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User: jgoemat

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  1. Re:why phase out DVI? on VGA and DVI Ports To Be Phased Out Over Next 5 Years · · Score: 1

    Nope, there was an external hd-DVD drive you could buy for it though.

  2. Re:The License on Latest Humble Bundle Comes With Uplink Source Code · · Score: 1

    If someone gives you a horse you dont't expect fine print saying you can't ride it.

    I've been told people shouldn't look them in the mouth...

  3. Re:No legal standing on Lawyer Continues Android v. GPL Crusade · · Score: 1

    Did you read his post? Is is a copyright owner.

  4. Re:No legal standing on Lawyer Continues Android v. GPL Crusade · · Score: 1

    You show a complete lack of understanding of the issue, the GPL and of copyright. The poster owns the copyright on the patches he made to the Linux kernel, if Google is distributing code from those patches then they need a license from the author. It sounds like he has licensed that code under the GPL. The GPL defines what source code means, and it includes definition files needed to compile to prevent a licensee from doing just this sort of thing:

    The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.

  5. GPL for idiots on Ask Slashdot: When and How To Deal With GPL Violations? · · Score: 1

    The only standing you would have to complain about "violating the GPL" is if you owned the copyright to code that is used in their closed-source product that they had the right to use because you made it available under the GPL. It doesn't matter if they incorporate the entire Linux kernel into their product, unless you own the copyright to some of the code they use, you have no standing to complain. It doesn't matter if you own the copyright to most of the code of the ext3 filesystem, if they take that out of the code they use then you have no standing to complain. If you suspect they are using code in their closed source product that they only had the right to use because someone licensed it under the GPL, I suggest you talk to the copyright owner to see if he cares. He might well accept a small sum from the company for a closed license to his code as well.

    If they own the copyright to all of the code they are releasing under a different license, there is absolutely no requirement for them to release it under the GPL. Any versions that you had that were released under the GPL would still be able to be used under the GPL, but they have no requirement to keep providing it.

    Let's take one provision of the GPL as an example. If you provide the object code without the source code, you must offer to provide the source code for up to three years. If the company owns all of the code then they can stop providing the source code at any time. They are not bound by the GPL because they own the copyrights. If however they included code that they had licensed from a 3rd party under the GPL, they would be required to provide the code, or they would have been violating the terms of the GPL and therefore violating the copyrights of the person that owns the code they licensed.

  6. Re:Why did you pick such a confusing name? on Ask The Bad Astronomer · · Score: 1

    Because he deals skeptically with bad astronomy. For example if someone calls themselves a macro economist, would you think they deal with macro economics or would you think that they were a large person?

  7. Need local access on Bug Opens Chrome to Easy Remote Code Execution · · Score: 1

    To work, the attacker needs to have planted two files somewhere that can be set to the working directory for chrome. Then they need to get the user to download a file to that same directory in order to make it the working directory. Then they need to get the user to visit an SSL site, but the user cannot be using google as their search engine and the user cannot have visited another SSL site prior to changing working directories.

  8. Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? on Global Warming 'Confirmed' By Independent Study · · Score: 1

    Read some of the papers. The models aren't "cherry-picked" by what results they give in the future, they are picked based on how well they match existing data in the past.

  9. I wish mercury were safe on Proposed Mercury Ban Threatens Vaccines · · Score: 1

    I mean how cool would it be to swim in a pool of mercury? The density is 13.5 times that of water and the human body, I think you could stand up in a pool of mercury and it wouldn't even reach your crotch.

  10. Re:This on No Tab Relocation Coming For Chrome · · Score: 1

    Or, since people prefer (*smirk*) car analogies, tabs on top in a browser is like a major car manufacturer deciding to replace the steering wheel with a tiller in all of its designs.

    If you prefer car analogies, you should use them better. It's like a new car company starting and making great cars, but only offering leather seats. Many people aren't used to them but most grow to like them. Then another car company switches their default to leather seats because most people prefer them, but they still offer fabric as an option. Then a small number of people complain online because the new company doesn't offer fabric like the old one does... And you really agreed with the previous post?

    It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it. Sure, he can do that, but he'll be considered a quirky craftsman at best, and a bad one at worst, and I don't think his carpentry business will be viable in the long run.

    That's moronic on several levels. First, this quirky carpenter just stole more customers last month from your "custom carpentry" guy. Oh, and the old mean spirited carpenter (IE) took some too. Second, it's not like a carpenter doing custom work for you. It's like one of the big 3 national cabinet manufacturer only offering bow knobs on their cabinets. You just love everything about their cabinets but you prefer round knobs. They are nice enough to have a forum to submit requests for cabinets online, but they decide not to offer round knobs. So people go online and whine about them "stifling dissent".

    [...] at least half of customers' cries of how awkward and cumbersome [...]
    ...
    If it weren't for the lack of that simple checkbox in Chrome, that's the browser I'd be using right now, but without it, it's a dealbreaker for me, and as the comments on the linked bug report demonstrate, I'm not the only one.

    No, 500 people starred the bug, out of 70 million. 500 is one out of 140,000. That's 0.0007% of users that cared enough to find the bug and click a button. 188 comments were there. Several were duplicate posts, a few were developer comments and a couple were against it so let's say 180. More people were injured by lightning in the US last year (241) than cared enough to post a comment to that bug.

    One of the developer comments was that many UI design professionals would say that options aren't always a good thing (I think they have a point) and that it is explicitly not Chromium's design philosophy. That is like a painter. They specifically want a consistent user experience, one of the reasons they streamlined it, don't have a menu bar and don't let plugins add bars. I've seen family where nearly have their screen is taken up by toolbars, and they like that. Are you saying that Chrome should allow Farmville to install toolbars on people's windows if 500 grandmas want it?

    Second, I think you are under-estimating the changes required. Hit SHIFT+ESC in Chrome, or hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and open your task manager. Chrome has a browser process and a separate process for each tab. The tab process owns the address bar. They did this for security and stability reasons. Putting the tabs from other processes under the address bar owned by another process is not that easy to do. I agree 100% with their philosophy on this, I've lost work in Firefox several times because Youtube crashed in another window. When that happens in Chrome I just lost that tab or other flash ones. I've had Javascript running in one tab hose the whole Firefox UI before, never happened in Chrome. If the tab processes managed tabs for other processes and it locked up for some reason, you would not be able

  11. Re:May have missed ? on Comet May Have Missed Earth By a Few hundred Kilometers · · Score: 1

    May have missed ? I'm fairly certain it definitely missed.

    I don't think it was a comet, therefore I'm fairly certain a comet didn't miss as described so I think you're wrong.

    A cometary fragment explanation is ridiculous. Bonilla's observations state that the time to cross the sun's disc was variable, between 1/3 and 1 second. If some of the bodies were moving three times as fast as others, there is no way they were fragments of the same comet.

    His observations over the course of 25 hours along with a minimal escape velocity from Earth of 10 km/s give a stream that is 900,000 km long. To not be seen by Puebla or Mexico city, the stream would have to be less than 600 km wide. In the article's sample picture of a fragmented comet, the pieces are spread out over 80 pixels wide and 240 pixels long. Being generous with the figures I calculated, the stream would be 1 pixel wide and 1500 pixels long. Comets just don't break up like that. With the same 1/3 ratio as the given picture, the swarm would have been at least 300,000 km wide. Not only would that mean it was easily visible crossing the sun from anywhere on Earth (Bonilla had astronomers at Mexico City and Puebla look for them and they couldn't see them), but if it were not flat for some unthinkable reason then Earth would be well inside the swarm and many pieces would have hit us.

    The more you increase the speed, the longer and narrower the stream becomes, making it even more ridiculous. The more you increase the altitude to make the stream able to be wider, the more you increase the speed. At 64,000 km the speed needs to be 593 km/s (563 km/s relative to the sun) to meet the observed crossing times. That's fast enough to leave the milky way (>= 525km/s) and certainly the Sun (40 km/s at Earth's orbit).

    Now think about this: Why didn't any of this 900,000 km stream of objects impact Earth? The first object to pass would have moved 900,000 km relative to Earth, but the Earth moved 2,700,000 km relative to the sun in that time, so those objects moved either 1,800,000 or 3,600,000 km relative to the sun in that time. And every single object in this 900,000km long, 600km wide flat band was travelling at just the right speed to pass between the sun and Bonilla.

    Now try to draw a graph of it, it is impossible. The comet must have been in a very similar orbit to Earth's. Imagine the Earth was not there. The first fragment would be at point A, 500-8000km from where Mexico would be in relation to the sun. 25 hours later the last observed fragment would be at point B, 2,700,000 km from point A and 500-8000km from where Mexico would be in relation to the sun at that time. There is no orbit that those two fragments could share that would make them hit those two points if they were together prior to that.

  12. Re:Uhm... on Oldest Submerged City Visualized With CGI · · Score: 1

    if the ocean floor didn't rise again after dropping you wouldn't get the characteristic wave.

    Why not? After the slip occurs, what force would move it back to where it was before?

  13. Re:About friggin' time... on Windows 8 To Reduce Memory Footprint · · Score: 1

    This same pattern of stupid comments can be seen in browser comparisons too. It's always full of people going "omg Firefox/Opera/IE is using this much memory!" while it shows that they don't understand what is really happening

    Are you sure about that? It seems like pretty bad behavior for a user application to suck up available memory if it isn't needed. If all apps did that, which one would win? The only programs I've heard of doing that are server programs like SQL Server that can actually use that memory for caching, and you configure them like that. I'm sitting here running Visual Studio and several chrome sessions each with several tabs (and with SQL Server running in the background) and it's reporting 3.15gb/12gb used (Sql server about 665mb of that). 9086mb cached and 9052mb of that available. At least Windows 7 is smart enough not to show the cache as used.

    On another note, memory prices have been dropping lately, you can now get 8gb (2x4gb sticks) for $40 on Newegg, under $50 for Corsair. 8gb is plenty for about anything you'd want to do short of running a server and at those prices I don't know why you'd run with anything less. So if Microsoft is trying hard to shave a few MB here and there, I'm thinking it's because they're trying to make it work well on smart phones and tablets. I'm worried they're trying to unify it all too much, I for one am not going to be leaning over my desk to swipe my monitor.

  14. Re:Cool... on $5M In Torrented Files Presented As Art · · Score: 1

    5 million dollars is the purchase price for the items on the drive. One of the torrents has over 200k books, which would be billions of dollars in damages with the U.S. copyright statute.

  15. Re:whoop-de-doo on 'Instant Cosmic Classic' Supernova Discovered · · Score: 1

    Accidental means unintentional, usually with undesirable outcomes. Their intention was clearly to find supernovae therefore it was in no way an accident. An accidental discovery would be Hubble taking a picture of the galaxy for other reasons and just happening to catch the supernova. The PTF survey looks at a large part of the sky and has found 858 type Ia supernovae so far.

  16. Re:they still need to be a lot bigger now 500GB an on Six-Drive SATA III SSD Round-Up Shows Big Gains · · Score: 1

    10 GB is easily enough for today's OS with most programs (3 GB or less with some sacrifices)

    What programs do you have installed? My Windows directory alone is over 34gb and My user directory is 7 gb. Those can't be moved. My Program Files directories add another 18gb and my 73.6gb (formatted 80gb drive) partition is nearly full. I can't even fit a single newer game on it, let alone my whole Steam library. I have another 4+gb of applications I've moved to another drive because of the space issues and 355 gb of installed games that cannot benefit from the SSD speed because they won't fit on it. Where do you get 10 GB from?

  17. Re:As someone who mostly reads books in bed on Google eBooks-Integrated E-reader Out On Sunday · · Score: 1

    Yes, normally you tap the side. Unfortunately, due to the nature of capacitive touchscreens, you can't just rest the finger at that spot and push harder to press

    Dear God, how did you survive when you had to actually turn a page?

  18. Re:Not exactly "free". on National Academies Release Over 4,000 Free Science Books · · Score: 1

    What exactly are you wanting to do with these reports that isn't allowed? Ever hear the expression "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth?"

  19. Bad summary on Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability · · Score: 1

    That's like saying vintage '94 web design was a step back from menu and keystroke driven application design.

  20. Really? on Mozilla Labs: the URL Bar Has To Go · · Score: 1

    So they want to do away with an easy way to type in a url that at the same time displays the current page's location so you can copy it to send to others, while at the same time adding a LARGER gaudy description of where you are inline to the page so you have to scroll down to see as much as you would have before?

  21. Media price, duh! on Why Has Blu-ray Failed To Catch Hold? · · Score: 1

    Some people have mentioned it, but the discussion seems to have concentrated on blank or writable media. The article focuses on consumers who generally don't care about that, however the article utterly fails to mention the price difference between movies on bluray and dvd! The difference in production costs is negligible, yet the list price for a new release bluray movie is $40! The list price for DVDs of the same movie is only $30. The special features for both versions of the King's Speech appear to be identical and the sale prices are $20 and $15 respectively. Why buy a new player and pay an extra 30% per movie when the quality difference is minimal?

  22. Re:Startup? on Expensify CEO On 'Why We Won't Hire .NET Developers' · · Score: 1

    Two years and still a startup? Maybe he should have tried .NET to get things done more quickly...

  23. Re:I tried LabView once on Expensify CEO On 'Why We Won't Hire .NET Developers' · · Score: 1

    If you buy VS2010, you'll be spending from $799 to $2,169 (MS MSRP). Then you need a Windows server to go with it. That's $469 to $2,999 (MS MSRP). Oh and the DB. MSSQL server is $3,500 to $54,990. Since you've gone that far, you'll want your Exchange server to go with it too, for $699 to $3,999.

    It depends on what you are talking about. I assume you are talking about a development house with multiple programmers because an independent developer can use Visual Studio Express and SQL Server Express to get started for free. For deploying a web site you can get a good dedicated server for $100 a month.

    As for the development house, why not use Google apps instead of exchange, I think it works great. If you take all your other licensing for a developer AND server, that's $5000. That's about what you spend on a developer for two weeks. The right tools can save a lot more time than that. Personally I would never hire a C or Perl developer to build a website nowadays, would you?

  24. God done it on DNA Analysis Hints At a Fourth Domain of Life · · Score: 1

    Instead of researching the possibilities of this new data, possibly giving us insights into how life evolved on Earth, why don't we just clasp our hands in prayer and thanks for the wonders of Intelligent Design?

  25. Re:Keplerian Occultations on Two Planets Found Sharing One Orbit · · Score: 1

    Imagine the sun (1.39E6 km) is as big as a square on a sheet of graph paper (1/4 inch). The Earth would be 100 squares away (about 2 1/4 sheets taped together the long way). The Earth is about 1/100th the size of the sun, so it would be much smaller than a period. What matters for Kepler is the angular size of the star. That is because on the scale with graph paper, Kepler would be 6,770 MILES away. Basically we could see any planets whose orbit takes them into that one square line of graph paper pointing out to Kepler from their star.

    Bigger planets are easier to detect because they block more of the star's light. Smaller planets block less light and their transits between Kepler and their star might be lost in the noise. Their size doesn't matter much for whether they actually transit or not however because their size is small compared to the size of the star. Imagine in the example above. The Earth will transit if it is inside the row of squares on the graph paper. If it is in the center of that row, we can move it up or down about 0.268 degrees (0.53 degree viewing angle) before it will not transit. The Earth is only 1/100th the size of the star though so at the edge we have only a margin of 0.00268 degrees between seeing it completely or not at all.

    Now imagine there is a planet at half the distance (50 squares) and at twice the distance (200 squares). As we tilt the orbits 0.133 degrees, the far planet moves out of the square and can no longer be seen. If we keep tilting past 0.268 degrees the middle planet moves out of the row of squares and can no longer be seen. If we keep tilting past 0.536 degrees the closer planet moves out of the row of squares and can no longer be seen.