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User: sxeraverx

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  1. I like-a to say on Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the words of Strongbad, "I like-a to say, 'Holy Crap!'"

    This certainly is unexpected.

    First off, Comcast is going to stop blocking or filtering or slowing down bittorrent traffic. That's bittorrent the protocol, not BitTorrent the company. From TFA, "We are working hard on a different approach that is protocol-agnostic during peak periods." Protocol. Not just torrents sanctioned by BitTorrent, Inc., but any torrents whatsoever.

    Second, what seems to be even better, is that Comcast is going to be increasing throughput to its customers. "Internet Capacity" as stated in the summary doesn't really make sense, unless it's referring to an IPv4-IPv6 changeover (-1: Pedantic), but if that means what I think it was supposed to mean, then it's great. However, is it an increase in last-mile throughput, or overall throughput? Or both? Because overall throughput would simply mean that if your neighbors are torrenting, your connection isn't slowed down, whereas last-mile throughput would only increase your peak speed when no one else is downloading anything. It seems like last-mile throughput is generally already maxed out with today's (yesterday's?) technology, namely, cable, at around 6Mbps, and the bottleneck is in the shared line.

    What I'm saying is that both should be improved. The shared line should be made so that everyone could attain peak throughput at all times, and the peak throughput should be about 10x-20x what it is now. That's right. The bottleneck should be in our own Cat5 cables or 802.11g networks, not imposed on us by our ISPs.

    Of course, ISPs won't willingly provide this (it costs precious $$$s), but for what we're paying ($50 a month, or $100 with TV, which amounts to $1,200 a year) it kinda seems like we deserve it. Telecom companies are required to put most of their profits back into their networks, but I don't think ISPs like Comcast, which operate over cable, are. Maybe they should be. Seems like it might help.

    Of course, most of that was just my incoherent rambling about one aspect of the state of technology in the US (don't get me started), so if you were expecting that to be meaningful, well, just forget what you read.

  2. Re:Robotic overlords on Endeavour Crew to Assemble Giant Robot, in Space · · Score: 1

    In soviet Russia, space welcomes you!

  3. Re:Terror Fears? on Counterfeit Chips Raise New Terror, Hacking Fears · · Score: 1

    The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Politicians understand that concept extremely well, just not the people, which makes them so easy to manipulate.

  4. Re:Strange... on Drugs In Our Drinking Water · · Score: 1

    In Soviet Russia, toilets pee in you!

  5. Re:What is the difference? on NVIDIA Performance On Linux, Solaris, & Vista · · Score: 5, Informative

    They have different priorities. Gaming cards try to keep the framerate up by degrading image (not showing every single texture, e.g.), if need be, while cards for stuff like CAD and the like lower the framerate to show every detail requested of them.

  6. Re:Cartridge Plan on Strict Order Boarding Would Get Planes in the Sky Faster · · Score: 1

    That's assuming everyone lived/worked in the same place, and there were TSA guys to scan you all over town. Again, in the name of cost-efficiency, they could simply hire more TSA guys, and build a bigger airport with more throughput at a cheaper price than redesigning and repurchasing the entire transportation infrastructure.

  7. Re:Seating area on Strict Order Boarding Would Get Planes in the Sky Faster · · Score: 1

    Hmm...That could work. Or you could just have another plane on the ground waiting, and when the incoming plane lands, all the passengers are already boarded on the departing one, and so it can leave even before people get off the incoming one. Doubling the size of the fleet (probably even 1.5x would work) would be a heck of a lot more cost-efficient than redeveloping the airplane and buying a whole new fleet, plus cartridges.

  8. Re:At what price? on Why Is Less Than 99.9% Uptime Acceptable? · · Score: 1

    Except in the case of cell phones, cable television, internet, etc., it really isn't that much more expensive. The costs are all artificial. It's just that telecom companies will slay to protect their profit margin, if it comes to that. Wait...did I say margin? Sorry, I meant page. (There...fixed that for me). They have so much more than a margin of profit it's starting to get past ridiculous.

  9. Re:Origin of life ?! on Correcting Misperceptions About Evolution · · Score: 1

    obviously a piece of granite doesn't have a soul nor does your computer.

    You haven't seen my computer.


    Mine's my soul-mate.
  10. Re:LiveCDs do this... on Preload Drastically Boosts Linux Performance · · Score: 1

    Dude...It's called a fork. Make one already. It's not that hard. Who knows, maybe someone else will actually use it.

  11. Re:Why did they buy ATI? on Is AMD Dead Yet? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a sort of adage that I think can be well adapted to this situation:

    20% of the engineering effort gives you 80% of the performance, while the other 80% effort is required to give you that last 20% performance.

    The Core's at that beginning stage where it's easy to overpower the other guys just by expending a little more effort. That's where the Athlon was a couple years ago. As soon as AMD introduces another architecture, ATI's going to hit that 80% mark trying to overpower it, and then it's going to be easy for AMD, and hard for Intel. Their roles are probably going to be swapping like that ad infinitum, until someone actually does bite the dust, but I don't think that's going to be this time around.

  12. Re:Why not use a spring? on Gravity Lamp Grabs Green Prize · · Score: 1

    If you're attaching a spring to it, some of the gravitational potential energy stored in the height of the rocks gets transferred to the spring as it stretches, instead of to the lamp. The effect would be similar to just having a smaller-mass rock. Actually, it would be exactly the same as a rock whose mass decreased quadratically with decreasing height. Not interesting, just pointless. Springs in garages work for us because we're not later using the energy of the lifted garage door. So all we really care about is its position, not how much energy the state of being in its position is going to give us. Now, we could regain some of the energy lost to a garage door, and it would operate on the same basic principle of the brakes in a hybrid car, but that's got nothing to do with this lamp.

  13. Re:I need only three words to explain this on Deal Reportedly Reached In Writers' Strike · · Score: 0, Redundant

    One word: Firefly

  14. Re:9% cpopy speed-up noticable? on PC World Tests Final Version of Vista SP1 · · Score: 1

    People probably were complaining about how it went too fast, and they couldn't tell whether or not it was actually happening. Application writers add in a minimum delay, in this case about 2 seconds, so that you can tell that the file actually moved. Also, this will force you to look at the pretty graphic that took someone months to produce. What happens is that the boss is happy, the newbs are happy, the normal users don't, and the power users complain. (On a more sadistic note, this lets application vendors claim improvements in the future when they're really just decreasing an intentional delay. However, it shouldn't work so well when there's already a previous version of the product that performs faster.)

  15. Re:Only Double? on Intel Doubles Capacity of Likely Flash Successor · · Score: 1

    No! They are in fact doubling the number of bits. A bit is a BInary digIT. '0'=1 bit '00'=2 bits.

    To be more precise, what they're doing is changing bits to qits (possibly pronounced 'kits'?), or Quaternary DigITs. There are the same number or qits as there used to be bits.

    Either way you look at it, however, you're doubling the data density, and therefore doubling the maximum storage capacity in a theoretical standard-sized hard drive without changing the price point.

  16. Re:You know what I don't get? on The Economics of Chips With Many Cores · · Score: 1

    You don't have Microsoft making a version of the XBox 360 that isn't backwards compatible
    Didn't Microsoft allow game makers to require a 360 with a hard drive after they decided to release the "Elite", basically screwing over anyone who bought a core system to force them to upgrade?
  17. Re:The best tools stay out of the way... on Goodbye Cruel Word · · Score: 1

    There is MS stuff that I like (Visual Studio, for example) and MS stuff that I don't like (Office 2007, obviously).


    The thing about Visual Studio is that it's written by developers for developers. Almost no other genre of software can be developed this way, be it games, desktop publishing, you name it. In no other genre of software development it the developer also the end-user. What people who develop software should do, right from the very start, is hire 10 (for small companies) to 100 (bigger companies, like MS and major game studios) people PER PROJECT who use that genre of software for a living to not just do QA, but to help out from square one. Unfortunately, FOSS and indie developers would have a difficult time doing that, since any money they would have to throw at a project would likely be used for more basic things. That's what software companies should be using to their advantage, not patents and unlimited copyrights and such.
  18. Re:It's only MOSTLY dead. on Toshiba Execs Declare HD DVD Not Dead Yet · · Score: 1

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

  19. WTF? on General Motors Embraces Open Source for New Community Site · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Saying using Wordpress is embracing open source is like saying using the LAMP stack for a webserver is embracing open source. In that sense, almost ever company out there has embraced open source by now. But we know that to not be the case.

  20. Re:MTBF/Write Cycles on Top Solid State Disks and TB Drives Reviewed · · Score: 1

    That would be true if you didn't take into account a full, or nearly-full disk. To be able to test this thing, at a ridiculously high estimate, say, 10M writes, the napkin math would be as follows: 32GB initial write 10M writes x 1024kB/write = 41.5GB At even 1MB/sec, that's 42,500 seconds or about 11.8 Hours straight. That's roughly half a day of just writing, no reading, no downtime, etc. At 60MB/sec, that's 12 minutes. Compare that to Seagate ES2's 1.2 Million hours MTBF (for platters constantly spinning), and you'll see, the sky really is falling.

  21. Re:Consoles? Really? on EA Says 'Next-Gen' Is 'Now-Gen' · · Score: 1

    That, and the probable Microsoft handouts to game makers to only target the newest Windows PCs.

  22. Re:This is weird... on Xbox 360 Updates Social Features, Back Compat · · Score: 1

    Sony still does offer complete backward compatibility for PS1 games on all PS3s. One model that's much cheaper than the rest is available for people who don't want or need BC. One other model that's currently in production had software backwards compatibility with almost 1800 titles at release and probably has even more now, as opposed to only 465 XBOX titles available even now, two years later.

  23. Re:the vision on Terabit-Per-Second Class Connections over FTTH · · Score: 1

    You really don't want to be swiping your retina across anything. Ever. It would hurt. You'd go blind. And you wouldn't even get any useful information out of it. It's the pattern of nerves behind your retina that a retinal scanner scans, AFAIR.

  24. Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot on Google's Shadow Over Firefox · · Score: 1

    I had WebDeveloper, DOM Inspector, and StumbleUpon, butI removed all of my extensions, including the DOM inspector that comes with FF by default, and nothing changed. It's an FF issue, not an extension issue. But like the AC said, opening a bunch of tabs, on a couple different sites, then closing all but one does it, as well as running FF for extended periods of time (like coming back to a couple open tabs the next morning). I've heard this attributed to FF caching absolutely everything you come across for (supposedly) faster page loading, but a 250M cache is just ridiculous.

  25. Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot on Google's Shadow Over Firefox · · Score: 2

    No memory gobbling bug? Please explain to me why FF's using 300+ *MEGABYTES* of memory with only a single tab open? And despite using very little CPU, FF's response becomes incredibly slow. FF needs to go back to its roots of being a minimalist browser, with just addons to give you what you want. Instead of incorporating new features, devs should introduce official extensions, using them for what they were meant for.