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User: ghjm

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Comments · 524

  1. Re:Blu-Ray Disc Association on LG Wants PlayStation 3 Banned From US Market · · Score: 1

    Or, as I'm sure LG is counting on, Sony might not get its act together and act as one force. In which case the (huge) Sony game division could make life extremely unpleasant for the (tiny) Sony smartphone division.

  2. Re:Blu-Ray Disc Association on LG Wants PlayStation 3 Banned From US Market · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The idea is that both companies hold so many patents that starting an actual war just results in the annihilation of both parties. But then Sony launched a missile. What's LG supposed to do? Not respond?

  3. Re:Soon? on Betelgeuse To Blow Up Soon — Or Not · · Score: 1

    Not in our reference frame.

  4. Re:Real enterprises very cautious with WiFi. on First Ceiling Light Internet Systems Installed · · Score: 1

    No, those are dumbass enterprises, which I agree is most of them.

    Real enterprises build out a PKI infrastructure and use client certificates to admit wireless clients to the corporate network.

  5. Re:Too many cooks... on Disempowering the Singular Sysadmin? · · Score: 1

    Windows and Unix/Linux also have the ability for many discrete UIDs to have superuser access. That's not the point of the article. The point is how to do away with the superuser concept, so that nobody (not even the admin) has unfettered access, but system administration tasks can still somehow be performed.

  6. Re:Lack of Imagination on Tron: Legacy — Too Much Imagination Required? · · Score: 1

    I don't know about anyone else, but in 1982 I was reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, John Brunner, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester Del Rey, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Roger Zelazny, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Larry Niven, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, Dean R. Koontz, Ben Bova, Frank Herbert, Spider Robinson, John Varley, Gordon R. Dixon, Orson Scott Card, Joan Vinge, Brian Aldiss, and others. I didn't feel any lack of SF; quite the opposite - there was more good SF coming out than I could possibly keep up with.

    By then I had seen Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Flash Gordon and Time Bandits, so I had some concept of what SF should look like on a movie screen. In my peer group, Tron did not strike us as a rallying cry for the hacker/hobbyist scene. Wargames was that movie (a year later); Tron just wasn't. It was another SF movie, not much better or worse than others of its era.

    In computers, I would absolutely and categorically disagree that 1981 was "blah" for home PCs. The Sinclair ZX80 and Radio Shack Color Computer (released in late 1980) were big deals because many more people could afford them than an Apple ][ or TRS-80, and in 1981 the ZX81 and VIC-20 were released, so 1981 was really the first big year for affordable computers. The C64, when it was first released, was an upmarket, premium priced VIC-20. Even in 1982/1983 more people were still buying VIC-20s than C64s. And don't forget that the IBM PC, TI 99/4A, and (in the UK) the BBC Micro all came out in 1981.

    In today's world of PCs, there has been nothing to really excite us for about 10 years. PCs are mature - they are only getting better incrementally. Where the action is today is mobile handsets. My current PC can run a flight simulator slightly better than my previous PC. My current phone can run a flight simulator at all, for the first time, unlike any other phone I've ever had. Is it useful to have a flight simulator in my phone? Not at all, but most of what we did with computers in 1982 wasn't very useful either.

    After mobile handsets hit their plateau, I don't know what's next. I don't see any other devices on the horizon. There's no reason to suppose there has to be an exciting new technological device all the time. Maybe if tablets take over from and/or merge with laptops, or something.

  7. Mainstream? on Pay What You Want — a Sustainable Business Model? · · Score: 1

    Yawn. Call me back when McDonalds, Burger King or Wendy's lets you pay what you want for a hamburger. That would be mainstream.

  8. Re:Geeky devices on Google TV Suffers Setback · · Score: 2

    Personally, I just turn to my wife and say, "Honey, who's that guy?"

  9. Re:And high school biology students on Do High Schools Know What 'Computer Science' Is? · · Score: 1

    Which games?

  10. Re:And high school biology students on Do High Schools Know What 'Computer Science' Is? · · Score: 1

    Don't even talk about paper tape. I once manually reconstructed a lost section of code with masking tape and a paper clip to make the holes. That was 30 years ago, but I still don't ever, ever want to think about paper tape ever again.

  11. Re:And high school biology students on Do High Schools Know What 'Computer Science' Is? · · Score: 1

    I have also used them in the distant past. But I'm pretty much 100% sure you don't still use them.

  12. Re:Hoare logic on Do High Schools Know What 'Computer Science' Is? · · Score: 1

    What high school was this? I want to send my kids there.

  13. It's not computer science... on Do High Schools Know What 'Computer Science' Is? · · Score: 1

    ...unless you're analyzing algorithms and assigning them to complexity classes, or at least determining their order of operation.

    So if you wanted to have a high school level class that was correctly named "Computer Science," what would you put in it? Writing working programs is computer engineering, and complexity theory is too advanced for high school students.

  14. Re:And high school biology students on Do High Schools Know What 'Computer Science' Is? · · Score: 1

    By that guy's standards, we are all "quiche eaters." Not a single one of us uses an 029 keypunch to enter Fortran any more.

    Pascal was, and is, a good teaching language.

  15. Re:Thoughts? on Tron: Legacy · · Score: 1

    Since when are 6 digit user IDs a thing?

  16. Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye" on Goodbye, VGA · · Score: 1

    Nope. I guess we've been lucky.

  17. Re:The Russians used a pencil on Rear-View Cameras On Cars Could Become Mandatory In the US · · Score: 1

    Actually, yes. The last time I replaced a burned out headlight was three cars ago, as it happens.

  18. Re:They are also kiling Altavista on Yahoo! To Close Delicious · · Score: 1

    Altavista was what Google had to defeat to become #1. It's like saying the Edmonton Oilers could "easily" have won the 2006 Stanley Cup, if they hadn't lost to the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 7 of the finals. Many people use the word this way - I don't think it's that bizarre a definition.

  19. Re:Wait, what? on Chrome OS Doesn't Trust Apps Or Users · · Score: 4, Funny

    June 29, 2007.

  20. Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye" on Goodbye, VGA · · Score: 1

    The reason I prefer USB is that PS/2 devices often don't reliably resume operations if you disconnect/reconnect them. Would you consider that a technical reason?

  21. Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye" on Goodbye, VGA · · Score: 1

    One of my customers is a Lenovo shop. All the Lenovo machines have DisplayPort. We have a bucket full of DisplayPort to DVI adapters since very few monitors have native DisplayPort adapters yet.

    Apple, of course, just has to be different - they, and they alone, use Mini DisplayPort.

    Also, back in the days of CRT monitors, in a large environment (2000 desktops) we would have one or two go bad each month. Occasionally they would even catch fire. Since the introduction of LCDs, I can't actually remember ever RMAing one that wasn't physically damaged. You can complain about a lot of things with LCDs - most notably, the way the manufacturers screw with the color representation to get garish, cartoon-like colors that make the demo look good but everything else look awful. It's the volume wars but for color.

  22. Re:The Russians used a pencil on Rear-View Cameras On Cars Could Become Mandatory In the US · · Score: 1

    When you say people, do you mean car manufacturers? Because when I'm driving, I usually turn on the one and only set of headlights my car is equipped with. If they are brighter than you'd prefer, blame Honda, not me.

  23. Re:It's called a filter on Internet Routing, Looming Disaster? · · Score: 2

    Cage match: "senior network engineers" vs the government of China. Who are you betting on?

  24. Re:In a word.. on Have I Lost My Gaming Mojo? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the drive to "have a storyline" is what's killing games, by turning them into movies. What was the storyline of Asteroids or Pac-Man?

    The problem with modern games is that the gameplay is exactly the same across many many titles. Most FPSs have pretty much the same gameplay. The breakout indie successes are almost always about gameplay, not storyline.

  25. Re:Don't ask don't tell on Red Hat's Secret Patent Deal · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Also, "I have some code on my machine that I worked on in 1979" is never prior art because there is no proof you didn't write it yesterday and backdate it. It has to be published or findable in a library or otherwise dateable. It's sometimes pretty hard to find prior art even for obvious things, because people don't usually write and store documents on obvious things.