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User: Knobby

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  1. Re:Chiropractor: A slight step above witch doctor on Internet Backbone DDOS "Largest Ever" · · Score: 2

    I'd have to agree with you on that!

    I have a number of friends working in the field of physical therapy and they consider chiropractors as a threat to public health. The PTs tell horror stories about people who've been going to chiropractors for years and being "adjusted" rather than talking to a Dr. who can refer them to a PT who will help them fix the problem (through exercise and stretching)

    I had some knee problems and talked to a good friend of mine.. She spent 5 minutes diagnosing the problem (an imbalance in the strength of the muscles on each side of my thigh causing the kneecap to slide across the knee as well as along it).. She told me to buy a new pair of shoes because the soles on my current pair were worn unevenly and that was probably the cause of the problem. Then she recommended a few exercises and some stretching techniques.. After a few weeks, my knee felt great and I haven't felt any pain in 2-3 months..

  2. Re:She did nothing wrong. on Microsoft may Sanction the 'Switcher' PR-Rep · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, there were a number of comments posted the other day that pointed out Mac (rather than windows) path delimiters recorded in the word document that was posted on-line. This implies that the may have been no "switch" at all..

    If I were Microsoft I'd probably be just as pissed that she mentioned having to reinstall Outlook while she was attempting to make the switch.

    As far as Apple's Switch ads are concerned, it's hard to believe they aren't real. The people get up there and state their name. If I knew the person on the screen and knew that they were lying, then you can bet that I'd say something..

  3. Re:Power 4, here we come on Apple Is Buyer of New 64-Bit IBM Chips · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think what the above poster was referring to was the time and energy that Apple has reportedly spent making sure that OSX can be ported to multiple platforms. There have been rumors of OSX (or at least Rhapsody) running on everything from ARM through Alphas and UltraSparc processors.

    How many of those rumors are true? Well, without being inside Apple, it's hard to know, but I wouldn't be surprised. NetBSD and its associated utilities run on just about everything under the sun. I have no idea how portable the MACH kernel is, but I'm guessing it's been ported to the ARM and the Alpha. That leaves the interface. Keeping that platform independent might be tricky, but I'll bet Apple's been keeping it in mind. They've known that the G5 was going to be 64 bit for a year or two now..

  4. It's a Slash-vertisement... on Intel's New Pentium 4 Chipsets Reviewed · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Also is this a review or an advertisment?

    This is a product announcement masquerading as a story or better known as a slash-vertisement.. I'm not implying that Intel is paying for this advertising any more than Apple pays for the articles in their dedicated section, but if it quacks like a duck, then damn it, it's probably a duck.

  5. Re:Yo ho ho.. on (CD) Pirates Take to the Ocean · · Score: 4, Funny

    Pirate Linux sounds something like PorthOS.. PorthOS is something a few friends of mine and I kicked around whenever the alternative OS announcements on /. became boring or we felt like tormenting the IT guys on campus (/. DDOS).. Anyway, PorthOS was going to be the Anti-Linux. The heaviest, most feature laden, OS ever. Error messages would be passed through text-to-speech and yelled at you in Esperanto with a drunken-french accent..

    Someday it'll happen!

  6. Re:Things like this... on BitKeeper EULA Forbids Working On Competition · · Score: 2

    To heck with the gpl, try the Free Oject-Oriented License

  7. Re:start-up speed on Review: Lindows 2.0 Dissected · · Score: 2

    Mac OS X takes a little while to install (about 15 minutes while I have dinner on my PBG3/400), but Mac OS 9- could be booted from the CD and then you could drag the system folder onto the blank disk. That's all it took to install the Mac OS. About 30 seconds for a minimal install..

  8. Re:Hmmm... on Apple and IBM Working Together on 64-bit CPUs · · Score: 2

    The current G4 has pretty miserable double precision floating point performance. The POWER4 chips on the other hand, absolutely rock. I can assure you that every scientist who's spent 5 minutes in front of OS X has dreamed of POWER4 FP performance driving the codes they develop on their OS X machine..

  9. Re:Hybrid Modifications on Gas/Electric Hybrids, Air Cars in the News · · Score: 2

    However, the real goal of all of these vehicles is not fuel-efficiency! It is having a low impact upon the atmosphere. It is far more important to be able to continue to breathe clean air than to be able to continue to afford petrol!

    What?

    So, it's not efficiency, but low-impact? Okay. How do you define low-impact? How do you reduce impact? My guess is that your answer will have some efficiency component to it. If I design a vehicle that runs on water, but requires 1000 gallons per mile, you'll probably agree that the lack of efficiency of my device is resulting in a large environmental impact.. Mileage counts!

  10. Re:I strongly recommend the Civic Hybrid on Gas/Electric Hybrids, Air Cars in the News · · Score: 3, Informative

    So, you are saying that I should drive a 100lb piece of plastic at 70MPH (putting my life on the line) down the CA freeways

    Actually, trucks are not held to the same safety standards as cars and are often less safe to drive. If you smash into a Honda Civic, you're correct in assuming that the Civic with bear the brunt of the damage and the Civic owner may sustain much more severe injuries than you. This might also be the case if you collide with a Lincoln Town Car despite it's large mass. In both cases the cars are designed to crush and absorb impact. Your truck is not designed in such a manner and the impact experienced by the car will approximate an impact with an unyielding object (such as concrete pillar) at an increased velocity.

    So, you're probably safer if you smash into cars, but if you hit anything that is not designed to crush, you're screwed! The frame will keep your vehicle from absorbing the impact energy, and your body will be forced to compensate..

  11. Re:ical, address book clutter on Use Your Mac to Share iCal Calendars · · Score: 2

    Apple could make one application that bundles all these things together, by why would you want that? If I want to write a mail client that shares information with address book and iCal, I can without having to deal with Mail.app. Each application should be small, well suited to a particular set of tasks, and easily tied to other applications.. Apple's doing this pretty well..

  12. Re:I love my Prius!!! on Ford Pulls The Plug on Electric Cars · · Score: 2

    I've been impressed by the ride of the Prius, and the features are certainly on par with most other cars in it's class. However, citing a 48.2 mpg average for a 440 mile trip is pretty pathetic. Honda Civics, Geo Metros, Subaru Justys, and a handful of other gasoline powered cars have been getting better mileage than this for 10-15 years now.

    Hybrid cars shine most brightly in stop and go traffic. Not on the highways!

  13. There's a FAT32 version... on New MP3 License Terms Demand $0.75 Per Decoder · · Score: 2

    Of the iPod that the x86 users can use with ephpod, or a handful of other pieces of software.

  14. Re:They Say Recovery is Easy...Yeah Right on The Day The Music Died: Windows Media and DRM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder how Apple will handle the same situation.

    My iPod has a little "Don't steal music" on its back. That simple suggestion and linking the iPod/iTunes synchronization to a single machine (not really much of a hurdle when you have Appletalk over TCP/IP and can mount a remote drive containing the music anyway) is all Apple has done. I don't see them doing a whole lot more. Their market is made up of a lot of people who create the content that MS is trying to control.

  15. Re:Well on Dell No Longer Selling Systems w/o Microsoft OS · · Score: 2

    Why don't we hear the Mac people complaining about similar things? As far as I know, though I may be wrong, you can't purchase a Mac with no operating system on it. In fact, Apple's selling practices are more constrained than Microsoft, they just don't have the market share MSFT does.

    You're not hearing a lot of Mac people complan, because most of us by the hardware so we can run the OS that comes packaged with it.. If we wanted to run Linux or MS Windows, we wouldn't buy a Mac.

  16. Re:Pre-install Word! on Microsoft vs. Apple's "Thunder" · · Score: 2

    Nah! Assign a handful of programmers, and a interface design guru to work on OpenOffice for OS X and install that on all Macs.

  17. Re:Why not MAC OS X he says? Re:Other OS's? on A Linux User Goes Back · · Score: 2

    Last I checked Apple doesnt have a try before you buy program.

    Are there any Apple stores in your area? You can hang out in the store for hours and play to your hearts content. I've never made it to one of the stores, but I have a close friend who grew up in a Windows household.. Last Christmas he & his family were wandering through the mall and decided to check out the Apple Store.. After an hour of playing around, they decided to ditch their x86 boxes. Today he and his family have an iMac, a couple of iBooks, and a pair of iPods.. All this because they had the opportunity to play with the systems and like what they saw..

  18. Re:Still delighted with my Prius on Alternative-Fuel Vehicle Recommendations? · · Score: 2

    You may prefer the feel of the brakes on the Civic, and in ten years I bet it's easier to find Civic parts than Prius parts.

    I drove a friend's Prius recently. I was rather disappointed. It felt like I was dragging an anchor.. That's a little off-topic though. What I wanted to mention was that it's very difficult to find a Prius in comparison to the Hybrid Civic. This is partially due to the choices made by the Honda engineers. By sticking with the Civic chassis and body work they don't need to do anything fancy with the production lines. That means cheaper, more readily available hybrids from Honda than Toyota. .. And as you mentioned, it probably means that parts will be easier to find for the hybrid Civics ten years from now..

  19. Re:Steel is an alloy on New Alloy Stronger Than Fe And Ti · · Score: 2

    Titanium (Ti) is a single-element metal, however.

    Alloying titanium with vanadium and aluminum will dramatically increase it's strength.

  20. Re:Best line on Review: Men In Black II · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For those wondering "WTF?," Take a look here. On the seventh line, there's a link to an image of a ballchin boy..

  21. Re:Now all we need is solar cell towers on Freecharge Windup Mobile Phone Power Source · · Score: 2

    I'd pay $10 more per month for a cell system that worked that way.

    Why? If the telecom can install a tower in east bumf*%k with having to run power to it, they could probably cover the costs of adding the solar cell and possibly a wind turbine.. This should cost you less, not more..

  22. Re:I have to say... on PC Users Switch to Apple · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but for things that actually matter to me like kernel compiles, mp3 encoding, or gaming

    Under OS X kernel compiles are a non-issue unless you're hacking around inside the Darwin kernel. MP3 encoding is pretty quick. I believe the MP3 encoding routine used by iTunes is Altivec optimized so it encodes as fast as it suck the music off the cd. Gaming is the only thing on your list that would be difficult for anyone to argue..

  23. Re:some things to ponder about. on First Benchmarks of AMD Hammer Prototype · · Score: 2

    if the main reason behind the hammer is to directly compete in the server line, then it should be the hammer vs itanium2 vs sparc vs pa-risc vs alpha vs powerpc

    Not PowerPC but Power.. The PowerPC chips are nice low power chips that work well in embedded applications and desktop/laptop machines. The Power chips are the real server chips..

  24. Re:Well, yes! on How to Own the Internet In Your Spare Time · · Score: 2

    One would hope that any data so critical or irreplaceable that its loss would be catastrophic is backed up on-site and off-sit

    You're right that critical data should be backed-up, but here's the problem. If I were a smart guy and wanted to wreak havoc on the economy, I wouldn't destroy any files. Destroying files is a dead giveaway that something's wrong and the back data should be used. Nope. What I'd want to do is corrupt the data in those files. Imagine the scandal that would ensue if some of the accounts in a particular bank were reduced by $1 and that money was donated anonymously to the republican presidential campaign. What would happen if the IRS database were hacked and the SSNs were scrambled.

    These aren't the greatest examples, but they illustrate the problems that could arise from data corruption rather than data destruction.

  25. Re:distributed computing on Hacking Web Services · · Score: 2

    There are a lot of tasks that humans can do quicker and more accurately than computers. Image and voice recognition is one of those things.

    For example: let's imagine a situation where you're signing up for an account and I flash 9 images on the screen with an empty text box beneath each. The user identifies each image with one word and then the server checks the text against a word list. If the response is not a valid word, the user is prompted for a word..

    The trick would be verifying that the responses are not automated. This might not work very well, but it's an example of a distributed task that would work well..