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  1. Re:To hell with BIG GOVERNMENT on Microsoft Tax Dodge At Issue In Washington State · · Score: 1

    There are (unsurprisingly) a couple of ones in France that can be considered as such, as they are applied on the "before taxes" revenue (Hence, you pay a tax on money you never had). Sorry for the links in French...

  2. Re:That sounds cool ! on French Deputies Want Labels On Photo-Altered Models · · Score: 1

    Of course! That "2-inch fat" as you call it, is precisely designed so women have something to hold when screaming in pleasure (in the missionary position). :-)

  3. Re:That sounds cool ! on French Deputies Want Labels On Photo-Altered Models · · Score: 1

    That is a change of process from the previous way pictures were staged

    Note that I would love to know how that picture have been taken !

  4. That sounds cool ! on French Deputies Want Labels On Photo-Altered Models · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd love to see that mention on Paris-Match pictures of Sarkozy...

    For the uninformed, Paris-Match magazine published an altered picture of Nicolas "cocainomaniac chihuahua" Sarkozy.

  5. Re:Almost competing on Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take Nearly a Day · · Score: 1

    That is not my experience. I had wireless drivers on no less than Dell c400 machines that refused to install on a fresh MSDN XP install. No amount of drivers downloading a kludging did anything to get it running. The same PC was running fine with its wireless card under linux.

    I had the same experience with quite a lot of windows install. Very very frustrating.

    In general I found that basic hardware had a better chance to work properly in linux, and that when something didn't work, it worked a few month later, "out of the box". Generally, not all features of the hardware can be used, while in windows everything will work, provided you succeed at installing the driver.

    Of course, for quite a lot esoteric hardware, linux support did not materialize and never will.

  6. Re:Almost competing on Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take Nearly a Day · · Score: 1
  7. Re:What about Syllable? on After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha · · Score: 1

    > Yup, Cocoa then was comparable to .NET, circa 2001.

    Another way to look at this is to say that .NET circa 2001 was a comparable to NeXT Foundation + AppKit, circa 1993 (NeXTstep 3.0)

    > .NET has had a lot of development since then, though.

    Good thing. I've been told that NeXT libraries also had some maintenance since early 90's :-)

  8. Re:This would be really great news... on After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha · · Score: 1

    You really want OSX to do NUMA?

  9. Re:What about Syllable? on After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha · · Score: 2, Funny

    > When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it.

    You should have looked at NeXT at this time. It was waaay better than BeOS.

  10. Thanks for posting the links, even if I'm afraid that I have to tag them "tl;dr". It seems that the article is a claim of evilness for the following Kuhn statements:

    I believe strongly that all published software should be Free Software. Users should get all the freedoms as defined in the Free Software Definition and Today, some argue that the "right to choose your own software license" is the greatest software freedom. By contrast, I think that, like slavery, it is an inappropriate power, not a freedom. are the points of contention.

    Well, first, I write proprietary software for a living, and I don't think that his position is particularly "evil". Extreme, yes. Evil ? Not that sure. I can see his point that law should be written to avoid enslavement of people by software. If you think in the long term, it sortof make sense:

    See, when copyright was created, it was absolutely reasonable, and served the purpose of information and culture diffusion. Today, you don't have the right to sing Happy Birthday in a movie. And you will never have it again.

    So, I can totally understand the FSF concern that, in some not so distant future, you may be totally locked out of software you use, due to restrictive licensing. I can easily envision a world where you can't develop an application that send data on the internet without having to pay for a specific license, and in which that license will only be granted by an opaque process, where you can be locked out if your application is not welcome.

    So, it is his opinion, it is maybe excessive, but I don't find the guy "evil" for that...

  11. Go ahead, post the links...

  12. Re:lego mirrors real life on How Hollywood Tie-Ins Saved Lego · · Score: 1

    I think the issue is just one of practicality. If either:
    1) You are doing something big and have not enough pieces to have the luxury of choosing colors
    or
    2) You don't have the time to both do what you want and choose the right color
    or
    3) You are not following a plan, you just grow something organically, depending on the bricks you can see
    then you end up mixing colors, and it doesn't matter.
    When a child start doing LEGO, he doesn't have enough pieces, often doesn't have time to search for the right pieces (it is quite rare to see a children bricks sorted in different bins), and don't follow very structured plans. So he develops a sort of color blindness. I know I was like that.
    Projects where colors are matched seems to be done by older people, with a lot of bricks to choose from, good organization and a solid idea of how you want to build the thing.
    So, I'd say, yes, it is when you get older that you start being more careful about the colors.

  13. Re:lego mirrors real life on How Hollywood Tie-Ins Saved Lego · · Score: 1

    I deep linked to a bigger version of this image. Seems that the site owner didn't like that. Ooops.

  14. Re:Tie-Ins Saved Lego? on How Hollywood Tie-Ins Saved Lego · · Score: 1

    3 or 4 years ago, when LEGO moved their fabrication to eastern europe, bricks became shoddy (didn't snap with the same force, were as flat as they used to be). Colors became less uniform.

    I have sets that I refuse to throw with he other ones, because the pieces are weak. I mostly stopped buying LEGO at this point.

    I'm happy to hear that they have supposedly solved their quality problem.

  15. Re:lego mirrors real life on How Hollywood Tie-Ins Saved Lego · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Having specialized pieces and 4 or 5 kits is cool. My kids have around 50 of 60 kits (around 20K pieces), so specialized pieces are just lost in the mess.
    Fun thing is that my kids turned to bigger scale reuse, where functional blocks of 10 or 20 bricks are reused from kits to kits. That gives most of their work a weird Tetsuo feel...

  16. Re:That's just the trick isn't it? on How Hollywood Tie-Ins Saved Lego · · Score: 1

    Oh, yeah ?

  17. Re:Amazing? on Thieves Clear Out NJ Apple Store In 31 Seconds · · Score: 1

    Holy crap, it does work ! I got myself a karma cleaning spell, and now, I can't use the +1 posting bonus anymore !

  18. Re:give them a day's work on Appropriate Interviewing For a Worldwide Search? · · Score: 1

    Woow. I have a hard time to believe that:

    1/ You actually do that
    2/ Valuable candidates will go through this process
    3/ You can link a reduction of turnover to such process ...unless the jobs are too good to pass out. Say like lego master builder, or something like that...

  19. Re:Example on Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline · · Score: 1

    Nope. The document you pointed to is about computed goto in *IBM*XL* C/C++

    In C99 goto *f() and &&a are both no-no.

  20. Re:Example on Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't think the efficiency is worth having a non-standard construct, considering a simple switch would do the trick.

    You could also split the function in multiple function (because having all the code in the same function is not very useful as local variables are trashed between executions), and directly returning pointer to the next function to call (hence you could spare of the cost of actually calling f() before jumping).

    Anyway, a nice trick. Didn't thought I would learn another one in C. The worst I ever did with function pointer (not in production code, of course, just to provoke disgust) was in the line of:

    #include

    int f0()
    {
            return 10;
    }

    int f1()
    {
            return 20;
    }

    int f2()
    {
            return 40;
    }

    main()
    {
            printf( "%d\n", (*((int (*)())(((int)f0+(int)f2)/2)))() );
    }

    (yes, this will print 20 on most compilers).

  21. Re:No mention of ClearCase? on Making Sense of Revision-Control Systems · · Score: 2, Informative

    Nope. Moving directories within a checked out repository and committing their content will commit them back from where they were checked out.

    His "save overwrite stuff" issue is probably due to him loading a file in his editor, updating the underlying version, and saving the file. If he uses a shitty editor, he may overwrite the changes. If he blindly commit his changes, he may have manually reverted the file. I've seen this happen with careless developers. I don't consider this a deficiency of CVS, as he actively overwrote the file. I could do that with any version control system.

    His last point is wrong, though. Maybe he had some script that did some forced commit.

  22. Re:Example on Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline · · Score: 5, Informative

    OMG. I didn't even knew you could write that in C (and I have my name in the comp.lang.c FAQ...)

    Of course, I checked C99, and, no, you can't write that:

    3.6.6 Jump statements

    Syntax

                        jump-statement:
                                        goto identifier ;
                                        continue ;
                                        break ;
                                        return expression<opt> ;

    identifier being defined as:

    identifier:
                                        nondigit
                                        identifier nondigit
                                        identifier digit

    So, goto *f() is a no-no (as is probably &&a)

    But, anyway, wow. Gcc actually compiles that to something that somewhat runs...

  23. Re:Wow. Talk about old news. on Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline · · Score: 5, Funny

    > it's the comments that are worth reading

    More specifically the comments in the article. I loved this one:

    "Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander.""

    That's awesome.

  24. Re:Tax Exempt? on US Colleges Say Hiring US Students a Bad Deal · · Score: 1

    There was no aspect of trying to use "savings" as a sales pitch

    From the first link, page 3:

    Q: Even if it's legal to hire international students, won't it cost a lot of money and involve a lot of paperwork?

    A: No. The only cost to the employer hiring international students is the time and effort to interview and select the best candidate for the job. The international office at the school handles the paperwork involved in securing the work authorization for F-1 and J-1 students. In fact, a company may save money by hiring international students because the majority of them are exempt from Social Security (FICA) and Medicare tax requirements.

    How can you be modded up as informative ? Probably by moderators that didn't read the linked document either.

  25. Re:Pardon? on Parents Baffled By Science Questions · · Score: 1

    Obviously, YOU are closed-minded: you cannot grasp that there are no other viewpoints !