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User: kinema

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  1. What's changed in two and a half decades? on World Solar Challenge To Start In Less Than Two Weeks · · Score: 1

    I haven't followed this race in a very long time though, I do remember GM's Sunraycer back in 1987. My question is: what has changed in the past twenty-six years? From a quick look on Wikipedia I see that the average speeds are higher but nothing like double what they were back when I was a kid. Is it safe to assume that the improvements made have been largely incremental? Are we talking about an ever so slightly more refined design every two years, better solar tech, better drag calculations? Please don't think I'm flaming. I all challenges like this one. I'm simply interested in what kind of progress has been made.

  2. Trademark on SEGA Brings Gaming To Public Restroom Toilets · · Score: 1

    Too bad Wii is already trademarked.

  3. (Probably) NOT Google on Unwise — Search History of Murder Methods · · Score: 1

    The company Google may not have been founded until 1998 but the search engine existed in the form of BackRub and google.stanford.edu prior to that. Though, I do agree that it is incredibly unlikely that Jensen used any version of Google. More likely he was using Yahoo or Altavista.

  4. Re:Not everyone is 20 on Is the Number Up For the Residential Phone Book? · · Score: 1

    GOOG-411 has been discontinued. All we're left with is BING-411 which it typical Microsoft fashion doesn't have as nice of an interface.

  5. Re:What about Qt? on KDE Developers Discuss Merging Libraries With Qt · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you're interested in using Qt with Python you should take a look at PySide which is being developed by Nokia.

  6. Re:Hmmm on Time To Rethink the School Desk? · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You're crazy if you think more than a handful of US schools have wood or metal shops anymore. It's a sad fact but we seem to really enjoy underfunding our schools.

  7. Re:IO scheduler != CPU scheduler on The State of Linux IO Scheduling For the Desktop? · · Score: 1

    I think a fair chunk of the "/bin/cp /from/large.iso /to/large.iso" problem could be eliminated if cp (and dd) helped the kernel and dropped the page-cache on large copies via fadvise/madvise. Linux really defaults to the most optimistic assumption: that apps are good citizens and will dirty only as much RAM as they need. Thus the kernel will generally allow apps to dirty a fair amount of RAM, before it starts throttling them.

    Why haven't basic system tools like cp had this functionality added to them? I can't imagine the required patches would be incredibly complex.

  8. Re:Kinematics on Grad Student Looking To Contribute To Open Source · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Speaking of kinematics, you might want to take a look at a EMC (Enhanced Machine Controller). EMC is a CNC package originating from NIST. EMC has an active community using and developing it. There are known bugs in the forward and inverse kinematics for PUMA style robots that could really uses the eye of a trained mathematician.

    I'm sure there are are plenty of other areas that the EMC project could utilize your math skills. There are many, many users and developers of EMC that would appreciate your skills.

  9. Re:Unexpected on Hunters Shot Down Google Fiber · · Score: 1

    I can't even think of anything Oregon's known for.

    Mostly Pabst Blue Ribbon and annoying hipsters on their fixed gear bikes. At least that's what Portland is known for.

  10. Re:I dunno, man... on Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed · · Score: 1

    What's wrong with NNTP? I'm not exactly sure how it fits into the whole social network theme but it works so much better than mailing lists or even web forums for threaded multiparty conversations.

  11. Re:Or you could on Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What is learned by simply booting up a VM and loading a game? In the story submission he specifically mentioned "all the fun workarounds" that he had to come up with get everything to work on a modern system. Don't you think doing a cleanroom reimplementing a subsystem like DirectDraw presents a great learning experience?

    No, I wouldn't have done this if you had payed me; I have my own interests and passions. I'm not at all interested in graphics programming or for that matter video games, though, apparently someone is and I think it's great that he saw a problem and decided to attempt to find a solution for it.

    This is what being a geek is all about. Bravo.

  12. Pacific Northwest on What Clown On a Unicycle? · · Score: 1

    You've obviously never been to the Pacific Northwest if you think unicycling clowns are out of the norm.

  13. Re:telcos have been granted a natural monopoly on The Need For Search Neutrality · · Score: 1

    Not to be pedantic, but natural monopolies aren't "granted" but are rather, well, natural.

  14. Re:Careful what you wish for... on FCC Declares Intention To Enforce Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    I would LOVE to start my own cable company that simply pushed analog and QAM TV without the need for converter boxes and was utterly lacking in all but absolutely require encryption. I think the public would love to use their own TV tuners again and be able to build their MythTV boxes/use their Tivos without having to clear it with some mystical gate keeper.

    I live in the Pacific Northwest (NW US) where Comcast is the one and only cable provider (there are some outer-suburbs with FiOS but not tons). I recently started researching my cable situation and found that Comcast pushes all their Basic Digital channels (2-71 plus some), which is all I subscribe to via clear/unencrypted QAM[1]. It turns out that most if not all of Comcast's West Coast network is the same. This means it dead simple to hookup a HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust to a MythTV box.

    [1] http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/lineup_web/US:97201#lineup_558689

  15. [OFF-TOPIC] Clear QAM TV on FCC Declares Intention To Enforce Net Neutrality · · Score: 1

    would LOVE to start my own cable company that simply pushed analog and QAM TV without the need for converter boxes and was utterly lacking in all but absolutely require encryption. I think the public would love to use their own TV tuners again and be able to build their MythTV boxes/use their Tivos without having to clear it with some mystical gate keeper. I live in the Pacific Northwest (NW US) where Comcast is the one and only cable provider (there are some outer-suburbs with FiOS but not tons). I recently started researching my cable situation and found that Comcast pushes all their Basic Digital channels (2-71 plus some), which is all I subscribe to via clear/unencrypted QAM[1]. It turns out that most if not all of Comcast's West Coast network is the same. This means it dead simple to hookup a HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust to a MythTV box.

    [1] http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/lineup_web/US:97201#lineup_558689

  16. Re:ATI? eek! on Neuros LINK Mixes Quiet, Aesthetics, and Ubuntu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What's wrong with XvBA from AMD/ATI? What does vadau offer that XvBA doesn't?

  17. "the fastest version of Windows to shut down" on Windows 7 RTM Reviewed & Benchmarked · · Score: 1

    "the fastest version of Windows to shut down"

    I'm pretty sure that Windows 3.x owns that title. If I remember correctly Windows 3 and earlier didn't need to be "shutdown", rather you could just turn off the computer.

  18. Get a Chumby. on DisplayLink Releases LGPL USB Graphics Code · · Score: 1

    Why not get a Chumby?

  19. Principia Mathematica on Classic Books of Science? · · Score: 1

    Newton's Principia Mathematica is without a doubt a classic, though, it is a little dense.

  20. Re:a possible idea on Looking To Spammers To Solve Hard AI Problems · · Score: 1

    Maybe that system was intelligent. It certainly had a lot of emergent properties.

    I love this quote!

  21. Why Matroska? on Decent DVD-Ripping Solution For Linux? · · Score: 1

    What benefits does Matroska provide?

  22. Re:rsync on BitTorrent For Enterprise File Distribution? · · Score: 1

    Even better, rsync against a local binary diff that was distributed via BitTorrent.

  23. OS X side-by-side with Linux using KVM on Run Mac OS X Apps On Linux? · · Score: 1

    - QEMU is a fast and open source emulator that can be used to emulate, among others, x86 PCs, AMD64 PCs, and Power Macs. This should allow you to run OS X as a guest OS. If you use QEMU to emulate an x86 on an x86, or an x86 or AMD64 on AMD64, it should run close to native speed. That is, as far as the CPU is concerned. Other hardware, graphics hardware in particular, will not have native performance.
    An even better option here would be to use KVM (which in turn uses QEMU) on Linux to run OS X in a virtual machine. There are questions about the legality of this approach because if I remember correctly OS X's license specifically forbids running it in a virtualized environment. Also I believe that QEMU is missing some features required to host OS X.
  24. TTY/console/fbdev/DRM reorganization on Linux 2.6.22 Kernel Released · · Score: 1

    hey wait TTY layer ...any takers? please :-)
    I'm with you brother. What ever happened to John Smirl's console rearchitecture proposal he presented at OLS 2004?
  25. Next few months? How about Q3? on PCI SIG Releases PCIe 2.0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Intel is scheduled to start shipping their X38 (aka "Bearlake") chipsets Q3 of this year. The final v2 spec may have just been released but it's been in development for sometime allowing engineers to at least rough out designs. Also, much of the logic from previous v1.x chipsets can be reused as v2 is an evolution not a completely new interconnect standard.