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User: Nalmar

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Comments · 15

  1. Re:Copy protected CD? on Copy Protected CD Makers Attempt iPod Support · · Score: 1

    I can say first hand that "velvet revolver - contraband" mentionned in the article does put the "compact disk digital audio" logo on the cd. It's smaller that usual but it's there. On the plastic wrap, there is a mention : protected cd or restricted cd, i'm not sure but once unwrapped, it looks like a regular cd

  2. Re:This is a non-story on Automobile Black Box Sends Driver to Jail · · Score: 1

    For me, there a much more important important issue than privacy and possible corruption of the result here ( which in itself, is already a good reason to oppose to such a thing ) : it one more of those kind of thing you can't defend yourself against. Even if there is an error/calibration/precision margin issue, there's no way to use it in court unless you got the money for a lawyer, and not a lower end lawyer, one with a clue that cost a lot and you can afford to bring an expert on your side, you can't argue the black box result.

    Speaking with experience, owning a working brain with logic functionality is not enough to make even the most basic common sense argument in court. You can bring every technical literature you want on a device, if you're not an certified in the particular device, your argument is automatically dismissed. Whether you try a very evident angle or range argument on a speed radar or even the side and angle of collision with picture to prove your point, you'll be asked in what way you're an expert in the matter.

    I'm referring to the canadian court system here but I'm pretty sure everything is also true for american and a lot of other country systems.

  3. Re:I like on Opera 7 for Mac OS X Preview Released · · Score: 1

    camino, safari and omniweb, like every other cocoa programs, all have mouse gesture with CocoaGesture

  4. Re:Cannonfodder on A Thoughtful Look at Indian Outsourcing · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ok.. I reply to you just because your the 1 too many comment writer which seems to think foreign aid is really aid.

    How do you think foreign aid works ? do you really think it's a christmas gift check handed out to another government with a message like "Use this money for the well-beeing of your people" ?

    Here's how foreign aid works. A company gives money in advance as campaign fund to government candidates. In turn the government, whichever one is elected since they paid both, give tax-payer money to the company via a third-party ( the "aided" country )in the form of Foreign aid. Foreign aid is a money laundering scheme: the company gets tax-payer money and the elected government gets it's share and that's what's important. The fact that the country gets the goods in the end is usually only a side-effect which can be turn into a positive spin : We're good people, we help the less fortunate or at least make americans think that everybody owe them.

    example ? the us government has financed it's good friends in the weapon industry for 50 years with billions of dollars through israel. It's a win-win-win situation : the weapon industry get the money, israel defend american interests in the middle-east and the government officials get a piece of the cake.

  5. Re:Sweet on Uranium Pebbles May Light the Way · · Score: 1
    Uranium is less radioactive than it's ore

    Refining ore makes the product less radioactive ??? maybe if I melt my 10 karat gold ring with a pound of lead, I'll end up with a 24 karat gold bar. That's just non-sense

    Uranium is one of the most common elements in the crust

    I think I read somewhere that it was 10x more common than silver. I'm not absolutly sure about the number but uranium remain in the very rare category

    It's radioactivity is unconsequential unless you eat it or something.

    Even if what you said was true, which it's not, that's the problem, YOU eat it. The wastes gets in the soil and in the water and contaminate crop. Even it it wasn't radioactive, it still is highly toxic like lead and mercury. It's radioactivity is an added bonus : instead of dying of a failing liver and kidneys, you'll also have cancer.

  6. Re:Sweet on Uranium Pebbles May Light the Way · · Score: 1

    You may call it as non-highly radioactive but U235 is what is used is power-plants and nuclear bombs. It's all a matter of concentration.

    The point about all this is that it is a very short term solution for power generation. Nuke waste only pile-up, they never disappear ( millions of years ~= never ). Right now, it's only represent a marginal part of the power pie ( in the usa anyway and in most of the world ). If nuke is to replace fossil fuel, the problems associated with nuke power will get orders of magnitude bigger ( storing, leakage, meltdowns, chemical pollution, radiation pollution ). We are 50 years in the nuclear age and there's already tons and tons of waste pilled-up. Imagine in 200 years ( if humanity manage to survive that long )

    One can argue that it will get safer in time but look at what happened with petrol : it get safer and less polluting but the increase in consumption far outweighs that factor.

    I think it's high time to look at REAL solution. I'd say hydro power and offshore wind power. Eventually solar when technology makes it a viable solution.

  7. Re:Sweet on Uranium Pebbles May Light the Way · · Score: 1

    decades ? look back to your periodic table. Uranium 235 has a half-life of 700 millions years. For a ton of it today, there will still be half a ton of it in 700 million years. Worst, uranium passes throught a lot of stages in it's decaying before becomming stable lead including a gas stage ( radon ) which makes it very difficult to contain.

    Why do you think there still is uranium to be mined up today on this 5 billions years old planet ?

  8. Re:Hindsight on Apple, Scully, And Intel vs. Motorola · · Score: 1

    I fully agree with you that apple should stick with PowerPC unless it really has no other choices but I wanted to add on your point 2 : If apple was to have osx run only on apple x86 motherboards, how long before someone release a hacked rom or a "mod chip" like the playstation or XBox ? You can't keep the secret very long when there are thousands of hackers working against you.

    In the matter of speed difference, I'd say that you forgot something : compilers. Apple still uses GCC which is notorious for their poor optimization. Going intel would mean access to way better compilers including intel own one which would make osx significantly faster. One could argue than there is the ibm compiler but for now, it's not available and I'm not so sure it will be. Don't forget the ibm xlc compiler is part of what makes DB2 ( ibm database engine ) faster than most of the competition.

    Yet, I think that the PowerPC is young and has room to grow while intel is old and trying to fill the few last square inches and the performances are ( let say similar ) today. In a year from now, the advantage will certainly be on the PowerPC side.

  9. Re:Canada did not fail on Network Blackout · · Score: 1
    Apparently Quebec runs on 60.25 Hz, in typical freaky frenchmen fashion, so they're in a crazy isolated power zone.

    I don't know where you get your facts but you're wrong. It's standard 60Hz power here but we didn't fail because are on an asynchronous network. Only texas and us have the newer async networks in north america.

    in typical freaky frenchmen fashion

    Pffff !!

  10. Re:Why /sw? on Virex 7.2 Hazardous to Fink's Health · · Score: 1

    There is nothing preventing you from chosing another directory. My fink installation is in /usr/sw. You can put it wherever you want. It was an installation choice and you could probably change it. There is the Basepath variable in /sw/etc/fink.conf but you will probably have to recompile everything to make it work in the new location.

  11. Re:File format is open on Good News For Creating Quicktime On Linux · · Score: 1
    An open source implementation would be good forever.
    Actually there is : http://www.openquicktime.org/

    And while I'm at il, 3ivx.com has a linux codec for xanim or openquicktime that support their own format + all flavor of divx, on linux. It's not opensource but...at least it's free

  12. Re:Well it's not that hard to fix. NDS != Evil. on "Seamless" Integration of Mac OS X w/ Active Directory · · Score: 1

    Well, I can definetly say that netware ease the pain of administrating a windows network. I've worked with netware 2, the great file system of netware 3, the excellent NDS with netware 4 and the wounderfull ZEN and groupwise of netware 5. But for the sake of discussion, I'll be the devil's lawyer here( does that expression make sense in english ? ). Novell is great if you have a microsoft os network but beeing a macintosh guy, I can say that I've rarely seen such a lousy mac support. I don't know is it's true for other platform ( linux, solaris, be,...) but for mac, the support was next to 0. You were stucked with an outdated, unreliable, bindary only, badly integrated with the os client. Maybe things have changed in the last 2 years but I doubt it since a search on novell.com download section for product:novell client platform:macintosh returned nothing. And the cost is prohibitive. Even for the education marked, it ran in the 30000$/year.

  13. Re:A quick Google search.... on Regionless DVD Players for Mac OS X? · · Score: 1

    The million color bug in vlc as been fixed. Just update to the last version

  14. Re:*cough* PowerPC *cough* on What's Next in CPU Land after Itanium? · · Score: 1
    When you design a processor, you look at what kind of job it'll be doing and optimize it for the most frequently used instructions. Double precision float are very far from being a priority. What kind of data range from 10E-1024 to 10E1023 ? The forces applied on the different areas of a space shuttle entering the atmosphere ? A simulation of a nuclear explosion ? The 10E-128 to 10E127 of the single precision is more than enough for most of the situations. The G4 floating point units support double precision but not altivec.

    On any system, the memory is a bottle-neck but the problem is DRAM chips, not bus. As long as the bus support what the dram chips can spit. 3D games send lists of polygons to the memory card. Even if we imagine a real crappy game using absolutely no acceleration, 30fps*1024*768*3 = 67 MB/S even if we double it for memory reads and add a lot of disk and network use, we're still far from 1GB/S. The same hold true for streaming video. The only solution is either faster ram ( SRAM is a lot more expensive, and the other solutions like DDR and other are only marginally faster ) or bigger and smarter caches that preload data while other data is being processed.

    A larger register set means less spilling to L1 cache; it has no effect on memory usage from L2 on out. If your application has a 10 MB dataset, then it has a 10 MB dataset, period.
    A large register set allow you to work with your data without having to read and write to memory all the time which is the biggest time waster on any modern system. Like you said, most of the accesses on a intel will be handled by L1 but you still have to calculate the physical address from the logical address in the instruction which means page table lookups ( ie other memory accesses ) and the arithmetic operations associated.
  15. Re:*cough* PowerPC *cough* on What's Next in CPU Land after Itanium? · · Score: 1

    Altivec is a vector unit that operate on integer and IEEE-754 floating-point. Vectors are 128 bits arrays of 16 * 8bit integer or 8*16 bit integer or 4 * 32 bits integer or 4 * 32 bits IEE-754 floating poing.

    And for the bus part, DDR is only a small improvement on the pc133 bus. If you think it's twice or more the speed of pc133, you're completely wrong. And what kind of code do really saturate the memory bus ? G4 like intel or AMD are aimed at desktop computing uses. Most memory accesses are filled by the caches and by design, RISC CPU ( g4,mips,sparc,... ) work mostly on register data reducing the memory access speed dependency.