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User: Chaostrophy

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  1. Why I like Califonia on Zenimax Accuses John Carmack of Stealing VR Tech · · Score: 1

    This is why like California, and one of the reasons the tech industry is out her (rather than, say, Boston). Non competes for ordinary workers are not enforceable. As long as he doesn't give his new company specific information, you are good. The skills you learned are yours. Around Route 128 (Boston), they sued people who switched jobs, people stopped, companies lost cross fertilization, and silicon valley cleaned their clocks. DEC, Wang, Prime, etc.

  2. For the FUTURE! on Oracle Shuts Older Servers Out of Solaris 11 · · Score: 1

    "So i assume Product Management was right with their decision to remove the support in order to make the feature i can't talk of possible, as i don't think that many of the early migrators are still using the system in question, as most systems have reached EOSL."

    http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7363-Result-of-the-How-long-do-you-wait-before-Solaris-11-gets-on-your-prod-systems.html

    And as he points out, how many people upgrade their server OS major version? The newest machines cut off are more than two years old, and no one is going for 11 today unless they have to, people will let it sit a while before they switch, if they are going to upgrade stuff, so by the time they do, this will be more than 3 years old.

  3. Re:It's complete bullshit on Is Sugar Toxic? · · Score: 0

    Really? Drink say, 300 calories of glucose with each meal for a month, then do a month doing the same with fructose. You will gain more weight with the fructose, and it will be among your organs and in your liver. This is bad.

    I think there is quite a bit more what has gone wrong with our diets than just this, but it is a big one.

  4. what stealth fighter? on Chinese Stealth Fighter Jet May Use US Technology · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We have some blurry photos of a largish fighter or light bomber, with a shape that looks like it was designed with a low RCS (Radar Cross Section) in mind, that would be done using equations the USSR published in the 1960s (never thinking that computers would become fast enough for them to be practical). What you would get from an F117 wreck would be RAM (Radar Absorbant Materiels), but how you can tell what an aircraft is made from via those photos is beyond me. Get the info from a US aircraft trying to track it, and you can say something, but all we can do with what is known now is speculate (which sure is fun).

  5. Re:adjustments on String Theory Tested, Fails Black Hole Predictions · · Score: 1

    But in 30 years, has there been any other _testable_ (currently) predictions?

    Not as far as I know, people have been calling string theory dead for a few years for that alone.

  6. incoherent on Oracle To Halve Core Count In Next Sparc Processor · · Score: 1

    I don't think the author had any understanding of the history of SPARC or Oracle (Sun)'s product linup. Here is an informative interview from the useful Sun hardware oriented blog on the subject http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/ http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/innovation/innovator-hetherington-191304.html

  7. Re:Why? on USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s · · Score: 1

    If you are enough of a god to fully use it, the Cell is an awesome CPU. You have a simple PPC cpu (I want to say two threads, no out of order, but good theoretical IPC), and 8 processors, each with their own 256KB of memory. Of course, you have to manage those processors and their memory usage, without killing the main memory bus.........not simple or easy, though if you think about it as a extremely CISC vector machine, it may well make sense for scientific computing (stream data several sets, mangle it through the Cell, write it out). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor

  8. Re:How about holding them to one qualifcations std on Obama Says Offshoring Fears Are Unwarranted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just make it so that if the H1B visa holder pays a reasonable fee, say, a prorated $20,000, they can leave the job and get another, keeping the visa. Then companies will have to pay US market rates for people.

    But frankly, they should be convertible to a green card (permanent resident), we want to steal all the smart people from other countries, not train them for a few years, then send them home.

  9. Re:What do you expect? I expect standards on IE6 Addiction Inhibits Windows 7 Migrations · · Score: 1

    Microsoft pushed hard to get people to code to IE6, and to use Active X (security? what security?), resulting in something that is stuck on one version of one browser. It was clear at the time to me that this was a bad idea, frankly, I'm just glad it turned out to be even worse (MS was forced to clean up their act, thus breaking compatibility with IE6).

  10. Re:Kinesis Advantage on Ergonomic Mechanical-Switch Keyboard? · · Score: 1

    Wikipedia says they use Cherry switches

  11. Kinesis Advantage on Ergonomic Mechanical-Switch Keyboard? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm

    Granted, by default they have stuff done with your right thumb, but I believe the keyboard is fully remapable, so you can fix that. They don't say what kind of switches they use, but they are very clicky, with a nice feel. I have used them for years, and really like them.

  12. Re:Reality check on Meta-Research Debunks Medical Study Findings · · Score: 1

    I wish I was. While I hate citing Time as a source, I've seen this other places, this is just the first that came up when I went looking.

    http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1967306,00.html

    "We have studies that claim up to 90% effectiveness against death from all causes [in inoculated patients compared with the nonvaccinated]. If you were to believe that evidence, you would believe that flu vaccine is effective against death not only from influenza, but also from heart attack, stroke, hypothermia, accidents and all other common causes of death among the elderly. That is quite clearly nonsense."

  13. Re:Phased Array antennas on Antenna Arrays Could Replace Satellite TV Dishes · · Score: 1

    It sounds like the break though here is in a much cheaper controller, such antenas have been around 50 years (the first nuclear aircraft carrier, Enterprise, had one), and are available for RV & SUV use (big blob on roof, $$$).

  14. Re:Reality check on Meta-Research Debunks Medical Study Findings · · Score: 1

    Well, there is reason to think the flu vaccine does nothing.

    You are far less likely to die of the flu if you get it, but it seems equally effective at preventing accidental death, and all cause mortality, which makes it seem that it is compliance effect (that people who are good about taking what the doc gave them live longer, even if it is a placebo).

  15. Re:For example on Meta-Research Debunks Medical Study Findings · · Score: 1

    Do some reading in the Paleo and low carb communities, there is no data that exercise leads to weight loss (it is good for health reasons, etc, but it will not make you thin). Unless you really want the goal (winning aerobic fitness based events, ie tour de france or just a marathon), high output aerobics seems to be harmful (check out Mark's Daily Apple, he made his living in that world for two decades).

    Low output aerobics, occasional max effort work, seems to be what people are made for. The Army has moved from long runs to sprints, a sprinter can do the runs, and you spend less time and fewer injuries than the runner training.

    Links:
    http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
    http://robbwolf.com/
    check out who they link to.

  16. Simplified gearing? on GM Criticized Over Chevy Volt's Hybrid Similarities · · Score: 1

    Well, I'm disappointed, but it may well make sense if you just have one gear, and thus a much cheaper, lighter gearbox etc. No lower gears, no revers, a larger electric motor than the generator, so you can hit batteries for acceleration, but not drag a big generator around that you almost never need.

  17. Re:CDNs are cheap, NAT makes it hard on Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads? · · Score: 1

    Very, very true, I'm just saying that trying to sell such a thing is very much of an uphill push, too many users cannot contribute, and your savings are not all that great, I bet you need to be serving 1000TB+ a month for it to have any chance of making business sense.

    That being said, I do think it makes sense, and ought to be used more, for instance, add some locality features, it would help everyone at the end of small pipes (Australia, NZ, etc), cut down bandwidth usage, boost performance on cable, etc.

  18. Re:Instead of BitTorrent on Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads? · · Score: 1

    Well, we do, sort of, it's called a CDN, like Akamai.

  19. CDNs are cheap, NAT makes it hard on Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A start up I know of started out using peer to peer, but it was too much grief to get people to download a plug in, and then get it to set up port forwarding through their firewall, and at the price of CDNs these days, you are just not saving enough money for it to be worth while.

    Now, when we get IPv6, and HTML5, perhaps it will be a different game (no NAT in IPv6, no need).

    In the case of a game, you already have downloaded stuff, and can convince a fair chunk of your users to set it up.

    Twitter uses it to push patches to their servers in 12 seconds instead of 10 min.

    So it is part of the future.

  20. Re:NeXT. Thanks. on Looking Back At OS X's Origins · · Score: 1

    NeXTstep used a variety of cap options, NextSTEP......ah, the late 1980s-early 1990s!

  21. Re:not actually a monopoly on Adapting the Post Office To the Digital Age · · Score: 1

    And the post office has sued companies and won (read it in the Wall Street Journal years ago, no cite handy), you may only use non USPS carriers for letter that require an immediate response, otherwise, you are violating their monopoly.

  22. Re:retire it on What To Do With an Old G5 Tower? · · Score: 0

    Sad but true.

    Kiss your wind tunnel good bye.

  23. Re:Speculation on Google Schedules Chrome 6, 7, and 8 For This Year · · Score: 2, Informative

    Don't forget bind, went from 4.9 to 9 in the mid-late 1990s.

  24. I'll tell you what it means on What the Google-ITA Deal Really Portends · · Score: 1

    Lisp is now supported language at google. ITA is one of the largest Lisp shops in the country.

  25. Re:null or not null, that is the question on Null References, the Billion Dollar Mistake · · Score: 1

    There was hardware that had a negative zero that could not be arrived at mathematically, it had to be assigned. You could use it for initializing arrays, and thus just by checking the value, determine if an element had been written to.