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User: tilk

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Comments · 45

  1. Re:Video rental on It's Official: HTML5 Is a W3C Standard · · Score: 1

    Right now there is no difference between a "durable copy", as you say, than just watching - in both cases exactly the same data needs to go between the service provider and the end user. Therefore there is no longer a need to distinguish the two, and anything else is just crippling the product - a questionable practice for physical items, but somehow okay for digital data.

    A message for the media companies: just let me pay for the damn file! I'm probably going to only watch it once, but if I do not, you should not care anyway.

  2. Re:Completely converted house to LED, 3 have died. on The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy · · Score: 1

    I have already repaired failed CFLs by replacing an electrolytic capacitor, I think this mode of failure is also common in LED lights.

  3. Re:Papers-ereader on Ask Slashdot: E-ink Reader For Academic Papers? · · Score: 1

    I'm using a Kindle DX for several years now, and I have read a lot of technical books and scientific papers using it. It has some software limitations (no highlighting, poor bookmarking) but other than that it works fine and I'm very happy with it.

  4. In Poland we have P.I.W.O. Project (B.E.E.R.) on MIT Hack Turns the Green Building Into a Giant Game of Tetris · · Score: 1

    Students of the Wrocaw University of Technology turned one of the dormitory buildings into a color display. The event is called P.I.W.O. (Potezny Indeksowany Wyswietlacz Oknowy - literally Giant Indexed Display made of Windows, but the acronym means BEER) and was held for several years during the juwenalia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGU8dlvOPUY

  5. Re:Why are monads cheating? on What Programming Languages Should You Learn Next? · · Score: 2

    No. Expressing imperative calculations is just one thing monads are good for. There are lots of other things. Parsing, for example. Did you see Parsec? It allows you to express parsers naturally in Haskell, without any preprocessing (or C++ template cheating, like in Boost.Spirit).

  6. Re:Blame Internet Explorer on Dvorak Rants on CSS · · Score: 1

    Floats are for, well, floating elements, not table layouts. It's just an ugly hack...

  7. Re:ESP, I sensed that. on Virtual Worlds and ESP · · Score: 1
    Can you really feel objects, considering no real contact is made and that the actual real occupied space in atoms is virtually nothing?
    Well, you obviously don't understand what "contact" is. Intuitions from macroscopic world cannot be used here. Elementary particles are not "objects", they (according to current theories) don't have any volume, so can't "make contact" like big objects apparently can. Particles "make contact" through forces, electromagnetic force being the most important one. Macro-scale "real contact", which we percieve, is only consequence of lots of electromagnetic interactions between particles.

    "Real occupied space" is an illusion too. Because every particle has no volume, every object occupies no space, because every object is made of elementary particles. Macro-scale "volume", which we percieve, is consequence of repulsive electromagnetic forces, nothing else.
  8. Re:I know you. on Do Kids Still Program? · · Score: 1

    And that's why imperative languages should go. It's so easy to fuck up stuff in them. People think declarative and thus make far less errors when programming that way.

  9. Re:802.11g under linux is somewhat messy. on State of WLAN Support on Linux? · · Score: 1

    Add ralink chips to the list. Ralink released open-source drivers for their rt2500 chips. I have a Ralink rt2500-based Cardbus 802.11g card - and it works perfectly.

  10. Re:rather than power a craft by ANTI-GRAVITY on Anti-Gravity Device Patented · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Nope. Gravity propagating with infinite speed is violating relativity, because it allows to transmit information faster than light. In your example, scientists on Earth could notice that the planet moves differently before they see the Sun disappear. So, the information about disappearance of the Sun has travelled faster than light. In relativity no information can travel faster than light (or back in time), so if gravity is propagating faster than light, relativity must be wrong.

  11. Re:executing with permission on Firefox Exploit Adds Fuel to Browser Security Feud · · Score: 1

    Oh well, likely just a stupid idea from a stupid person.

    Well, according to IEBlog Microsoft is doing with IE7 exactly the thing you are suggesting.
  12. Re:Wow on IE7 Bugs and Reviews · · Score: 1

    They also don't have a dropdown menu on the back button

    You didn't read the article, right? The back and forward dropdown menus are integrated in a single menu in IE7.
  13. Re:UA strings! on MS Urging Developers To Prep For IE 7 · · Score: 2

    Please don't repeat this bullshit. ACID2 includes tests for error handling - but they aren't the only tests, you know. They aren't even half of them. ACID2 tests much more than just error handling.

  14. Re:Let them release first, then we'll see on MS Urging Developers To Prep For IE 7 · · Score: 3, Informative

    CSS fanatics always claim that you should not use tables for layout, but I find that CSS lacks some basic features for alignment especially at the bottom edge of the content area, which are very simple to implement when using a table.

    You are wrong. Have you ever read the specification? CSS has these features, it's just IE that doesn't implement them. Display: table and friends
  15. Re:This is truely... on EU Says No To Software Patents · · Score: 1

    Bullshit.

    http://www.l4ka.org/ - pushing the boundaries of microkernel performance.
    http://www.llvm.org/ - making optimized code generation trivial.
    http://www.nemerle.org/ - merging C# and functional programming into interoperable language.

    These are open-source computer science research projects. Are you trying to tell me, that they are not innovating?

  16. Re:Software Engineer in the shower on What's the Best Geek Joke You Know? · · Score: 1

    A good coder wouldn't ever wash his head using these instructions. Infinite loops don't have stop property.

  17. Re:Has the world gone XML crazy? on Google Launches Google Sitemaps · · Score: 1

    It doesn't do it. Crawling new medium to large websites takes months for Googlebot. The sitemap allows Googlebot to get the most important content indexed first - within days, not months.

  18. Re:No cell phones on aircraft! on SETI Disrupted By Cell Phones in Airplanes? · · Score: 1

    Maybe that's because good radiotelescopes have to be friggin large? The Arecibo radio telescope has 305 meters in diameter. Have you any idea how much it weighs? Launching this kind of mass to orbit is not an option.

  19. Re:Xen is not a true hypervisor on Microsoft Plans Hypervisor for Longhorn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You know that x86 processors don't support full virtualization very well? True virtualization software like VMWare does it with a performance hit, which Xen evades. Thus, one can argue that Xen is better option than true virtualization.

    And now for something completely different...

    People from L4Ka have built a pre-virtualizer, which allows to easily compile virtualizable kernels from unmodified source, which can be then run on Xen or L4Ka microkernel.
    Pre-virtualization with Compiler Afterburning

  20. Re:Has the world gone XML crazy? on Google Launches Google Sitemaps · · Score: 1

    But as it stands this XML Sitemap index doesn't provide any new information that HTTP headers don't (assuming dynamic pages update handle them well) except for the priority weighting...which should be derived from update frequency

    No, it shouldn't. My page is a informational one, so most important pages - these with the information - pretty much don't change. And I want to get them indexed quickly. Sitemap seem to be the perfect choice to tell that to the crawler.
  21. Re:the best bet on Web Designer's Reference · · Score: 1

    Try to play around with CSS only tabled structure...Then do the same work with good old table and TD tags and hspace=0 vspace=0 for img border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0.

    It will take me half of the time plus I won't have to care about compatibility. I know it will work in any browser.

    How do you know that? I've seen LOTS of pages built that way that are seriously broken in non-IE browsers.

    Anyway. CSS layout shouldn't be any harder than table layout. There IS something called display: table in CSS, which even allows to build table layouts USING CSS. Why isn't it used? Because IE doesn't support it.

    CSS isn't broken. IE is.
  22. Texas Instruments card reader on HP Will Offer Customized Linux in Notebooks · · Score: 1

    Will they create a driver for the fscking Texas Instruments 5-in-1 memory card reader? It's the only thing which I miss in Linux on HP laptop.

  23. Re:Censorage on Ask 'Hitchhiker's Guide' Exec. Producer Robbie Stamp · · Score: 1

    Do you know what are you talking about? Douglas Adams was an atheist. His works have signs of it - for example the Babelfish entry, which says about "proof of non-existence of God". Or the Oolon Colluphid trilogy: "Where God Went Wrong", "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes" and "Who Is This God Person Anyway?". So, your question should be like that: "You want to censor the books because the idea of the world NOT being created by a Supreme Being annoys you?"

  24. Re:Racisms will end on Hatemongering Becoming A Problem On Orkut · · Score: 1

    1. All humans die 2. All humans ascend 3. All humans interbreed until everyone is one race

    That's wrong. You're assuming that people are interbreeding completely random. It isn't true. People choose, who they are breeding with, considering looks, money, social status, character, intelligence, interests and more.

  25. Re:MP3 Playback IS Free... on Real Pays For Legal MP3 Playback On Linux · · Score: 1
    Why should someone that goes to the effort of coming up with a solution to a difficult enough problem, or comes up with something completely novel and exiting be any less entitled to patent their hard work just because the implementation of the idea involves typing at a keyboard instead of working with gears and pulleys?
    Because creation of software is much lest costly, and its reproduction is nearly zero-cost - which isn't true for mechanics or chemistry. Software development requires little investment, so everyone can develop software. Many software developers just can't afford patents.
    The biggest problem with software patents is not the fact of software being patentable, it's the failure of the patent examiners to properly distinguish between a patent that represents true inovation, and something that's just documenting a common practice or a perfectly logical combination of existing technologies (like Amazon's "One Click" patent).
    That's right. And it will remain like that. Both patent offices and software giants want lots of patents - and they will have them, if we will not just ban them all.