Comment Re:OMG (Score 1) 441
How come Christians are the only ones that are asked to suffer this unconstitutional prohibition on their free exercise?
Did you miss the part where the second item in the lawsuit was a Menorah?
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Comment Re:Don't bitch. (Score 1) 353
Don't take it out on others just because you're imperfect and ignore all of the S.M.A.R.T. and controller warnings... Some of us tech Gurus do religiously tend to our flock of hard-drives and recognize when they are in spiritual, and physical, need of replacement....
I do hardware diagnostics for an HPC storage system vendor, including drive testing, qualification, and failure analysis. SMART has its uses, but, in my experience, if you've tripped SMART, you're already in serious trouble.
It's not helped by the fact that pieces of SMART which are actually in the ATA standards are basically tripped/not-tripped - none of the attribute structures are in the current specs, let alone which attribute IDs mean what. Heck, even getting the thresholds is no longer in the ATA standard!
Fortunately, *most* vendors implement *most* of the SMART structures the same way, and *most* use the same attribute IDs to mean the same things, and *most* still implement the sub-command for getting the thresholds. But all the really interesting data that could be used for more aggressive failure prediction (i.e. beyond the almost-always too late SMART trip) is vendor specific, and getting that information out of some vendors makes pulling teeth look like taking candy from a baby.
</rant-let>
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Comment Re:let's see DRM, high cost of HDD's get in the wa (Score 1) 371
with only two manufacturers of 3.5in form factor hard drives (seagate, wdc)
Samsung?
Actually, it's Hitachi. And Toshiba has (re?)entered the 3.5" space, at least on the enterprise side of the world - I have no idea if they make consumer 3.5" drives.
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Comment Re:At a very young age (Score 1) 86
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Comment Re:Next (Score 1) 309
If there were call centers setup in the US to cater to Indian clients then why would they be speaking English in the first place?
Because English is one of the official languages of India, and is spoken in every state.
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Comment Re:LLVM? (Score 2) 237
... And also, does the above mean that Gnome is no longer using GCC to compile, but switching to the LLVM compiler?
LLVM is designed to be modular. It sounds like what they're doing is probably similar to what Apple did a few years back - include LLVM bit-code files for functions that aren't handled natively, then hand those off to libllvm to emit native code when needed.
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Comment Re:If your Mac is too old (Score 1) 542
I've read comments in past stories about the iOS developer program from people who own a Mac but still can't develop because the Mac is too old to run recent Xcode. So you end up having to depreciate the Mac and the iPod touch on which to test as annual expenses just like the developer fee.
Apple generally supports the current OS and developer tools on hardware going back three years, for both Macs and iPods/iPhones.
Comment Re:Say what? (Score 1) 633
If you've determined to never pay back all your treasury bonds, how can treasury bonds be a stable investment?
You pay them all back, you just also issue new ones, which you will also pay back.
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Superluminal Neutrinos, Take Two 98
Coisiche writes "To address the many responses to their original findings, the OPERA team who reported the detection of faster-than-light neutrinos is starting a new and improved version of their experiment. 'The neutrinos that emerge at Gran Sasso start off as a beam of proton particles at CERN. Through a series of complex interactions, neutrino particles are generated from this beam and stream through the Earth's crust to Italy. Originally, CERN fired the protons in a long pulse lasting 10 microseconds (10 millionths of a second). ... [In the new experiment], protons are sent in a series of short bursts — lasting just one or two nanoseconds, thousands of times shorter — with a large gap (roughly 500 nanoseconds) in between each burst. This system, says Dr Bertolucci, is more efficient: "For every neutrino event at Gran Sasso, you can connect it unambiguously with the batch of protons at CERN," he explained.'"
Comment Re:This answer makes no sense... (Score 1) 107
... (Only works in browsers which recognize the data: URI scheme. Tested in FF and Opera.)
Works in Safari 5.1.1 (on OS X Lion) as well.
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Comment Not (primarily) about round-rects (Score 5, Interesting) 313
... (unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition)
...
As previously stated, it's not a patent on round-rects:
I came across this yesterday and found it interesting (comparisons of what Samsung's tablets looked like before and after the iPad came out):
It seems like it's not quite as silly as it's usually been presented. (Don't get me wrong, I do think it's silly.)
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Comment Re:How about Sagan (Score 1) 176
Oh, and the Argus Array in the book was located outside Socorro, New Mexico. Guess where the VLA is located?
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Comment Re:How about Sagan (Score 3, Insightful) 176
In Contact, the facility Ellie was at when The Message started arriving was called the Argus Array. Then when they made the movie, they actually used the VLA and called it the VLA. So why not make life imitate art and go with the Argus Array.
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Comment Re:How about giving Thunderbolt a few months first (Score 1) 327
... Since Thunderbolt is Intel tech, Microsoft will support it as well.
They already do. Thunderbolt is nothing more or less than 4-lane PCIe Gen. 2 over a wire instead of a board. Don't believe me? Ask Anand!
(Okay, it's DisplayPort too. But they're muxed/de-muxed at the chip, so the OS doesn't know or care.)
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Comment Re:Still kinda messy. (Score 1) 409
That's an option for people with a brain cloud.
Never mod points when I need them!
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