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User: Spurion

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Comments · 34

  1. Re:Been there, done that on Grow Your Own Heart Valves · · Score: 1

    You stole my joke :-/

  2. Re:scifi tag? on One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm wondering how they get there in the first place
    The same way they get into any other cell. Eggs, like all cells, are produced by cell division. It's not exactly the same process (meiosis rather than mitosis) but many aspects are the same.
  3. Re:Wookin Pa Nub on Rewritable Song Lyrics · · Score: 1

    My most successful Valentine's day ever didn't involved doing nothing, but it did involve doing none of the things that we're told we should do. We got some beers and sushi to take home, then spent the evening consuming them and watching porn (and having sex, of course). She loved it, precisely because it wasn't "production-line romance".

  4. Re:english language is mostly fluff on Exhaustive Data Compressor Comparison · · Score: 1

    That redundancy is probably pretty helpful when it comes to working out what was actually meant, instead of what was said/written.

  5. Re:special tactile mouse needed .. on Tactile Passwords vs Shoulder Surfing · · Score: 1

    Do you actually know your PIN? I just remember the shape of the key sequence I need to press - it's all in "muscle memory". I have to think quite hard to know what the actual numbers are so I'd be pretty much stuck with the interface you suggest :)

  6. Re:Umm on GMail and Sourceforge E-mail Bouncing Saga · · Score: 1

    Technically that would be irony. Sarcasm (from the Greek for "tearing flesh") has offensive intent by definition.

  7. Re:Here's the asshole's contact info on Controversy Erupts Over Craigslist Prank · · Score: 1

    I'd be tempted to leave a message at this number ... but for all I know, it's the number of someone unrelated whom you just happen not to like :)

  8. Re:This is a horrifying precedent on Google to Give Data To Brazilian Court · · Score: 1

    This is undeniably off-topic, but I love your use of "Google" and "mainframe" in the same sentence :-)

  9. Re:oblig on Steve Irwin Dead · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Okay Anonymous Coward, try looking at it this way: making light of particular bad news is just a symptom of a world view that would rather not worry about bad news in general. Nobody (that I know of) makes jokes about September 11th because they think September 11th was a personal loss. Plenty of people make jokes about September 11th because it's a stark reminder that, however hard we try, humanity is still a messed up bunch of animals and we'll all still be dead in the end. They'd rather treat death the same way as anything else life throws at them, instead of investing in the same stock of emotions the media deal out just like with any other tragedy.

    As for Steve Irwin, he seemed to be a great guy and I hope that everyone who knew him finds their way to deal with his death.

  10. Re:There's only one way out of this on Biofuel Production to Cause Water Shortages? · · Score: 1

    Will investing in rubber plantations rather than biofuel crops do less environmental damage?

  11. Re:Never press the shiny candy like red button!!! on UK ISP PlusNet Accidentally Deletes 700GB of Email · · Score: 1

    One would have to assume that federal investigations are relatively rare in the UK.

  12. Re:WHOOOOOSH on Nvidia Unveils New 64x SLI GPU Rig · · Score: 1

    Well, technically it's irony unless it's meant to be offensive. (The word sarcasm comes from Greek for 'tearing flesh'.) But enough of this pedantism.

  13. Re:SPAM on YouTube Killer (Media Portal w/ Revenue Sharing) · · Score: 1

    Could this be the new self-killer?

  14. How can anyone name a magazine "Business 2.0" on The 10 Tech People Who Don't Matter · · Score: 1

    ... and still keep a straight face? "2.0" is surely the most risible buzzword ever conceived. Everyone with any sense realises that it's just a short way of saying "with more hype and less quality".

    I dismissed the relevance of the lists on the basis of the magazine's title. When I checked my dismissal, I found I was correct to do so.

  15. Re:Wow... it's already in Fedora!? on Flock, the Web 2.0 Browser? · · Score: 1

    Hmm, is this going to be supported on Hurd?

  16. Re:The freeway non-monoculture on Dan Geer's Monoculture Bomb Goes Off · · Score: 1

    That said, roads and cars in the US are spectacularly crap :-)

  17. Re:Microsoft Office on Useful Apps for First-Time Windows Users? · · Score: 1
    Okay maybe I'm just a retard, but Visio for easily designing and prototyping? It's the most f*cking sh*t piece of diagramming software I've ever had the misfortune to have to use. Visio makes it incredibly hard to build a diagram where the arrows go where they're meant to and the text doesn't flow over arrows and other text. The list of basic layout tasks that it fails to automate is longer than the list of tasks that it does in fact automate.

    Using Visio for designs is like using Project for management. It just doesn't do you any favours.

    (end of rant)

  18. Re:Attacking the wrong people on Government-Aided Phishing · · Score: 1

    The difference is that if you have to go and ask in person to look at a someone's details, then the county knows who's looking at whose records. It also limits the set of people to whom the information is available, to just those within driving distance.

    Making all the data so widely available in such an impersonal way is going to make it orders of magnitude harder to work out who has abused knowledge of a particular person's information.

  19. Re:Explanation? on IBM Creates Ring Oscillator on a Single Nanotube · · Score: 1

    That is a very neat explanation. Earlier posts described the ring oscillator as a "proof of concept" or similar, but you have successully taken advantage of a better-known concept to be both more concise and more lucid.

  20. Re:Mod parent DOWN on GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft · · Score: 1
    BTW, what has Google ever given back to the OSS community it depends on to supply Linux, MySQL, Python, etc.?
    http://goog-goopy.sourceforge.net/ and http://goog-sparsehash.sourceforge.net/ among a whole bunch of other things.

    Google using Linux doesn't make it more viable; it demonstrates Linux's existing viability in a very high-profile way.

    I'm not even a Linux fanboy, but really: do your research.

  21. Re:I think it's a ridiculous notion on The Physics of Friendship · · Score: 1

    Then read Foundation by Asimov. Sure, it's fiction, but it makes the motivation very clear. And it's a good book too.

  22. Re:Hmm on Windows Live Search goes Live · · Score: 1

    I'm not using a non-MS browser, and it's still dog slow. Windows Live? Only just. Windows Terminally Ill, perhaps.

  23. Re:Cambridge (UK) on Scientific Brain Linked to Autism · · Score: 1

    In three years I never really saw the evidence just by walking around Cambridge. It's not like autist are prolific graffiti artists or anything...

  24. That depends on how you interpret it on Ancient Flaws May Leave Mac OS X Vulnerable · · Score: 1
    OS X may or may not be more secure that Windows. In fact, it could be less secure. Either way, at present OS X is a safer choice for a user, simply because there isn't so much (any?) malicious code that targets it.

    So if you give the author the benefit of the doubt, and assume that by "safe" he meant "safe for a user to connect to the internet" rather than "secure", then his point stands.

    In a world where predators attack X but not Y, it's safer to be a Y than an X even if an X has more armour. The concern is that if Y becomes interesting enough to be attacked, then it's really in trouble.

  25. Re:More like 0.2 than 2.0 on Web 3.0 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I completely agree. Switching from "1.0" to "2.0" technologies loses you as much as it gains. You win:
    • Some portability. I reckon AJAX is little more portable than Java (if at all) because no two Web browsers are ever quite the same; you're just dealing with differences between browsers rather than differences between OSes.
    • No installation step. Users can launch your application just by following a hyperlink.


    You lose:
    • All the accessibility mechanisms that OS GUI frameworks have. Everyone loves GMail, but navigating around it without a mouse is a real pain. No hotkeys, and an unpredictable tab order.
    • Proper control of the layout of your UI.
    • A whole lot of performance.


    Of course, you could implement the missing parts yourself, but the extra layer of abstraction that is "Web 2.0" remains pointless. To my mind, a far better approach would be to push the advantages of AJAX down onto the platform, rather than push the advantages of the platform up into AJAX.

    For example you could use things like Java Web Start, or the OSGI framework that underpins Eclipse, to simplify product installation. Once you've got that, you can build a much more flexible application that integrates better with the host OS and runs that much closer to the hardware.

    I strongly suspect that the whole "Web 2.0" idea is only creating any hype because Web designers have now realised that they can create relatively complex applications without having to learn anything new.