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User: xouumalperxe

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Comments · 1,237

  1. Re:Great startegy on Windows 7 Pre-Orders Top Vista's In Just 8 Hours · · Score: 1

    Amongst other meanings, descent also means the set of people who can trace their lineage to you (your descendants as a whole)

  2. Re:Great startegy on Windows 7 Pre-Orders Top Vista's In Just 8 Hours · · Score: 1

    Not that I don't mind using a descent OS, which Windows 7 seems to be at this time.

    So Windows 7 is an operating system specialized in producing offspring? Truly, that's taking "The internet is for porn" to its ultimate consequences!

  3. Re:Self-downloading fonts... on Typography On the Web Gets Different · · Score: 1

    Don't tell me that TTF can include executable in some form?

    A priori? No less than PNGs, JPEGs or mp3s.

  4. Re:It's one from column A OR one from B not both. on Spyware In BlackBerry Updates For Users in the UAE · · Score: 1

    Common usage of crippling implies grave impairment. You don't call a guy with a sore finger crippled, for example. Pretending that using a word is fine just because the dictionary says it means the same thing as another while blatantly ignoring common usage is disingenuous at best.

  5. Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie on Canadians Find Traffic Shaping "Reasonable" · · Score: 1

    I like your analogy, because it illustrates the key difference: if the bus is too full, the bus driver doesn't start pointing at people and saying "you can go, you have to wait". It's first-come, first serve. Same at the gym - when Mr. VoIP comes through the door, the gym doesn't grab Mrs Torrent and kick her out to make space.

    No, but if you have a full bus with no empty seats, and a pregnant woman walks in, you'll find that some of those seats are marked priority for pregnant women, elderly, or handicapped. Your service as a regular Joe gets degraded, where other clients get priority -- but the difference isn't per client, it's per client status. And it's also true that a nominally elderly person might be perfectly healthy and capable of standing while I might not because I have a bad migraine or something, so this isn't perfect either.

    If they oversold by 10%, reduce everyone's connection equally. But that's a heck of a lot fairer than them deciding what traffic they like and what they don't.

    As a first approach, I agree. Here's where it gets hairy: What does "reduce everyone's connection equally" mean, exactly?

    Here's one scenario: You're one of 10 people sharing a 100 mbit pipe, with a nominal subscription of 20 mbits. 9 of you are downloading stuff from bit torrent, which would take up the whole of your pipe if you could, for a total of 180 mbits desired connection. The last guy is trying to keep a 1 mbit stream of video chatting, or whatever, going steady. That means there's a total of 181 mbits of demand. One "fair" division scheme goes as thus: 100/181 = 0.552 so everybody gets 55% of the bandwith they asked for. All the downloaders get 11.04 mbits, the streaming guy gets 552 kbits (assuming 1m = 1000k because it makes the maths easier). Quite clearly, the streaming guy is getting shafted here.

    Here's a different, still "fair" scenario: Take turns giving 1 mbit (or whatever) per person until each individual is satisfied or you run out. Under this scenario, the guy who's asking for only 1 mbit is getting all he wants and his real time stream is going just fine, while the remaining 9 guys divide the remaining 99 mbits between themselves: 11 mbits apiece, for a grand loss of 40 kbits each. Arguably the scheme is still fair, but the guy who needed a little bandwidth got it all while the guys who need a load barely felt the difference. Still, this scenario breaks down when the difference between usage types isn't this jarring.

    So once you realize that ideal scenarios break down, we need to try more pragmatical strategies. VoIP tends to be low consumption, low latency tolerance, whereas P2P is usually high consumption, high latency tolerance. Even if I'm chit chatting with my friend while you're getting a crucial business tool from BT, my usage breaks down from throttling faster than yours does, so I get bandwidth first. What's important is that we're not getting screwed: If the contract says 20 mbits, we shouldn't get throttled "because it's P2P".

  6. Re:It's exactly the same on Staying Afloat In a Sea of iPhone Apps · · Score: 1

    Sorry, my bad. I obviously meant the .com bubble. I knew internet bubble sounded strange. Either way, my point was that, just because the market will survive and become better for it (and I wholeheartedly agree with you: it probably will), it doesn't follow there isn't a bubble right now.

  7. Re:My fanboi response on Bill Gates Puts Classic Feynman Lectures Online · · Score: 1

    Well, 10.0 and 10.5 are entirely different beasts

  8. Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie on Canadians Find Traffic Shaping "Reasonable" · · Score: 1

    Get this through your heads: The ISP has sold you X bandwidth for Y price; they then arbitrarily change X to Z and charge you Y price.

    This place is rife with car analogies already, so one more won't hurt. You buy a bus pass that allows you unlimited travelling in that company's buses. What you're saying is that the company isn't allowed to deny you a trip because a bus is full. Or that a gym for which you have full access would be cheating you if they don't have a free treadmill when you get there at peak hour.

    Yes, I fully agree that too much overselling is bad, and in some particular cases where you know full well you're going overcapacity (e.g. plane tickets) it should be downright forbidden. I also think that internet access is rapidly becoming as essential an utility as electricity, gas and water. But we're still not at a level where a blanket "no overselling -- at all" imposition makes sense.

  9. Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie on Canadians Find Traffic Shaping "Reasonable" · · Score: 1

    This is exactly what the net-neutrality advocates are against: the idea that some company could pay for connections to their site to get better performance than connections to some other company that paid less. Every connection has two end-points, and both of those ends has paid for a level of service. Which one gets honoured?

    Still wrong. I paid for my pipe, I get x speed. You paid for your pipe, you get y speed. Assuming no congestion, a connection between the two of us would naturally get the lowest of x or y. If there is congestion, then bandwidth has to be distributed in some sort of way and we'll get less than that, but that's ok too.

    The net neutrality issue only comes up when either of our ISPs (or someone else along the way, presumably) wants to provide bandwidth in a way that depends not (only) on what their contract with the end user is, but (also) depending on who's on the other end. This can take both a direct money grubbing theme (our customers make loads of requests for Google pages, so we want Google to pay for that bandwidth or we'll throttle them) or a less direct, more anti-competitive theme (we provide VoIP services, so all traffic that looks like VoIP that's not ours gets decreased priority), possibly others too.

  10. Re:legal on Internet Astroturfer Fined $300,000 · · Score: 1

    This stuff is sleazy, but I don't see how it's inherently worse than other advertising we already tolerate.

    "our product is the best in the market" - subjective, sleazy, legal.
    "our product contains substance x" (which is actually not there) - objective, still sleazy, illegal - false advertising.
    "this guy's product is great" when you're actually "this guy" but pretending not to be - astroturfing, subjective, I'm guessing illegal - fraud.

  11. Re:No burst - phase change on Staying Afloat In a Sea of iPhone Apps · · Score: 1

    Far from being an app bubble, we are simply seeing a transition into a more mature market with richer products. Because it's so easy and cheap to create apps I'm sure we'll always see a ton of simple apps, but the market will grow on from that base instead of contracting as the term "bubble" would imply

    How is the phenomenon you're describing different from the internet bubble?

  12. Re:What is it with judges going beyond the law? on Judge May Take "Fair Use" Away From Jury · · Score: 1

    Some people with a extremely aggressive views on copyright, people trying to diminish or eliminate Fair Use, they are very very misguided. If they actually succeeded in their efforts then copyright itself would be null and void, struck down as unconstitutional.

    Presumably, the whole point would be to pursue the point to its ultimate consequences, and amend the constitution to jive with the desirable copyright law :)

    Anyway, so what you're saying is: The supreme court effectively said "Copyright Law is unconstitutional, but we don't want it to be, so Copyright Law is constitutional. Any case where you think Copyright Law is being unconstitutional just means it doesn't actually apply, even if its text as written says it does, because Copyright Law can't possibly be unconstitutional, so it can't apply to something that would render it thus". Is that what you're saying Fair Use is?

  13. Re:I thought they.. on Wikipedia Debates Rorschach Censorship · · Score: 1

    2. Two baby elephants high-fiving with their trunks as they crush something under their front feet.

    Funny, I saw two sumo-fighting garden gnomes.

  14. Re:Why Internet radio should pay more on Pandora Wants Radio Stations To Pay For Music, Too · · Score: 1

    Or, to push the plane example further: Because the 777 carries more passengers than the 737, it should pay more for the fuel.

  15. Re:Price point on What To Expect From Apple's Rumored MacPad · · Score: 1

    I was about to comment that "price" and "price point" were different things, but I reread the summary, and apparently it's whoever wrote it that needs to be taught that...

  16. Re:OK, Since this is a non-event... on Windows 7 Hits Build 7600 (Possible RTM) · · Score: 1

    Serious impact? Like a crater?

  17. Re:I just got sweaty palms... on Windows 7 Hits Build 7600 (Possible RTM) · · Score: 3, Funny

    I use this rather arcane procedure. I fetch a small box from a shelf, take a metal-coated plastic disc from within it, put it in my computer, and the film starts playing just like magic!

  18. Re:Nobody Cares on Traditional News Media Lead Blogs By 2.5 Hours · · Score: 2, Funny

    That's because it's recursive, and lags 2.5 hours behind itself.

  19. Re:And something of value was gained? on Korean DDoS Bots To Self-Destruct · · Score: 3, Funny

    I fail to see how giving an old virus to a dead composer would help.

  20. Re:Hear the heads exploding - Java is fastest on Open Source Search Engine Benchmarks · · Score: 1

    hint to people doing benchmark: When benchmarking a component which use gc or similary memmory handling methods, remember to have the test dataset be large enough that you cause enough gc cycles to make the performance of any single cycle noise.

    I have an even better idea. Why don't we just model the benchmark on the real world usage scenarios, and let those decide whether garbage collection and allocation even matter?

  21. Re:ftfy on US Couple Gets Prison Time For Internet Obscenity · · Score: 1

    Nah, the OP is sad he doesn't get any Creampie/Cumshot pics anymore.

  22. Re:Importing characters from earlier games on The Essentials of RPG Design · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Or, perhaps, do what the oh-so-clever people at SSI did, don't give players god-like powers, and pick up where the game left off. Unthinkable, huh?

    Dungeons and Dragons, played "by the book", doesn't really give you enough XP to get to level 20 in the course of the typical CRPG. Given the extension of Neverwinter Nights, you'd probably be like level 10 at the end, tops. So what they did with the Gold Box games is that the first game in the series is the low level adventure that leaves you at like level 5-6, the second game picks up at about that level (and the plot hook itself explains why you were stripped of all your cool gear) and takes you to low-mid levels. The third game picks up there and takes you to mid-high levels, and the final game, with a truly epic plot (not necessarily good, but decidedly epic, with gods, major demons etc involved), takes you all the way to the highest levels. At no point before the final game were you really "god-like" in power.

    Part of what makes this possible is the fact that the games are single player but party-based. A party of 5 at level 5 isn't very strong, but you had 20 level ups along the way to incrementally power them all up a fair bit, rather than 20 "micro-levels" for one single character.

  23. Re:Zombie XP on One Year Later, "Dead" XP Still Going Strong · · Score: 1

    Yeah, resting. It's all shagged out after a long patch, innit?

  24. Re:correct on In Canada, No Expectation of Privacy On the Net · · Score: 1

    Hence, it follows that you shouldn't work for your cousin.

  25. Re:Love on First Electronic Quantum Processor Created · · Score: 1

    Yes! No! Maybe? Er... I think you'd have to look at it to be sure.