Slashdot Mirror


User: TheRaven64

TheRaven64's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
32,964
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 32,964

  1. Re:New phone every month? on The Days of Cheap, Subsidized Phones May Be Numbered · · Score: 1

    I have a smartphone, and I have never paid for data on it. There is a single setting to toggle that says 'don't use data except on WiFi' and then I'm in the same situation as you but without having to carry two devices around. I'm not sure what the advantage of having two devices would be.

  2. Re:Damned if they do... on Microsoft Reads Your Skype Chat Messages · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a distinction between a federated and a proprietary network. When you make a telephone call, your mobile operator may or may not be the responsible for the far end. They are selling you access to a world wide telephone network, parts of which are operated by many companies even within a single country. The rules for this network are defined in part by the ITU and in part by the national laws of the various participating countries. In most of the western world, these place limits on who is allowed to listen in to messages. In contrast, Microsoft is selling you access to a private network that is owned and operated entirely by them.

    The laws apply to federated networks because you may not have a direct business relationship with the carriers for a potentially large part. They do not need to apply for non-federated private services, because you have a direct business relationship with the supplier, in this case Microsoft.

  3. Re:Damned if they do... on Microsoft Reads Your Skype Chat Messages · · Score: 1

    I very much doubt the law says that, if a person sends up to a service that will relay messages for them and explicitly states in the ToS that it may read those messages, that the service is not allowed to read the messages. It's not a service like the post or the telephone system that is regulated under common carrier legislation, it is a proprietary service that stores and forwards messages between subscribers.

  4. Re:Q&A on How Colleges Are Pushing Out the Poor To Court the Rich · · Score: 1

    Liberals like you never ask yourself how much more efficient it would be if people would not be taxed and instead donate even 10% of what they would have been taxed to the causes they believe in

    It's an interesting thought experiment. You can see a lot of what happens from the current tax exemption rules for charities in the US: most people with surplus income give to things that will directly benefit themselves (educational trusts that run schools predominantly for wealthy people, heart disease charities, and so on). Of course, most people wouldn't donate anything. There's a reason why economists have the term 'the tragedy of the commons' and it's not because they invented a hypothetical scenario, it is based on large numbers of historical examples.

  5. Re:O'rly? on Ad Exec: Learn To Code Or You're Dead To Me · · Score: 1

    Most of the artists I know are 3D artists, so no, I don't know much about the 2D packages. All of the 3D ones have scripting interfaces though, and I'm pretty sure Photoshop does (at least on the Mac, it exposes a lot to AppleScript, no idea about Windows).

  6. Re:O'rly? on Ad Exec: Learn To Code Or You're Dead To Me · · Score: 2

    There's a difference between hiring artists who are good programmers and hiring artists who understand the basics of programming. It amazes me how much time commercial artists waste doing grunt work that can be trivially automated. If you hire only the ones that know a tiny bit of programming then they'll spend a tiny bit of time writing some crappy code instead of a lot of time doing everything by hand.

  7. Re:confused on The Days of Cheap, Subsidized Phones May Be Numbered · · Score: 2

    The loan was for two years, with interest payments of £150 (so, £75/year) on a total of £450. That works out at about a 17% AER. On other words, you'd have been about as well off to get the first credit card offer that came through your door, buy the phone outright, and pay back the money at the same rate. You'd have been a lot better off if you could afford to pay back £50 on your credit card bill every money. A quick search tells me that the Sainsbury's credit card has a 7.8% APR, so if you got one of these, you'd be a lot better off to buy the phone on the card, and then paying back as much as you could afford.

    If you're in a situation where £450 is an unaffordable expense, I'd imagine that you already have a credit card that you pay off every money, so you postpone paying for your regular expenses by 14-45 days, in which case just buying the phone on the card you already have would be cheaper and no more effort.

    And it sounds like you actually got a comparatively good deal on your phone. Most 'subsidised' phones are equivalent to a loan with an APR of 20-50%. I'd love to see the regulator say that phone companies had to sell phones at the same price whether you had a contract or not, but could include a loan for phone purchasing with the contract as long as they stated the terms with the same detail required of other lenders.

  8. Re:Not a smart idea on Boston Replacing Microsoft Exchange With Google Apps · · Score: 1

    If you only care about email and calendars, then something like SOGO is a much cheaper alternative than Exchange and removes the requirement to run Windows on the server. It's also mainly developed by a Canadian company, so should keep your government contracts very happy. If you're already employing system administrators for Exchange, then the costs shouldn't change much.

  9. Re:Good on Boston Replacing Microsoft Exchange With Google Apps · · Score: 0

    If I were an accountant, I'd want to use something like Quantrix Modeller, not a toy like Excel. Or possibly something a bit more tailored to my specific domain.

  10. Re:Why the need to share blood? on Transfusions Reverse Aging Effects On Hearts In Mice · · Score: 1

    Ixian? Try again...

  11. Re:Photo synthesis is not all that efficient. on Plug Into a Plant: a New Approach To Clean Energy Harvesting · · Score: 2

    Photosynthesis isn't very efficient, but it is very convenient. If you want the maximum possible conversion rate from solar energy, it's a terrible choice. If, however, you want something that can be cheaply deployed, then something that can self-assemble from light, water, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a few trace nutrients is quite attractive in comparison to photovoltaics.

  12. Re:misuse of the term redshirt on New 'Academic Redshirt' For Engineering Undergrads at UW · · Score: 1

    If you're telling your students that grades don't matter, then you're lying to them. Their grades are going to be important when they try to get their first job. The education is more of a long-term investment - it's something that will benefit them over their entire life. It's important to balance both at university. Make sure that you do enough work to get good grades but, as Mark Twain said, don't let it interfere with your education.

  13. Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire? on New 'Academic Redshirt' For Engineering Undergrads at UW · · Score: 1

    This usage is confined to the USA, so 50% (last published numbers) of the audience will have had to look it up. It's one confined to a traditionally non-geeky niche in the USA, so at least half of the remainder will have needed to look it up. When you are using a term that you would anticipate that 75% of your target audience will need to look up, it's generally a good idea to define it.

  14. Re:So... they get eaten by the salt vampire? on New 'Academic Redshirt' For Engineering Undergrads at UW · · Score: 1

    The problem is, we don't have good metrics for selecting students. If we did, university admittance would be much easier. We've found that there is very little correlation between students results in their last year at school and their final mark. We have a lot of data at Cambridge because each college has different admittance criteria: none of them consistently manages to pick the best students.

  15. Re:I don't want on Adobe's Creative Cloud Illustrates How the Cloud Costs You More · · Score: 1

    Make up stuff elsewhere

    I didn't make stuff up, I simply read the linked page, from Adobe, which says:

    These products were released more than seven years ago, do not run on many modern operating systems, and are no longer supported.

    It also says that it runs on:

    Microsoft® Windows® 2000/Windows XP

  16. Re:Good on Ubuntu Developing Its Own Package Format, Installer · · Score: 1

    No you don't. The buffer cache is indexed by inodes, not by file paths. Both copies of the library resolve to the same inode and so when you mmap() the library you get one (CoW) copy of it that is shared between all processes that map it.

  17. Re:Good on Ubuntu Developing Its Own Package Format, Installer · · Score: 2

    No it doesn't. PC-BSD has had this model for application installs for ages. The installer hard links duplicate libraries and so on together. Hard links are already reference counted, and have been since the early days of UNIX, so you end up with one copy of each library. The logic in the installer is relatively complicated, but the uninstaller just has to delete the tree.

    The way that the packages in the repository are built ensures that programs using the same library ship the same binary. If you upgrade just one program, then you'll have two copies of the library, until you upgrade all of them and then the old one's reference count will hit 0 and it will be gone from disk.

  18. FOI Requests? on US DOJ Say They Don't Need Warrants For E-Mail, Chats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Does the same logic mean that the government can not reject FOI requests for emails and can not redact anything in emails?

  19. Re:I don't want on Adobe's Creative Cloud Illustrates How the Cloud Costs You More · · Score: 1

    It also only runs on XP, not on any newer version of Windows, so it's increasingly irrelevant for the Windows users too.

  20. No. Most modern displays (even TVs) can take HDMI input. You need VGA output to connect to the old CRT monitor that you don't want to upgrade. The issue isn't that the new tablet doesn't work in random places, it's that it doesn't work in a single specific place. The fix for that is to add an adaptor in that specific place, not to carry one everywhere.

  21. You don't need to carry around the adaptor, you leave it attached to your monitor and plug in the tablet when you get near it...

  22. Re:More Adobe Viral Distribution Software on Google and Adobe Contribute Open Source Rasterizer to FreeType · · Score: 1
  23. Re:Too late? on Google and Adobe Contribute Open Source Rasterizer to FreeType · · Score: 2

    Pretty much any vaguely modern API is resolution independent. Cocoa was even back when it was called OpenStep - everything is done in units of PostScript points, not pixels. The problem is that the display server has a fixed resolution. Before Xinerama, X11 was better at this, as each screen would report its own DPI and the toolkit could render windows at different sizes depending on which screen they were on. Unfortunately, the down side of this was that it didn't support windows spanning multiple screens. To do it properly, the toolkit has to be able to render different rectangles of each window at different resolutions. This isn't especially hard to do. With the OpenStep APIs, every view responds to a message that tells it to render the subset that overlaps a specific rectangle into the current graphics context, so you could just call that once for each rectangle and then composite the result. Or you could go for the really rough solution of having each overlapping window rendered 2 (or more) times, once for display and then cropping the result. The problem is that a lot of custom views do things like loading bitmap images depending on the resolution of the display, and these would end up looking ugly on the different screens.

  24. Re:why not ban capitalism? on Paul's Call To Abolish the TSA, One Year Later · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, it's true. It is possible to become wealthy in a capitalist society by providing a product or service that is a strong net benefit to society. Unfortunately, it's easier to become more wealthy by exploiting others.

  25. Re:chrome fails MathML acid1 on Firefox Is the First Browser To Pass the MathML Acid2 Test · · Score: 3, Informative

    MathML attempts to separate the content and presentation. This is fine if you have a tool that properly supports both (I've never used one, maybe Mathematica or similar does?), but it sucks for most editors. The idea is that you can have a single format that describes both how to lay out equations and their semantics. In practice, pretty much everyone who generates MathML does it from the TeX equivalent and so only ever gets the presentation form. The other advantage of MathML is that each individual element is exposed via the DOM, so it's easy to manipulate equations from JavaScript, although I don't think I've ever seen that done either.

    Part of the problem with a format that is basically impossible for humans to write is that it also ends up being difficult to produce tools that can write and display it, which is why it's taken 10 years or so for MathML to get even a token amount of support in mainstream browsers...