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User: Timothy+Brownawell

Timothy+Brownawell's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:Sweet! on VGA and DVI Ports To Be Phased Out Over Next 5 Years · · Score: 1

    Why would you buy a TV that only does 1920x1080 when you can get a higher res monitor?

    I have a pair of 2048x1152 monitors. That size seems to pretty much not exist any more, which just leaves 2560x1440 (or 2560x1600). Which are about 6x as expensive as 1920x1080, and which I've only seen online and not in physical stores.

  2. Re:Dear Hugh: on Do Companies Punish Workers Who Take Vacations? · · Score: 1

    civilized labour law that includes no firing without cause after a probation period, paid annual vacation, paid overtime, and other laws that are simply fair and levelling the playing field

    Making it hard to fire people is a bad idea, since it makes hiring mistakes far more expensive.

    What I'd like to see is something along the line of (1) free vocational training and higher education; (2) work-hour limits (not overtime pay rules) that are higher than reasonable people would want to work but low enough that "evil" employers can't use overtime to interfere with (1); (3) assistance is breaking the information asymmetry in hiring, by proving information to workers; (4) a reasonable safety net so that being out of work for a bit isn't the end of the world. Basically, instead of restricting what employers can do, empower workers so that it doesn't really matter what employers try to do.

  3. Re:I just got back from a job fair today on Do Companies Punish Workers Who Take Vacations? · · Score: 1
  4. Re:BSD license was always more permissive, so grea on GPL, Copyleft Use Declining Fast · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that those that profit from your work also give back.

    Its purpose is economic warfare against all non-copyleft software, with the ultimate goal of world domination (eliminating non-free software).

  5. Re:Idiots on The Rise of Developeronomics · · Score: 2

    The safest investment for corporations and individuals is corporations, as usual.

    It's turtles all the way down?

    At some point the value in these investments needs to either come from making things, or doing things. This is saying that the (current) best investment is in doing/making things that make it easier (or cheaper) for others to do/make things.

  6. Re:Great a new boom. on The Rise of Developeronomics · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Right now, I make nice money. If this is a bubble, that will go up. And I'll get comfortable with that, and adjust my life to suit. When the bubble pops, my income will go way back down again, and that is going to hurt.

    Sign up for direct deposit, with a fixed amount (not percentage) going to your checking account, and the rest going to a savings account that you never look at.

  7. Re:Holy Wars ... the Punishment Due on Can Newegg Survive the Post-PC Future? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Obviously there will always be some demand for high-end PCs. However, it is plausible that at some point in the near future, most people will be using "netbooks" or tablets for their day-to-day computing needs.

    Won't those be the same people who currently buy preassembled machines at bestbuy or walmart?

  8. Re:Copyrights on facts on RMS On Header Files and Derivative Works · · Score: 2

    So by this explanation I can link my closed-sourced program to a GPL library(dynamically). I only use it's headers!

    Depends on what's in the headers (is it *just* declarations you need for talking to the library, or is half of it macros and inline functions and such that end up in your binary), and whether you have enough spare cash/time to fend off a lawsuit.

  9. Re:200-line patch on Linux 2.6.38 Released · · Score: 3, Informative

    (And if it's completely IO bound, there's never been any reason to fork it 20 ways.)

    That depends on why it's IO bound. If you're saturating available bandwidth then yes, but for example if you're trying to crawl a bunch of really slow webservers on the far side of the internet (high round-trip time) then you'd really want to have several outstanding requests at any given time. Even if you're IO bound against local disk parallelism can sometimes help a little, since it gives the IO scheduler more to work with.

  10. Re:200-line patch on Linux 2.6.38 Released · · Score: 5, Informative

    the example was forking 20 compile processes. normally that's a big speedup because when one has to pend on some i/o, another can pick up and do some work on your overall compile. with this new scheduling instead of 20 new processes crowding the few existing processes into much less cpu, now the 20 processes only act like one new process which makes me wonder why you'd fork 20 processes any more, since they'll have only one process' share of the resource. might as well run them sequentially; it'll take almost exactly as long

    Say you have regular desktop programs that take some small amount of CPU, and you want to be able to compile things a quickly as possible without making your music skip or your window manager get laggy. Before this you would have to guess at the right number of compile processes to run; too few and it takes longer and doesn't use all your CPU, too many and your desktop gets laggy. Now, the scheduler treats all of the compiler processes as a group, and lets your music player and window manager steal CPU cycles from them more easily -- so you can run more processes and keep the CPU busy, without worrying about your music skipping.

  11. Re:Good. on SSDs Cause Crisis For Digital Forensics · · Score: 3, Informative

    These drives are oblivious to the file-system, which is why there needs to be a TRIM command which allows the OS to say "hey, I don't care about that page (4 KB) any longer."

    Some SSDs actually do understand a few filesystem formats (maybe just NTFS?), and used this to GC unused blocks before TRIM was implemented.

  12. Re:either sympathy or accusation on London Stock Exchange Price Errors 'Emerged At Linux Launch' · · Score: 1

    I can well believe you have had problems in your projects if you think that there are "known issues of TCP/IP message passing from Unix/BSD stack to a Win stack".

    Oh, but there are issues. One side does "write(sockfd, &myobject, sizeof(myobject))" and the other does the equivalent (which .NET makes far more difficult that it needs to be, so I haven't room to write it here), and because the platforms are incompatible your program usually just crashes.

    Much better to use SOAP (or even just XML over HTTP if you have truly extreme performance requirements) and completely avoid all that TCP/IP mess.

    .

    Note to the humor impaired: you have no sense of humor.

  13. Re:God here we go again.....all phones have the is on Verizon iPhone Also Haunted By the Death Grip · · Score: 1

    The iphone 4 has a VERY real problem when you hold it not in some magical "death grip"....

    ... according to everybody but the owners of the phone.

    Every iphone 4 I've seen coworkers using lately has one of those rubber bumpers on it. I don't see this for the company-issue blackberries or for people with other kinds of phone (including those who have iphone 3's), and I didn't see it for the first couple weeks after people got their iphone 4's. This suggests to me that there is a severe problem, but it has a (rather ugly) $2 workaround that everyone uses.

  14. Re:It happens on 'Death By GPS' Increasing In America's Wilderness · · Score: 1

    How far south are you from? One-quarter inch of snow is enough to obliterate road markings. One-quarter inch of snow in no way means you shouldn't take a road.

    It does around here...

  15. Re:This is slashdot? on Slashdot Launches Re-Design · · Score: 2

    What tab plugin is that that you're using?

    "Tree Style Tab"

  16. Re:This is slashdot? on Slashdot Launches Re-Design · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...and even better, the keyboard navigation seems to be all jacked up. It's like April come early!

  17. Re:This is slashdot? on Slashdot Launches Re-Design · · Score: 5, Informative

    No ponies, but sidebar-hides-content seems a fairly close substitute.

  18. Re:Recovery Fairy Tales again on Espionage In Icelandic Parliament · · Score: 1

    Nobody accepted it because it was stupid, and probably just a publicity stunt for the people running it.

  19. Re:You would think. on Beware of Using Google Or OpenDNS For iTunes · · Score: 4, Informative

    They only find out your IP address after it's too late.

    1. Your computer asks a DNS resolver where the server is.
    2. The DNS resolver asks Apple's (well, Akami's) DNS server where the server is.
    3. The DNS server guesses the closest server, but all it has available to work with is the address of the resolver.
    4. Your computer uses that answer to contact the server and download whatever. If it was given the wrong server, it's too late now.
  20. Re:Steam Power for the Win on Navy Uses Railgun To Launch Fighter Jet · · Score: 1

    Steam turbines are basically the way to turn an external heat source into mechanical energy. Typically this is just used to generate electricity since it's so much more convenient to work with, but for a few applications the turbine will be attached directly to something other than a generator (say, a propeller on a big boat). Steam can also be used even more directly; as a heat source / heat transfer mechanism (say, for heating groups buildings particularly in colder climates), for cleaning carpets, for sterilizing things, in industrial chemical processes, apparently as a replacement for liquid water in some kinds of modern clothes-washing machines, ... .

  21. Re:More security in what way? on DNSSEC Comes To .Net Zone Today · · Score: 1

    Chain of authenticity is provided by each parent domain signing the delegation records provided by the child domain.

    So, for the "government" to "exert control" over your domain, they would have to completely spoof every parent of your domain. This would affect not just your domain, but all domains in that TLD. Pretty sure if everyone in .com all broke at the same time, someone would notice.

    Or they could pressure the parent domain into signing their own bogus delegation records, the same way they currently can pressure them into serving bogus delegation records (such as customs seizing all those trademark-and-copyright-infringing domains a few days ago). This relies entirely on each parent domain being trustworthy about what they sign, which is a bit difficult if you don't trust the government that they're subject to.

  22. Re:Super on Rear-View Cameras On Cars Could Become Mandatory In the US · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The taillights will be lit whenever the headlights are lit. These can look exactly the same as older brake lights, except for being slightly dimmer. The additional brake light makes it easier to see the difference.

  23. They're in the middle of the ocean. on One Giant Cargo Ship Pollutes As Much As 50M Cars · · Score: -1, Troll

    Since I'm not in the middle of the ocean, I don't have to breathe whatever crap they're spewing out. So I don't really have a reason to care. Of course it might still make sense for the big port cities to put emissions limits on what ships they'll accept, and send the really nasty ones elsewhere...

  24. Re:Agreed on EU Commission Says People Have a 'Right To Be Forgotten' Online · · Score: 1

    but it's a great concept. Why should someone have your data with out you knowing and better yet why should they keep it if you ask it to be destroyed.

    What I know, is mine. This, is saying that my knowledge is not mine and can be taken from me. Really, it looks like the next step from those absurd libel laws where truth isn't a defense. What's the next step after this one, require that anyone can have anyone else dragged off to get portions of their memory medically erased?

  25. Re:goes against basic ad psychology on Fighting Ad Blockers With Captcha Ads · · Score: 1

    ...ow! Stop doing that to my eyeballs!