Slashdot Mirror


User: LordCrank

LordCrank's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
20
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 20

  1. For someone whose job... on Florida Town Stores License Plate Camera Images For Ten Years · · Score: 1

    For someone whose job is based on the premise that people will not always obey the law, that police chief seems a bit too trusting that laws will prevent abuse.

  2. Re:Hardware Decode on Next-Gen Video Encoding: x265 Tackles HEVC/H.265 · · Score: 1

    I had a laptop that would barely be able to do hdtv, and couldn't handle 720p content without significant stuttering. I believe the issue was that I had done enough research to know its graphics card supported decoding, but not enough to know that the particular brand making the graphics card had a long history of terrible linux support.

    As far as whether hardware decoding is even necessary, it's something that I'd look at as an issue for set top boxes/low power media centers. It seems XBMC has generally been able to get linux drivers for these released fairly quickly in recent years, since the hardware manufacturers are aware that a significant portion of their potential customers are looking for a device to run XBMC.

  3. Hardware Decode on Next-Gen Video Encoding: x265 Tackles HEVC/H.265 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it's anything like H.264/x264 then I expect to have the hardware to decode H.265/x265 in my laptop about 2 years after movies and tv shows are being distributed in this format, but 2 years before there are any linux drivers for the hardware decoders.

  4. Re:Uhhhh on What 'Negative Temperature' Really Means · · Score: 2

    This doesn't really help. I pondered this for a while the other day when I read that first and gave up trying to wrap my head around it. I was always under the impression that 0 kelvin (absolute 0) meant a state at which there was no movement at the atomic/subatomic level. It would seem as though to reach a negative temperature, one would have to slow a substances particles to less than 0 movement. Then I realized they were talking about a quantum state and I pretty much gave up trying to understand it at that point, because anything which has the word 'quantum' in it suddenly defies all the rules I'd ever been taught about anything at all. :o)

    As far as 'quantum' goes, if you're okay with the idea that a particle can have either a positive spin or a negative spin, even though spinning would always seem to imply a positive amount of spin, that's halfway to understanding what's going on here.

    The way that temperature is defined, (1 / Temperature) = (Change in Entropy) / (Change in Energy). By this definition, absolute zero would mean that there is an infinite decrease in entropy for any decrease in energy, i.e. going to absolutely no movement of particles as energy decreases.

    What happened here is that scientists developed a system where increasing energy decreased entropy, so (Change in Entropy) / (Change in Energy) had a negative value. This naturally involved a vacuum and a lattice of lasers and anything else a Bond villain could ask for, with the end result being that the particles could continue to take energy while decreasing the entropy in the system.

    As far as this particular article being easy enough for a layman to understand, if it were I wouldn't expect to read "researchers getting a quantum gas to go below absolute zero" in the summary, because:

    tl;dr: A quirk in the definition of temperature allows for it to be negative without having to remove energy from a system that is at absolute zero, meaning the temperature never 'goes below' absolute zero.

  5. Re:lol @ your shitty speeds in the US. on Netflix Ranks ISP Speeds · · Score: 1

    I think it's more an issue of the phones people are using. None of the cell providers appear to be separated into 3g/4g, so the more people who are using older cell phones the worse that provider will appear in the measurements.

  6. Re:I knew that on Reading and Calculating With Your Unconscious · · Score: 1

    Using the "off-topic" moderation to describe being irrelevant to the thread a comment is posted in as opposed to the original article should discourage this behavior. Unfortunately it would require changing the way a lot of people view that moderation option.

  7. Re:Doesn't intent matter... on IP Lawfirm Sues Typosquatting Security Researcher · · Score: 1

    By registering these domains he prevented the senders from getting a message that the url in the address they were sending to did not exist. Presumably he also made it so whatever catch all for the typoed domains wouldn't report an error. If he hadn't set up these domains then the senders would have received automated messages informing them their emails weren't delivered. While he didn't violate the law in stopping these emails from bouncing with errors, his behavior certainly wasn't ethical and did disrupt the intended communications.

  8. Preferably as unbiased as possible on Ask Slashdot: How To Inform a Non-Techie About Proposed Copyright Laws · · Score: 1

    You ask for a source giving a specific viewpoint on SOPA/PIPA that is also as unbiased as possible?

  9. Re:No, the US has too much freedom for Apple. on How the US Lost Out On iPhone Work · · Score: 3, Informative

    The savings from using Chinese labor is actually estimated at 23%:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/17/jon-stewart-foxconn-siri-the-daily-show-video_n_1210556.html

  10. Re:Yeah...but on How the US Lost Out On iPhone Work · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Employees at Foxconn who put together iPhones earn 31 cents an hour. Clearly anyone who isn't willing to fly to China to get a 31 cent/hour job is too lazy to be employed.

  11. Re:I live in Slovakia on Newspaper Articles Not Copyrightable In Slovakia · · Score: 1

    Does copyright law in Slovakia have the notion of fair use applied as it does in the U.S.? Without fair use of copyrighted materials as a middle ground you'd have a much harder time arguing that news articles can be copyrighted.

  12. Re:The Law of Unintended Consequences... on Baker Has to Make 102,000 Cupcakes For Grouponers · · Score: 2

    Groupon only gives the actual vendors half the money, so if a groupon user paid £6.50 the retailer would receive £3.25, so she was spending about £6 to make a dozen cupcakes and charging £26. Those are indeed some very healthy margins.

  13. Re:who can use this speed with the current usage c on AT&T and Verizon LTE Networks Compared · · Score: 2
  14. Re:Paywall sites are going to be hit pretty hard on Google Goes After Content Farms · · Score: 1

    The classic example is JavaScript-rendered dynamic content. This tends not to work so well when you're dealing with search engines. However, if you can serve them a static page that contains the text of the page minus all the rendering, then it can index the content without choking on the JavaScript. I'm not sure how important this is these days, but it certainly was a problem at one time.

    That's what the noscript tag is for

    It's also useful to serve modified versions for search engines so that searches for content within your site can return more relevant results. For example, you might insert certain keywords that describe the content of the page using terms that don't actually appear. Case in point, your page talks about Airport, but you serve a copy to Google that inserts the terms 802.11 and Wi-Fi.

    That's what the meta name=keywords tag is for

    Finally, there's the question of bandwidth and CPU overhead. If your site changes a lot, Google beats on your servers rather frequently. You can reduce the bandwidth hit by stripping JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. from your content before serving it to Google. This won't significantly change the searchability of the content, but will reduce the bandwidth overhead. And, of course, if there are static versions of content that you can serve instead of a server-side-dynamic version, this also saves on CPU overhead.

    Google spiders text, not images. It also doesn't spider the text of css or javascript files. Also, I question how effective it is to dynamically decide to serve a static page based on a user-agent as opposed to merely serving everyone the dynamic page.

  15. Semantics on Nook Color Rooted — Will B&N Embrace the Tablet? · · Score: 1

    Jailbreaking is breaking out of a software-based jail, necessary to gain access to anything outside of a sandbox. On an iPhone this is necessary before one can root the device.

    Rooting is simply gaining root privileges, and is all that is needed here.

  16. Metaphor on Aussie Gov't Decides ISPs Aren't Responsible For Infected Computers · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It would be like forcing an ISP to take responsibility for a copyright infringer.

  17. Re:Isn't all government stuff public domain? on New Jersey Sues YouTube Over Crash Video · · Score: 1

    The (legal) argument against the federal government being able to hold a copyright is that there is a specific law forbidding this for works that they create. Without a similar law that applies to state governments, there is nothing preventing them from holding copyrights for works that they create. From a legal standpoint all the proof that is needed to show a state can hold a copyright is the fact that no law forbids it.

  18. Re:Isn't all government stuff public domain? on New Jersey Sues YouTube Over Crash Video · · Score: 1

    According to copyright.gov the law states, "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise." This states specifically that the federal government may not receive copyright for works it creates, but it does not deny states the right to receive copyright protection for works they create. The real question is if the video is considered creative enough to warrant copyright protection (in my opinion it's clear that it isn't creative in the slightest).

  19. Re:To Serve Man on Earth's Species To Be Cataloged On the Web · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hopefully they'll start with homo sapiens, I know a few people who have been dying for a new recipe

  20. Default Threshold Reached on "Fastest PC in the World" Runs Athlon at 800MHz · · Score: 1

    Well, with this comment the default threshold is reached, and there's a couple of things that I'd like to mention.
    First, if you were to look at my computer you'd notice the clock is slow. If my computer were operating at 800 megahertz, I'm assuming it'd be fast, or possibly just not as slow.
    Second, no matter how much you argue about which computer is fastest, none will ever compare with Batman's supercomputer. Damn that thing is cool. If only I could play Quake 2 on it, I'd die happy.

    Where's the any key?