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User: setagllib

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  1. Re:Are Computer Crooks Renting Out Your PC? on Are Computer Crooks Renting Out Your PC? · · Score: 2

    The article itself mentions that many of these machines belong to businesses, where Linux has a higher share. And while servers are more difficult to attack in general (well, they don't have Adobe Flash or Reader...) they make better targets, and servers are where Linux is the higher profile target. Its heterogeneity and timely security updates save it a lot there. We can expect more effort given to attacking Linux over time, but for sure it will *take* more effort.

  2. Re:Females... on Vibration Killing Enterprise Disk Performance? · · Score: 2, Funny

    Paging Dr. Freud...

  3. Re:Wasn't Windows 95 and 98 built from the ground on "Midori" Concepts Materialize In .NET · · Score: 1

    Managed code by its nature can work WITHOUT memory protection at all.

    How did you think the "management" worked? Either you trap each pointer access manually (and maintain all of that state and overhead), or you use a memory management unit to do it for you (and accept the cost of traps and context switches).

    The very best that a VM runtime can do is infer that a class of access is impossible and thus exclude traps for it. This only works in extremely limited circumstances, and still requires code to be correct. It in fact makes profiling really difficult - and performance is the whole problem in the first place.

  4. Re:Energy efficiency will do it on Multicore Requires OS Rework, Windows Expert Says · · Score: 1

    You have a very strange definition of "core". Do you mean that any ASIC or FPGA is automatically a core? More ambiguously, what about an FPU or GPU? If a mobile phone has "half a dozen cores" then a PC has hundreds.

  5. Re:Window control buttons on the left? Bad. on Ubuntu Gets a New Visual Identity · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can close (and minimise, maximise, etc) windows by right clicking on the title bar or even the task bar's button corresponding to that window. This is consistent in KDE and several other window managers.

  6. Re:How about on Fixing Bugs, But Bypassing the Source Code · · Score: 1

    When you ask, Bruce Schneier receives.

  7. Re:How about on Fixing Bugs, But Bypassing the Source Code · · Score: 3, Funny

    Bruce Schneier is the general solution.

  8. Re:The straight dope on Apple Discontinues ZFS Project · · Score: 4, Informative

    You really need to subscribe to the mailing list. The rate of development is only growing -- it's just now moved on to a lot of smaller features and improvements, now that most of the work is already done.

  9. Re:Not Really on Windows 7 On Multicore — How Much Faster? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I disagree - user-mode code, whether it's separated into threads or processes, still relies very heavily on kernel scheduling decisions. It may sound simple enough, but if you study the decisions the kernel has to make (such as which thread to wake first, from a set of 8 all waiting on the same semaphore), you can find lots of ways to get it wrong. We now take it for granted because thousands of man-years have been spent on solutions.

  10. Re:Why the need to 'discover' the elements? on Element 114 Verified · · Score: 2, Informative

    Leave both in a vacuum and see which one lasts longer. There's a very clear definition of atomic stability that is markedly different from chemical reactivity.

  11. Re:Useless on PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ok, what? It definitely works as a daemon. But even if it didn't, what's the issue? If you have a dedicated headless MPD server, you gain nothing by using Pulse. If you have plenty of desktop applications that all want sound input/output, Pulse solves basically everything.

  12. Re:Great on Firefox Disables Microsoft .NET Addon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft has put billions of dollars into developing the most effective and efficient security vulnerabilities to date. I can only watch in awe and wonder.

  13. Re:GCD also replaces most synchronization / lockin on Apple's Grand Central Dispatch Ported To FreeBSD · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you're creating a serial queue anyway, you no longer have parallelism. If you have multiple serial queues, you may as well have had multiple threads with no interlocking between them. This is just yet another API to do what competent parallel system programmers have been doing since the first thread.

  14. Re:People who write in textbooks... on In Trial, Kindles Disappointing University Users · · Score: 1

    I said the best students *I* know; I'm in software engineering.

  15. Re:People who write in textbooks... on In Trial, Kindles Disappointing University Users · · Score: 1

    I agree. The best students I know don't even buy the books, let alone write in them, because they're actually using the material in practice (hobby, job, overkilling lab work, etc.) and internalise it better than note-taking and highlighting ever could. They look lazy until you see what they can actually do.

  16. Re:First post... on Mainstream Press "Cringes" At Win7 Launch Parties · · Score: 1, Insightful

    In all fairness, when did Microsoft ever have fanfare? Informed computing enthusiasts were sick of Windows after 10 minutes, opting to at least diversify into Apple and free Unix, and nobody else even knew there was anything other than Windows, and treated it as part of the computer.

    Now that people realise they have choices, Microsoft is scrambling to do what it never had to do - actually market its operating system - and has shown all of the competency of a high school dropout.

  17. Re:battery life? on Intel Core i7 For Laptops — First Benchmarks · · Score: 1

    Using Linux' frequency controls, the Turbo just increases your maximum multiplier by 1, and that's it. If you're configured to maximum performance, you get the Turbo, otherwise you don't. Maybe it's more complicated in Windows, but it's clear that the feature is controllable from the operating system.

  18. Re:Linux audio on Linux Kernel 2.6.31 Released · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The real fix would be to make PulseAudio use OpenAL optionally, so that cards that have accelerated mixing can be made to use it. I don't see the point though - not only are modern CPUs more than powerful enough to do it in userspace, they can't possibly have per-card defects while doing it.

    Now that we do have PulseAudio it's best to trim as much fat and necrotic code from the kernel as possible. If the remaining realtime issues can be resolved, for which there is much experimental literature, it'll be perfect.

  19. Re:There is no secret patent based plot to kill li on Microsoft Letting Patents Move To Linux Firms · · Score: 1

    Linux and open source in general are a theoretically infinite competition to Microsoft. After a big spike in proprietary models, the trend of all software industries is now towards more open standards, more open software and smaller companies offering small sets of products that together solve big problems. This is exactly where open source most naturally thrives, and it's the exact opposite of how Microsoft has always operated - one vendor, one set of products, nothing open. Microsoft's executives know this, they're not stupid, so they're trying to hold back the trend with patents and faux-open standards like OOXML. It's like trying to hold off a global ice age by burning your house down.

  20. Re:Cool, but what does that spec mean? on Con Kolivas Returns, With a Desktop-Oriented Linux Scheduler · · Score: 0

    It's a scheduler term, not a hardware requirement strategy. Leave the tech to the people who know (certainly not me, but Con is epic).

  21. Re:The only way to win on iPhone App Wins Microsoft-Campus Programming Contest · · Score: 1

    I first saw it on http://cdtdoug.blogspot.com/2009/05/wascana-is-over.html. I don't have the links I found later but that post and its comments all say the same thing.

  22. Re:The only way to win on iPhone App Wins Microsoft-Campus Programming Contest · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why do people keep repeating that? Even Microsoft's own developers admit that their C/C++ indexing is primitive and broken, while Eclipse's CDT, which has had maybe 0.0001% of the funding and man-hours, is already far superior.

  23. Re:Where in the world??? on Solar Roadways Get DoT Funding · · Score: 1

    Was elementary school hard for you, with math skills like that? Try to keep up:

    500 * 500 = (5 * 5) * (100 * 100) = 25 * 10,000 = 250,000

  24. Re:seen some bad shit. on Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline · · Score: 1

    If it doesn't, it is still far better for your software quality to use cpp (literally, the C preprocessor) to get assertions into the source code. There is basically no alternative to assertions, except for expanding them to a manual if each time, which is *still* better than not having them at all.

  25. Re:One word.. on Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline · · Score: 1

    If you aren't using RAII semantics, you aren't really using C++, but C+-. If you're using RAII and sane integrity guarantees, exceptions avoid a lot of redundant and bug-prone code.