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User: cjHopman

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Comments · 37

  1. Re:Bizarro Buzz on Google Launches Google+ Social Network · · Score: 1

    From someone who has used it, you are quite wrong.

    1. Adding people to circles is manual, but the ui for it makes it quite easy.
    2. A person can be added to more than 1 circle.
    3. You are not limited to those 4 circles, they are just the defaults, you can add whatever circles you want.
    4. When you post, you can assign it to be shared to whatever combination of groups/individual people/special categories that you want. However, the UI is simple and will remember your previous choices and default to your last one.

    Honestly, without actually trying it, you shouldn't have made those claims.

  2. Re:Disagree on Netgear CEO Says Jobs's Ego Will Bite Apple · · Score: 0

    I would like to note that you did not list "make and receive calls" in your list of things that your iPhone can do. This is one of the many things that my Android phone can do but your iPhone can't.

  3. Great Summary!!! on Judge Ends Massive Porn Lawsuit · · Score: 1
    From the summary:

    ...starting with 7,000-person and 9,000-person suits in the first wave...

    From the article:

    Ford's initial lawsuits were releatively small... by late October that he began filing against 7,000 and then 9,000 individuals at once.

    From the summary:

    the $350 court filing fee will require an investment of $7.7 million ($1.8 million for the individuals listed so far)

    Individuals listed? What listing of individuals? From the article:

    For the cases severed yesterday, this would amount to $1.8 million...

  4. Re:I work for a video rental store on Movie Studio Finally Sees the Light On Rentals · · Score: 5, Informative

    Those copies at BB are only licensed for private home exhibition (that's why the rental copies cost a lot more and your company pays royalties when you rent them, dipshit). By renting those out you're cheating not just the studio and the distributor, but also the writers, director and actors out of income. My neighbor down the hall is Columbia Pictures Home Ent's Worldwide President, you want me to pass along a URL to your post?

    God I hate freeloaders.

    Might want to pull out that law book of yours before commenting on legal matters. The right to rent retail purchased DVDs was affirmed in NEBG v Weinstein. Feel free to read more here.

    You've now made a fool of yourself to us, please reconsider before doing the same with your neighbor down the hall.

  5. Article is based on false assumptions on For Normals, Jobs' "Retina Display" Claim May Be Fair After All · · Score: 1

    As pointed out in the article, the assumption that 20/20 is normal vision is absolutely wrong and is based on a self-reported sample of people 120 years ago. Mean visual acuity for ages 18-29 is better than 20/15.

    I had a whole bunch of good information to post here, but someone at the article's comments said it even better.

    So, shamelessly quoted from there:

    40. Daniel Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 9:25 am

    It is clearly an exaggerated claim. 20/20 Snellen visual acuity is a reference standard used as a cut-off for the lowest level of normal vision -- not as an average visual acuity for the human population.

    Elliott, Yang and Whitaker (1995) published Visual Acuity Changes Throughout Adulthood in Normal Healthy Eyes. In this paper, they reported mean VA for 18-24 was 20/15 (6/4.5 metric). That's the MEAN visual acuity for young adults. So a significant number likely had a better VA than 20/15. 25-29 year old mean actually _improved_ to ~20/13 (6/4 metric). The mean VA increased (approaching 20/20 or 1.0) from that point until reaching a mean VA of 20/20 (6/6 metric) in the 75-year-old group!

    20/20 is the wrong VA to use for average human visual acuity. In addition, R.N.Clark at Clarkvision.com reports that people up to 50 can reliably tell the difference between 300 ppi and 600 ppi printouts.

  6. Re:Is this really beer on The Race To Beer With 50% Alcohol By Volume · · Score: 2, Informative

    unfortunately the EU has forced us here in Germany to lower our standards so that people may call it "beer" even if it hasn't been made according to the Reinheitsgebot

    And thank god for that... the Reinheitsgebot is one of the worst laws in existence. It was originally written to stop competition in grain prices between brewers and bakers. Yep, that's right, brewers were limited to certain ingredients to keep the price of bread down. This law was then spread to other countries so that brewers who had to follow the law could actually compete in the marketplace. I'm sorry, but that is not the process for making a good law.

    Today, the law is merely a marketing sham. That is, marketing departments like to claim that following the law somehow makes the beer better and that their company follows the law; the first is false, and the second usually is.

  7. Re:Flamebait on Google Reportedly Ditching Windows · · Score: 0

    People managed to check email, schedule tasks and appointments, manage contacts and keep notes before Outlook came on the scene.

    Well, kind of. That is, not many people did any of the checking email thing before Outlook came on the scene, and most of those other things were done with paper and pencil.

    Note that Outlook is a direct descendant of Microsoft Exchange 1.0 which was packaged with Windows 95 OSR2 in 1996, and released as Outlook in 1997.

  8. Re:I want to see the long term results of this... on Google Reportedly Ditching Windows · · Score: 1

    "...if you need more proof i am writing to you on a 400 hertz computer..."

    I'm sorry, but the credibility of you as a computer user just went right out the window.

    I'm sorry, but the credibility of you as a comment reader just went right out the window.

  9. Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started on Gulf Oil Leak Plugged? · · Score: 1

    All of the preliminary plans involved using, in some form or another, methods that would allow them to keep the oil rather then having the primary concern of say, stopping the leak all together.

    And you claim is that this is because BP was attempting to profit off of this.

    I'm sorry, but that is ridiculous. BP's cleanup costs so far are something like $20 million dollars a day, and you claim that they were delaying stopping the leak to gather 5000 barrels of oil a day? $350,000 dollars worth of oil a day? I'm sorry, that doesn't really make sense. BP's civil liability is capped somewhere between $1100 and $3400 dollars per barrel, and you claim that all they care about is collecting the oil that's worth $75 per barrel?

    Let me advance another theory. All of the methods that do not actually stop the leak, are methods that have worked in the past and in the worst case cause no damage. The methods that stop the leak all have a worst case scenario that ends with oil leaking at >20x the current rate (or rather the pre-"top kill" rate).

  10. Re:older developers... on Why Linux Is Not Attracting Young Developers · · Score: 3, Informative

    No comparison-based sorting algorithm has complexity less than nlogn. However, there are sorting algorithms that are not comparison-based and thus can have "better" complexity. For example, counting sort is a sorting algorithm with complexity O(n + M) where M is the size of the range of values.

  11. Re:Statistical analysis of the summary on Why Programmers Need To Learn Statistics · · Score: 1

    You are basically saying that the two possibilities are that zed is right, or that all of the other 9 are right. But, we want the probability that zed is right vs the probability that at least one of the others are right, since they all disagree with him. On a side note, I find it amusing that Zed takes his experiences with a nonrepresentative sample of a group to determine that the group itself doesn't understand statistics. As he is a member of the group himself, do you think his rant's self-reference was intentional or is he as oblivious as he claims others are?

  12. Re:This is False on NVIDIA To Exit Chipset Business · · Score: 1

    It's a good thing that you RTFA. That is how you knew that the second one was a detailed analysis of the exact statement from Nvidia that you linked to, showing how it did not really refute the point.

  13. Re:Wrong line of work! on Relaunched Recovery.gov Fails Accessibility Standards · · Score: 1

    On my main FreeBSD/amd64 desktop box, I not only make the point of not having Flash on it, I don't even have the choice, as it is not supported by Adobe. So much for accessibility.

    Well, when you made the choice of what OS to use you weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each. In particular, you considered the fact that the particular one that you chose was a very small portion of the market and was commonly not supported as well (or not at all) as your other options.

    Now, any site that requires flash is making the decision that you are not important enough to support.

    Point is, don't blame Adobe, blame yourself and those companies (and others) who require flash.

  14. Re:why flash? on Intel's Braidwood Could Crush SSD Market · · Score: 1

    First of all, DDR RAM is not cheap (at least, not compared to NAND RAM). It costs significantly more per gigabyte than even the most expensive of Intel's offerings for SSD's.

    Not actually true. Based on pricing at newegg.com, a 2GB stick of DDR2 can be had for $24. A 32 GB Intel X25-E is $420. That is, DDR2 costs $12/GB and the X25-E is $13.1/GB.

    Now, for the ddr drive, you have to consider the cost of the drive itself and other factors. For example, for a ddr ram drive to be practical, I think it needs at least 32GB of space. That is 16 2GB sticks (which probably won't fit in a normal sized drive enclosure) or requires using the much more expensive 4GB sticks. So yeah, in my opinion, there's not really a place for ddr ram drives in the market.

  15. Re:Thanks Google on Highlights From the 2009 Google Summer of Code · · Score: 1

    True.
    Also IBM does a similar thing with ACM-ICPC world finals. They have probably dished out $1,000,000 for us here in Stockholm. And that is for a field of 300 potential hires.
    I am one of the lucky few who will have benefited from both these companies programs.

  16. Re:When I was breaking in on More Than Coding Errors Behind Bad Software · · Score: 1

    return (n*n+1)/2

    You mean n*(n+1)/2

    No, he means (int)(n*((n+1)/2.0))

    No he means n * (n + 1) / 2.

    For those unable to follow at home, n * (n + 1) is always divisible by 2. Let's not convert to and from floating point just for fun.

  17. Re:When I was breaking in on More Than Coding Errors Behind Bad Software · · Score: 1

    True. Great programmers are about 10000 times as productive as mediocre ones.

  18. Why no wired/wireless combo? on The Best Computer Mice In Every Category · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've had a logitech wireless from a long time ago, mx700 i think. It's great, but for one thing; it must be put in its dock to recharge. I prefer this to using regular rechargeables as it is actually kind of convenient, but why is it necessary? That is, why can't there just be a wire that I plug into the mouse just where a normal wired mouse's wire would go. Then I could keep using it while it recharged. As it is I have had to have an extra wired mouse connected to my computer for the few times when I need to keep working when the wireless one is low on charge. So, tell me, why can't somebody do this?

  19. Re:Best Project Management Book Ever on Your Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books? · · Score: 1

    Best book ever written on leading software development projects. Personally, I don't think students should graduate with a CS degree until they've read it.

    I agree, knowing how to lead software development projects is very important to a computer science degree.

  20. Re:The companies not happy with grads is pure BS. on Bjarne Stroustrup On Educating Software Developers · · Score: 1

    array-reversal was the _hard_ question. Granted, it had to be in-place array reversal using constant space and linear time.

    hard? I will be graduating in from a CS program in the spring and I can barely believe what you are saying. It blows my mind that such an easy problem can stump so many people that it could be considered a "hard" problem.

    Then again, just recently we had what I considered to be a relatively simple programming assignment and many people just couldn't do it. I looked at some of my classmate's code and they were all just complete messes.

    But still, you (and others) are saying that many graduates have basically learned nothing.

    My worry is that, because of all these incompetent graduates, companies are unwilling to pay what a good programmer is actually worth. That is, since any company who hires a graduate has to consider the fact that their new hire might be incompetent, they will not be willing to pay as much as they would for someone that they knew was good. So, basically, all the bad programmers drag down the prospects of the good ones.

    Anybody who is in charge of hiring or such, is this true? Is there any way that you can tell if a candidate is actually good? Is there anything that a good candidate could do to prove that you wouldn't be taking a risk hiring them?

  21. Re:Way To Get Sued on Interviewing Experienced IT People? · · Score: 1

    It is illegal to discriminate against anyone for whatever reason other than the job qualifications, including age.

    Actually is is only illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or disability.

    See here.

  22. Re:Why do i feel that ... on Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced · · Score: 1

    Most people don't understand the beauty of photon tracing .... oh wait a minute, most people are DUMB! that's right >;D

    Seeing these comments reflects very well the average human intellect about a subject before talking about it.

    Then what's so special in photon tracing versus ray tracing?

    It's actual real world based mimickery. Photon tracing mimicks how real world works.

    Ask yourself would you prefer physics to correlate to real world physics, or something quickly around the corner which is something like that but not quite? That's the difference between photon tracing and ray tracing. Ray tracing comes close, but never is quite the real thing, while photon tracing works to replicate real world physics of light.

    Yes, it actually is physics calculations, in this case, the physics of light and visualizing it.

    Then there's things like (insert other random rendering method here) aswell ...

    With photon tracing just provide enough computational power, and you can make it look real, like an photo. With ray tracing you can't do that you need to think about how the real world works first, how light travels, how it interacts with what it hits, in other words how the rays interact with objects.

    Ray tracing is JUST a cheap (relative to photon tracing, that is) trick to make it look something like that, nothing else.

    It's a bit like comparing veggie soy "meat" to the real thing It's something like it, but not really, just a "cheap trick".

      ---

    And then we get into some misinterpretation of moore's law.

    To be honest, using ray tracing is just giving up one approximation for another, that's what computer graphics is currently about.

    Back in reality though, yes ray tracing can make some things look more realistic than rasterization, usually at a significant performance cost. My personal view is that there will be only very little ray tracing used in games for some time. There is not currently spare performance to go around, the performance of rasterization is still a major bottleneck for games, the idea that there will be this change to a less efficient system seems highly unlikely.

    Yet, I would not be surprised to see some slight hybridization occur over the next several years, and eventually ray tracing may become the dominant renderization technique in games... I'd say more like 15 - 25 years though... and then another 20 years and maybe we'll be doing real-time photon tracing, who knows.

  23. Re:Just a tad over the top? on DDR3 RAM Explained · · Score: 1
    Check newegg.com

    Lowest Prices
    512MB DDR $18
    512MB DDR2 $9
    1GB DDR $29
    1GB DDR2 $19
    2GB DDR N/A
    2GB DDR2 $32

    Yeah, DDR2 is way too expensive. Even the expensive DDR2 is only a bit more than the cheapest DDR.

  24. Re:@_@ on Followup On Java As "Damaging" To Students · · Score: 1

    If you have a good tool, but need an auxiliary tool to use it, the tool is actually not that good. You're right, a hammerhead is useless... I mean you need a handle to use it.
  25. Re:Lets play logic games then. on Diffing Guantanamo Bay SOP Manuals · · Score: 1

    Actually, original statement:

    if guarded by MP then POW
    equivalent to original:
    If not POW then not guarded by MP
    Any guarded by MP are POWs


    not equivalent to original:
    if POW then guarded by MP
    All POW are guarded by MP