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User: Blaskowicz

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  1. Re: Not Interested on First Smart TVs Powered By Firefox OS On Sale In Europe, Worldwide Soon · · Score: 1

    On off-the-shelf desktop motherboards, TPM modules plug in a special socket or more accurately, a set of pins. It's invariably empty if you buy the motherboard, as the motherboard vendor won't field that cost. And perhaps they don't want to do a job similar to that of a CA or credit card company etc. by managing the keys anyway. So I wonder if this is how/why we got where we are today, instead of the outcome having been decided by a battle between good and evil.

  2. Re:Everytime you switch it on... on First Smart TVs Powered By Firefox OS On Sale In Europe, Worldwide Soon · · Score: 1

    Firefox OS is plugin-less, which may be a good thing or a bad thing.

  3. Re:Just what I needed...? on First Smart TVs Powered By Firefox OS On Sale In Europe, Worldwide Soon · · Score: 2

    I heard you can install linux on the TV instead : rolling release with systemd, KDE 5 and of course firefox. Another TV can work for the lifetime of a TV (remember when a TV lasted 20 years?). You can buy a TV that runs AIX or HP-UX, but it costs $200,000.
    The z/OS TV is best, but requires expertise on your part and costs $1,000,000 + $20,000 a month fee (if you spend a bit more, you can activate the Channel Changing Processor, which is disabled in the low end configuration)

  4. No dumb TVs exist anymore on First Smart TVs Powered By Firefox OS On Sale In Europe, Worldwide Soon · · Score: 1

    Not sure what "smart" exactly means, but on the tiniest TVs with bad sound and a bit of light leaking out of the LCD panel, you now have graphical menus, media player and USB port.
    Seen one the other days, the owner was using it as speakers for his recent netbook (plugged to the sound RCA input meant for use along composite or VGA input) and the TV was switching off every 15 minutes, against his will.

    Perhaps "smart" means internet access on top of that? Open the TV and disconnect wifi antennas. Ruin the USB ports if you will, but perhaps they aren't that bad. If you're paranoid use it with VGA, since HDMI can possibly carry ethernet etc.
    And/or use that antiquated antenna connector, where digital HDTV is beamed in

  5. Re:This will be a historic mission. on Arab Mars Probe Planned For 2020 · · Score: 0

    No but where else do cops empty a whole pistol clip into people at random?

  6. nvidia driver 304 on KDE Plasma 5 Becomes the Default Desktop of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

    - kwin compositing is not usable on older nvidia hardware with the nvidia proprietary driver 304.x, even if the driver supports opengl 2.1

    lol that poor older hardware on driver 304.x just suffers :
    - on some recent new distros, you may need to boot with "nomodeset" or equivalent before fixing things up
    - WebGL is very slow, freezing/unreliable
    - you can't run the port of Counter Strike Source, a game from 2004, on a graphics card from 2006, even if the driver supports opengl 2.1

    and to replace a 32 watt card with dual VGA support (not VGA + DVI only!) there aren't many options.

  7. Re:Linux Mint 17 XFCE, SSD on How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook · · Score: 1

    That's what LMDE 1 ended being (semi-rolling snapshotted debian) but LMDE 2 and Ubuntu Mint get plenty security updates (from the upstream distros)

  8. Re:Missing new classification... on On the Taxonomy of Sci-Fi Spaceships · · Score: 1

    A moon station covered in guns and they couldn't find room or budget for a few thousand tie fighters to defend it.

  9. Re: hardly surprising on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty In Boston Marathon Bombing · · Score: 1

    It's easy in fact. Kill the executioner, because he committed the act of killing somebody, willingly and in front of other people.

  10. Re:My Model M on Mechanical 'Clicky' Keyboards Still Have Followers (Video) · · Score: 1

    You still can easily choose a motherboard with one or two PS/2 ports.

  11. Re:Rust made a mistake in going C++-syntax on Rust 1.0 Released · · Score: 1

    But on simple examples I like that macros are identified with a bang, like this : println!
    It's daunting that in a language you might encounter some name, but don't know if it's a real function, or a macro, or something that was overloaded.
    As for the :: operator I simply don't know what the fuck it means. dunno if it's ugly or not, but means that I would have to learn what it means, and why it's not just a ".".

  12. Re:So? on Does Using an AOL Email Address Suggest You're a Tech Dinosaur? · · Score: 1

    Two kinds of x-ray machine in fact, that small one next to the chair you refer to, and a stand-up one in a different, small room. The stand up machine seems to be networked in some way, in any way pictures are digitally archived indeed as well as whatever database fields say "this tooth sucks" etc.

    I do go to a 900-year-old hospital (but it an section that looks 19th century, and quite refurbished), but don't worry about old school dentists. I get to have some wait there and have students working on me. Visits from supervising old farts are rather funny as they spot whatever the thing is within 5 seconds.

  13. Re:Global warming on Greenland's Glaciers Develop Stretch Marks As They Accelerate · · Score: 1

    Without government you eventually devolve into militia rule, slavery, rape, forcible starvation etc.
    Perhaps you save much energy from the collapse of the standards of living of 98% of the population, and slave labor is an alternative source of energy.

  14. Re:Global warming on Greenland's Glaciers Develop Stretch Marks As They Accelerate · · Score: 1

    Yes, the evil government. I did find one government that acts on climate change

    http://theconversation.com/beh...

  15. Re:One thing to keep in mind... on RTFM? How To Write a Manual Worth Reading · · Score: 1

    info's info page looks like a converted man page on my system! wow.
    Most missing in its documentation is "NOTES : This program is unusable, use pinfo instead."
    Man pages themselves could see some color.

  16. Re:Not at all on Does Using an AOL Email Address Suggest You're a Tech Dinosaur? · · Score: 1

    I did not have ISP floppies, so I used Windows 95 floppies! They seemed rather good and the original content was just as useless.

  17. Re:So? on Does Using an AOL Email Address Suggest You're a Tech Dinosaur? · · Score: 1

    Surely you can attach in some way a printer to a digital X-ray machine?
    And use a payment terminal to accept debit/credit smart cards but not bother doing accounting on a PC.
    I'm sure the computer-less dentists uses many other computers, running cell phone's firmware, the land line phone, an alarm clock, microwave etc. but these are actual appliances.

  18. Re:Pretty sure the heat death of the universe will on Criticizing the Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die · · Score: 1

    I'd be very concerned that my feet get time dilated at a faster rate than my head, if I'm going feet first in. If plain old dislocation isn't enough I mean.

  19. Re:using the OpenCL APIs is *noisy* on GPU Malware Can Also Affect Windows PCs, Possibly Macs · · Score: 1

    There's many ways it could be quiet, in the audible way, at least on the desktop :
    - you use a fanless graphics card. duh!
    - your GPU is integrated into the CPU, and the combination is low power enough or a big enough heatsink and fans are installed
    - you got a low power midrange graphics card with a dual slot design and big enough heatsink and/or fan(s)
    - you messed with the fan profile, clocks, BIOS etc. to keep it quiet
    - certain high end cards are conservatively clocked to stay quiet (Quadro, Titan)

    On laptop :
    - you use a fanless laptop
    - most laptops are shit, but perhaps there exists a good one

    That's for stuff that would cause high utilization of the GPU.

  20. Re:We rolled out a few web applications ... on Ask Slashdot: What's the Future of Desktop Applications? · · Score: 1

    Easy, deploy each "web app" as a RDS app that's just a browser with a single use, blank profile and the web app as its own page. If you ever wanted a server with 120 hardware threads and 1TB RAM, now you can get it! that may be enough to run four browsers per person, for a small office at least :).

  21. Re:What's old will be new again.. on Ask Slashdot: What's the Future of Desktop Applications? · · Score: 1

    I would love single pay for email, e.g. to pay $50 for a lifetime of email, or $99 for a decade.
    That is, I would love to pay for email, which is apparently how you get some clean service with a choice of squirrelmail, roundcube etc. or a local mail client.
    But what I'm willing to pay seems unrealistically low.
    Trouble is, I guess business like recurring monthly or yearly fees (paying them, and especially collecting them) but for consumers it might be something to get rid of.
    If you piss away 10% of your income on recurring fees and your income halves, then suddenly you're paying 20% of your income on these shitty fees. Easy to cancel gym, TV etc. or even your internet access but not so much your email and similarly important "app" or service.

  22. Re:No on Ask Slashdot: What's the Future of Desktop Applications? · · Score: 1

    Google Maps was even *freezingly* slow on mine, I think it tries to use OpenGL which is unreliable in the browser for my PC. Unchecking "use of hardware acceleration if available" in Firefox makes it work, at all.

  23. Re:MS confuses GUI design with functionality on What Might Have Happened To Windows Media Center · · Score: 1

    So you have a new laptop with an extremely fast GPU (maybe I overshot the requirements a bit) and that proves what, exactly? That you can emulate the PS2 with a system over 10 years younger.

  24. Re:Deniers on Top Advisor To Australian Gov't Says Climate Change is a UN Conspiracy · · Score: 1

    The skeptics *are* the science lovers.

    Too bad I misread this as you saying that the scientists are the real skeptics. This is what I believe. How can some people call themselves "skeptics" when they determine their belief first (belief in no warming) and then make up or repeat any bullshit they can come up with?

    Climate scientists are the real skeptics, because it is their actual job. We call that "science".
    So-called climate skeptics rehash bullshit, either because they fall victim to propaganda, cashed a nice $10000 check or make profit from book sales or added notoriety.

  25. Re:MS confuses GUI design with functionality on What Might Have Happened To Windows Media Center · · Score: 1

    As to consistent hardware, you're saying this like this is hard or special or something. PC game makers do just fine with variable hardware. Yes, consoles have consistent hardware but that doesn't mean much. That just means you have one version of the operating system with one set of drivers that are slightly better debugged than what the PC people deal with. So what.

    No, really, the memory hierarchy is a crippling difference and the game has to be reworked anyway - though DirectX 12 makes that easier.
    As an example, Playstation 2 has been a bitch to emulate, because there's some extremely fast eDRAM in there for the GPU to use, and stupidly high fillrate to brute-force graphical effects in wasteful and interesting ways (later hardware such as Radeon 9700 pro and PS3 used pixel shaders instead). Only with recent and high end GPUs can we do the same shit (we'll talking hundreds of gigabytes per second of bandwith needed)

    So, to run any console game (Xbox One or PS4) that exploits stupidly low latency and high bandwith between the CPU and GPU - because they're on the same die - we'll probably need future PC hardware where both the CPU and GPU are on the same chip. Alright, all Intels are like that but bandwith, GPU power and features don't match.