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Comment Re:Windows 8 Is Failing on It's Own (Score 1) 610

Teachers interact with a vertical touch UI, known as a "blackboard" and "chalk", for hours on end every day. They even do so standing. How is this possible, given what you just wrote above? Well they aren't standing there in front of the board like a zombie; they are putting their arms down when they aren't drawing on the board.

They're also standing less than a foot away from the board, so they don't need to extend their arms in order to reach it. If you could put your computer monitor less than 12 inches from your face, gorilla arm probably wouldn't be as much of a problem (though I can't say the same about eyesight).

Comment Re:Disable nvsvc32 (Score 1) 129

I just tried disabling nvsvc32, but I discovered that it doesn't exist on my system - the NVIDIA Display Driver Service is named "nvvsvc.exe" (and the Update Service Daemon is "daemonu.exe"), and while I did find an "nvsvc64.dll", I could not find a single file named "nvsvc32.exe" anywhere on my system.

Is this something that only exists in the 32-bit drivers (I'm running Win7 x64), or is it something that disappeared in the 310.70 drivers released last week?

Comment Re:In which case you're going to have to explain.. (Score 1) 230

How on earth do you translate 240p to "240 frames progressive" without making the [effectively] industry-standard terms "480i", "480p", "720p", "1080i", and "1080p" equally meaningless?

It means 240 scanlines progressive - old NTSC television sets normally like to run at 480i, but they're tolerant enough to handle video signals which don't have the extra half-scanline at the end of each frame and display it non-interlaced.

Comment Re:Reminded me of my first C application (Score 1) 241

Microsoft's compiler has a similar warning - "C4706: assignment within conditional expression", and it actually doesn't let you suppress it just by adding extra parentheses - instead, you have to add a comparison around it.
Thus, your second example would have to be while ((list = list->next) != NULL)", which is probably more readable anyways.

Comment Re:And Linux? (Score 1) 321

What you've said is certainly true... for Windows 95/98/Me, which were indeed built on top of Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS and not properly designed to be multi-user. If you think Windows 7 falls under that same category, you are sadly mistaken - that traces back not to 16-bit Windows 3.1 but to 32-bit Windows NT 3.1, which was designed to be multi-user (and even multi-CPU) from the very beginning.

Comment Re:recipie for disaster (Score 1) 391

If you did never lock up your drive wheels using engine braking, you haven't tried hard enough.

Last I checked, "wheel lock up" means the wheels cease rotation and start skidding uncontrollably, so the only way you could possibly lock up your drive wheels with engine braking would be if you stopped the engine - as long as it's still running (and the transmission is engaged), the wheels will keep turning (though they won't provide much torque unless you're driving an automatic and you're at a complete stop).

I will agree, though, that strong negative torque from engine braking (equivalent to what would cause your brakes to lock up the wheels) can definitely cause you to lose traction and start skidding, but it won't lock the drive wheels unless you define locking differently.

Comment Re:Eventually... (Score 2) 169

A man with three clocks will invariably find some convoluted way of using them to tell the time:

"This one runs ten minutes slow every two hours. This runs twenty minutes fast every four hours. The one in the middle is broken and stopped at two o'clock. I take the ten minutes on this one and subtract it from the twenty minutes on that one. Then I divide by the two in the middle."

Comment Re:effectiveness in 2011 (Score 2) 271

EAS alerts have a distinctive noise they make before the announcement.

Specifically, that noise is a data burst which encodes most of the details of the alert (who sent it, what happened, where it happened, when it happened, etc.). Wikipedia provides a reasonably detailed description of the signal structure and the data encoding.

Comment Re:Register as a developer (Score 1) 389

Simple - make it so applications have to be signed by Microsoft, a certificate on your domain controller/equivalent (for enterprises), or a "test" certificate that's specific to your own system so you have to sign everything yourself.

To make it even more annoying, force the user to boot the system with a special option (which you can't set in boot.ini) in order to disable signature verification entirely (like you have to do when developing 64-bit device drivers, from what I recall).

Comment Re:Placebo (Score 1) 117

The term "homeopathic" specifically refers to medicines that are purported to be more effective the further they are diluted. Tapeworms aren't homeopathic - they're just one of many examples (another of which would be Radiation) of people using harmful things they didn't yet understand as if they were beneficial.

Comment Re:Still think Wikileaks knows what they're doing? (Score 2) 632

Killing Bin Laden does not weaken the terrorist threat and may well make all of this worse. Think Leia to Darth Vader "The tighter you clench your first, the more star systems will slip through your fingers like grains of sand."

Funny, I was thinking of an entirely different Star Wars quote - "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." Martyrs are particularly difficult to deal with, after all.

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