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Comment Re:What's really funny... (Score 1) 396

Samsung parts make up a solid quarter of the electronics in iPhones and iPads! It gets better: Samsung fabricate the phones...!

So what happens to Apple if Samsung decide to be bastards and pull the plug on parts /and/ assembly? What the fuck can Apple do about it? Precisely *nothing*!

And just to make things better, Samsung owns the patents for the 'retina display' - so if Samsung don't sell the screens to Apple, who can Apple get to make them? That's right, nobody.

Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - Did you like Total Annihilation? Help KickStart Planetary Annihilation!

An anonymous reader writes: RTS Total Annihilation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_annihilation) was released in 1997 and 7 years later was still winning awards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_annihilation#Awards). Now, the team that built both TA and its successor, Supreme Commander (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_%28game%29), wants to build a modern RTS in the same vein with your help via KickStarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts). Here's some raw meat to get the /. crowd excited: Linux support at launch and DRM-free (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts/posts, buried).
The Courts

Submission + - New eBay EULA Prohibits Class Action Lawsuits (ebay.com)

dangthill writes: On August 21, eBay updated its end-user agreement by adding a binding arbritration clause. By accepting the new agreement, users forfeit their right to join class action lawsuits and instead must submit to arbitration. However, users may opt-out by mailing eBay a signed notice. eBay joins Microsoft, Sony, Electronic Arts, Valve and other companies attempting to prevent class actions after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled such tactics valid.

Comment Re:Peripheral Vision (Score 1) 146

I do exactly this to get my fix in Team Fortress 2. 3 x 24" screens running 1920x1080. The outer screens are angled ~30 degrees in and using the bevel removal tool for the ATI card seems to get the perspective thing sorted out.

I have hotkeys in the ATI Control Panel that allow me to switch configs between the three screens being seen as a single display (giving me 5968x1080 with bevel correction) and 3 x seperate 1920x1080 for normal use.

Why 3 screens? Well, if you have 2 - look at the bevels between the two screens, and your aiming point in just about EVERY FPS game will be smack bang in the middle. Use 1 screen or 3. Don't even try with just 2!

Comment Re:Tunderbirds are NO! (Score 1) 378

Oh, I dunno... how about fixing bugs in the Thunderbird UI and elsewhere that have persisted for a timespan of years when they've been reported to GetSatisfaction and Bugzilla?

I agree. Using the IMAP COMPRESS feature and I'm always getting told I have XX,XXX new messages when a single message drops into the inbox. The number seems to be random, but its always in the 5 figures. Always laughable for a single new message ;)

Comment Re:Abuse (Score 1) 234

One game I would love to see hit an Open Source license is Theme Hospital.

The game is great by itself (I just finished playing it again!) although there are many bugs and things that could really be improved upon.

There are attempts at an open source version - but having the original code would be orders of magnitude better...

Comment Re:Sandy Bridge on Linux? (Score 1) 96

I posted this just above, but as this is a thread purely about linux on SB, I'll place it here also:

Be careful. You may get bitten by this bug. The tl;dr version: If your apps use dynamic loading on Sandy Bridge, you may get segmentation faults cause by a bug in glibc.

RHEL should have this fixed by release 6.3. Other clones of EL will get the fix via the update to 6.3 after RH has released it.

Comment Re:Are there any benchmarks posted yet? (Score 2) 96

We run a large number of XenApp servers as VM's and while total system throughput is important so is single threaded performance. Right now we use x5670's with 2.93 GHz clock speeds and a 95W TDP. I'm wondering if the E5-2660 would be as powerful for single threaded workloads which would get us 33% more total throughput for the same power budget but I'm not sure that a 2.2GHz base clock with a 500MHz turbo boost using the SB core is going to be as fast as a 2.93GHz Westmere core.

Be careful. You may get bitten by this bug. The tl;dr version: If your apps use dynamic loading on Sandy Bridge, you may get segmentation faults cause by a bug in glibc.

RHEL should have this fixed by release 6.3. Other clones of EL will get the fix via the update to 6.3 after RH has released it.

Comment Re:Who cares (Score 4, Interesting) 239

As someone who recently jailbroke his iPad2, its one of the best things to ever happen to my iPad!

I bought a WiFi only model - as for my purposes, the onboard GPS is *very* substandard. When then trying to use a normal bluetooth GPS, I find out that you need a GPS that speaks "Apple" at $99USD + shipping to your country. After the jailbreak, a $5 donation to the guy who wrote a part of a bluetooth driver and bingo, now it works with ANY bluetooth GPS.

Theres also this awesome extension called "Mail Extender" that adds all the features that mail clients have developed over the last 10 years when Apple decided that you shall not send anything but plain text emails.

Thankfully, I live in a country where console modchips and other methods for device compatibility are 100% legal - and tested in court.

Comment Re:IPv6 Info (Score 1) 463

Its interesting how TFA says most disabled IPv6 support after the day - however:

host www.v6.facebook.com
www.v6.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

# host ipv6.google.com
ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:800::1011

Looks like of the 3 listed, only 1 backed out - Bing.

Comment Re:MS Taking Aggressive Steps Against MALWARE On A (Score 1) 675

Has anyone stopped to think about piracy for a second? The BIOS loaders just about make Win7/Vista/Server2008 anti-piracy a joke. It circumvents it completely.

I figure if this actually does what it sounds, the main aim is to close the door on the bios loaders that prevent any kind of effective copy protection on Windows... If they could do it for x86, they would.

Comment Re:CentOS (Score 1) 382

Given that you probably don't need a support contract, CentOS 6 would fit the bill nicely.

Its been a long time since I've posted here on Slashdot - and I agree with the idea of your post - however I would not recommend ANYONE currently doing any new rollout to use CentOS. After just getting a heap of updates pushed through for CentOS 5.x that are mostly security and bugfixes that are mostly a few months old, I would highly recommend using Scientific Linux instead.

You can find more details on Scientific Linux on their site.

In a nutshell, its still RHEL (with a few minor changes), however updates seem to be delivered on time and with minimal delay. The project also doesn't seem to have the infighting that has infested the CentOS world.

Comment Re:Actually, you're right. (Score 2) 449

Forgive the laymen for asking a stupid question: wouldn't it make sense to use accelerometers and gyroscopes to help to determine the attack angle and speed? Isn't a gyroscope a standard equipment in a cockpit?

It doesn't quite work like this. A gyroscope is set to a point in space and will always track that point. An artificial horizon will always show relative to the horizon. Angle of attack however is different as it has no bearing on the actual angle to the horizon. To explain this a little better, I shall go into a bit of detail and mention a little bit of aerodynamic theory.

Usually, a wing generates the most like with the least drag at about a 4 degree angle of attack (AoA). This is handy to know. When an aircraft starts its takeoff roll, the wing will usually be about 4 degrees above the horizon. As you are rolling along the ground (assuming its perfectly flat), this 4 degrees is perfect for maximum lift.

This changes when the aircraft raises its nose. The AoA increases (usually to 10-14 degrees) at rotation, but as the relative airflow changes to the aircraft climbing, the AoA will drop back to about 4 degrees. At this point, the aircraft nose will *still* be 10-14 degrees nose up. As the airflow is not parallel to the earth (as the aircraft is now climbing) it is quite different to the pitch of the aircraft.

For this reason, it is impossible to get an AoA from a gyro - you need to measure exactly where the air is coming from - not the pitch of the aircraft.

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