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User: derinax

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  1. All part of the master plan. on AT&T Calls For Net Neutrality Laws After Fighting To End FCC Rules (engadget.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure, encode the "new" net neutrality as a law drafted by AT&T lobbyists. Set things in stone and neuter any future liberal FCCs.

  2. Watch out if you've got a big roof on Tesla's Highly-Anticipated Solar Roofs Go Up For Pre-Order Today (inhabitat.com) · · Score: 1

    We have a pitch of 8 and a pretty large multilevel roof, this calculator tells me that a 50% coverage Tesla roof + battery will cost me $54K with the tax break, down to costing $20K after 30 years. That's still more than a shingled roof would cost today, and to be comparable to a fancy tiled roof I guess I'd have to wait until I'm very, very old.

  3. Gopher was a stepping stone... on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol (minnpost.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I recall having a soaring conversation with a tech friend in a Seattle back-yard party about this rumored "new thing" that was going to revolutionize the world. It was like Gopher, but had the ability to transparently serve all types of media and links were network-agnostic.

    Frankly it blew my mind, and I had some difficulty wrapping my head around the concept, but most interestingly, we both found Gopher as the common-ground existing paradigm to compare against the nascent Web.

    Then I threw up in a bush, but I think that was the Jim Beam.

  4. Re:A spreadsheet for an RSVP list? on Recalc Or Die: Excel 1.0 Developers Celebrate Their Baby's 30th Birthday · · Score: 1

    I was at one of the early Office launches, 1997 or so (not for fun, I was an MS conference tech). One of the things that lodged in my head was the presentation from the Excel project lead and the implied competition between the Office apps. He said he had heard about all the great advances Word had made for text formatting and presentation for this release, and he exclaimed that "we have Word's functionality inside each and every cell!"

    So no, even from the earliest, and as far as MS was concerned, spreadsheets were not primarily calculators but a way to present tabulated data.

  5. PLEASE JUST BRING BACK JON KATZ! on Your High School Wants You To Install Snapchat · · Score: 2

    I mean seriously Slashdot, if you're going to go full mediocre then go full mediocre.

  6. Re:Amiga 2000 in East German nuclear research on The Almost Forgotten Story of the Amiga 2000 · · Score: 1

    The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) also extensively used the Amiga for data visualization (Hippograph), capture, and documention (TeX) in the late 80s and just into the early 90s. A few great (mythical?) Amiga applications are hosted there, still:

    https://www.slac.stanford.edu/...

    http://science.slashdot.org/co...

  7. Microsoft "At Home" lab is a bust on Microsoft's Missed Opportunities: Memo From 1997 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the late nineties and into the last decade Microsoft just dumped too much time and money on their vision of a hyper-connected home. They dumped so much research money into building out test spaces and building out test devices, they failed to realize that people don't want an intelligent dryer and an intelligent toaster and an intelligent melon baller. The reality is whatever fancy device you own that has any kind of transistor in it, much less a CPU-- a phone, a tablet, a TV-- you're having to fuss with it. Constantly. And the same is/was always true for their "Microsoft At Home" vision. And yes, these things were connected-- but only to each other.

    That, and the fact that Microsoft has always misread the Internet, from coming to TCP/IP late, to ignoring the vital interoperability that cloud services demand. It's always been about the toys with them. Toys that run Windows. Ugh.

    Gratefully, only a few of these monstrous things ever saw the light of day beyond the lab.

  8. Sounds like a good companion book to this one: on Playing At the World: a Huge New History of Gaming · · Score: 2

    http://games.slashdot.org/story/08/07/02/1317200/dungeons-and-desktops

    Take the two of them together for an unbroken history of RPGs up to about a few years ago. I'm nearly finished with Dungeons and Desktops, and despite a slight bias against Amigas (or ports in general) and an unfamiliarity with certain D&D rules, it's a great tour of CRPGs from the past. Use the author's Gamasutra articles for the full-color screenshots, though.

  9. Google+ is not a social network. on Google+ Loses 60% of Active Users · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google+ is "primarily an identity service."
    --Eric Schmidt

    I have no need for an identity service in my life. That's why I left.

  10. Oh, SO going into my Alpha Personal Workstation... on Zotac Releases GeForce GT 520 With Classic PCI Connector · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm hoping it's got a bog-standard PCI interface specification, so that the old PWS console firmware works with it. The PWS 600au works great with an ATI Radeon 9000, NetBSD + X11. Not so sure about the xorg support for the GT520 though. We'll see.

  11. Re:Good idea, how will the implementation be ? on OCZ Wants To Cache Your HDD With an SSD · · Score: 1

    I very strongly disagree; I went from a Caviar Black to a Momentus XT (same size) in my Macbook Pro, and I see improvements everywhere. I dual-boot this with Windows 7, so I don't see the full improvement that I would if it were a single-OS-system, but even after I run an extended Windows session, restarting into OS X largely comes off the SSD. My "bouncemarks" (dock bounces are often used as a bench) are very low or nonexistent for frequently-used apps (like Mail, or Outlook), where before with the Caviar they could take a dozen seconds or more to start up.

    There are likely differences for each system as to how effective it is (and possible ROM version differences, this one is SD26), but I see real improvements with the Seagate hybrid drive.

  12. Xen is alive and well on Xen 4.1 Hypervisor Released · · Score: 1

    Don't believe the FUD in these party-line comments. I run a NetBSD Dom0 with now 7 Red Hat DomU's in an LDAP/messaging cluster on a single server, scoped to 10 concurrent VMs hitting iSCSI cluster targets.

    It's not a desktop product. It's designed for high-availability and dense clustering, has a mature codebase and tools, and it works well. And yes, Red Hat 6 runs just fine as a DomU out of the box, and can be a Dom0 as well, if you like (although not "supported" by Red Hat, still quite functional).

  13. Re:Amiga -- circa 1985 on Kinect's Grandaddy Running On an Apple IIe In 1978 · · Score: 2

    There are examples on YouTube. This one is cool, check out 3:41 when he's manipulating words on the screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8-jGDyhdU8

  14. Re:I forget... on FBI Alleged To Have Backdoored OpenBSD's IPSEC Stack · · Score: 4, Informative

    No. NeXTSTEP pre-dated NetBSD and FreeBSD. NeXTSTEP was based on BSD Tahoe 4.3, and OS X took code from all three codebases (OS X was NetBSD-heavy in the early days until Jordan Hubbard joined Apple and influenced further conversion to FreeBSD code).

    To this day you can find BSD code from all BSD codebases, but not quite as much from OpenBSD. Run 'strings' on the libraries to get the skinny.

  15. Re:BillG hated the concept! on Microsoft Patents OS Shutdown · · Score: 2, Funny

    Hehe. Tier-1, not Level-1. Maybe I should stop using that term in my resume, perhaps that explains quite a lot.

  16. BillG hated the concept! on Microsoft Patents OS Shutdown · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I worked at Microsoft for the Windows 95 launch, where I provided Tier-1 support for BOOP (Bill and the Office of the President, i.e. CEO tradeshow tech support). I do recall that Bill specifically called out the 'shutdown' function on Windows 95 as an error. He didn't like it, he hated the idea of waiting for the OS to shutdown, and wanted simply to be able to push the power button to immediately turn the system off, like a DOS PC.

    He may or may not have understood the concept of in-memory caches and unsaved user work, but it didn't much matter to him.

  17. Sunshine? That sunny version of Event Horizon? on Sunshine Writer Joins Logan's Run Remake · · Score: 1

    ...Although we wouldn't need to worry about any dubious cribbing with Logan's Run; the original was a classic.

    /liked Sunshine.
    //just thought it smelled awfully much like Event Horizon, that's all.

  18. So the field emulates binocular depth? Bullcrap. on Ball Lightning Caused By Magnetic Hallucinations · · Score: 1

    I'm not a neurologist, so school me. But look, we all know when we are having ocular hallucinations. Press on your closed eyes for a while and open them. There's no perception of depth to it; no sense of "oh, that hallucination looks like it's hovering over that hill 30 meters away." Now, these are allegedly affecting the visual cortex directly, but still...

    How would a magnetic field hallucination within the visual cortex create a sense of binocular depth, and consistently track to a static location in space, within each input to the cortex? It's _obvious_, isn't it, when we hallucinate? Just flick your eyes a bit and move your focus, and watch the hallucination follow.

  19. Re:Closed Developer ecosystem, !"Closed system" on History Repeats Itself — Mac & the iPad · · Score: 1

    So make a better open platform instead of whining about the fact that a company that apparently knows how to make a platform is making decisions you don't like.

    As an Apple user and shareholder I have every right to express my grievances with their business decisions.

    Or don't you agree?

    "Shut up and go away" is an extremely weak response to the argument. Unfortunately it seems to be the primary response in defense of the App Store.

  20. Re:Closed Developer ecosystem, !"Closed system" on History Repeats Itself — Mac & the iPad · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's not hyperbole when "all" refers to us OS X developers, which was the intention.

    Nor is it hyperbole if a closed developer channel proves too lucrative, and too compelling-- and other platforms smell blood in the water. Like Microsoft, for example, who already is implementing a single gateway for Windows Mobile 7 development.

    I would love for it to *be* hyperbole. I certainly hope it turns out to be so, and that the larger open platform (where developers can choose their own audience) isn't rendered obsolete.

  21. Re:Closed Developer ecosystem, !"Closed system" on History Repeats Itself — Mac & the iPad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The end does not justify the means. Anything that restricts developer and user freedom in a mass-market channel should be argued against.

    And anything NOT open source can be considered a "closed system". Windows is a closed system. What Apple did was to extend the closure to the developer channel, such that it provides a single, monolithic, commercial gateway to the system, which has been very rare in the industry. Not even Microsoft at their most abusive would have attempted that kind of developer lockout.

  22. Closed Developer ecosystem, !"Closed system" on History Repeats Itself — Mac & the iPad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The fact that Company X makes a closed system is nothing new, nor is it noteworthy. Closed systems are a dime a dozen.

    What the blogs are on fire about, and what we ALL should be worried about, is a closed developer ecosystem. It's Apple's new focus, and if it's allowed to propagate to the open platform we're all screwed.

  23. Re:Apple's Developer Relations on Adobe Evangelist Lashes Out Over Apple's "Original Language" Policy · · Score: 1

    I guess that's why my knee is jerking. The iPad looks too much like the future, and too little like OS X.

  24. Apple's Developer Relations on Adobe Evangelist Lashes Out Over Apple's "Original Language" Policy · · Score: 0

    Does it exist? Between the App Store, the iPad, platform and channel lockdowns, and the trend toward punishing developers, pro users, and creatives, Apple is showing an unbelievable amount of hubris lately.

    They are burning their bridges and salting the earth behind them. They may be in a mass-consumer ("the lowest common denominator") ascendancy right now, but they won't be able to stay there with this attitude.

  25. Re:After Bob was cloned on 15 Years of Microsoft Bob · · Score: 1

    Although in this case, the project manager of Bob was Melinda French--now known as Mrs. Bill Gates.

    In other words, she stayed in on her back. Normally that dismal a failure causes a project manager to be shown the door, but because of who she was sleeping it, she could do no wrong.

    You nailed the one, single reason we're still talking about Bob. I recall she was also responsible for Microsoft's "Magic School Bus" properties as well, which weren't particularly successful either. She showed off Bob to the luminaries at the Allen and Company conference in '95, and I recall the deathly silence in the room.

    If this Slashdot article could be boiled down to one fact, this would be it.