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User: simcop2387

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  1. Re:Found at 125 GeV on LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson · · Score: 2

    if you think it's disturbing now, realize that the mass that that field gives everything will also bend and twist light like aether was thought to!

  2. Re:I know the open drivers may not be as good on XBMC Developers Criticize AMD's Linux Driver · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not yet, AMD hasn't opened up the specs of the hardware video decoder for fear of DRM and other problems with it. There is work being done to do the decoding with the shader processor and it sort of works for mpeg2 (at least for me anyway) but not for anything more advanced. For the nvidia open source drivers i believe it's the same situation.

  3. Re:WTF is csoonline? on US-CERT Discloses Security Flaw In 64-Bit Intel Chips · · Score: 1

    The XEN hypervisor can potentially cause all guest systems (even dom0 is a guest under XEN) to get into a problem. Redhat ships a number of products directly under XEN so that may be why they report it.

  4. Re:users vs producers on Study Shows Teen Gamers Like Tech, But Don't All Crave IT Jobs · · Score: 1

    Actually eating might corrolate decently. It's rare to find a chef that doesn't like to eat.

  5. Re:Found happiness elsewhere on Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't You Running KDE? · · Score: 2

    It mostly became impracticle to keep around after distros started taking measures to kill HAL after the HAL team had deprecated itself and was trying to move everything away from it. No idea what version was around then of kde4 though I had switched to it a bit before that since the bugs that existed didn't affect me too much and i didn't like gnome then either.

  6. Re:No OS support. on Where Are All the High-Resolution Desktop Displays? · · Score: 1

    I've actually got an interestingly broken one. It isn't "off" or "on" but only has about 4 states in between instead of the 2^6 that the others have. Certain colors it's overbright, others its overdark. It's very weird to see and play with.

  7. Re:Done. on Is OpenStack the New Linux? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I always think of Betteridge's Law of Headlines

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines

  8. Re:Did I miss something here? on Global Payments Breach Led To Prepaid Card Fraud · · Score: 1

    I don't know. Getting a bunch of prepaid cards and then using them to get cash back at places doesn't sound like a half bad idea if you can pull it off fast enough to get some money.

  9. Re:Warranty? on Philips Releases 100W-Equivalent LED Bulb, Runs On Just 23 Watts · · Score: 1

    The problem isn't necessarily the LEDs themselves but how they're hooked up. I'd be surprised if they aren't hooked up with a full wave rectifier or some other support circuitry to get them to output a more stable light, otherwise it'd be like cheap LED christmas lights all over your house.

  10. Re:How does this help? on British MPs Propose Censoring Internet By Default · · Score: 4, Informative

    IPV6 would get you that, IPV6 NAT would get you where you're at today with ipv4, one ip to the isp and outside world and then everything inside has a private address. NAT would make this impossible to do well.

  11. Re:Electronics Vs Furniture on IKEA Announces Furniture With Integrated TV, Speakers, and Blu-ray · · Score: 1

    That's because you can accesorize them into pink!

    http://compare.ebay.com/like/170541070215?var=lv&ltyp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar
    http://www.otterbox.com/strength/strength,default,pg.html

    those are just the two i found off the top of google. I'm not sure about laptops, but for phones there's a huge market out there of customizations to make it "you" just like the thousands of others of people who buy the same cover.

  12. Re:Diesel on Hybrid Car Owners Not Likely To Buy Another Hybrid · · Score: 2

    I'm likely to consider diesel myself, though in my area it's actually the other way around price wise, about 20-30 cents higher than gas but it's been far more stable and if you really do get that much better milage it'll still pay for itself given how long the engines usually last.

  13. Re:Wayland vs X on Update On Wayland and X11 Support · · Score: 1

    Why hope it flops? There's currently projects to do network transparent wayland. In fact it should likely end up working much better than doing X over the network since it will be able to do things that and actually compress the data properly to get better transfer times and won't need so many round trips just to draw something (last i looked X needs about 4 round trips for putting something on the screen, minimum, all synchronous). Along with that you've got the rather annoying problems where X11 doesn't provide any good ways to render things in any decent way that actually works among all the drivers: Xrender [held up by nvidia still for their fencing code], XAA [being dropped since most other drivers have moved on], EXA [i think this is the latest one], UXA [done by intel that's very similar to EXA but uses GEM instead of TTM for memory on the graphics card], and then a number of others that are in embedded graphics DDXs that are only supported by the manufacturer because they don't want to give out code.

    The situation with X11 is not as full of rainbows as people seem to think. Because of all the stuff above, most toolkits and libraries have stopped using X11 for doing anything other than pushing bitmaps, they're doing all font rendering in application, all widget drawing in application, all scrolling in application, the only thing the X server gets used for by the applications anymore is to display images and get input. That's what wayland is being written for, to replace the rather horrific design issues of the X11 server for handling the hardware.

    Wayland aims to fix all this by instead using the kernel interfaces KMS and indirectly DRI2 (through Mesa). This leaves one interface to talk to hardware to maintain, far less code for bugs to be found in, and makes it possible to support things that X11 can't do right now like supporting hot plugging graphics cards, NVIDIA Optimus (the "support" in linux right now isn't really support. It's running two X servers and copying one of them to the other to make it look like there's only one).

  14. Re:Black dot in the center of stars? on 150 Gigapixel Sky Image Contains 1 Billion Stars · · Score: 1

    This is pretty typical of CMOS sensors, you can see it happen on a digital camera if you try hard enough (usually need a laser).

  15. Re:What is the matter with car companies on A Hybrid Car With Detachable Engine Proposed · · Score: 1

    While I don't know your situation and obviously this vehicle isn't designed for you. I've got to ask why you don't move? a 300+ mi commute is far from trivial it'd make me consider a place closer to work to avoid that.

    It could easily save a fortune for you in fuel do so.

  16. Re: Just Wait on 3D Printer Models For Universal Construction Toy Connectors · · Score: 1

    Being worked on right now.

    http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rocknail/filabot-plastic-filament-maker

    Currently waiting to receive mine to give a try, last message from the guy (in the comments, not the posted updates) says that the major systems are working and gives an indication that the issures right now are going to be getting parts sourced and kits made and everything. Still definitely at the hobby stage but it'll work great for recycling bad prints or for reclaiming material from other sources.

  17. Re:No good choices here. on KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers · · Score: 1

    It can even be disabled with driconf and/or doing export vblank_mode=0; pay attention to the lowercase. I've found the open source drivers to be far far far better than the catalyst drivers for stability. I hate the power management (I can only get it down to about 40W total usage for my laptop compared to 30W with the catalyst drivers), but it has been getting better and better. I've actually been running the development builds recently and they seem to be very stable still.

  18. Re:So, when do I get Achievements in real life? on Visual Studio Gets Achievements, Badges, Leaderboards · · Score: 1

    You should talk to the BSA, they started all this shit. http://www.bsa.org/

  19. Re:Answer, in brief: on Can NASA Warm Cold Fusion? · · Score: 3, Informative

    No Water would not likely be the waste product. It'd be helium in most fusion reactors. Which means that we'll all have lots of latex balloons for parties.

  20. Re:But wait. on Geek Tool: Slashdot Video of Award Winning 3D Printer From CES · · Score: 2

    You can cut that down to half an hour of possibly messing with the printer by just downloading one [1]. As these printers get more common and "standardized" like with the Makerbot Replicator and the Printrbot, it'll soon be less hassle to print one. Though the cost is still higher on the plastic bits to go in, it is being worked on by the reprap people to get the printers to be efficient and as more of them become available the cost of the spools will go down. There's been some work at directly using injection molding pellets but I don't believe it's printed any fruit yet. That alone will get the cost down by about 50% per object.

    [1] http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=spoon

  21. Re:Level of detail on Geek Tool: Slashdot Video of Award Winning 3D Printer From CES · · Score: 2

    While I don't know about this particular machine, some of the repraps have been doing some very fine detail models down to 0.01m layer height [1] This combined with I believe about 0.3mm horizontal resolution should let you get some decent detail at 28mm sizes. You might still need to do a little additional clean up (the hot plastic like to make thin strings on some models, and some other minor things like that), to get a finished product but it could easily end up cheaper than some of the prices I've heard of other people paying for things like Warhammer ($4k investment for an army to play with... just go to the dollar store and buy 100 little green army men!). Along with units it'd also work well for doing buildings and other structures, possibly better than for units.

    [1] http://blog.reprap.org/2011/12/001-layer-height-on-prusa-mendel.html

  22. Re:Unlikely to support life on Three Tiny Exoplanets Suggest Solar System Not So Special · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While that is true, it is nearly impossible for us to determine such things right now. That's why current searches are looking for things that appear to be earth like for the simple reason that we know what to look for. Until we can find other things that we KNOW are life we can hardly begin to speculate on if we are detecting things that might be life but not as we know it. As we get more comfortable in detecting these kinds of things we'll be much much better equipped to come to conclusions for things we haven't seen.

  23. Re:Interesting... on Ask Slashdot: Is E-Learning a Viable Option? · · Score: 1

    Even when "adequately" insured it can still be a nightmare. I've got a neighbor that spent about 4 months fighting with the insurance company to get the money to fix a car when they got hit by an uninsured driver. This was because even though they were stopped at a stopsign the insurance company still wanted to claim that they were at fault and not pay anybody at all. It can still be a huge imposition due to the nature of some of the stupidity of the insurance industries.

  24. Re:Linux Driver State? on AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested · · Score: 1

    I've personally had stability issues with the AMD drivers for my laptop. But this seems to be because they only try to support ubuntu and all the versions that they use, anything else it's hard to get a fix for until ubuntu either updates to your version or you find a work around in the community. The open source drivers aren't as performant but they are much more stable for me.

  25. Re:Srsly? on Ready For Your Payroll Software Update? · · Score: 2

    #define PERCENT = / 100.0f
    #define PAYROLL_TAX = 12 PERCENT

    Just like we learned in school!