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User: Doppler00

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  1. Re:Let's Go Back To Potty Training... on To Flush Or Not To Flush · · Score: 1

    Actually, most of the ones I've seen in any building built in the last 5 years are automatic.

  2. Re:Flawed analogy on To Flush Or Not To Flush · · Score: 1

    If the waterless urinals ran on Linux would you be happy?

  3. Re:No! God did it! on Humanity Responsible For Current Climate Change · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I am a proponent of HUGE tax increases on gasoline. Push it up to the $6 level. People won't stop driving until it really hurts to do it.
    And what would that accomplish? Cars in the U.S. are only a small fraction of the total emissions of greenhouse gases. It won't do any good. It will sure give politicians a nice piggy bank of money to spend on their pet projects. It won't help us in anyway though.

    But the other day I was looking at some 'Enviro-Logs' I bought. They are like Duraflame logs, but they are made from recycled 'waxed cardboard' (which they can't use for making new cardboard.)
    Good for you, I'm glad you did your part to reduce greenhouse emmissions by 0.000000000001%. Guess what, people have been using this renewable resource called "firewood" for several millenia now. What's great is that it can be efficiently harvested and regrown year after year netting a zero increase to greenhouse gasses. Unfortunately, due to environmental restrictions more rural areas are burning natural gas which used to be trapped underground where they were not contributing to global warming.

    The label touted them as being environmentally friendly because they took the cardboard out of the waste stream and landfill. But is burning it even worse?
    No, because it originated from a tree which would have burned down or decayed into greenhouse gas naturally anyway. If it is in a landfill it consumes landmass and will decay in many more centuries than if it was burned.

    Overall I still don't buy any of the arguments that global warming is "bad". "bad" is only a human definition. The environment changes, yes, but you can't say it is "good" or "bad".

  4. Re:LOC'ed in. on Bandwidth Challenge Results · · Score: 4, Funny

    More importantly, how many letters from MPAA lawyers does that equal per second?

  5. Re:That kind of qualification smokes my baloney on Recruiting IT Students? · · Score: 1

    That's exactly the kind of "qualification" that is irrelevant. Do you know the COM3 default base port on obsolete PCs (0x3E8, INT 4)? If not, you are an ignorant poseur who should go back to tending cattle in Elbonia.

    Yes, because we all know that high end consumer electronics such as MP3 players and printers require the COM3 default base port. Or maybe one of those new-fangled dial up modems.

    The only reason I would believe your question is relevent is if you are a company that supports low end, ancient computers for some proprietary database system. Otherwise, most people out of college probably won't know the answer to that question (when was the last time you've seen a PC with a second COM port even?). Now, getting back to the original question:

    "Why would you use SSH instead of telnet?"

    This question is good enough to at least weed out those who have no clue. Besides by asking this kind of question you would definitely expect some type of explanation of why SSH is the better method. If you are interviewing several people, you can compare the technical detail of their answer. If you ask esoteric questions you might get no answer, even if the person is quite knowledegable in other areas.

  6. Re:but why on Blazing Dual Channel Thumb Drive · · Score: 1

    It's people like you that made MiniSD and xD cards sellable. Come on people, there is a limit to how small something gets to where it becomes impracticle. Thankfully they stopped at somepoint with cellphones right?

  7. Re:Good Books on the Subject on Papers On Real-Time And Embedded Linux · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not only did you not recommend any books you didn't even spell embedded right.

    For the most part I think you'll learn the most just reading through the databooks and application notes that come with the particular embedded platform that you are working on. Stay FAR away from any hobby-type embedded systems books that focus on PIC processors if you are doing anything serious. I've found a lot of the code in those types of books to be poorly written and counter productive. Since most embedded systems are programmed in C you'll want to pick up a book on that.

  8. Re:only 3 computers? on Costly Music Store Coming to Cellphones · · Score: 1

    Wow, the computer vesion! I didn't know there was a "phone version", an "ipod" version, a "computer version", a "copy protected CD version" of all your favorite songs! Boy is the music industry and the cellphone carriers clueless. Do they really think people want to put up with this? Having to buy a seperate copy of a song they already own for each device they want to play it on?

  9. Re:Compared to ringtones, not so bad on Costly Music Store Coming to Cellphones · · Score: 1

    Wow, are you serious? I got a $300 phone for free after rebates. It came with Bluetooth, this was a higher end model so I'm sure some $200 phones have it too now. A Bluetotoh adapter can be bought for $20 for your PC.

    So where is the expensive part?

  10. Re:Hmm.... on BART Outfitted With Wireless · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The Simpsons is anti-culture. I mean that in the sense that there is nothing about it artistic or redeeming to our society. It's just entertainment.

    I don't know how many times I browse through wikipedia, find a serious article, and then some idiot has to throw in a Simpsons reference as if its absolutely necessary to include every Simpsons related fact when applicable.

  11. Re:configuring apache #1 complaint, still unaddres on Apache Comes With Too Much Community Overhead? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why don't they just make the configuration file XML, release the specs, and someone comes out with a GUI configuration editor. Problem solved.

  12. Re:So what? on JPEG Patent Challenged · · Score: 1

    ah, but it's called RAW for a reason. It means it's a raw format, but there are no documented specs for most RAW files produced by cameras. They are all completly different. Standardization is a good thing people! Why can't camera manufactures get this right?

  13. Re:If JPGs aren't available... on JPEG Patent Challenged · · Score: 1

    Well there WOULD have been (MNG files) if they didn't pull support from Mozilla and Firefox. What a shame. All in the name of "bloat" reduction. Oh no! We added 50k to the downloadable install package! Let's remove a feature! And yet they still haven't released a patch function for incremental upgrades.

  14. Re:TUROK for N64 on CNN's Game Over On The 360 · · Score: 1

    Man I hated that game. I felt like I spent 90% of my time jumping from rock to rock over countless bottomless pits only to lose it at the last jump and have to crawl my way from the farthest save point. And the vast fog that seemed to exist EVERYWHERE in the game wasn't cool either.

  15. Re:Appeal to a bigger audience on Amazon Tries Its Hand at Tagging · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Speaking of Wiki's, how come no one has come with a Wikipedia equivalent of a website like Amazon.com? What if every product page was a wiki where customers could customize it for other customers? I think Amazon is missing out.

  16. Re:only winner on The Math Behind the Hybrid Hype · · Score: 1

    Many thanks for pointing out that when the environment wins, so does everyone else.

    Okay, I'm sick of hearing this. Unless someone can quantify this statement "the environment wins" I don't want to hear it. Can they even say that all the Hybrid drivers have diminished CO2 by 0.001% or more? How does this effect global temperatures? Without metrics of any kind, saying a hybrid is good for the environment is just a feel good-ism.

    Besides, who buys these hybrids to begin with? People well above the median income for the most part. Those kind of people could do much more to help the environment by giving up some of their luxuries such as meat, huge houses that consume more eneregy for heat and electricity, vacations which require travel, consumer electronics that require vast amounts of polutents to produce, etc, etc.

    Okay, in all seriousness I'm not suggesting they give up any of those luxuries, it's just that let's put this whole Hybrid vehicle thing in perspective. What is the total CO2 production penalty based on all products that the average household uses? How much of a % does the vehicle consume? Are there more effective ways to help the environment or are we just going for the high tech feel good solution we can buy with a wad of cash?

    If it wasn't for the fact that the world IS going to run out of oil, Hybrids would just be a fad like solar was early on.

  17. Re:PS2 and PS1 games? on Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility Finalized · · Score: 1

    It's makes perfect sense, but from a technological aspect it's impossible.
    Of course it isn't technologicall impossible! The only question is how much time and money does Microsoft want to spend perfecting an emulation layer? My guess is that if the new platform is at least twice as fast as the old one, than emulation is possible. If they had some kind of JIT compiler, they could optimize the hell out of the exsiting XBOX 1 games to run on the XBOX 360 just fine. The main problem is probably the graphics chipset. Since they are switching from Nvidia to ATI (is that right?) there may not be a one-to-one instruction corresponding to the new video system, thus they may have to cut corners and some games may not render the same as the original.

  18. Re:Good but not great on WI Assembly OKs Voting Paper Trail · · Score: 1

    I think you underestimate the "next" improved DRM. Manufaturers now easily have the ability to encrypt the entire signal stream from the media all the way to the display devices. The only reason that DVD's were cracked was because that software was sold that could decode them under an "untrusted" computing environment that the user controls. Once this control is eliminated, it would be virtually impossible to hack. They may even design the decryption IC's to self distruct if an attempt to open them is made.

  19. Re:Eventually, we'll come to this... on Intel Roadmap Update: The Art of Naming Processors · · Score: 1

    Where is the punch line? What the hell is this?

  20. Re:Episode 3 on Sony Music CD's Contain Mac DRM Software Too · · Score: 1

    All DVD's sold are encrypted so yes, there is DRM on all DVD's. Probably no root-kits though. I've seen some DVD's that do try to install their own DVD "player" software which ends up usually just being spyware.

  21. Re:Not the first time on PCs Plagued by Bad Capacitors · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sorry I couldn't resist

    Few people have that capacity.


    Well, it doesn't require that much inductive reasoning.

  22. Re:UTC - is universal time on U.S. Scientists Call for a Time Change · · Score: 1

    I think I understand UTC pretty well, but how to computers handle leap seconds in calculations? Say you know an event occured at 2005-11-10 01:44:00:00 UTC. Lets say that on 2035-11-10 01:44:00:00 UTC you want to calculate the time delta from the original event. It's not exactly 30 years anymore. How is software going to handle this?

  23. Obfuscated code compiler? on Winners of the 18th IOCCC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wouldn't the ultimate obfuscation be to write an obfuscation compiler that retranslates the C code into obfuscated code, and then run that compiler against its own source code? Repeat several hundred times. I couldn't imagine the resulting code to ever be understandable.

  24. Re:SSH on Carnegie Mellon Resists FBI Tapping Requirement · · Score: 1

    Ha! My encryption uses 4097 bits!

  25. Re:OK, cool.. but... on NHK Working To Make HDTV Obsolete · · Score: 1

    Ah... the current generation of CPU's are quite pathetic with processing media streams.

    Just wait a year or so. HDTV hardware decoding in video cards will become very popular. In fact, I wonder why the pixel shader GPU unit can't be programmed to do some of the calculations. I'm very disappointed with Quicktime 7 for example which requires such an insane CPU speed (dual core even???) just to watch 1080i video. It's obvious Apple did not bother to optimize their software (of course, it helps sell new mac's doesn't it?). And here I bought this nice 1920x1200 LCD and it can't even play video smoothly!