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User: caywen

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  1. I would create a counter to count from 0 to infinity, and point the CPU IP do the address of that big integer. The program I want will be generated somewhere along the way. The trick is to filter out the ones you don't want.

  2. What's the fundamental difference between being an EU member and having a trade deal with the EU? For example, is it theoretically possible to strike a deal that provides basically the same payment vs benefits as an EU member?

    I would think one possible progression is for the UK to negotiate a deal with the EU that isn't actually that different from what is already in place. Pressure from Scotland and N. Ireland would be the main drivers for such a deal, perhaps.

    Just wondering if the outcome of all this is basically the UK gaining some more latitude, but overall just an incremental change.

  3. Re:It needs to make its way into tablets.... on Taking Great Ideas From the Lab To the Fab · · Score: 1

    I'm all about the deep insight.

  4. It needs to make its way into tablets.... on Taking Great Ideas From the Lab To the Fab · · Score: 1

    Just so we can say we can take ideas from the Lab to the Fab to the Tab.

  5. Re:Translation: Slash 18K jobs, apply for 18K H-1B on Microsoft CEO To Slash 18,000 Jobs, 12,500 From Nokia To Go · · Score: 1

    code monkeys? You speak of employees not being the greatest asset, about how the "suits" don't care about them, only the quarter's results. Yet, you call your colleagues monkeys, unnecessarily demeaning their value. I smell hypocrisy.

  6. Re:Doctorow on 'Curiosity' Lead Engineer Suggests Printing Humans On Other Planets · · Score: 1

    And, how would YOU know something went awry? You would just cease, never suffering for even a nanosecond. No one you love would be pained by your prolonged absence. Everything would be perfect.

    oh sweet release!!

  7. So, who transports the equipment? on 'Curiosity' Lead Engineer Suggests Printing Humans On Other Planets · · Score: 1

    I assume some hardware will be at the destination point. I am fairly sure once we figure out how to transport things over interstellar distances, moving these bags of meat and water won't really be a problem.

    I also suspect once we can travel that far, the cosmos will bore us. Rocks tend to look the same everywhere. And perhaps other forms of life don't vary enough to keep our attention for very long. We will probably find more fun in trying to understand reality itself.

    We will even don togas as we debate the unknowable.

  8. Windows essentials on Ask Slashdot: What Software Can You Not Live Without? · · Score: 1

    PuTTY and Cygwin. They are the only truly essential thing on my Windows box.

  9. My manager Bill Brassky on Do Non-Technical Managers Add Value? · · Score: 1

    My manager wasn't technical enough to open a laptop lid, but could debug your kernel memory manager with just a protractor and 2 fifths of whiskey. He once filled out a requisition form using only a sharpie stuck up his ass in the middle of a team meeting. Here's to Bill Brassky!

  10. Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, 3200x1800 is great on Rise of the Super-High-Res Notebook Display · · Score: 2

    As a Lenovo Y2P owner, I have to just say that 3200x1800 is plain great. First, to the detractors of 16:9 aspect ratio, I really like this aspect. Running Blender, I can keep the side panels open and still have a reasonable working area. Same goes for Unity 3D. Web browsing is good, but 16:9 really shines when you side-by-side 2 browser windows.

    As for the resolution, having text this sharp is a noticeable, if minor, convenience. I actually find that displaying 20MP photos is astonishingly clear. I thought it would be the other way around, originally. I thought the text readability would be the huge win and the photos/video win would be minor. In either case, more pixels are better than fewer.

    And for those complaining about the Windows desktop at really high DPI: I just set the scaling to 200% and it works just great. Some apps kind of suck at scaling, though. I wish those Windows devs would get off their asses and fix it. But they are all probably busy writing Android or iOS apps right now.

    Overall, the resolution is great, and the aspect ratio is just fine. Even in tablet mode - having a long page is just fine be me.

    If there's one thing I would warn about in general about high res laptop displays, it's that the GPU can easily be underpowered for this. The Y2P's HD Graphics 4400 does an OK job, but the HD 5000 would have been way better. That's my one gripe about the Y2P.

  11. Isn't "exo" a bit redundant here? on Fomalhaut C Has a Huge Cometary Debris Ring And, Potentially, Exoplanets · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To say another star has an exoplanet seems redundant. Why not just say it has planets?

    In fact, seems to me that all stars have exoplanets, by definition.

  12. One major fail was the type covers on Microsoft's Surface RT Was Doomed From Day One · · Score: 1

    One major fail was selling the type covers separately for a hundred bucks. They showed the product everywhere *with* the cover, making people think it was all one product. To walk into Best Buy with a picture in your head about what you want to get, and then be told it's another $100 - that kills any forgiveness anyone might have over Surface RT's other issues.

    And then they screwed themselves yet again. Announcing a $150 price cut should have also included the cover. Yet again, Microsoft keeps thinking those covers are oh so precious.

    I actually think Surface RT is a decent product. I'd buy it *with* a cover for $300. No more. And so, no deal. From someone not fundamentally opposed to the product.

  13. Re:Data vs Hand-waving on Former Sun Mobile JIT Engineers Take On Mobile JavaScript/HTML Performance · · Score: 1

    I'm with you, and I think a lot of what is said boils down to trying to paint scenarios in black and white. The word "allocation" really doesn't mean anything until one specifies how and what is allocated. An allocation can come from a recycling allocator, slab allocator, or just plain old unoptimized malloc(). To say game programmers never alloc during "game level execution" (whatever that means) is just a gross facepalm statement. But it's certainly common for game developers to develop allocators well optimized to their memory usage patterns. I don't think many serious game developers would heavily use vanilla malloc/free in performance critical game loops.

  14. Simple formula for code quality on When Smart Developers Generate Crappy Code · · Score: 1

    code_quality = time * talent * experience * just_dont_care_factor

    If you find code_quality nearing 0, that often means they just didn't care.

  15. Reinvention on A Commencement Speech For 2013 CS Majors · · Score: 1

    Junior programmers will inevitably recreate what you created. It is then your job to grumble and start the task of putting proper locks in their code and running it in valgrind.

  16. It has FM radio gestures on Microsoft Unveils Xbox One · · Score: 1

    I hear you can tune into FM radio stations simply by using your arm as the antenna. You just have to keep it that way while you listen.

  17. Re:Microsoft's attempt at a do-everything box on Microsoft Unveils Xbox One · · Score: 1

    Looks like the Xbox One is a home-entertainment center for which gaming is mostly an afterthought.

    Is that how it looks? The thing has gaming specs on par with PS4, motion sensors, and dedicated game controllers. It has its own OS partition to handle games.

    How is that an afterthought?

    Perhaps you meant:

    "Looks like the Xbox One is a home-entertainment center for which gaming is a major feature."

  18. Google Health, take 2 anyone? on Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy · · Score: 1

    So, should Google jump back into the health data service market, who among you would use it, given a statement like this from Page?

    I suspect Page believes Google should be able to analyze your health data and even sell you to advertisers.

    No way no how.

  19. Doesn't it have to be grown? on Why We Should Build a Supercomputer Replica of the Human Brain · · Score: 2

    In order to construct a virtual brain, doesn't that mean it has to be grown, virtually? What would be the environment in which it grows?

  20. Facebook doesn't suck, just in the wrong place on Facebook Home Flagship Phone, HTC First, May Be Discontinued · · Score: 2

    Facebook isn't where users want it to be. We like Facebook in the browser and as an app, but collectively users don't feel it belongs as their shell. Consumers had the same reaction to Chrome OS: phenomenal as a browser, but we're rejecting it as the OS, hence, Chromebook has floundered. Same thing goes for Windows - consumers like it on their desktops and laptops, but so far looks like we don't really want it on a phone and tablets. Same thing for Linux - we flocked to it for server apps, but overall avoided it on our desktops.

    It's not that I feel they made a mistake, though. I think it's very worthwhile to bump software experiences up and down the stack to see if there's a better fit. But when consumers reject the positioning, it also makes sense to go back to what works.

  21. Re:1st rule in business on Bill Gates Opens Up About Steve Jobs · · Score: 1
  22. And the retraction on Microsoft Developer Explains Why Windows Kernel Development Falls Behind · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sounds like the guy was just frustrated and venting. Lots of us do that sometimes, and this one seems ready made to please the slashdot crowd. But do read the retraction the guy posted.

    First, I want to clarify that much of what I wrote is tongue-in-cheek and over the top --- NTFS does use SEH internally, but the filesystem is very solid and well tested. The people who maintain it are some of the most talented and experienced I know. (Granted, I think they maintain ugly code, but ugly code can back good, reliable components, and ugliness is inherently subjective.) The same goes for our other core components. Yes, there are some components that I feel could benefit from more experienced maintenance, but we're not talking about letting monkeys run the place. (Besides: you guys have systemd, which if I'm going to treat it the same way I treated NTFS, is an all-devouring octopus monster about crawl out of the sea and eat Tokyo and spit it out as a giant binary logfile.) ...

  23. It'll be a step forward for them on Microsoft Prepares Rethink On Windows 8 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I think Win 8.1 will be a great step forward for them. Not only will it fix most of the things consumers hate about Win8, it will be timed to coincide with Bay Trail and Haswell, and possibly will tie in with XBox "720" (whatever it will be called). It'll never make fans of the slashdot crowd, but it could well become a major market success. Ridiculing Windows and Microsoft has never seemed to matter very much.

    I usually sprinkle in some gratuitous criticism of them and their products as it seems standard protocol for slashdot, but that has gotten tiresome. Win 8.1 and their other products might well be a very strong play this year.

  24. Netbook 2.0 is coming on Intel Details Silvermont Microarchitecture For Next-Gen Atoms · · Score: 1

    Always hard to read the tea leaves, but I predict a wave of new netbooks that will catch the market by surprise. I believe a wave of $350 netbooks running Bay Trail and Windows 8.1 will prove pretty popular. This will, of course, cannibalize the $1000 ultrabook sales, so this isn't to say it will be a revenue success. But Bay Trail would definitely make Netbook 2.0 pretty compelling.

  25. Often, they cannot on Can Older Software Developers Still Learn New Tricks? · · Score: 1

    Often, older developers cannot learn new tricks for one simple reason: They know most of the tricks already, in some form or another.

    It has been my experience that older developers don't just adapt just as quickly to a new technology, they bring in knowledge from other areas of experience that a younger developer might not consider.

    This isn't to say this is true of all older developers - not even close: there are as many dinosaurs as there are greenies fighting above their weight class. But, as so many will point out, you can't generalize.

    I'm turning 40. I need to believe this.