mattia - Slashdot User

Comment Re:OS Change (Score 1) 414

by mattia on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @09:00AM (#29730735) Attached to: Revisiting the Original Reviews of Windows Vista

Hmm, been using dual monitors on linux from ... let's see, it was 1999 and it was slackware and they were two matrox G200,
I had to ditch an hercules b&W only because I couldn't really stand having one monitor at 24bpp and the other in black and white ....

from there on ... dual lcds, one lcd one crt, laptop+lcd, laptopo+crt ....
never been using less than eight virtual double-desktop ....

what version of windows has support for virtual desktops ? Hmm, let's see ... they haven't got there yet ...

Comment Lamest excuse ever for justifying a second monitor (Score 1) 424

by mattia on Friday May 22, 2009 @06:05AM (#28051043) Attached to: Using 1 Gaming Computer For 2 People?

Man, this is the lamest excuse I ever heard for justifying the expense for a second monitor.

I can imagine trying this line out with my wife:
"really dear, we need to buy this second 24'' lcd so you can play with me on my computer ..." .. whatever ...

NVidia Considering Porting PhysX To OpenCL 54

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday March 29, 2009 @01:48PM from the learning-to-share dept.

arcticstoat writes "NVidia has revealed that it's considering porting its PhysX API to OpenCL to allow PhysX GPU-acceleration on competitors' graphics cards as well. At the moment, a GPU needs to support NVidia's CUDA technology in order to accelerate PhysX on the GPU, and ATI has so far declined NVidia's offer to get CUDA working on ATI GPUs. NVidia's director of product management for PhysX, Nadeem Mohammad, said, 'In the future it's a possibility that we could use OpenCL' for PhysX, adding, 'If we start using OpenCL, then there's a chance that the features would work on ATI, but I have no idea what the performance would be like.'"

DRM Shuts Down PC Version of Gears of War 598

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 30, 2009 @02:58AM from the you-know-what-really-grinds-my-gears dept.

carlmenezes writes "It seems that the DRM on the PC version of Gears of War came with a built-in shut-off date; the digital certificate for the game was only good until January 28, 2009. Now, the game fails to work unless you adjust your system's clock. What is Epic's response? 'We're working on it.'"

Sizzling Weather On a Dive-Bombing Planet 57

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 29, 2009 @05:44AM from the much-sexier-after-computer-enhancement dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "A massive planet orbiting the star HD 80606 is on a roller-coaster orbit: it dive bombs the star, in just 55 days dropping from over 120 million km to just 4 million km from the star's surface! Astronomers used the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe the heat from the planet as it gets blasted by its star, and used that data to make a beautiful computer-modeled image of what the planet must look like. Their results: an ube-rviolent storm that acts as if a bomb were exploded in the planet's atmosphere."

45% of Dutch Media-Buying Population Are "Pirates" 307

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 29, 2009 @04:32AM from the dutch-treat dept.

Anonymous writes "A non-government study in the Netherlands found that 4.7 million Dutch Internet users 15 years and older downloaded hacked and pirated DVDs, games, and music in the last 12 months — or, about 25 percent of the Dutch population. But there may be an upside to this unauthorized sharing/distribution: 'The average [Dutch] downloader buys more DVDs, music, and games than people who never download,' with illegal downloaders representing 45 percent of consumers who purchase content legally, according to the Institute For Information Law, which administered the study."

Nintendo Brain Games Effectiveness Questioned 63

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday January 29, 2009 @02:55AM from the flickering-boxes-will-make-us-smart dept.

nandemoari writes "While Nintendo boasts that its Wii can make you fit, the game company's popular line of DS 'Brain Games' have for some time promised to make kids smarter by challenging them with word puzzles and math formulas. However, a French professor isn't buying the shtick. University of Rennes professor Alain Lieury, a cognitive psychology specialist in Brittany, France, recently studied a group of ten-year-old children playing a variety of mentally-challenging games. Not all were video games, however; Lieury pitted more traditional games (including sudoku, Scrabble, and regular old reading and homework) against Nintendo's popular line of DS hits, including Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and Brain Training. Although he credits the Nintendo DS — one of the best selling consoles of all-time — as 'a technological jewel,' he finds Nintendo's claim that it can actually help kids learn is nothing more than pure 'charlatanism.'"

Photog Rob Galbraith Rates MacBook Pro Display "Not Acceptable" 504

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @10:29PM from the pulling-no-punches dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Professional digital photographer and website publisher Rob Galbraith has performed both objective and subjective tests on laptop displays, finding that the late-2008 Macbook Pro glossy displays are 'deep into the not acceptable category' when used in ambient light environments. The Apple notebook came in dead last for color accuracy, and second to last in viewing angles (besting only the Dell Mini 9). He concludes: 'Macs are no longer at the top of the laptop display heap in our minds.'"

Miscalculation Invalidates LHC Safety Assurances 684

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @07:07PM from the philosophy-of-science dept.

KentuckyFC writes "In a truly frightening study, physicists at the University of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid (abstract). The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se but the chances of any particular scientific argument being wrong. 'If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,' say the team. That has serious implications for the LHC, which some people worry could generate black holes that will swallow the planet. Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: 'there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.' The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this? The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."

Cox Communications and "Congestion Management" 282

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @06:19PM from the why-isn't-everything-unlimited-and-free? dept.

imamac writes "It appears Cox Communications is the next in line for throttling internet traffic. But it's not throttling of course; Cox's euphemism is 'congestion management.' From Cox's explanation: 'In February, Cox will begin testing a new method of managing traffic on our high-speed Internet network in our Kansas and Arkansas markets. During the occasional times the network is congested, this new technology automatically ensures that all time-sensitive Internet traffic — such as web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming — moves without delay. Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads, peer-to-peer and Usenet newsgroups, may be delayed momentarily...' Sounds like throttling to me."

How To Track the Bug-Trackers? 174

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @05:22PM from the and-what-if-they-have-a-bug dept.

schneecrash writes "Submitting bug reports — and waiting for responses etc. — seems to be SOP for developers and users alike, these days. Every project has some sort of bug-tracker — bugzilla, trac, mailing list, etc. E.g., we currently track 200+ external bugs across ~40 OSS projects. Half the bugs depend on something else getting fixed, first. Every bug has its own email thread, etc. Management asks 'How we doin' overall?,' and suddenly everyone involved gets to work removing dried gum from the bottom of their shoe. What do Slashdotters use/recommend for centrally keeping track of all the bugs you track across all those different bugtrackers? In particular, managing communications and dependencies across bugs? So far, the best method I've managed to use is bunches of PostIt-notes stuck to the screen of an out-of-commission 32" TV (glossy, non-matte screen, of course!)."

Less Is Moore 342

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @03:02PM from the 3-slugs-from-a-.44 dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore's law, derived from an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months. The Economist reports however that in the midst of a recession, many companies would now prefer that computers get cheaper rather than more powerful, or by applying the flip side of Moore's law, do the same for less. A good example of this is virtualisation: using software to divide up a single server computer so that it can do the work of several, and is cheaper to run. Another example of 'good enough' computing is supplying 'software as a service,' via the Web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway. Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version. That could be bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade — only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."

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