Slashdot Mirror


User: Pius+II.

Pius+II.'s activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
153
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 153

  1. Re:NOT great news on EU Plans To Make Apple, Adobe and Others Open Up · · Score: 2, Informative

    ADC online accounts are free. The source for their latest gcc can be found here. You don't have to have an account to download it. For some other things on their open source page, you have to login, though. Assuming you were actually interested in developing for OS X, I'd advise you to use clang instead; gcc sucks bigtime in comparison, and will not be seriously updated by Apple anymore.

  2. Re:Jobs once called Adobe lazy and he may be right on Apple's Change of Heart On Flash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With all due respect, that's bullshit. VLC decodes Youtube's streams (saved to disk) at 13% CPU. Flash takes 90%. I don't have a graphics chip that could decode H264 in hardware (apart from being programmable thru OpenCL, to which Adobe has all access in the world). Apple not exposing any APIs (to what?) is a red herring. To me this looks like slowness in the Flash interpreter, a shoddy video codec they implemented, and pure lazyness.

  3. Re:Nothing New on Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds · · Score: 1

    mismoderated you. posting to reverse.

  4. Re:sampling frequency and signal frequency !mix-up on Speculation On a Lossless iTunes Store · · Score: 1

    Platinum has a conductivity of 9.48e6 S/m. Gold has something 42.55e6. Someone mod this guy down!

  5. Re:hmm... GPL? on iPhone Root Password Hacked in Three Days · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why don't you post those lines in the context they belong, as an advisory comment in the (free as in free) bzip2 source? Oh yeah, because you prefer to badmouth people instead of checking your facts.
    For the record, here's the source.

  6. Re:Self-selection bias on Political Leaning and Free Software · · Score: 1

    It's posts like this that make me realize that the american parlance re: liberal/conservative is fucked up to the max. In every other part of the world, being liberal means being against a nanny state; hence all newly rich and businessmen being liberals (they're fighting against the already established system).
    The linguistic root of "liberal", after all, is latin "liber" - "free", while conservatives are the ones trying to preserve the status quo (them being on top, that is).

  7. Re:Tip ... on EU May Force iTunes Store To Accept Returns · · Score: 1

    The exception is that it's only valid for goods ordered via internet, phone, mail or somesuch. There's also exceptions for consumables, animals, perishable goods and the like.

  8. Re:If USA lost control over internet on Will the U.S. Lose Control of the Internet? · · Score: 1

    Das Problem m.E. ist nicht, daß zur Zeit seitens der USA wesentlich reguliert würde (obwohl man auch so durchaus argumentieren könnte). Vielmehr besteht die Angst, daß sich die aktuelle Situation durchaus wesentlich zum schlechteren ändern könnte.
    Was vielfach übersehen wird, ist, daß auch ein zentrales Gremium außerhalb der USA keine Verbesserung darstellen würde: es wird hier nur der Teufel mit dem Beelzebub ausgetauscht.


    So, jetzt bitte eine weitere Sprache.

  9. Re:Someone remind me... on Dodging the Negative Reaction To GE Crops · · Score: 1

    The problem I have with GM food is the fact that the genes used are patented by large corporations.
    The crops on totally unrelated farmer's fields are being cross-pollinated by GM plants, and the farmers are sued afterwards (for "using" the patented genes). This sucks.
    Even if you believe in the (to my eyes, silly) idea that something as basic as genes should be patentable [1], there should never be any possibility for people to sue others after letting their own "property" escape in the wild. Yet this exact case happens.
    Of course I am against it!

    [1] Who am I kidding? Remember the case of that guy who started growing yellow Mexican beans in the US, then proceeded to sue everyone who imported those same "patented" beans? Just patent anything, genes or not...

  10. Re:Their next move on Apple Warns Companies About 'Pod' Naming · · Score: 1

    Tried to?
    They sued everyone using any trademark with a prominent T, capital or not, or printing ads in magenta (never mind that it's pay-per-color-per-page in some magazines, making magenta basically the only choice aside from black). And they won. They even had questionnaires going out to prove that most people associate the letter T with Telekom, and succeeded.

  11. Re:Foriegn Laws For US Companies? on ITMS Faces Complaint From Norwegian Ombudsman · · Score: 1

    ...and when you buy from .ru sites, you'll buy under Russian terms. So allofmp3 is legal (well, as long as you go there via their Russian domain).
    Or is it?

  12. Re:Go Sony, go! on PS3 Cell Processor 'Broken'? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sixty comments, and not one of them is actually setting this whole thing right.
    Yes, the local memory can be understood as some kind of cache. It's local to the SPUs. Every SPU uses its own local memory, and can meddle around in it as it likes. The local memory is cache for the SPU, not the for the CPU.
    There is no reason for the main processor to ever read from an SPUs memory.If you just want to send it more data, use a DMA. If you want to review the results of a computation, have the SPU DMA them to main memory. The speed of memory accesses from CPU to local memory is irrelevant, because it never happens.

  13. No, that's the iTMS. on How iPods Took Over the World · · Score: 4, Informative

    You are talking about the iTunes Music Store, not the iPod. My iPod Music is all MP3s. If I want to, I can just copy them to every other player. I won't, since I happen to like my iPod (and, accordingly, do not have another player).
    I do not even care that there's this store, where admittedly you can buy music that's not easily reproducible. The store has nothing to do with the iPod; it was made after I bought my iPod, and hasn't influenced my decision to buy one (I think the US store had already been established at that time, though).

  14. Re:There's a point to be made on Pact Not to Use Image Constraint Token Until 2010? · · Score: 1

    You don't have to be in possession of the computers. The scheme you described works, but you won't be able to shop in the iTMS from those disconnected computers. I guess that is considered enough of a disincentive for them to just allow it.
    Note that you can also copy your DRM'ed music on as many iPods as you like, without authorizing those.

  15. Re:Duh! on Mac OS X Kernel Source Now Closed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Nope. If you didn't see this coming, that's because it happened months ago. And just like months ago, the xnu ppc source code is still being published.

    What's more, I have personally used the ppc kernel source to compile an x86 kernel. I haven't tested it, since I lack an ICBM, but I'd assume it would work.
    The only difference I noticed was that the official x86 kernel includes Rosetta, while my self-built kernel didn't[1]. If I was to take a wild guess, it'd be that Apple does not have the right to distribute the in-kernel parts of Rosetta, and accordingly cannot distribute their x86 xnu branch.

    [1] Note that there may well be other differences, but I hacked on binary loading stuff, so that one really caught my eye.

  16. Re:x86? on Core 2 Extreme 40% faster than Pentium EE 965? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This silly -Os conspiracy is starting to annoy me. -Os is actually quite a lot faster in most cases. For the total borderline cases where -O3 is faster, you're supposed to profile and change it manually. -Os has all the optimisations of O3, except for those which bloat the code unnecessarily, such as 16-byte alignment of loop headers. This type of "optimisation" bloats the code and makes it _slower_ in most cases.
    The idea that Apple uses Os to make IBM look bad is totally ridiculous.

  17. Re:Pricing could be interesting on MacBook Announcement Expected on Tuesday · · Score: 1

    You may want to try using one of the new Mac minis in an Apple store. I have a PPC Mini, without the secret speedbump, and with the sucky Radeon 9200. Still, I was shocked to see just how badly the GMA 950 performs. Yes, it has some semblance of pixel shaders. No, that doesn't make up for its abysmal fill rate (at least I think that's where the problem lies): just try dragging a large window over the screen. It seems like although the machines use QE (hardware compositing), they are actually too slow to do it properly.
    Really, test it out. The GMA 950 chips are horrible, and if the Macbooks come with them, I won't buy a new Mac laptop till the next revision of the Pro.

  18. And "jazz" is supposed to be better? on Both Sides of Wii · · Score: 1

    "If the truth were known about the origin of the word 'Jazz' it would never be mentioned in polite society."

    To spare you clicking the link, it's said to be derived from Creole patois "jass" for sexual intercourse and tightly related to "jism".

  19. Re:Text on Microsoft PowerShell RC1 · · Score: 1

    Forward slashes are officially supported, and have been so at least since NT 4. There is documentation on this here.
    I remember that there's even some document wholly dedicated to this problem somewhere, but I really can't be bothered to find it.

    I also like the sentence "In this version of Visual C++, UNIX compatibility information has been removed from the function descriptions."
    Thanks for helping, MS!

  20. Re:Uh, what OS can you "own" on Microsoft Bypasses HOSTS File · · Score: 1

    Simple: don't accept the license.

    That's what the GPL says (clause 5): you don't have to accept it. If you don't want to accept it, fine. You still own your copy of Linux, and are free to do with it what you want. As long as you don't violate the copyright, which you don't own. The GPL is a distribution license, not some silly EULA.

  21. Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed on Unusual Open Source · · Score: 1

    No, but the BSD license allows you to strengthen the terms under which you license your (un)modified code. That is, you may use it commercially without offering source code, or you may GPL it. We call that "GPL-compatible", and the FSF has whole pages about it, which I can't be bothered to google right now because I'm drunk.

  22. MOD PARENT UP on The Register Takes Aim at Wikipedia Again · · Score: 1

    I'm happy to see a single human being on /. knows what an ad hominem attack really is.

  23. It's certainly not a weapon on Radio Telescope Has Military Uses? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, sticking your head directly in front of an active (sending) radar antenna will be quite unpleasant. Being hit over the head with one would be, too. That doesn't mean it's sensible to use a radar antenna as a weapon, much less passive antennas like in this here telescope.
    Is anybody seriously thinking these things work anything like a simple ship's radar? Yes, you could make them into weapons. By scrapping them, then building new, emitting antennas in their place. These things are receivers. They don't send. If we would try deep space astronomy by sending stuff at stuff billions of lightyears away, we would take 2*billions of years to get any results. The pace of space science may seem slow, but it's certainly faster than that.

  24. Re:Would you quit driving? Sure. on Safe Cigarettes? · · Score: 1

    It does not seem the least bit unreasonable to stop driving indoors. To stop driving in pubs, at the cinema, or in restaurants.
    In fact, the whole suggestion to allow driving indoors in the first place seems totally laughable to me.

  25. Re:Altivec on Intel PowerBook Rumor Mill · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's very very dependant on your actual code. The gcc intrinsics mostly cover stuff that is also nicely optimized in Accelerate.framework: vector operations. But there are a few Altivec instructions which are impossible to map to SSE, yet they are widely used (IIRC, shifting by a variable amount is one of them). If you heavily depended on such instructions, you're basically SOL.

    And Altivec is really fast. Keep in mind that OSX86 still uses the brain-damaged 32-bit mode, so the algorithms will be totally register-starved. That may be less relevant if you've designed for the architecture in the first place, but porting specialized assembly from an architecture with, what, >64 registers (r0-r31, f0-f31, plus Altivec), to one with 8 sounds like pure hell to me. Good thing I always used the frameworks (actually I just figured that Apple would be better at optimizing than me :-) ).