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Comment No kidding (Score 1) 611

One of the reasons I live where I do is because I'm close to work, about 4 miles away. Lets me bike in. That way I don't have to deal with the expense and clusterfuck that is parking on a big campus. 4 miles is a very easy, short, ride so it is no problem. You don't need to change or anything, you don't work up a sweat.

Comment Because Apple has no fucks to give about Windows (Score 2) 161

You discover Apple software sucks way less on OS-X. The fanboys will tell you this is evidence of how much better OS-X is, of course, but the real reason is Apple doesn't do a good job on their ports. They really half-ass their Windows ports so they end up not being good software. It is possibly something to try and make OS-X look better but more likely simply laziness and a lack of good Windows developers.

Comment Windows doesn't stop it (Score 5, Insightful) 161

There's a big difference between not going out of your way to support something and going out of your way to prevent it. Windows doesn't have a native POSIX interface (it used to have a basic one) but you can add one if you like. It can be done higher level via something like Cygwin, or it can be done directly in the executive just like the Win32/64 APIs. There is nothing stopping you from adding it, they don't care.

Same deal with DirectX and OpenGL. A Windows GPU driver has to provide DirectX support. It is just part of the WDDM driver. Windows provides no OpenGL acceleration, and no software emulation. However you can provide your own OpenGL driver if you wish, and Intel, nVidia, and AMD all elect to do so. Windows does nothing to stop this and they work great (if the company writes a good driver). Indeed you could develop your own graphic API and implement that, if you wished.

There's a big difference between saying "We aren't going to do any work to support your stuff," and saying "We are going to work to make sure your stuff can't be supported."

Comment That's not how it works (Score 4, Informative) 379

The court can't just jump up and say "We don't like that, it goes out." They have to follow procedure which means a challenge has to appear in front of them. That challenge can also only be brought by someone with standing, meaning that this law had a negative impact on you somehow.

That's one of the reasons the government loves the secret gathering so much, makes it harder for it to get challenged. If you can't show this harmed you, then you can't fight it in court.

So someone has to be impacted by this, challenge it, and it has to be appealed up to the SC. Then and only then do they rule on it.

Comment Slashdot incompetence (Score 2) 346

> See also #3.

Sorry, you wanted the numbers rendered on your ordered list? Wrong site.

Yeah, I can't imagine why they did that, either.

What is going on here with the lists? Who at Slashdot thought that non-list lists made any kind of sense? How do Slashcode devs not understand the effects of list-style-type: none;? Why does this persist?

Perhaps more salient, why are we, as ostensible tech geeks, not raising more of a fuss about a site that many think represents computer geek-ness, and yet that cannot implement sane (and relatively simple) CSS?

Comment Even power users don't have much to worry about (Score 2) 125

I write a lot more to my SSDs than most do because of lost of application installs, playing with audio, etc, etc. 6TB to date, drive was purchased about 20 months ago. Ok well assuming I maintain that rate of writing (3.6TB/year) it would be 13 years before I'd hit 50 TB of writes, on a 512GB drive which can probably take 1PB or more.

Even if you hit it harder than the norm, you still don't hit it that hard. It really has to be used for something like database access or a file server or the like before endurance becomes an issue.

Comment Particularly if you define income as revenue (Score 1) 602

Meaning the money a company takes in. The difference between revenues and profits is vast, and varies by company and company type. Some companies take in a lot of revenues to make very little profits. Target would be an example. They took in 73 Billion dollars in revenues the last 12 months. However on that, they only made about 1.5 Billion in actual profit, or 2% when put another way. Retail doesn't make a lot of money, particularly discount retail. So once you add up all their costs (buying the merchandise, payroll, buildings, taxes, power, insurance, etc) there isn't a huge percentage left over.

Compare that to Apple. Not only do they make more money, but they have a much higher profit margin. They took in 182 Billion, and made 39 Billion on it, a 25% margin. Because of the nature of their business, they make more profits per dollar of sales than a place like Target.

This is, of course, only talking about profitable businesses. There are plenty that don't make money. My parents ran a small quilt shop for a number of years. Did about $750,000 in sales per year, yet never made a profit. After they'd paid rent, taxes, insurance, salaries, replenished merchandise, and so on there was not only nothing left over, there was a deficit they had to cover.

Comment Re:Knee-jerk... (Score 2) 256

Mainly that Twitter appears to be turning into one of the main platforms for online bullying and harassment and that the police want in on the action as well.

Is it a result of the brevity of tweets leading to the inability to engage in any meaningful communication? Is it an effect of Twitters social dynamics with following/followers? Interesting research could surely be done, possibly qualifying for an Ig Nobel prize.

Comment Re:Most youg ones don't know crap... (Score 1) 376

Of course, thinking that the technology a company is developing is so new and different that experience is meaningless is usually the effect of not having enough experience.

A lot of things in the IT industry seem to move in cycles, and while there are certainly those that seem to stagnate of any age, for those inclined to continously adopt new technology having experienced a similar technological shift twenty years ago rather means you're halfway to understanding the implications of an up and coming one, how to use it and its probable limitations.

And as far as neural degeneration goes, I'd agree. Unless you have an actual disease wrecking your neurons, loss of capacity rather seems related to lack of interest and rigidity, stress related damage, lack of confidence or similar. Most people I see continously actually using their learning capacity seem to keep highly capable of learning new things well beyond retirement these days.

Comment Re:For low power? None (Score 1) 78

No, it doesn't. HardOCP did a test with the new Haswell E series, as well as normal Haswell and Ivy Bridge chips, and then the AMD FX-9590. In every case, the AMD chip lost. Sandra Drystone, Sandra memory bandwidth, Hyper PI, Cinebench, POV Ray, Handbrake, LAME, WinRAR, and games, in call cases it scored below the Haswell chip. In most cases it scored below the Ivy Bridge chip, sometimes substantially. For example in Cinebench the Haswell-E 8 core scored 19.31, the normal Haswell 4 core scored 9.93, the AMD scored 7.93. Also the AMD chip was clocked 500 MHz higher than the Intel chips (all were OC'd, HardOCP is a performance site).

Also please remember that normal Haswell has a TDP of around 90 watts.

Right now, AMD chips just are not a very good showing in terms of power per watt. Intel also is able to be price competitive because their more midrange chips compete with AMD's higher end. The Bulldozer architecture has not proven to be efficient, and Intel also gets to lean on their lead in lithography. All Intel's lines are on 22nm these days and they are rolling out 14nm chips for sale now. AMD is still using a 32nm process.

http://www.hardocp.com/article...

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