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User: Sam+H

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Comments · 96

  1. If there is one movie that happily ignores copyright, it’s La Classe Américaine (1993), a.k.a. The Great Détournement.

  2. Can you back that claim? Because on the other side of the spectrum, Mélenchon has also been criticised for openly praising the achievements of the Dassault companies, for instance, such as their CAD software CATIA (source: http://gauche.blog.lemonde.fr/...)

  3. Re:First! on Ask Slashdot: What Software Can You Not Live Without? · · Score: 1

    Statistics are wonderful, but yours are most likely wrong. A better estimate of how many people born before computers and software existed have died would be 93%. I am using http://www.prb.org/Publication... as my main reference.

  4. Re:SLASHBETA ADMINS on New Zealand Spy Agency Deleted Evidence About Its Illegal Spying On Kim Dotcom · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well at least I shall use all my mod points to flag fuckbeta posts as “Insightful”, because they are. Off-topic, but insightful.

  5. Re:Try to do something right on Reporters Threatened, Labeled Hackers For Finding Security Hole · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It might take a security expert to write code that works as specified the first time, but it takes a fantastic idiot to put any kind of code in production before it's been debugged and error-corrected.

  6. Re:Non story on DNS Hijack Leads To Bitcoin Heist · · Score: 2

    Oh, so you don’t believe the Bitcoin crime of the century was pirateat40’s BS&T going away with 500,000 BTC, that are now valued at about 20 million dollars?

  7. Re:Great idea, but... on Can You Do the Regular Expression Crossword? · · Score: 1

    I think you haven't actually given it a try. The clues are written as regexes, which require to know the syntax, but it's actually a pretty easy logic puzzle.

  8. It's actually easy (really) on Can You Do the Regular Expression Crossword? · · Score: 2

    It took me less than 10 minutes to complete that crossword. It's actually easy, because the clues always give enough information to immediately place a letter somewhere with minor thinking; no tracking back is ever needed (unlike in some Sudoku grids where it's often easier to "try" a number, then cancel if an inconsistency appears).

    Actually most of the clues can be easily translated to natural language and make the puzzle understandable to the average people: [^M]*M[^M]* means "there is one and only one M in this line", (RX|[^R])* means "every R in this line must be followed by an X", etc.

  9. Re:Piracy = Theft Analogy on Pirated iOS App Store Site Shuts Down · · Score: 1

    Theft:
    noun
    1. The act of stealing

  10. Re:Piracy = Theft Analogy on Pirated iOS App Store Site Shuts Down · · Score: 2, Funny

    Oh wow, the first attempt to justify a piracy site not by directly defending it but by making a pointless semantic argument.

    Oh wow, looks like the second Slashdot troll of the year!

  11. Piracy = Theft Analogy on Pirated iOS App Store Site Shuts Down · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Think of it as being able to walk into a fancy department store, steal anything you want, and never get caught.

    Oh wow, the piracy / physical theft analogy. Looks like the first Slashdot troll of the year!

  12. Re:A simple Linux port on How Does a Single Line of BASIC Make an Intricate Maze? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sorry, what was I thinking? This is obviously more elegant:

    tr -dc '/\' </dev/urandom

  13. A simple Linux port on How Does a Single Line of BASIC Make an Intricate Maze? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    strings /dev/urandom|tr -dc '/\'

  14. Re:Not much point in 64 bits here on Mozilla Dropping 64-Bit Windows Nightly Builds For Now · · Score: 1

    and going 64 bit has a significant memory cost -- for typical C++ code, around 33% extra.

    There is no such thing as "typical C++ code" for the memory usage metric. Pointers may be larger, but a decoded 1680×1050 32-bit image takes 7 megabytes of memory on a 32-bit platform and 7 megabytes on a 64-bit platform. Remember that the web is full of images.

    I work on multi-million-line C++ projects and my personal experience indicates about 5% overhead. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you really need to back up that claim with some real life figures if you're going to use the word "typical".

  15. Re:Why is Direct3D still the de facto API? on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 0

    No they don’t. The PS3 provides a stripped-down OpenGL ES for testing purposes but almost no one uses it except hobbyists or indie devs. And you can certainly guess how many hobbyists and indie devs there are who can afford targeting the PS3.

    Most PS3 games use libgcm, Sony’s own graphics library for the RSX, which actually has a very Direct3D-like API. Source: if I told you, they’d have to kill me.

  16. Re:Why is Direct3D still the de facto API? on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 1

    Are you referring to the PS3, and if not, what console is that? Do you really know how many of your games actually use OpenGL?

  17. Re:20% difference is too large on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A 0.5-millisecond difference in a 3.6-millisecond frame time is “hardly worth mentioning”? You know, people get paid a lot to find out how to gain those 0.5 milliseconds in a 33-millisecond frame time.

  18. Re:OpenGL Support on Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sir, this is complete, utter bullshit.

    DirectX gets almost nothing “much earlier”, because it has no extension mechanism. With DirectX you are stuck with the latest version. It has obvious advantages, but early features are certainly not amongst them. Think what you want about the ARB, it does release and releases often.

    As for the documentation being terrible and vague, that's pretty uninformed, too. Every extension is fully documented and the vendors know precisely what needs to be implemented. There is no Direct3D equivalent of the 600-page OpenGL specification. The DirectX documentation is a programmer’s guide, not a specification. Every single version of the GLSL standard comes with a full grammar of the language which lets you reimplement a parser or compiler. There is no such thing as a grammar for HLSL (the D3D equivalent). What Microsoft calls a “grammar” for HLSL can be found here and anyone not even in the field of graphics programming will immediately understand how much of a joke it is compared to this (pages 166 to 174).

    (Source: I work on Windows, Linux, PS3, Xbox and mobile game engines)

  19. Is it time? What? on Microsoft Won't Say If Skype Is Secure Or Not. Time To Change? · · Score: 2

    Is it time to consider more secure alternatives

    Why now? How does Microsoft change anything? It was time to consider more secure alternatives from day zero!

  20. The WC3? on HTML5 Splits Into Two Standards · · Score: 2

    How can one misspell W3C twice in so few words?

  21. Clearly inferior products on Police Find Apple Branded Stoves In China · · Score: 1

    Those gas stoves obviously do not heat as much as a real MacBook Pro.

  22. Re:Poor analysis - its film not the camera itself on Kodak Failing, But Camera Phones Not To Blame · · Score: 1

    Maybe some day direct brain stimulation will make us able to see these colors that can't exist in the real world.

    This was first created in 1938 and is called LSD.

  23. Re:Disturbing and possibly misleading metric on Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment · · Score: 1

    While your statement is logically true, it appears to insinuate that I didn't read the text, whereas I did, so who the fuck are you to insult me by suggesting otherwise, and has the additional problematic characteristic that it has nothing to do with what I am talking about and therefore further supports my personal opinion that Slashdot has become a shithole unworthy of the slightest consideration.

  24. Re:Disturbing and possibly misleading metric on Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment · · Score: 1

    This is biased logic, too. I can bias it the other way: if you're an application developer and you want a platform feature that is not yet released, and you need to wait for 6 months instead of one year, then you will get half your market six months sooner.

    Also, as an application developer, I can tell you the worst limitation is the hardware, not the software. Most of the time, missing OS features can be emulated. But if the GPU only has half the VRAM, no update can fix that and the application is likely to need a degraded mode.

  25. Re:Disturbing and possibly misleading metric on Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment · · Score: 1

    It is completely relevant, because with a fair metric the Nexus One and Droid Incredible lines would be all green and would indicate worthier products.