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User: MtHuurne

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  1. Re:Does this figure in government subsidies? on Why American Internet Service Is Slow and Expensive · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to TFA, telecom companies received $3000 per household in subsidies over the years, so it's not like US internet is unsubsidized.

    In my country (the Netherlands) local governments put coax in the ground in all non-rural areas for radio and TV. Then at the time of the dot-com boom, those coax networks were sold to telecom operators at ridiculously high prices. They financed that by issuing stocks, which lost most of their value when the bubble burst. So effectively it was the stock holders who bought overpriced telecom stocks who paid for the broadband infrastructure.

  2. Re:Network cost is not proportional to user base s on Why American Internet Service Is Slow and Expensive · · Score: 1

    The internet backbone has multiple routes between two points, but it is far from a complete graph. It is probably pretty close to being a planar graph, in which case the number of links grows linearly with the number of nodes. The number of nodes per subscriber is probably higher in rural areas, but that doesn't explain why many urban areas can't get fast and cheap internet either.

    Below the backbone level, the vast majority of connections has only one upstream route, so the topology there is a tree. Certainly consumer connections, which is what this article is about. Trees can be seen as a hierarchical version of the hub-and-spoke topology you described, so they are pretty cost effective. Adding a hierarchical level is only necessary if the capacity hub cannot be upgraded anymore and adding one level exponentially increases the number of subscribers that can be served.

    So I doubt the extra cost for a larger network is all that much. And I cannot imagine it outweighs the gains from being large, such as being able to do marketing at a larger scale, buying in bulk, spreading research costs over more subscribers etc. Also, if being large isn't an advantage, then why have there been so many mergers in the telecom markets?

  3. Re:Dynamic ticks on Intel Details Power Management Advancements in Haswell · · Score: 1

    My primary interest for this is games and emulators on handheld consoles, which have to do a certain amount of work per frame and then sleep until it is time for the next frame. If performance increases because there are less interruptions, a frame's work will be finished sooner, so the CPU can spend more time in sleep mode, thus saving power.

  4. Split screen on Ask Slashdot: Teaching Typing With Limited Electricity, Computers? · · Score: 1

    You could plug USB keyboards into a PC or laptop and let two or maybe three students share a single screen. You'd have to make your own software setup though to send the keys from each keyboard to a different window.

  5. Dynamic ticks on Intel Details Power Management Advancements in Haswell · · Score: 4, Informative

    Linux has had the dynamic ticks (CONFIG_NO_HZ) feature for a while, but that only shuts down the timer tick when the system is completely idle. There is a new feature in the works named "adaptive tickless", see announcement and a recent progress update, that will also shut down the timer tick when the system is running a single task.

  6. Re:First Intel, now AMD? on AMD's Hondo Chip 'A Windows 8 Product' · · Score: 1

    Hmm, you're right, I should have read the article...

  7. Re:First Intel, now AMD? on AMD's Hondo Chip 'A Windows 8 Product' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That would be my guess as well. Usually, companies say something along the lines of "we have no immediate plans for Linux support" if they're going to focus on a different OS. To rule out future support in advance in such firm words suggests there is some sort of exclusivity bonus.

  8. Re:Pussies on Review: New Super Mario Bros. 2 Illustrates Nintendo's Greatest Problem · · Score: 2

    Video games used to be hard . They were a test of manliness and skill, not to mention perseverance.

    The early video games were either arcade ports or highly influenced by arcade games. An easy game would keep the machine occupied for a long time and not receive many quarters.

    I am glad that games nowadays put the most difficult parts in optional challenges. For example Veni Vidi Vici in VVVVVV: I'm simply not good enough at the game to succeed in that challenge, but I could still finish the game without it. For about 80% of the old school games I had to cheat to make it to the end demo. I got pretty skilled at finding cheats though.

  9. Why arrest him at all? on Kim Dotcom Raid - What Really Happened · · Score: 1

    The **AA could simply have sued MegaUpload for not taking sufficient action against copyright infringement. I don't see why the NZ police had to go after the founder directly, other than to intimidate him on behalf of US corporations.

  10. Re:Er... on Open-Source Movements Bicker Over Logo · · Score: 3, Informative

    The logos look similar enough (in my opinion) that people might assume they are related. The way trademarks work is that if you let others use them without any kind of control over how they are used, you lose them. So the options the OSI has is to let go of their trademark altogether or to come to some kind of agreement with the OSHWA about the conditions under which the similar logo can be used. The problem with the former is that they would then be unable to prevent anyone from using their logo, even on software that is not open source. The article says negotiations between the two groups are in progress. I don't see anything wrong here, unless you're opposed to the concept of trademarks itself.

  11. Re:Tough luck on US Is Finally Cleaning Up Agent Orange In Vietnam · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They won in the sense that they kept fighting until the US decided to pull out. It's not like they were marching on Washington DC. Your reasoning would only make sense in a symmetric war.

  12. Re:Google Code Jam on The World's Greatest Competitive Programmer · · Score: 1

    My favorite was the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, but you have to be a student to participate in it. Google Code Jam is a very good alternative though and the type of problems is quite similar. I know that I have zero chance of making it to the final, but I did manage to score well enough to get a T-shirt this year.

  13. Re:emulators on Ask Slashdot: Understanding the SNES? · · Score: 1

    Be careful though from drawing conclusions about how the hardware works from emulators: some emulators try to mimic the hardware as closely as is practical, while others only implement the behavior necessary to make the popular games run.

    The accurate emulators are more likely to implement the actual hardware behavior, as the behavior-based approach quickly falls apart with a big software library: if you add a hack to fix the behavior of one game, you often break another, while if you emulate the hardware regressions like that are rare. So look for emulators that run obscure titles and especially stuff from the demo scene correctly.

  14. Re:Check out Byuu's stuff from BSNES. on Ask Slashdot: Understanding the SNES? · · Score: 5, Informative
  15. Why Intel should buy RIM and Qt on Why Intel Should Buy Nokia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Since we're speculating wildly, what about this scenario: Intel buying RIM and Qt. Nokia isn't using Qt anymore for new development and is looking for a buyer. RIM is switching to Qt and Intel has Qt experience from MeeGo. RIM is looking for a niche market rather than compete head-on with iOS and Android (see the recent interview with the CEO), so an Intel-owned RIM would be less of a direct competitor to Apple and Android manufacturers, which would increase the chances of them adopting Intel CPU's in the future. After all, getting into the mobile market would not be a goal in itself, just a way to sell more CPU's.

  16. Re:If you don't have javascript, you're a bot? on Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nowhere near 80% of Facebook users has noscript active or otherwise disabled JavaScript; TFA says this number is about 1-2%.

  17. Re:New markets on Microsoft's Lost Decade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the post-PC world will be much like the paperless office...

  18. Bigger is better? on Microsoft's Lost Decade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The article's author seems to think that Microsoft should have conquered those new markets. But what about the opposite approach: don't even try to enter those markets. Why should a company always try to become bigger even in areas that are not its strength?

    In particular, why should Microsoft be in the smart phone business? It's not like smart phones will replace PCs. They are behind Apple and Google in terms of features, mind share and available 3rd party applications; to succeed they must either do the same thing much better (like Apple with the iPod) or do something different to make their platform stand out. If they don't have the ideas for that, it's better in my opinion to stay out of the market altogether rather than make a "me too" product.

  19. Re:Was Jesus riding Nessie? on Fundamentalist Schools Using "Nessie" To Disprove Evolution · · Score: 2

    Duane Dibbley might teach math though.

  20. Re:Bad on Vulnerable SAP Deployments Make Prime Attack Targets · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Indeed, it's one of those systems that is so expensive that its deployment has to be declared a success or the person who authorized it will be in trouble.

  21. Re:is the git repository down? on The Death of an HTML5 Game Breeds an Open Source Project · · Score: 1

    Works fine for me (without the quotes).

  22. Re:Gotta love this on Pro-ACTA Site Says 'Get the Facts' · · Score: 2

    Also note they call "counterfeiting and piracy" a single problem, while those are separate issues. Until we get replicators, clothes manufacturers won't have to worry about piracy of the digital kind (robbery at sea might still be an issue for them). And even for industries that do have to worry about both, the people committing counterfeiting (running an unlicensed DVD factory) and piracy (downloading movies) are two different groups with different motivations and different ways of operating, so lumping them together is not helpful.

    In my opinion, any proposed law or treaty that tries to bundle unrelated issues should be struck down for that reason alone, but I guess I'm just not cut out for politics.

  23. Re:Secret negotiations on Pro-ACTA Site Says 'Get the Facts' · · Score: 1

    I don't think the problem will ever go away: manipulative use of text will not be unlearned and attempting to ban it would cause far more problems than it solves, since it's very hard to be truly objective even if you try to be unbiased (this applies both to people writing texts and to people judging them). Therefore the best way to deal with it is to teach people how to spot spin, framing and other manipulative communication. For example by pointing it out and there are plenty of opportunities for that.

  24. Re:Everything is insecure on AMD/ATI Video Drivers: Unsafe At Any Speed · · Score: 1

    DER and ASLR don't make a system secure though. But they do make holes much harder to exploit.

  25. Re:Does it still have the deal-breaker? on KDE Announces 4.9 Beta1 and Testing Initiative · · Score: 1

    KMail still supports maildir, but it's handled by a daemon now instead of inside the KMail process. And that daemon isn't very stable. So you'll see status notifications appear when the daemon has crashed and restarted. I hope this will be addressed in 4.9 (I'm using 4.8).