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User: Mashdar

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Comments · 466

  1. Re:Least helpful summary ever? on MIT Study Outlines a 'Perfect' Solar Cell · · Score: 1

    At least they avoided offending any butterflies and Predators.

  2. Re:It's not bad on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr Released · · Score: 1

    I don't know if they ever pulled their heads out of their collive ass, but when they first introduced that menu bar, you have no choice but to have it on the left, and if you had two monitors, it was on the left of your right-hand monitor. (I tried changing primaries, ports, etc, but it was literally hard-coded to be on the right-hand monitor.)
    This meant that the bar was in the middle of my field of vision at all times. Pretty damn annoying. And not letting me move it was a giant middle finger in my face.

  3. Re:opposed to what? on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr Released · · Score: 4, Funny

    I appear to be lacking in my knowledge of large Asian ungulates. Apologies to your mother.

  4. Re:mockup schmockup on Iran Builds Mock-up of Nimitz-Class Aircraft Carrier · · Score: 1

    Dey took er JERBS!

  5. Re:Intel on AMD Develops New Linux Open-Source Driver Model · · Score: 2

    I would say AMD generally prices their parts competatively. If you are talking about >$300 Intel parts, you are correct that AMD has nothing to offer (I don't count 220W parts as viable, as I'm not in the market for a desk-side-vacuum-cleaner). But at $180 an FX-8350 looks pretty competative vs a $200 i5-4570:
    http://www.tomshardware.com/ch...
    If you are using efficiently multi-process applications (e.g. video compression), AMD is the clear winner. If you are using mostly-single-process applications (Blizzard games?), Intel is the clear winner.

    In my usage, single-process applications tend not to be CPU-bound, or they tend not to be computationally taxing. But YMMV. And some games are obviously highly 1-2 core CPU bound (Blizzard), which is worth considering.

    Finally points:
    Over clocking: If you are planning on overclocking, the least expensive intel part is $240 (33% over FX-8350). Overclocking won't close the FX-8350 single-threaded performance gap, but it helps.
    Heat: The FX-8350 is rated at a TDP of 125W... The i5-4570 is rated at 84w. So AMD is hotter and louder.

    Disclaimer: My next system is going to be Intel, primarily because I want the machine to be near-silent, and 125W is hard to work around.
    Note: All prices based on Newegg at the time of writing.

  6. Re:This could be good news... on Ubuntu's Mir Gets Delayed Again · · Score: 1

    gome24ever.

  7. Re:Shouldn't they start out small first? on 43,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Remains Offer Strong Chance of Cloning · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
    They use additives to prevent formation of ice crystals, but the temperatures are certainly what you would call freezing, and the preserved objects (embryos, here) are solidified.

  8. Re:Tulips are the next big thing on The Tangled Tale of Mt. Gox's Missing Millions · · Score: 2

    Right. The value of gold is based on supply and intrensic industrial value. 95%+ of the value of gold is purely speculative. Just because it is shiny and limited does not make it safe. Anything used as a currency is going to have an artificial value far in excess of its tangible value. Hope you didn't buy in 1980, or you are still missing half of your money. http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

  9. Re:which he at first found "abominable", on Einstein's Lost Model of the Universe Discovered 'Hiding In Plain Sight' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Stop trying to tell God what to do." -Bohr

  10. Re:XP Works on Microsoft's Attempt To Convert Users From Windows XP Backfires · · Score: 1

    What your post glosses over is the following:
    Microsoft will essentially be publishing security flaws for XP every time they patch Vista/7/8. It is not a matter of "discovering" a few new bugs. It is a continuous process of bugs being pointed to by M$ with no patching.

    If you own an XP machine, and you keep it connected to the internet, good luck. You will be a zombie if nothing else within a year or two (and you should definitely not do online banking/shopping with it...).

    If you have an offline XP machine, or a well guarded (no flash, javascript, IE, MS Office) XP virtual machine which boots a clean image, you'll probably be okay.

  11. Re:Legitimization on MtGox Files For Bankruptcy Protection · · Score: 1

    The problem is, the people jumping on the bandwagon don't even know what arbitrage is, let alone what to look for in a currency. It's one more example of tech assuming it can do $X better than the industry built up around $X, without understanding how $X even works.

  12. Re:Get Over it FFS on Will Peggy the Programmer Be the New Rosie the Riveter? · · Score: 1

    Actually I did :) Flu, sorry!

  13. Re:It's just a tool I guess on Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening" · · Score: 1

    According to the link below, approximately 5% of people in state prisons in 2012 were incarcerated for possession with no other crime. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm... I think it is highly dependent on where you live and the color of your skin. There is a huge racial disparity in police letting offenders off with a warning.

  14. Re:My guess on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 1

    Are you claiming that online banking does not exist? Do you think banks are shipping paper back and forth when transactions occur? And paypal stores value in (wait for it) Dollars. Gold is a commodity, and has value (although we could argue about whether the current value is inherent or speculative). Likewise land and housing represent resources/goods and have value. But like all goods prices fluctuate, and (other than resources like gold and land) depreciation is a killer. If you are "storing" your worth in a house, land, etc., viewing it as superior to more diverse assets, you are a goof. Even if you buy that the housing market in general is fairly stable (can we lay this theory to rest?), individual markets surely are not.

  15. Re:My guess on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 1

    No because deflationary currency is unstable, and Bitcoin is a hype bubble.

  16. Re:Risk? on Blood Test of 4 Biomarkers Predicts Death Within 5 Years · · Score: 2

    My mother regularly says she'd want to die were she in the throws of dementia. It's a sad state of affairs that we give dogs a more humane death than humans...

  17. Re:It's just a tool I guess on Doctors Say New Pain Pill Is "Genuinely Frightening" · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Confinement is certainly a good thing for some, but jails/prisons seem like the wrong setting for non-violent addiction-related issues. The focus of prisons (from my limited observation) is rarely to rehabilitate.

  18. Re:My guess on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 1

    Do you store your wealth in Beanie Babies, or use them as a means of payment? You talk about "store of value" and "payment network", but that's exactly what a currency is, and a failed currency is a terrible option for either, because it has very unpredictable value.
    The algorithm behind Bitcoin is interesting. It's just not a functional currency. The lack of built-in scaling means it would be deflationary purely due to population growth, if nothing else.
    I'm not saying Bitcoin has not given us an interesting case study, or possibly laid groundwork for some more functional accounting algorithm, but I have not seen any economically sound argument for its stability.

  19. Re:Get Over it FFS on Will Peggy the Programmer Be the New Rosie the Riveter? · · Score: 1

    Did you even read gp before you vomited your opinion to the screen?

  20. Re:In before... on Google Ordered To Remove Anti-Islamic Film From YouTube · · Score: 1

    He didn't say the threat wasn't rational. He said the person wasn't rational. Big difference. In either case, the desired effect of a death threat is usually a dead person, not a youtube takedown :)

  21. Re:In before... on Google Ordered To Remove Anti-Islamic Film From YouTube · · Score: 1

    It's like my right to drive, or my right to buy the linguine my grocery store just stopped carrying. They eroded my past :(

  22. Re:My guess on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 2

    Not to mention that while national currencies can be manipulated to affect the economy, Bitcoin floats wherever the masses bid it up/down to. It has all of the instability with none of the control mechanisms and no underlying value. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is inherently deflationary. It's really a disaster of a currency in any financial sense. The only people touting it seem to be ideologues and get-rich-quick types.

  23. Re:Ken Ham issues statement on Confirmed: Earth's Oldest Rock In Australia · · Score: 1

    Which reminds me -- My partner's brother was reemed by a clueless judge/history teacher at his middle school science fair for not having a control group in his observational study of moss growth across local tree species.... Observational study is awesome, especially when all you care about is correlation between a known and an unknown, rather than causailty. The US school system likes the word "experiment" too much for its own good.

  24. Re:Ken Ham issues statement on Confirmed: Earth's Oldest Rock In Australia · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think gp's problem is with this specific type (U-Pb) of dating.
    I don't understand how initial values are determined. (Is there some method by which the original ratio of the two elements is known? Or the proportion of radioactive isotopes?)

    But, from the wikipedia article

    Uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating is one of the oldest[1] and most refined of the radiometric dating schemes, with a routine age range of about 1 million years to over 4.5 billion years, and with routine precisions in the 0.1-1 percent range.[2]

    so it does not sound at all un-tested.

    While GP is correct that we cannot experimentally confirm the specific mechanisms here (radioactive Pb decay over one million+ years...) , we have a very good description of radioactive decay across the board (table?) and observational results sound extremely consistent. Direct experimentation is not the only form of scientific evidence, despite what [creationist intelligent_designist whatever_nut] might say.

  25. Re:decoding may be faster, but encoding is still d on FFmpeg's VP9 Decoder Faster Than Google's · · Score: 3, Informative

    Most users never encode a single video in their life. (Except for cameras on devices, and who is doing 4k video on thier phone these days?)
    And if encoding takes 50x longer, that's 50x the resources Google needs to keep up with the work flow.
    So you have it totally backwards.

    Not to mention that we are talking about 4k-targetted codecs, so you should be comparing to H.265, not H.264. The additional computations for encoding H.265/VP9 are to reduce bandwidth requirements. If you don't care about bandwidth, feel free to generate a 5GB H.264 video.