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User: Bing+Tsher+E

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  1. Re:Lawrence on Frank Herbert's Dune, 50 Years On · · Score: 1

    The Islamists in isis are a front. The core leadership and power behind isis are the Bathist former generals from Sadaam Hussein's Iraq. It's the folks who were thrown from power after the Iraq invasion. They use the islamist front as cover.

  2. Re:That's still exactly what it was on Frank Herbert's Dune, 50 Years On · · Score: 1

    Charismatic. Very different word.

  3. Re:The author doesn't understand Herbert on Frank Herbert's Dune, 50 Years On · · Score: 1

    Really, the most disappointing people to talk to about Herbert and Dune are the people with a throwaway attitude. They say 'That movie really sucked' and you can't get them to think about the matter further. I've tried to read Herbert more widely. Just last week I picked up a second copy of 'Whipping Star' to reread it. He wrote a lot of books besides the Dune series.

  4. Re:That's still exactly what it was on Frank Herbert's Dune, 50 Years On · · Score: 1

    Mostly you're just talking about California, and arid regions where people just shouldn't congregate to live.

    Here, I am using electricity to pump excess water off a corner of my land and to the railroad drainage ditch.

    Low government interference? Again, you're just talking about a California problem.

  5. Re: Slippery slope on Trolls No Longer Welcome In New Zealand · · Score: 1

    Ah, so you accept a definition of the practice as 'gaslighting'.

    That's very cynical of you. But all that matters to you is the end result. There is no room for discussion. You have it all figured out and there is no reason to engage your opponents. You need only impose your view. It's good we were able to come to an understanding.

  6. Re: Slippery slope on Trolls No Longer Welcome In New Zealand · · Score: 1

    So you are saying: "Pay no attention to those imbeciles over there claiming to be atheists. They are false and wrong. I espouse the One True Atheism."

  7. Re: Fee Fees Hurt? on Trolls No Longer Welcome In New Zealand · · Score: 1

    Bread and Circuses, to keep the masses from fighting.

    Feeling upset and angry? Don't go to a protest rally. Here, download some music and movies. You're such a rebel!

  8. Re: Most of their apps are annoying anyway on Google: Stop Making Apps! (A Love Letter) · · Score: 1

    2003? Usenet archives should go back about 15 years earlier than that.

  9. Re: Why does Jobs always steal the limelight? on "Jobs" vs. "Steve Jobs": Hollywood Takes Another Stab At Telling the Steve Jobs Story · · Score: 3, Informative

    People don't want to hear it today, but Microsoft played a big part in the early growth of the Macintosh. It was a threadbare platform without Microsoft Word and Excel. Excel, in particular, was a Macintosh program for quite awhile before Microsoft had a Windows environment good enough to run it on.

  10. Re: Why does Jobs always steal the limelight? on "Jobs" vs. "Steve Jobs": Hollywood Takes Another Stab At Telling the Steve Jobs Story · · Score: 1

    And Apple, especially in the early years, was a Pascal shop. With some Smalltalk and other stuff thrown in there. The whole Apple culture was way too baroque and niche-ridden for anything as utilitarian and clean as C. Apple spent hundreds of millions on failed attempts at a new 'elite-unique' OS before giving up and just buying in NeXT Step, which is based in Unix/C legacy code.

  11. Re:Port it away from Java... on Microsoft To Launch Minecraft Education Portal For Teachers · · Score: 1

    Microsoft is already working towards less java visibility. The Windows installer from Microsoft is now an .msi file, and when you install it, it installs and uses it's own embedded Java runtime.

    When I noticed this last week (after a disk problem caused me to roll back my Windows install) I uninstalled the troublesome and always nagging-for-updates JVM on my system. If you don't use Java for anything else, you're certainly better off using the embedded runtime.

    So any new installer of Minecraft on the Windows platform will not need to know about the JRE at all.

  12. Re:Ask other retro communities on UK's National Computer Museum Looks For Help Repairing BBC Micros · · Score: 1

    BTW, one of the neat things about the BBC Micro is that they shipped with a complete circuit diagram for the main board in the back of the manual.

    They provide a small but complete schematic of the C64 in the back of the thick ring-bound manual that came with that system, too.

    For that matter, you could buy Technical Reference manuals for the IBM-PC product lines and many of us have them. It has schematics of the mainboard and all the IBM-brand expansion boards, along with commented source code listings for the BIOS and the BIOS extensions on expansion boards.

    Providing lots of information about the hardware used to be a priority. Not just for repair, but so that programmers could get right down to the signal paths and I/O scheme.

  13. Re:Replacing capacitors... on UK's National Computer Museum Looks For Help Repairing BBC Micros · · Score: 1

    Solder wick has a lot of uses, though. It's more useful for medium-pitch surface mount rework, where you're trying to remove as much of the solder off the tiny pins. Once you have the solder wicked out of the fillets, the terminals can be popped loose one at a time. I used to pride myself on being able to remove an SO-8 package and be able to put it back on.

    For through-hole rework a spring loaded solder sucker is better, or if you're wealthy or for professional work, a powered desoldering tool with a vacuum pump.

  14. Re:Replacing capacitors... on UK's National Computer Museum Looks For Help Repairing BBC Micros · · Score: 1

    Yes. Jumper wires are usually the best method. Connected from a component terminal to component terminal. Best to not put a lot of effort into 'repairing' the original trace. An obvious well anchored jumper wire is better than a little bit of bare wire 'woven' into the trace. There are ''quality standards' for that form of rework.

    Back when I was troubleshooting medical device circuit boards that were fallout on a production line, I would sometimes find attempts by operators to 'fake out' the rework when they'd yanked the tube out of a hole. The worst cases were when they tried to disguise the damaged feed-through with a little ring of wire to simulate the pad they'd ripped out. It looks nicer for a visual inspection but if the trace isn't connected to the fake pad there's no electrical circuit, or there's a trace on the other (component) side of the board that's also broken. That is one of the worst kinds of rework/troubleshooting- when someone has mucked it up and tried to hide it from you.

  15. Re:Replacing capacitors... on UK's National Computer Museum Looks For Help Repairing BBC Micros · · Score: 2

    Power supply circuit boards of that vintage, and even some of them today, are usually single-sided without plated through vias to pull out.

    Not sure if you knew this, or if you're sorta bush league yourself.

  16. Re:Was Safari ever a force in the browser market? on Is Safari the New Internet Explorer? · · Score: 1

    Cyberdog was popular once, too. In that same 'demo' as you put it.

  17. Re:That's because... on Is Safari the New Internet Explorer? · · Score: 0

    Well, in later time, Apple encouraged developers to develop iOS 'apps' that are just a bunch of HTML/JS all zipped up into an 'app' container.

    Technical detail: The .ipa files that are the apps in your iDevice can be renamed as .zip files and opened. I've done so with a few of the image-rich apps that I acquired back when I used an iOS device and pulled out nicely hierarchical directories full of the useful images and other content that were embedded into an 'app' in the .ipa file. (For instance, there are some nice collections of Kahn Academy videos you can get that way.) You can get the .ipa files out of whatever directory iTunes caches them into when you synch your device to your PC.

  18. Re:They broke it when they named it TLS. on RFC 7568 Deprecates SSLv3 As Insecure · · Score: 1

    In the US, you need to defend a trademark for the trademark to remain valid. If you haven't sued anybody, you won't be able to eventually.

  19. People still use Safari? on Is Safari the New Internet Explorer? · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I haven't even turned on my iPod Touch in months.

  20. Hardware Boot Sector Recovery on Celebrating Workarounds, Kludges, and Hacks · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back when a 10 MB full-height 5-1/4" hard drive was still somewhat of a big deal, I acquired one that had boot sector damage. It could be low-level formatted just fine, but the first few cylinders were damaged so it couldn't be a bootable drive in a PC-XT clone.

    It used an optical limit sensor to detect when the stepper motor moving the head in and out was at the outer end of travel. I epoxied a little bit of metal onto the end of the encoder to slightly extend the head inward. After a fresh low-level format, the new 'track zero' was defect free and the drive was bootable and could be deployed as the C: drive. I think I then put it to use as the C: drive in the PC-XT that I ran my BBS on (WWIV 3.2.1, 1200 baud, online 24/7)

  21. Re:$450 Million on Apple Loses Ebook Price Fixing Appeal, Must Pay $450 Million · · Score: 1

    Since it's a penalty and not a 'find' situation, it's more the equivalent of one of us getting a $320 speeding ticket.

    That's fairly significant though it's not financially crippling.

    If Apple doesn't want lawyers swarming all over them for loot, maybe they should do what other companies do, actually pay more of the cash excess back to the shareholders as dividends.

  22. Re:Dangerous on Disney Bans Selfie Sticks · · Score: 2

    While the long recovery process is going on, they should set up a long roped-off corridor running all the way through the park, for the person with the selfie stuck to walk out through. Every other person in the park, particularly those who were inconvenienced and didn't get to ride the coaster that day, could see and/or possibly say a few things to the moron with the selfie stick.

  23. Re: Well, well, well. on A Failure For SpaceX: Falcon 9 Explodes During Ascension · · Score: 1

    Naw. We can just take it away from them temporarily, then send it back via PayPal.

    That's really the only Musk enterprise that's in the black, so it makes good sense.

  24. Re:Looks like the second stage ruptured on A Failure For SpaceX: Falcon 9 Explodes During Ascension · · Score: 2

    We should all demand a cut of NASA's budget. Then we can decide if we want to invest it in SpaceX.

  25. Re:here's a prototype without the camo paint on Aiming To Beat Tesla's "3", Chevy Tests and Teases a Cheaper 200-Mile Electric Car · · Score: 1

    That sounds like my dad's old Datsun 210. Smallest engine, automatic transmission. On entrance ramps, you just floored it and prayed.