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User: ChunderDownunder

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Comments · 3,381

  1. Re:What about McGyver on The X-Files To Return · · Score: 1

    Californication is the follow-on series anyway. Hank (Mulder), Karen (Scully), Becca (Scully's love child with either aliens or Mulder, no one knows)

    All it needs is some young Snowden-like stud (played by Tim Minchin!) to sweep Scully off her feet and make Fox jealous, all the while he's having a bit on the side with Walter Skinner's jailbait daughter. Melodrama at it's finest?

  2. Re:When did Slashdot become a press agent? on Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    because Steve Jobs.

  3. Re:Stata Center on RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More · · Score: 1

    He he. I wondered if MIT had done a deal with Martin Odersky's Typesafe or partnered with EPFL.

    Scala as a teaching language in the USA?

  4. Re:Nothing new on Gaming On Linux With Newest AMD Catalyst Driver Remains Slow · · Score: 1

    I don't game and my linux box has intel graphics. :)

    I would consider a "steam machine" though if I wanted a new development box for my office desktop. Whether I stuck with nouveau or loaded the properietary graphics would depend on whether the free drivers were sufficient.

  5. Re:It's not the almonds. on How 'Virtual Water' Can Help Ease California's Drought · · Score: 1

    I have a friend who used to grind his own almonds as a health-kick but went back to cow's milk after his fad diet ended. :( For the record I did go through a soy-latte phase a few years ago, so I'm no stranger to faux-milk.

    Lamb is a fairly common meat here in Australia, though not as popular in certain other countries I've visited, where it's regarded as peasant food. But then similarly, goat meat never caught on here because of the gamey taste. Kangaroo has never caught on either, which is a shame given they're culled to control overpopulation.

    Switching animals isn't a whole solution but if beef is the worst offender then surely divesting in production by promoting alternatives, including vegan recipes, is a strategy worth persuing?

    (Sorry if I have unintentionally offended your vegan sensibilities - I'm a pragmatist from a long line of meat-eaters!)

  6. Re:It's not the almonds. on How 'Virtual Water' Can Help Ease California's Drought · · Score: 1

    Are there enough converts to veganism in achieving a significant water reduction? That is to say almond milk and tempeh will appeal to only a small fraction of the population.

    Do Californians love their steak too much, or would less water-intensive animal protein such as chicken, seafood or lamb reduce the state's water consumption? Have there been any studies on the relative water usage in production of goat or sheep cheese vs moo-cheese?

  7. Re:Elon Musk vs Richard Branson on Virgin Could Take On Tesla With Electric Car · · Score: 1

    Virgin is doing okay in Australia as the #2 airline. They also do mobile phone services running on the Optus network.

  8. Re:You're doing it wrong. on Internet of Things Endangered By Inaccurate Network Time, Says NIST · · Score: 1

    I expect Apple Watch apps will be written in Swift.

    But now you're telling me the watch itself won't keep accurate time because Darwin isn't an RTOS? Suckers!

  9. Re: It's win-win. on Tag Heuer Partners With Google and Intel To Create Luxury Apple Watch Rival · · Score: 1

    Isn't that the point of Quark, their 'wearable' SoC?

  10. Re:Then ID would be required on Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US · · Score: 1

    We use the honor system in my country. Just state your full name and address...

    Incidence of voter fraud is statistically insignificant.

  11. Re:New study? on Speaking a Second Language May Change How You See the World · · Score: 1

    Did language acquisition help in your journeys or do you travel only to countries where they speak Canadian? :)

    For me I learned Spanish as an adult merely as an intellectual exercise as a podgy IT nerd. I'd never left my home country before but it did inspire me to travel to Europe and South America - but only in hindsight was it a means to an end. I'm currently doing a 3-week MOOC on Dutch, which again is an intellectual exercise but may inspire me to travel to, say, Belgium at some point in the future.

    But yeah, I can relate to being a teenager living in an Anglophone city learning French because doing a language was a required part of the curriculum.

  12. Hello on Windows 10's Biometric Security Layer Introduced · · Score: 1

    Evidently they did not consult Firefox on the name.

    My laptop way back in 2007 running XP had a finger scanner for logins and the like. I guess it's nice if there's a UI/Authentication API standardized for which vendors only need to plugin in a hardware implementation.

  13. Re:Do that for the laptops as well on Fujitsu Could Help Smartphone Chips Run Cooler · · Score: 1

    "Mac Minis of the time".

    Which in the P4 era (mid 2000s), would have been powered by motorola PowerPC chips as used in mac laptops.

  14. Re:Some pedants are more pedantic than others... on Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English' · · Score: 2

    And ending sentences with a preposition is exactly what every Germanic language has, dones and always will do.

    "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." - Churchill.

  15. Re:What What? on Windows 10 Enables Switching Between Desktop and Tablet Modes · · Score: 2

    Well for the last 4-5 years I haven't owned a tablet. :) A phone can do everything a tablet can do, albeit on a tiny screen such as "convenient data access and occasional very light data entry".

    What constitutes a "real PC" these days? Laptops are, for many, a desktop replacement. Touchscreens are becoming the norm because it's a 'value-add' that adds little to the purchase price. If you embed the CPU in the screen instead of the keyboard, you have the option of detaching the keyboard altogether.

    Should one device perform both functions, or do we stick with the Apple mantra that you need both an iPad AND a macbook? Or the Google mantra that, increasingly, you don't need a desktop OS altogether?

  16. Re:What What? on Windows 10 Enables Switching Between Desktop and Tablet Modes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well I agree with GP's assertion that a 4" phone shouldn't have the same interface as a 2x21" desktop. As such one of my 'computers' runs Firefox OS and the other KDE atop debian.

    But I don't have a tablet in my life. A 9" phone, running iOS or Android, that doesn't make phone calls, no thanks! What would convince me to buy a tablet would be one that comes with a fancy stand (we used to call it a docking station back in the day) that allows me to plug in all my existing peripherals and transform into a workstation OS.

    MS share that vision. KDE share that vision via plasma (though their Vivaldi tablet didn't make it to market).

  17. Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm? on Intel Will Reportedly Land Apple As a Modem Chip Customer · · Score: 1

    To rely on a rival SoC vendor for parts undermines Apple's commitment to develop their own chip, as opposed to using an off-the-shelf component such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Exynos or Tegra.

  18. Re:The 20th Anniversary Macintosh on Steve Jobs's Big Miss: TV · · Score: 1

    12,000 only made; never intended for mass production.

    It was a Jony Ive concept machine - the iMac G4 didn't debut an LCD desktop until almost 5 years later.

  19. USB dongle on Steve Jobs's Big Miss: TV · · Score: 1

    Seriously, $30 retail for a DVB-T tuner to watch free to air digital...

    Another FUD article denigrating the great leader? Jobs missed nothing.

    Of course Apple ][ machines used TVs for output via RF modulation.

  20. It's a *trap* :) on Google's Angular 2 Being Built With Microsoft's TypeScript · · Score: 3, Funny

    Also how are the tools for typescript? Having static typing but no auto-complete IDE is a major drawback.

    Visual Studio 2013.

  21. Re:This is good on edX Welcomes 'The University of Microsoft' Into Its Fold · · Score: 1

    Which Google are embracing in Angular as per today's story.

    Getting a team of half a dozen or so to do a mooc is way cheaper than a 3 day training course.

  22. Re:Work with IE 8 on Google's Angular 2 Being Built With Microsoft's TypeScript · · Score: 1

    Your client saveie6.com has migrated to IE 8?

  23. Re:Write-only code. on Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? · · Score: 1

    Dan Grossman's Coursera offering has Racket as one of the languages too.

    https://www.coursera.org/cours...

  24. Re:Oops on Reactions to the New MacBook and Apple Watch · · Score: 1

    Well I've mainly worked for corporations where the Windows desktop reigns supreme and most correspondence is still done with Office and Outlook plus all the inhouse tools they foist upon us. If I can't get away with Libreoffice on Linux and use an ad-hoc calendaring system then having a copy of Windows on hand is then the next easiest thing than to find that this piece of software doesn't run on OS X and you'll have to run a copy of Windows in a VM.

    Certainly that's been my experience in the technological backwater of Australia. Perhaps the acceptance of platform agnostic workflows is greater in other parts of the world.

  25. Re:Casting on Was Linus Torvalds Right About C++ Being So Wrong? · · Score: 1

    We had such typing in Java once. Then programs started failing at runtime with a ClassCastException. So the burden moved to the compiler in the form of generics. This sporned a new category of NullPointerException, when referencing primitive int and double variables (autoboxing). So people switched to Scala, where null pointers where eliminated at compile time via the Option type.

    Casting is a bad smell in a sufficiently evolved statically typed language.