Down From an Office Server To NAS-Only? · · Score: 1

    Clients emphatically do not have access to our file server. Quite a few of them are facing very serious criminal charges, and a certain number might even be guilty. Frequently a client will want to send us files; we accept those by e-mail or physical media. Occasionally a client will ask for a copy of his file; we're pleased to burn that to CD-ROM.

    Heh!

  15. Re:Damned if you do.. on Lenovo CEO Gives His $3M Bonus To 10k Workers · · Score: 3

    I don't typically mod memes, but jeesh this is once I wish I had my expired mod points back!

    +1 funny, sir or madam.

  16. Re:20 perm jobs? on East Texas Getting Compressed Air Energy Storage Plant · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With no lake above the salt mine any new oil wells would just punch a hole in the ceiling of the mine that would have to be patched. While their is a small creek that passes above the retired salt mine, I highly doubt anyone would choose to drill in the middle of a creek when they could move 100 meters in almost any direction and have an easier time of it.

    In addition, it isn't like they are pumping natural gas or other volatile chemicals that could cause a problem via explosion through a puncture- it is air, and at 60 to 70 bar is unlikely to cause any problems when there is almost 4000 feet of rock on top of it.

    That said, the giant swirly that was Lake Peigneur was epic.

  17. Re:The last time i tried this on A Fresh Look At Multi-Screen PC Gaming · · Score: 1

    Where do you get a 1920x1600 monitor? That is an interesting resolution.

  18. Re:I know!! on Is Our Infrastructure Ready For Rising Temperatures? · · Score: 1

    You do realize that the wonderful thing about AC is the WOOSH sound that each unit emits, right?

  19. Re:Voting with wallet on Cisco's Cloud Vision: Mandatory, and Killed At Their Discretion · · Score: 1

    The incident was in 2002, yes, and I joined Dell in 2004, and the story was used as the reason why I was banned from using the word laptop in any of my presentations. I didn't mean to suggest that the switch to using the term notebook ONLY occurred because of the incident, but more that the term laptop was forbidden afterwards- no one could argue that a 17" notebook would qualify as a "laptop" under previous usage definitions, but they were all notebooks from that point on.

    BTW, 3rd degree burns do not require charring of the skin, only that the damage goes the full thickness of the dermis. Anywhere the skin is very thin (e.g. a man's penis), what would normally be only a 1st or 2nd degree burn in other places can be upgraded a notch. It is 4th degree burns that have charring by definition. At least that was what I have been taught by the Red Cross for the last 30 some odd years. That said, if he only had one blister and it wasn't bloody, it was probably at most a second degree burn. On that, I stand corrected.

  20. Re:Counterfeit goods, now this? on Cisco's Cloud Vision: Mandatory, and Killed At Their Discretion · · Score: 1

    How a major networking company can fall from such grace, see early 2000's, is absolutely unbelievable. Cisco, where did you go wrong? (and it wasn't the purchase of Linksys, which was just a desperate plea into consumer space)

    Did you not watch how fast (or seemingly slow, if you were on the inside) Nortel did the death spiral? The entire board of directors and upper management must have been early adopters of bath salts.

  21. Re:Voting with wallet on Cisco's Cloud Vision: Mandatory, and Killed At Their Discretion · · Score: 1

    Call shenanigans all you like, but Dell specifically changed from calling them laptops to notebooks after a German customer sued for the 3rd degree burns he sustained to his nether regions. Seems it isn't that difficult to do it if you use your computer naked and the heat builds up slowly enough, just as cooking frogs is easier if you turn up the heat after they are in the water.

  22. Re:Give it a few months... on Sonic.net's CEO On Why ISPs Should Only Keep User Logs Two Weeks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If the US passes a bill requiring ISP's to retain the data it would mean that their data (US Congress) would also be retained and possibly be subject to FOIA requests. I doubt that many in Washington DC want their data held for any longer than it takes to complete the http request.

    Congress commonly exempts itself from complying with laws, since prosecutable offenses are for the little people usually.

    In 1994/5, the Republican-led (under Newt Gingrich) Congress changed that somewhat by passing the Congressional Accountability Act, but once the Republicans were out of power the Democrats resumed business as usual.

    To be fair, though, the Republicans probably would have done the same, if only a little slower, and no one made any moves to every fix up the insider trading issues back then, either. And Congress has always been exempt from FOIA requests and other petty laws that as an employer I could have been heavily fined for if I ignored.

  23. Re:Coincidence with X-37? on Liu Yang Becomes China's First Female Astronaut · · Score: 1

    Wrong orbital mechanics.

  24. Re:50% more colours? on Display Makers To Use Quantum Dots For Efficiency and Color Depth · · Score: 1

    I have a buddy who used to teach ophthalmic surgery at Georgetown U. and did research in this area. He also did computer animation as a hobby (one that actually made him good money, to where I think his teaching later became the hobby). Wish I could locate one the papers, but most of his work was done pre-WWW and probably has never been put up. His info showed that most people can resolve 8 bits of red, 9 bits of green, and 8 bits of blue. That extra bit sucks from a memory usage point of view, though, and compressing it out only affects side-by-side comparisons for a huge portion of humanity, and even then not all that meaningfully.

    But 24 bits is definitely not more than what the average human brain can distinguish.

  25. Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? on Hybrid Drives Struggling In Face of SSDs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's nice to talk about having one SSD for caching and then platters for big storage of everything else, but the point of the hybrid drives is that you don't have to split up your partitions and manually allocate data between the two.

    caching: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. :)

    If you have an SSD set up as a caching drive, there is no need to split anything up, it works just like the Momentus (though a particular chipset like the Intel Z68 or another solution might be required to make it work). Perhaps you are thinking of using an SSD for a boot drive + critical performance apps (for some definition of critical, I am sure WoW counts as critical, sure), plus a spinning platter for bulk data + lower performance apps?

    Personally, I like having a 240 GB SSD with ~20 GB allocated to caching my 2 TB data drive (the Z68 chipset makes this possible, I don't know if other methods allow it), and the remaining ~220 GB allocated as my boot drive. But I do this on a desktop, not a notebook. I am fortunate to not have any performance oriented requirements related to disk access on my notebook at this time.