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User: bheekling

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Comments · 79

  1. Re:Civ V! on Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave · · Score: 1

    Now you've made me sadder. And destroyed this week's productivity by reminding me that I haven't tried Diplomatic or Cultural victories yet.

  2. Civ V! on Construction On Spaceship Factory Set To Begin In the Mojave · · Score: 1

    16 comments and no one mentioned the obvious Civilisation V reference? I am a sad panda.

  3. Re:Wednesday on OpenGL 4.1 Specification Announced · · Score: 1

    Wine is capable of translating DirectX to OpenGL in realtime, which is how you're able to play that in Linux.

    You (and our omniscient mods) seem to have grossly misinterpreted my statement. I am well-aware of how Wine works.

    Back when HL2 was released, Wine had horrid/non-existent support for Direct3D 8. So the two options to play HL2 via Wine was either play it in Dx7 mode (-dxlevel 70), or GL mode (-gl). I played it in GL mode since dxlevel 70 caused a crasher in Wine.

    The source leak for HL2 also had a GL renderer in it, so they probably had it from the very beginning. However, it seems that Valve has since removed that command line option, since I can no longer find any references to it (only hints in old google caches of pages).

  4. Re:Wednesday on OpenGL 4.1 Specification Announced · · Score: 1

    Source Engine has had an OGL backend for a very long time (HL2-release times). Mostly for the inevitable PS port I suppose. I distinctly remember using it to play HL2 on Wine.

  5. Re:Good luck with that one on Company Claims Patent On Spam Filtering, Sues World · · Score: 1

    Texas on patents is a very very dark gray.

  6. Re:So let me get this right... on ITER Fusion Reactor Enters Existential Crisis · · Score: 2, Informative

    Human water demand per capita is 200-300 liters per day. You need water for more than just drinking.

    You must be thinking "That's still pretty cheap". And you're absolutely right. Except, people don't want to pay even that. If they were willing, we'd just recycle waste-water, reducing our water consumption drastically. It only costs $0.2/m^3 to do so.

    But we don't. Partly because idiots go "eewww" when you tell them what is intended, but mostly because they don't want to pay the extra "Water tax" which will result.

    PS: I meant m^3 in the original comment, and I used unicode for that, but slashdot's comment system ate that up nicely

  7. Re:So let me get this right... on ITER Fusion Reactor Enters Existential Crisis · · Score: 2, Informative

    De-salination is also quite costly. It costs around $0.5/m to de-salinate in Israel, Saudi Arabia etc. On the other hand, as I learnt (and calculated) in my water treatment course last year, fresh water treatment costs Rs.~5/m which is around $0.1/m.

    So, it currently costs 3-5 times as much to de-salinate than to just treat underground/river water for human consumption. Of course, it'll get cheaper as the demand increases, but that will take time.

  8. Re:Not surprising... on Linux Users Donate Twice As Much As Windows Users, On Average · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How many in the Linux/OSX marketshare play games?

  9. Re:Sensationalism on Steve Jobs Hints At Theora Lawsuit · · Score: 1

    You can easily test it yourself. Theora and x264 binaries are easy to find if you just google them.

    I was talking about VP8 vs H.264. The technical limitations of Theora are moot if VP8 is released and turns out to be better than (or equivalent to) h.264. Also, you misrepresented my position and ignored 2/3rds of my post. In total you did a classical strawman attack on my reply.

    To be honest, I hate Theora because it is a shitty video codec (in comparison to h.264). My entire post was about making it better or finding a replacement + making it wide-spread before 2016

    This would be the same disaster that only last year people said was inevitable in 2011. Given the MPEG-LAs history it's more likely that nothing will change in 2016.

    Don't forget that the last h.264 codec expires in 2028, and there will probably be MPEG-5 and MPEG-6 to counter too. I don't know about you, but I'm not comfortable being held hostage by a consortium of corporations.

    I think this is the best time for Google/Mozilla/Opera/etc to fund work on VP8 or Theora-based video codecs (which don't infringe on MPEG-LA's patents) so we can be rid of all this software-patent-sponsored monopoly nonsense.

  10. Re:Sensationalism on Steve Jobs Hints At Theora Lawsuit · · Score: 1

    In other words, the amount of reading between the lines and such required to reach your interpretation is rather excessive.

    Things read the same with and without emphasis.

    For example, what difference does it make that VP8 is going to be Open Source? And how does VP8 threaten Apple in the first place? If it becomes popular, and if it's superior to H.264, Apple will license it (and if it's fully Open Source in the way people are thinking, Apple won't even *have* to license it).

    Who said anything about Apple being threatened? It's the MPEG-LA and their revenue stream that is being threatened; and probably them who are assembling the patent pool. Or are trying to see which of the patents apply to VP8 and Theora

    Oh, btw Apple is a part of MPEG-LA as a licensor of patents(they hold one patent) so I guess part of their revenue is threatened too.

    It does not take any stretch of imagination at all to see why MPEG-LA would want to try and prevent any MPEG-LA-patent-free video codecs from being released for royalty-free use. The fight is not for a wide-spread free video codec right now. The fight is for 2016.

    Apple's objections to Theora aren't strictly financial (outside of the uncertainty of the codec's legal status),

    Financial objections? What, the price is too low?

    they're practical. In terms of quality, level of adoption and hardware support (specifically as it affects battery and heat)

    I wonder how valid that objection is... It turns out that most of the savings are done by using the generic DSP hardware available. So VP8 would also benefit in the same way.

    Theora is vastly inferior to H.264.

    "Vastly"? How can you just make a sweeping claim like that without anything to back it up? I would say MPEG-2 is vastly inferior to MPEG-4; but Theora is somewhere in the middle. On the other hand, VP8 is supposed to be better than h.264. But I won't pass that judgment until I can see for myself.

    The only real advantage of Theora is that it's (presently) free and open.

    And that isn't enough? Of course, we still have till 2016 to avert this disaster.

  11. Re:Sensationalism on Steve Jobs Hints At Theora Lawsuit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now

    (emphasis mine)

    Google recently acquired On2 and plans to Open Source the VP8 codec.

  12. Re:Hey everyone, this is Microsoft! on IE9 Throws Down the Hardware Acceleration Gauntlet · · Score: 1

    What they call "layers" (which is what they wrote for this hardware acceleration) does support OpenGL as well as DirectX.

    They've explained (sorry, can't find the link) that the Intel drivers for a lot of cards don't ship OpenGL 2.0 drivers. So they need to use DirectX for Windows. They also explained that they're using Direct2D for the layers backend, which needs DirectX 10.

  13. Re:Repeat After Me: on Geohot Brings Other OS Support To PS3 With Custom Firmware · · Score: 1

    Bonus points for using a car analogy.

  14. Re:Left click on The Problems With Video Game Voice Acting · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think they're talking about in-game interaction with NPCs, not cut-scenes. In Modern Warfare for instance, you *need* to listen to your friendlies or you won't get anywhere.

  15. Re:Ext3 on Best Filesystem For External Back-Up Drives? · · Score: 1

    Ever tried writing to them? Before you start hurling abuses, did you try verifying your facts?

    Last week I tried writing to an HFS+ Journaled FS on Linux, and it managed to corrupt the FS. I had to use an OSX install to run an fsck and fix the partition (and lost 100GB of data out of a total of 250G in the process).

  16. Re:Ext3 on Best Filesystem For External Back-Up Drives? · · Score: 1

    Linux has very good support for HFS+.

    Not if you have a journaled HFS+ filesystem. Also, hpfsck is just simply a joke.

  17. Re:Togh on How Google Uses Linux · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you think udev and devtmpfs conflict, you don't know what each of them are supposed to do.

    If you read about them, you'd know that devtmpfs just populates /dev as devices are discovered by the kernel during boot. Which means udev doesn't have to spend several seconds parsing /sys to populate /dev with information the kernel already had.

    Now during init, udev's job is to parse udev rules and add user configuration plus fix the permissions of nodes in /dev. Afterwards it also monitors device addition and generates events which apps can monitor (recent versions added a gobject interface too), and adds device nodes according to rules, if any.

    In essence, devtmpfs's job is to allow a bootable system without the need to maintain a static /dev or depend on udev for a recovery shell.

    devfs was bad, really bad because there was no naming system back then, and every driver did something different causing utter chaos (which led to different distros patching the kernel in different ways to change the node names). Now there's uniformity, and the kernel knows what to call the basic device nodes created by the drivers.

  18. Re:Togh on How Google Uses Linux · · Score: 1

    What does HAL's deprecation have to do with the Linux Kernel's development model?

  19. Re:not sureprised on Did Microsoft Borrow GPL Code For a Windows 7 Utility? · · Score: 1

    Replying to negate bad modding.

  20. Re:tell me something a child couldn't figure out on Scientists Discover How DNA Is Folded Within the Nucleus · · Score: 0, Troll

    You got modded troll. Still think so?

  21. Re:Boson in time on The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate · · Score: 3, Informative

    The English "or" maps to the operator "OR", but the English "either ... or" maps to the operator "XOR". In other words,

    scary or wonderful => scary OR wonderful

    either scary or wonderful => scary XOR wonderful

  22. Re:Siren Noise on Nissan Gives Electric Cars Blade Runner Audio Effect · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Doppler Effect should take care of that for you. No matter what kind of sound is made, it's affected by the Doppler Effect.

  23. Re:Prolly not going to work. on Universal "Death Stench" Repels Bugs of All Types · · Score: 1

    Does this mean we'll never have sharks with frickin' lasers?

  24. Re:Well, kind of obvious... on How GNOME and KDE Spend Their Money · · Score: 1

    Ah, right, sorry about that. They changed from KDE-by-default to "Choose what you want" in 2005, and now back to KDE.

  25. Re:Well, kind of obvious... on How GNOME and KDE Spend Their Money · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No "large enterprise distro" currently ships with KDE as the main DE. SUSE is the only one that has decided to ship KDE by default, and that too very recently. Also, Linus's infamous statements are not a factor for people when deciding which DE to use. Seriously, they're not.

    The reason why KDE is growing so much is because their community is insanely motivated. The only other community I've seen more motivated is the Drupal community. KDE is able to project a halo of (mostly valid) hype around itself which attracts users and hence contributors, which results in more features and hype, and so on.

    OTOH, a lot of GNOME development is done by RedHat/Fedora dudes, and I constantly get the feeling that they are a closed book and don't pay attention to engaging the community and gaining contributors. There are exceptions of course, such as Richard Hughes and Dan Williams.