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Comment Stupid Clickbait Whoring (Score 1) 157

Specifically he argues that companies care about their bottom line and that the trend of customers refusing to tolerate insecure products will force companies to protect user privacy, implement encryption, etc.

Posting this article on slashdot is trolling, whoring for clicks, etc, because no technical solution can ever solve our political problems. As long as the USA is willing to use the rubber hose, presaged by a national security letter, nothing corporations can do can fix this problem.

Markets are defined by governments. Wank wank, stroke stroke, flonk flonk.

Comment Re:Wooden bikes are cool (Score 1) 71

I've been to Calfee and seen the best-known bike. Yes, the tubes are just bamboo. It's just that simple.

You should see how carbon fiber bike frames are prototyped. Cut and scallop your CF tubing, epoxy the tubes together into a frame shape, put it into a clamp and then wrap the joints with CF twine while brushing on the resin. When done, stick it in the oven and cook it. When it comes out you take a die grinder to the places where the tubes come together and just smooth it out and make it pretty, done and done. It's literally just done by hand on a table. For the final bike they make molds for the pieces which join the tubes, but you only save a couple ounces on the final frame and the end result has about the same strength.

Comment Re:Toronto Municipal Gov't divided (Score -1, Troll) 169

There is a difference between sharing a journey which would happen anyway (and being compensated for fuel used, etc.) and someone actively earning a living from driving people around.

Yes, and that difference is who is getting paid. That is literally the only difference.

this Uber nonsense threatens to lower the quality massively, as well as put people at risk.

No, it really doesn't, because Taxis suck anyway. They do not receive special safety inspections above and beyond the normal, the drivers do not receive special scrutiny above and beyond a normal driver, the only issue is insurance which the ride services already require be handled, or handle themselves.

Taxi drivers are usually shitty drivers. The twat who drives a [licensed taxi] minivan around the county in which I live can't even figure out that left turn always yields at an intersection. Bitch almost hit me. And when you drive through a city, the taxi drivers are always the biggest assholes, cutting people off and whatnot, even when they don't actually know where they are going.

Fuck Taxis, and fuck Toronto

Comment Re:Wait a second, this is very interesting. (Score 1) 109

The design is so close one has to wonder if they are actually using the same machinery for some of the components between this tablet and the iPad. They really are that similar.

Foxconn makes the Apple iDevices, and China is known worldwide for its copying. Foxconn actually has some real engineers that can design things. So they just went ahead and copied the overall design, making only those changes which were necessary. They won't be using any of the same components, but the devices might well be produced on lines formerly used for Apple equipment.

Comment Re:AMD wins again (Score 1) 75

Most of Intel's desktop Core i3s are STILL running circles around AMD in single threaded performance tests. Sure, if you can use 8+threads AMD has a few decent options, but that's not most consumer workloads.

Most consumer workloads won't tax either processor, the AMD chip costs a lot less, and the AMD chipset costs a lot less, too. When the system is "good enough" (even my old-ass 1045T is peppy both when puttering around and also when the system is heavily loaded) and literally a couple hundred dollars cheaper between the cost of the CPU and the cost of the motherboard, a lot of people are going to go AMD. I have other places to spend my money, and wringing a few more FPS out of a game isn't worth adding 20% or more to the cost of the system.

For highly-parallelized tasks, AMD is still cheaper than intel flop for flop, and if you're planning to throw all your servers away every few years as many businesses do, you can punt on the power consumption issue. For a home user, it's usually not even on the radar. And it's not like AMD is just burning power, either. The lowest-end systems still have better graphics than intel; though I'm certainly no fan of ATI graphics, intel is only now getting serious about graphics performance, or perhaps that's becoming competent in.

If you need/want balls-out single thread performance, or can be convinced that it's important to you even when it isn't, sure you're going to buy intel. But you're going to pay a premium. It has been ever thus. At times, it made great sense, because for example around the P55C vs. K6 days everyone else had apparently forgotten completely how to make a chipset. Today, not so much.

Comment Re:irrelevant (Score 1) 57

PC gamers hate joysticks.

Joysticks are part of what I love about PC gaming. The ability to use any input device for which someone has been arsed to cook up a driver is a beautiful thing, and it's one of the things I've missed during my latest foray into console gaming. I have an F22 Pro with Stickworks conversion which I'll probably stuff an Arduino into soon so I can make it a USB device finally, two logitech twisty sticks, two cyborg golds, and probably some more joysticks I'm forgetting about. Each of them fulfills a different purpose - for example, the cyborgs can be converted to the left hand and they're fun for 'mech games if you don't have a proper throttle or just don't want to dig it out. A throttle is the one thing I still don't have, since I do have a CH yoke and pedals as well. The yoke has one or two throttles on it, though. And of course, I also have gamepads which work on the PC, because emulation. I also have converters for PS2 controllers, which are what I actually tend to use.

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