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User: solafide

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Comments · 294

  1. Re:Why bother? on Vista Can Run Without Activation for a Year · · Score: 1

    You don't even have to read the manual anymore usually. Gentoo has a lovely smart graphical installer, and the install cd boots up into a GNOME enviroment, which has Firefox. Maybe you have weird hardware, but I haven't had any trouble with the graphical installer. And the graphical installer even installs your favorite wm for you using binary packages.

  2. Easy... on Political Leaning and Free Software · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Left people _tend_ to be richer, so they go for Macs. The far Right (the kind that read the American Conservative) tend to be practically libertarian anyway, so they go for privacy and freedom, which happens to come best with Linux.

  3. So what? on MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility · · Score: 1

    So the download servers move offshore, muslix et al move to other countries with looser copyright laws, and everything is hunkydory. Besides the inconvenience of moving away, why does this matter besides that it makes it a little illegal to download?

  4. Instant messenger? on Google Apps Premier Edition Launches · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Forgive my ignorance, but I thought that everyone except Google believes GChat to be a great time-waster, not something you'd offer to your corporate clients to increase productivity at work...?

  5. Re:IEs4Linux on Mid-Range Accounting Solutions for Linux? · · Score: 1

    It's important to read the summary. 1, it requires an activeX control, which IEs4linux doesn't support. 2, that doesn't cure the IIS server requirement; I get the impression they'd have to buy a Windows server to get IIS. So that suggestion is not particularly applicable.

  6. Re:It's official. on Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem? · · Score: 1

    As far as I know he's the most parodied scientist in the history of the world :)...

  7. Re:Relation to Linux? on Open XML Translator for Microsoft Word Available · · Score: 1

    It's under the BSD license, so I'm sure someone can redo it so it can be compiled on Linux. After that, surely the Word hooks aren't that difficult to emulate? (IANAMP (not a mono programmer), so I don't know how difficult it'd be. Assuming it works better than what the OO.org people have, though, I suppose they'd rather adapt well-working code than write it from scratch...)

  8. Re:PS-3 on Linux 2.6.20-rc6 Kernel Performance · · Score: 1

    And e17 isn't pretty enough?

  9. Re:I agree on US Military Tests Non-Lethal Heat Ray · · Score: 1

    However, if we allow the participants in the study to choose their treatment, we have to factor in the possibility of response bias in our results, possibly demonstrating no perceptible difference between bullet application and no bullet application rates of cancers. Thus we must randomly assign participants to a treatment.

  10. How do you unveil something this small? on Scientists Unveil Most Dense Memory Circuit Ever Made · · Score: 1

    Eh? Isn't it already veiled by virtue of its size, and if it has another veil which is removed (thus the unveiling) it's still kinda difficult to see...

  11. Re:This is not news. on Dell Sells Open Source Computers · · Score: 1

    In other words, it's ancientnews.

  12. Re:Bullshit propaganda on Chinese Prof Cracks SHA-1 Data Encryption Scheme · · Score: 1

    Did you know that crypto people generally derive as much satisfaction from showing someone else's cipher attack is useless as creating successful attacks themselves? If you don't hear news to the contrary, you assume a crack is real. Because with a very high probability it is real.

  13. Re:Sounds easy enough... on Largest Ever Online Robbery Hits Swedish Bank · · Score: 1

    On the contrary, there's lots of time: you even mentioned they buy a car and go on vacation. Oops, here come the police. Guess it'd be unpleasant to be an innocent suspect being chased, but there's still time for a police chase and recovery of the moneys.

  14. Re:The Galactic Lottery on Extraterrestrials Probably Haven't Found Us - Yet · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Plus he's not taking into account multiple alien races. So that's like double 4% which is almost 8%. Do that a few hundred times and you get 108%. This guy clearly doesn't understand math.
    Nope, do that n times and you get 1-(.96)^n probability they find us.
  15. Re:Two birds in one shot? on Navy Gets 8-Megajoule Rail Gun Working · · Score: 1

    You have feathered and well-oiled missiles. Though I don't think birds usually fly at 95 miles up, so your missiles won't have the danger of birds for long.

  16. Re:Someone didn't read his next email... on Gentoo/FreeBSD On Hold Due To Licensing Issues · · Score: 1
    All right, I opened my mouth and stuffed my foot down my gullet. I personally recompile my system when I try to upgrade my GNOME or KDE to ~amd64 a couple versions. But I have only recompiled my server (only 1 ~x86 package) once in 5 months.

    Surely you've read something more entertaining in the last 8 days ;) - like that story on input type=image submit buttons not working?

  17. Re:Someone didn't read his next email... on Gentoo/FreeBSD On Hold Due To Licensing Issues · · Score: 1
    You can do other things with your computer while you're recompiling, as long as the other applications aren't taking up most of your CPU. It might be a little slower, especially if your CPU isn't fast in the first place, but computers are not unusable while they recompile.

    Also, I doubt the time required being a month: my laptop (1.5GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM) only takes 2 or 3 days to recompile everything, and it _does_ have OO, KDE, and GNOME.

  18. Re:Someone didn't read his next email... on Gentoo/FreeBSD On Hold Due To Licensing Issues · · Score: 1
    Um, how do you expect to take advantage of a new gcc without recompiling your system with it? Besides which, a recompile every month or so is good for your system.

    Portage update disasters only occur when you don't check what emerge --update world will actually install before you do it, or you're running ~arch and a new expat comes out.

  19. Re:and please... on Blurring Images Not So Secure · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you don't remember or want a refresher on what happened, the original article is at http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/22/138 210 . It's worth bookmarking in case you ever need to do the same yourself.

  20. Why not dd-wrt on the router? on Workarounds for Vista's Networking Problems? · · Score: 1

    I don't know for sure, but if I remember correctly dd-wrt works well on your router. Maybe if nothing else works reflash your router with dd-wrt?

  21. Re:Not abuse of power on Luxpro Sues Apple for Damages and 'Power Abuse' · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I find Luxpro's Super Shuffle a significant UI improvement, with those more prominent buttons; my biggest complaint with the actual Shuffle is that it's hard to tell when you've hit the buttons. Not a problem with Luxpro's.

  22. Re:No Experience? on Ideal Linux System for Newbies? · · Score: 1

    Hmmmm. So Gentoo may be bloated and a heavyweight?

  23. One powerful earthquake? on An Early Warning System For Earthquakes · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It takes 20 seconds for it to travel 40 miles? How much power has that secondary wave lost in those 40 miles? Wouldn't it take one really powerful earthquake for you to need to take cover 40 miles from the epicenter?

    (I'm not an expert on earthquakes, but 40 miles seems like a long way for the earthquake to travel.)

  24. Re:NVidia mobile GPUs and Linux on Linux Overclocking Software · · Score: 1

    The 9xxx betas are out: I'm running 9742 on my Gentoo system right now. I don't know about the state of CoolBits though. Get the x86 Linux or the amd64 Linux 9742 drivers direct from nvidia, or get Gentoo and have the choice of being always up-to-date :).

  25. Re:This looks like a lie on 256GB Geometrically Encoded Paper Storage Device · · Score: 1
    Suppose we try to print a sequence of M distinct messages, where M > L; the L + 1st message must be identical to one of the previous L messages.
    Not quite right, but a trivial flaw. By the Pidgeonhole Principle in a set of L+1 messages with L possible values for each message one value of a message must appear twice, but that doesn't guarantee that the L+1st is equal to one of the previous ones; take L=2 -> M-M-N has L+1 messages, but the L+1st is not equal to any previous message.