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Comment There's lying and lying... (Score 1) 865

Let me put it this way. I did not call you a liar (read it carefully), but the gist of what I wrote is that you come across as being untruthful. I think I did a similar thing to what I'm accusing you of, which is to carefully use words to create an impression.
I think when one reads the whole of the Lovelock article he comes across as far more sensible than what you portray in your summary. So I think you're not stating a falsehood, but I think your exclusive selection of one fragment of the interview for your summary creates a falsehood, strengthened by the fact that very many slashdotters don't read TFA.

Comment My bank uses my cellphone for authorization (Score 4, Insightful) 462

My Dutch bank ING uses my cellphone for authorization of transactions or changes online. I can log in and view my account data with just a password, so that might get compromised, but for a transaction or for instance changing over to a new cellphone number, I need a transaction number that is being sms-ed to the cellphone.
My other Dutch bank ABN/AMRO uses some kind of calculator thingy that provides a transaction number based on a value you receive from the banks webpage.
The same ING bank also provides a very simple system where you have a sheet of paper with transaction numbers, and the webpage just asks you for your next TAN code.

What do all these have in common? Right, a separate transaction authorization outside the browser. How hard is that?

Comment Re:Other OS's already have OpenGL, so don't need t (Score 3, Informative) 63

Historically Microsoft has pushed very hard for their own DirectX 3D api. This happened after the OpenGL standard was already common for Unix workstations and such.
So wether or not it's the card vendors or Microsoft, it's a fact that Microsoft created the non-uniformity of the 3D api world, by introducing its own non-open non-crossplatform standard.
So ofcourse one can run OpenGL on Windows, but it's not easy, not standard, and often works badly. Which is exactly what Microsoft wanted when it created DirectX. A new 3D standard, that would be used in gaming, and that would make it harder (i.e. more expensive) for applications to be crossplatform; it thereby served its purpose: continuing and extending the dominance of the Windows platform.

Comment Other OS's already have OpenGL, so don't need this (Score 3, Informative) 63

From TFA

Many Windows machines can't render WebGL content because the OpenGL drivers aren't installed, even though the computer has powerful graphics hardware, Bridge wrote. Computers running OS X or Linux are fine, however, since those operating systems use OpenGL as the primary 3D API, Bridge wrote.
"ANGLE will allow Windows users to run WebGL content without having to find and install new drivers for their system," Bridge wrote.
Because ANGLE aims to use most of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, it may help developers working on mobile and embedded devices, Bridge wrote.
"ANGLE should make it simpler to prototype these applications on Windows and also gives developers new options for deploying production versions of their code to the desktop,"

So WebGL works fine on real operating systems that already have OpenGL, and because Microsoft suffered from its not-invented-here syndrome, Windows computers typically can not do WebGL because they have no OpenGL stack. That't the driver TFA is talking about.

Comment Glad I'm writing embedded stuff (Score 2, Informative) 623

Hello World.

I've spent most of my career on embedded projects, and I'm still doing real programming, from bit banging an I2C or Dallas onewire bus, writing a custom assembly routine to provide a uC-OS-II task switch on an ethernet chip interrupt, or interfacing with some higher level Tcl stuff. To get the whole thing working mix in some shell, awk, python xslt, stir well, and get space qualified software. Oh and when all that starts to get boring, throw in some FPGA programming for a completely new way of doing things. I love my jobs!
Really, I think embedded software is often more interesting than most web-, gui- or server apps. The disadvantage is that you pretty much need an electronics degree (which I do), to be able to do it effectively.
Last but not least, it often pays pretty good, and the quality requirements are high, which means that there is time allocated to make something good. Google for 'Declic' on linuxjournal.com if you want to see what I'm talking about.

Comment learn something about embedded! (Score 1, Interesting) 293

Buy an Arduino or something similar (msp-430) and see how much work it is to actually toggle a LED at a certain frequency, or drive an LCD connected via I2c or something. It's a whole new world. You'll have to learn C (probably) and maybe a bit of assembly language.
Linux journal had a nice introduction article on embedded programming.
I've been doing embedded development work for the last 20 years, and am still enjoying it. It pays pretty good, and you'll be far less interchangeable with someone else than your typical Java programmer.

Comment Re:Nice to get some bargain beachfront property (Score 1) 243

Thanks for calling me names.
Fortunately I feel quite justified in having my own opinion on the science behind AGW; after all I have a cum laude Masters in Physics. I've spent most of my career in University labs, so I don't share your trust in the perfection of science. There are a lot of dumb and/or bad scientists, and there is a lot of bad science done and published. I happen to think that a lot of the science behind AGW is really bad, and as far as the computer modelling goes: anyone that thinks we are currently capable to accurate model an open energy system as complicated as climate, is not aware of the difficulties of computational physics. The predictions of these models are as reliable as simple extrapolation of the past, and the last 10 years of level or slightly dropping global average temperatures is proof that simple extrapolation of trendlines from last century (which period?) does not cut the mustard.

Comment Re:Nice to get some bargain beachfront property (Score 1) 243

Thanks for the link to wikipedia. Just looking at the graph it is clear that the sea level has been rising steadily since the last ice age. There is no increase in the slope at all, so there is nothing about global warming/climate change that has changed anything whatsoever about our decisions to live near the coast or not.

Comment Linux 2.6 in a scientfic system on the ISS (Score 5, Interesting) 183

Our scientific equipment "Declic" was sent to the ISS last august. It runs Linux and uC-OS II on a whole pile of microprocessors. The Linux of the part of the system that we built was completely custom built based on "linux from scratch". For an interesting read: Linux Journal
The 2.6 kernel was state of the art when we built it, but we needed its lower latency features.

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