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User: PaladinAlpha

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  1. Re:Why not promote a Dvorak keyboard instead? on Man Campaigns For Addition of 'Th' Key To Keyboard · · Score: 1

    Maybe you should have a look at the wiki page with references before making up complete bullshit.

    As of 2005, writer Barbara Blackburn was the fastest alphanumerical English language typist in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, she has maintained 150 wpm for 50 minutes, and 170 wpm for shorter periods. She has been clocked at a peak speed of 212 wpm.

  2. Ridiculous on Fear of Thinking War Machines May Push U.S. To Exascale · · Score: 1

    This is completely, factually wrong. I'm funded by DoE exascale work. I mean, it's *exactly wrong*.

  3. Re:does not compute on Google Redesigns Image Search, Raises Copyright and Hosting Concerns · · Score: 1

    And copies results from Google.

  4. Re:I don't believe 1% of computers give wrong answ on Whose Bug Is This Anyway? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You don't have any idea what you're talking about, and that's why you don't understand what he's talking about.

  5. Re:Oh! Look! on Video Purports To Show Successful Hover Bike Test Flights · · Score: 1

    A bicycle is not flying.

    With a bike, you control balance directly -- i.e. leaning and whatnot actually dominates the force on the bike, allowing you to control it with the same reflexes that allow you to stand up and run away from tigers.

    What they have with this thing is controls. You're once removed from the action -- your reflexes create inputs that the device acts on. It's a second-order effect, and that means it is much, much more difficult to do without concentration.

  6. Re:No Genesis computer on Sealed-Box Macs: Should Computers Be Disposable? · · Score: 1

    This is a terrible idea.

    If you're running your development environment on the target hardware, how do you deploy? How do you run your game? If it's inside the environment, you've stripped resources from the system. If it's not within the environment, how do you do testing? Debugging? And if you do both (i.e. a limited-resource run for debugging and a separate deploy) how on earth is that better than having a dedicated development machine that can debug the game at full power beside the console that you have to deploy to anyway?

  7. Re:After Rage on John Carmack: Kudos To Valve, But Linux Is Still Not a Viable Gaming Market · · Score: 1

    XBox Live sounds pretty good. Where do I download it? What? You're saying a console market and the PC market are the same? So if it's something they've already got figured out, where is the amazing PC version? Because right now what they have is GFWL, and it's awful. That kind of lets the air out of your argument, don't you think?

    Oh, and, just so we're in agreement, Steam has features that when using other platforms you have to use "Google" and "open a tab in the browser" to emulate? I rest my case.

  8. Re:After Rage on John Carmack: Kudos To Valve, But Linux Is Still Not a Viable Gaming Market · · Score: 1

    So basically what you've said is none of that stuff exists.

    Steam sales aren't about the "publisher setting prices", they're about people knowing every day Steam runs a deep discount on a game.

    "Up to the developer to implement" means it doesn't exist since there is no common API.

    Forums are a requirement -- I always check them (as many people do) before making a purchase. That's a key source of information on support levels, compatibility, and so forth.

    And, yes, Clancy, everyone for the past twenty years has had ratings; that's not what I said. Steam has integration with MetaCritic, a review aggregator.

    You, like Microsoft, are missing the point of what makes Steam so usable. It's not just another App store. It has a lot of stuff built specifically for games and a culture that encourages purchasing.

    Let me put it another way. Valve nailed it in one with Steam. Microsoft gave us Games for Windows Live. Any questions?

  9. Re:After Rage on John Carmack: Kudos To Valve, But Linux Is Still Not a Viable Gaming Market · · Score: 1

    This is assuming that Windows Marketplace will offer:
    - Deep 50%-75% sales
    - Automatic updating/patching of games
    - Cloud-based per-application file backup
    - Integrated social and communications tools
    - Integrated unobtrusive DRM
    - Integrated achievement (or similar) tracking
    - Integration with MetaCritic, etc.
    - Per-product forums
    - Et cetera

    Pretty tall order for an app store supposedly for general merchandise, no?

  10. Re:They've turned their backs on Steve on Apple Comes Clean, Admits To Doing Market Research · · Score: 2

    Like most stats of this kind, these numbers are from an ad network -- i.e. they're measuring ad views on their network by device. This shows that their ads are displayed more often on Apple products, not "actual usage". Different ad networks are more popular on Android; that's all.

  11. Re:Best known for protecting the Pres... on When Art, Apple and the Secret Service Collide · · Score: 1

    That link in no way supports your assertion that the Secret Service was started for protecting against identity theft. You are being disingenuous or dishonest.

  12. Re:Functional on Why Is Wikipedia So Ugly? · · Score: 1

    Okay, I'll bite. What would you do with HTML5 or AJAX to improve the Wikipedia experience? For instance, I'm reading the article on cats. What specifically would you do using "modern techs like AJAX and HTML5 to make it faster and show/hide content on demand as needed by the reader"?

  13. Re:see plus on Objective-C Overtakes C++, But C Is Number One · · Score: 1

    In fact I think one can argue that the current incarnation of C++ is a dog in terms of performance. With all of that template "goodness" you are just loping on stuff that Java and C# can do in an easier manner.

    Templates carry no run-time overhead, unlike the C# and Java generics, etc. That's why template-driven programming produces such fast code.

  14. Re:fp on Objective-C Overtakes C++, But C Is Number One · · Score: 1

    OK:

    typedef struct button {

        long long color[3];

        void (*onClick)(int);
    } Button;

    Button okay;
    Button cancel;
    okay.onClick =
    cancel.onClick =
    okay.color[2] = 0xffffffff;
    cancel.color[2] = 0xffffffff;

    The C version is probably smaller and faster than your version.

    That's incorrect. Your version will produce code that is at best as fast as a class with an inline color setter (that should be in the ctor, really) and an inline settable click function. If you use virtual inheritance to override click instead of passing a function pointer, the C++ will be faster, as modern compilers can inline many virtual function calls when they know the type at compile time.

    But, as written, the provided class would produce identical assembly to your code, with in addition explicit construction/destruction semantics and easier invocation.

    Oh, and by the way, you left color[0] and [1] undefined on both of your Buttons.

  15. Re:How far how fast on What's To Love About C? · · Score: 1

    If you're pursuing honest discussion, I apologize for the snark.

    Generally, on limited (embedded) platforms, the functionality exposed by iostreams isn't needed, as there's no stdio, and no real buffering to speak of. In such situations you'd still get mileage out of STL containers (possibly with a custom allocator), which carry negligible size implications, but not really any of the heavyweight stuff like streaming.

    I'm not a huge fan of iostreams myself, but they're worth using for the type safety, and if you can afford a printf call you can typically afford the 250k link.

  16. Re:Subset holy wars; STL without exceptions on What's To Love About C? · · Score: 1

    So write that logic into your allocator. Generally there are two options when your allocator gives you NULL; that's either retry or abort, and writing those into your allocator is trivial. That's what's so good about C++, btw. (You're still incurring no runtime overhead aside from whatever extra cycles you are burning in your allocator with these checks, which you needed anyway.)

  17. Re:MultiBoot binaries for GBA on What's To Love About C? · · Score: 1

    Yes, because what he said was clearly "I always demand using iostreams on every single platform regardless of environment restrictions, and there's no such thing as a tradeoff."

  18. Re:Eh? This is how Skype works? on Microsoft Using Linux To Optimize Skype Traffic · · Score: 1

    So how's that XBox handheld working out for you?

  19. Re:Eh? This is how Skype works? on Microsoft Using Linux To Optimize Skype Traffic · · Score: 3, Informative

    having the worlds largest mobile phone manufacturer Nokia by the balls?

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, Microsoft + Nokia, taking the world by storm! Windows Phones everywhere! HAHAHAHAHA! They're gonna expand that 0.41 percent market share into something important real soon now!

    Anyway, that's all I -- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

  20. Re:Not worth it. on Ask Slashdot: DIY NAS For a Variety of Legacy Drives? · · Score: 3, Informative

    This.

    With such a wide range of storage sizes, you're going to have serious trouble setting up any kind of redundant encoding. To mirror a segment of data (or the moral equivalent with RAID-5 or RAID-6) you need segments of the same size; those segments are going to have to be no larger than the smallest drive. That means larger drives have to store multiple segments, but that the segments have to be arranged in a way such that a drive failure on one of the large drives doesn't take the RAID down. If the drives can't be bisected -- that is, divided into two piles of the same total size -- this is impossible, and the fact that your range is from .1TB to 3TB implies this might be the case.

    Think about it -- it's probably going to take most-to-all of those smaller drives to "mirror" the larger drive to make it redundant (and mirroring is the best you can do with just two drives). But having one side of the mirror spread across 9 drives makes failure laughably likely, to the point where you're paying performance penalties for nothing.

    Your alternative is to use a JBOD setup and have just contiguous space across all of the disks. This is the same problem, except when a drive goes you lose some random segment of data. That's acceptable for two or three drives in scratch storage, but you don't want to actually store things on that.

    Make no mistake -- those drives are going to die.

    Trust me on this; don't go down this road. Your actual options are to either pair up the disks as best you can, supplimenting with strategic purchases, and make 2-3 independent raids (and maybe even RAIDing those, but it'll be painful), or just write the whole thing off, put disks in if you have obvious candidates in your hardware, and donate the rest.

  21. Re:Mr. Wall, please sit down... on Oracle and the End of Programming As We Know It · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's actually one of Google's defenses. They didn't copy the entire Java API, just a portion of it. So no, if the ruling is in Oracle's favor (which is unlikely but not impossible), then you can't get away with fair-use.

    This is really, really scary for open source and GNU-like projects -- it's an attempt by a corporation to define copyright law in a way that lets big business completely shut down the academic "free exchange" culture once and for all.

    This is serious, guys.

  22. Re:Yes, but other than that, how did you like it? on Microsoft's Hotmail Challenge Backfires · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This would hold water if Microsoft weren't a convicted monopolist.

    They did some things right -- they gambled on backwards compatibility at expense of efficiency and won big-time. But they pulled a lot of dirty tricks, too, and their market position partly reflects that.

  23. Re:GPU programming is a nightmare. on Tegra 4 Likely To Include Kepler DNA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Half of our department's research sits directly on CUDA, now, and I haven't really had this experience at all. CUDA is as standard as you can get for NVIDIA architecture -- ditto OpenCL for AMD. The problem with trying to abstract that is the same problem with trying to use something higher-level than C -- you're targeting an accelerator meant to take computational load, not a general-purpose computer. It's very much systems programming.

    I'm honestly not really sure how much more abstact you could make it -- memory management is required because it's a fact of the hardware -- the GPU is across a bus and your compiler (or language) doesn't know more about your data semantics than you do. Pipelining and cache management are a fact of life in HPC already, and I haven't seen anything nutso you have to do to support proper instruction flow for nVidia cards (although I've mostly just targeted Fermi).

  24. Re:Thanks gcc! on GCC Turns 25 · · Score: 2

    This is more handwaving. Let me say it again.

    GCC's license has no effect on your source code or your finished binary. It doesn't matter if GCC is GPLv2, GPLv3, or GPLv9. It has no effect. It doesn't matter. It is exactly the same as if it were a proprietary product that you purchased. Better, in a lot of ways, but in no way worse. It doesn't change or affect your license on your final product in any way, and it doesn't require a "legal team" to ascertain that.

    LLVM's development has nothing to do with licensing. It started as a research project and continued as a result of GCC's relatively tangled and highly-domained code base. GCC can get away with that because it's good, but there's plenty of room for competitors, of course.

    Companies following procedures you describe are shooting themselves in the foot. Are you implying that when purchasing a product for integration in your toolchain there aren't licensing issues? Does your company just buy the first thing on a Google search without considering how it affects your product?

    And regarding mixing GPL 2/3 -- again, that's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Your product is not GCC, nor is your code being "incorporated" with it.

    Typically this attitude is the result of smear campaigns against vague licensing boogeymen by Microsoft sales people for upper management. Is that the case here?

  25. Re:Thanks gcc! on GCC Turns 25 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is just fearmongering. It's not complicated at all. If you don't hook GCC's (internal) intermediate code generation to run some custom process on, then you are covered by the compilation exemption.

    Configuring your build to output GCC intermediate, retain that output, modify it with an external tool, and resume the build with the modified intermediate code is not something that will happen by accident. The implications of GCC being GPLv3 are, exactly, none.

    FreeBSD's philosophical objections to GPLv3 are well known and they have the right to maintain those objections, but that has little bearing on GCC's use for a proprietary end product.

    I would be interested to hear about your build process that you feel is likely to accidentally create a non-exempt compilation. Do you have an example?