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Comment Re:Reviving the bit wars? (Score 5, Informative) 773

The increased address space is not the important part of the ARMv8 64-bit architecture in this case.
Instead it has twice the number of general purpose registers (31) with twice the size (64 bit) than that of the previous ARMv7 architecture. It also has 32 x 128 bit vector registers, which again is doubled. This allows for more data being processed at the same time, and also saves a bit on memory accesses, which are horribly slow. There are also other improvements such as built in AES encrypting and SHA hashing instructions.

Comment Re:universal connector (Score 2) 393

You are of course correct. They use the "device attached" pin of the USB port with a specific resistor to switch the USB data lines into two analog audio outs.
While this is a cool hack, it still suffers from a few limitations that the apple dock connector doesn't have. It can't do analog in at the same time (think microphone input for a car handsfree), or video, or simultaneous USB data transfer, to name a few things.
Also, this is not part of the USB standard, which means the cable only works with certain phone models, and can actually make other devices misbehave. Try connecting a Galaxy Nexus to that cable. :-)

AMD

Submission + - AMD confirms CPU bug found by DragonFly BSD's Matt Dillon (gmane.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Matt Dillon of DragonFly BSD just announced that AMD confirmed a CPU bug he found. Matt quotes part of the mail exchange and it looks like "consecutive back-to-back pops and (near) return instructions can create a condition where the processor incorrectly updates the stack pointer". The specific manifestation in DragonFly were random segmentation faults under heavy load.
Robotics

Submission + - See Robot Cheetah In Action (patexia.com)

techgeek0279 writes: "When you think of robots, especially when they are portrayed in movies, they actually move at the rate of those slow zombies you see in the old classic horror movies. In this video, you'll see that DARPA researchers have created Cheetah robot that runs at a pretty decent speed."

Comment Re:Doesn't surprise me. (Score 1) 254

This is where the Magic Mouse shines in my opinion.
But you have to use Better Touch Tool or other software to really make it useful, because OS X's built-in gestures are just not enough.
I use two and three finger swipes and "tip-taps" to open/close tabs, navigate back/forward, turn up/down volume etc in addition to just scrolling. Best mouse I've ever had!

Comment Re:Amiga did *real* multitasking with the same CPU (Score 1) 203

I saw this as a feature! :-)
I used to create sinus-tables for use by my assembler code by using Amiga-Basic.

Just do a for-loop, use the built-in sin(), and poke the result into a (hopefully) free memory-location. Then switch to the assembler/monitor and dump the memory back to either assembly notation or raw data to be written to disk. Quick and easy. :-)

Comment Re:Amen! (Score 2) 448

(2) developing tools for cheating in-game, ala aimbots that're easily adapted to new games,

Well, what did I as a PS3 gamer do to deserve this? This is precisely the reason why hackers are despised right now by most PS3 owners.
I couldn't care less about them making emulators, games, knockoffs or even copies of games, installing linux, xbmc or using the console for other awesome stuff, but what I do care about is that my gaming experience is being affected by what they do. I am not Sony, nor am I fan of Sony. I choose the PS3 because I like to play games without hassle once in a while, and in my experience, Microsoft is by far the more evil company.

So, about retaliation:
(1) Fight the DMCA. This is the real problem, isn't it?
(2) Stop buying Sony products.
(3) Stop whining. You (american hackers) knew full well that this was illegal in your country and didn't give a shit about getting caught.

Science

It's Surprisingly Hard To Notice When Moving Objects Change 140

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at Harvard have found that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. In a paper published yesterday (PDF) in Current Biology, the researchers present a new visual illusion that 'causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.' The finding has implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots."

Comment Backed up in the cloud (Score 1) 498

I lost all my old C64 floppys when my parents moved to a new house. Felt a bit sad that every demo I ever made was gone.

Luckily I found them again when googling my own name! Turned out that someone I have never met had the time and devotion to find them, transfer them to a PC, read every scroll text and attribute every part to the correct person. They even found my real name, and my old address and phone number by dumping the memory at $3000. :-)

An important note here is that I am not a well known scener, nor was my group, and the demos were not very technically advanced or pretty. But if something ends up on the internet it seems like it will never go away.

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