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User: Akir

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  1. I'm still going my original guess for NVIDIA on Nvidia Waiting In the Wings In FTC-Intel Dispute · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I still think they're using Transmeta's engineers to run x86 code on their GPUs so they can get Windows to run on systems with other ISAs for their CPU. ARM and POWER, anyone? It sounds much cheaper and simpler than doing the insane amount of testing needed to roll out a new chip, and you'd get the added benefit of accellerating your everyday applications without needing to recompile them for CUDA. Plus NVIDIA will have the advantage of being the first ones out there with SSE5. So BAM!

  2. Re:A Few Points on Microsoft Applies For Patent On Tufte's Sparklines · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness [....]

    You're saying this about the patent system that approved the patents on swinging on a swing and using a laser pointer as a cat toy?

  3. I don't get it. on Bomb-Proof Wallpaper Developed · · Score: 1

    How does this work better than pictures of half-naked girls already on my desktop?

  4. Re:Don't trust developers. on Google Releases Source To Chromium OS · · Score: 1

    This plan, of course, has been devised by our resident decision-engine, HAL 9000.

  5. Re:Hmm.. on Google Releases Source To Chromium OS · · Score: 1

    You know, I like to think that I'm a nice person, but I'm going to just have to say this; you are an idiot if you think you can compare what's essentially opcode code translation with complex interpretation.

    Have you ever found a CPU that was designed to run programs slowly? x86, along with every other ISA, is designed to run general applications as fast as possible. So they designed their CISC-philosophy chip to do instructions that would, if used, make programs run faster. But when they developed the RISC philosophy, and figured out how to implement superscalar design, of course you're going to get more performance out of the RISC core - it's implementing every part of that 5-cycle instruction simultaneously in one or two cycles. Besides, with the plethora of extensions x86 has tacked on to itself, do you really think that those instructions are the most important for running your computer?

    However, the web is not machine code. There is no known design for a hardware processor that will 'execute' a web page. And that's because web pages are more like a page description language than anything else. Thinking metaphorically, it's more like source code for some high-level compiled language. Every time you render a web page, you have to wait for it to compile the code. And even after that, you have more complexity with javascript, AJAX applications, server pushes, flash, java, and more. And if you think about it, you'll realize that none of the web technologies were originally designed to do even a quarter of the things we make them do today. Do you really think that we'll be able to do everything that we can do with our relatively behemoth desktop machines on a web browser?

    I'm not saying it's impossible to do everything we can do with computers in a fancified web browser. But it's definitely going to take a lot of work, and for it to work, the technologies involved in the internet are going to have to evolve dramatically.

  6. Old news. on Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3? · · Score: 1

    Do I seriously need to look into the past articles to prove how old this news is? Seriously folks; this isn't exactly rocket science here - this is all stuff everyone knows about by now. Hey, do I even need to point to the link to the story about how people actually prefer the sound of MP3 because of the encoding artifacts, much like how people preferred records after CD's came out because of the noise/repressed frequencies?

  7. Solaris time! on Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If the problem with deploying Linux is not having enough trained professionals, why not go with Solaris? OpenSolaris is free, and Sun offers training for it. Don't know if they have russian solaris training, though. Or they could go through multiple other training sources that are available for Linux. No matter how you put it, paying for windows, no matter how low your discount is, doesn't make sense. For chrissakes - if everyone in Russia were running Linux, wouldn't that get rid of the training problems?

  8. Re:Problems on the horizon for Gnome 3! on GNOME 3 Delayed Until September 2010 · · Score: 1

    I was a little tipsy when I wrote that comment. OK, a lot tipsy. What I was trying to do was compare the transition between gnome 2.x to 3.x and the transition between KDE 3.x to 4.x. KDE 4.x introduced tons of new technology and did it's best to break away from the desktop metaphor. But because it was so unlike KDE3, there was a huge uproar.

  9. Problems on the horizon for Gnome 3! on GNOME 3 Delayed Until September 2010 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, lots of people will be in an uproar! There are millions of problems with Gnome 3! For starters, it won't be enough like KDE 3, so everyone will think it's broken when there's really no problems with it!

  10. They call it Tivoization. on Reusing Old TiVo Hardware? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Everyone knows that you can't do anything with a tivo. It may be using open-source software, but the hardware checks the software's checksum, and if it doesn't match, it simply doesn't run the software. If you remember, this is a major reason (if not the only reason) why Richard Stallman got all upset and created GPL v3.

  11. Vision of the future (for cows) on Pain-Free Animals Could Take Suffering Out of Farming · · Score: 1

    The latest and currently most popular sport: cow charging. Almost any motor vehicle will do. Ram it into the cow, and listen to it's hilarious confused mooooooooo,

  12. You havn't scratched the surface! on Disney Buys Marvel For $4B · · Score: 1

    Now that Disney is buying Marvel, Disney's marketing department will consume their IP and digest it into other forms. Soon you'll be seeing marvel-themed toys, then marvel-themed sitcoms!

    Oh wait, that's how it is already. Except Marvel's media tends to be more serious.

    Except that wasn't the end; the end is when you go to the dollar store and buy marvel-branded plastic sandwich baggies. You can't get lower than that.

  13. Re:Just admit, you hate microsoft. Apple = free pa on FSF Attacks Windows 7's "Sins" In New Campaign · · Score: 1

    The anticompetition thing Microsoft is going under is for Windows Media Player - not for DirectShow Filters. Quicktime is like a suite of DirectShow filters for the mac. The player is just a frame around that. WMP is much more then that.

    Beyond the obvious method of physical distrobution, one can always download a browser through the wonders of wget.

    90% of all computers don't come with Mac OS on them.

    Right now, I'm wondering if you have some problems with the understanding of what is real or not. How can you say that Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly? Go to any shopping center, it doesn't matter where, and you can go into all the businesses and ask them if they have any computers without windows on them. The few who won't say 'no' are the people who don't even know what you're talking about. You won't find any public school in the US with student computers running anything but Windows (excepting the precious few schools which have been blessed by Apple), and you'll be hard-pressed to find one running servers running anything else.

    And how the hell do you think that Apple is more locked than Microsoft? Last time I checked, there's a FOSS Mac OS X core available, but no FOSS Windows core. With Windows, you'll never be able to access the kernel, short of writing hardware driivers. Apple has contributed to the public, while Microsoft has only accepted payments from us. And don't forget, people still think highly of them because of the discounts they give to public education. While switching to a FOSS solution would save everyone billions combined.

  14. You know the truth on The Irksome Cellphone Industry · · Score: 1, Funny

    The OP just did posted this so that he could say that he gave the 'correct answer' to the poll.

    ... RUN AWAY!
    [NO CARRIER]

  15. ViewSonic is Great for this. on Small, High-Resolution LCD Monitors? · · Score: 2, Informative

    my VS11979 is 19" and has a native resolution of 1680*1050, which exceeds your needs. It also has a very high response rate and insanely high contrast ratio. The colors are simply fantastic; I almost fainted when I first watched Big Buck Bunny on it. I also got it dirt cheep at Fry's. And everyone knows ViewSonic displays are the best. Just ignore the fact that it has built-in speakers - they're predictably terrible.

  16. This Title is Whack, Yo. on Can Urine Rescue Hydrogen-Powered Cars? · · Score: 1

    Urea, commercially used, is synthesized. You'll find that many shampoo products have urea in them. I don't think that people would like to put piss on their heads.

  17. Re:what do you want to do? on HTML Tags For Academic Printing? · · Score: 1

    PostScript, the technology upon which PDF is based on, is still around and running. It can do everything required for this application, since it was designed for paged media (such as real pages). Best of all, it's a more open standard than PDF is, and it's actually slightly more ubiquitous since there are so many printers that use it.

  18. Applications for the Glove on First Fully Programmable Gesture-Recognition Glove, Cheap · · Score: 1

    In interactive media:
    take off the glove to smack your opponent as you challenge them to a duel!
    play a virtual flute that will make others watching you think you've gone insane!
    Fill the glove with Vasoline and pretend you're Curly(R) from Of Mice and Men(C)!
    Most realistic boss-stabbing simulation ever!
    Aim your gun - WITH YOUR HANDS(TM)! (disclaimer: never aim a gun with other appendages)
    Smack them bitches - LITERALLY!
    Pretend you're a ghost by activating {noclip} and walking through walls! (disclamer: do not attempt to walk through walls)
    Pet virtual chickens!


    Coming soon from ANTHROTRONICS!
    The IntelliSock (patent pending)!

    All your friends will be jealous of you when you wiggle and pick up things with your toes - IN A VIRTUAL WORLD! WOW!
    After all, who would like a VR fighting game where you can't _kick your enemy when he's down_(TM)?

  19. You forget, EMA, that that extra $6B IS ALSO GOING TO BE THE $6B THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO SPEND ON GAMES THE NEXT TIME AROUND!

    I may be exaggerating, but meh.

    Well, this new activation scheme may be a good thing. After they put that into effect, the cracking groups will become so popular that they'll establish their own publishers who won't deal with this crap.

  20. I want that! on NASA Sticking To Imperial Units For Shuttle Replacement · · Score: 2, Informative

    It must be some astronomic and powerful calculator they need for those conversions. I'm assuming that it's so expensive because it can calculate the highest prime number and last digit of pi in under a second.

    But that still doesn't account for the costs they're making up.

  21. Keep only one home directory on How Do You Sync & Manage Your Home Directories? · · Score: 1

    There are numerous ways to do this, but I would use Samba (best used with VPN), because it can pretty much be used everywhere, even on computers with crappy OSes like Vista. There are numerous other solutions for the same thing; FTP, AFS, maybe iSCSI.

  22. There's the time-honored route, too on Where Does a Geek Find a Social Life? · · Score: 1

    You could always, I dunno, try walking out your front door? Geeks are everywhere! All you have to do is get out and meet people. You can even do it *gasp* at work!

    Now get off of my lawn!

  23. Hooray! on Intel Eyes Smartphone Chip Market · · Score: 1

    This is a day of rejoicing! Now even our most simple embedded devices can have decades of backward-compatibility baggage and buggy code!

  24. Re:Which "Unix" are they talking about? on Saving Unix Heritage, One Kernel At a Time · · Score: 1

    You are confused sir. 'D' is a slice of watermelon.

  25. What an odd thought on Saving Unix Heritage, One Kernel At a Time · · Score: 1

    "... the actual artifacts of early Unix development were in danger of being lost forever."


    That's odd. I seem to have had copies of Unix versions 1-5 on my computer for quite a while. And I'm not talking about UNIX system V SVR blah blah. I had some (there was a lot, it could have been all of it, but I didn't look too far into it) of the source code too.

    This was at least a year or two back, when I was interested in the origins of UNIX, when I was simulating the PDP with SIMH. Complicated computers they were.

    Also note that I don't have any real links to AT&T, Lucient Technologies, or Bell Labs. I do, however, have the internet and access to Google.