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Comment Re:The originals really are something else (Score 5, Informative) 140

by drfuchs (#33427576) Attached to: Homebrew Cray-1
"Why," you may ask, "was the internal wiring so insanely packed?" The length of each point-to-point wire was individually calibrated, such that all the signals to each gate arrived at the same moment, so you didn't need flip-flops to latch values in the flow of the circuits. Kind of a "just-in-time delivery" of electrons; and each layer of buffering avoided saved you delay along the pipeline. I don't think this sort of scheme was used on any other mainframe.
Wine

Wine 1.2 Released 427

Posted by Soulskill from the pop-the-cork dept.
David Gerard writes "Stuck with that one Windows app you can't get rid of? Rejoice — Wine 1.2 is officially released! Apart from running pretty much any Windows application on Unix better than 1.0 (from 2008), major new features include 64-bit support, bi-directional text, and translation into thirty languages. And, of course, DirectX 9 is well-supported and DirectX 10 is getting better. Packages should hit the distros over the weekend, or you can get the source now."
GNU is Not Unix

FSF Asks Apple To Comply With the GPL For Clone of GNU Go 482

Posted by timothy from the y'know-fellas-the-license dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Free Software Foundation has discovered that an application currently distributed in Apple's App Store is a port of GNU Go. This makes it a GPL violation, because Apple controls distribution of all such programs through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is incompatible with section 6 of the GPLv2. It's an unusual enforcement action, though, because they don't want Apple to just make the app disappear, they want Apple to grant its users the full freedoms offered by the GPL. Accordingly, they haven't sued or sent any legal threats and are instead in talks with Apple about how they can offer their users the GPLed software legally, which is difficult because it's not possible to grant users all the freedoms they're entitled to and still comply with Apple's restrictive licensing terms."
Government

Submission + - Non-compete clauses out in California; USA next?

Submitted by drfuchs
drfuchs writes: The non-competition clause in that employment agreement you signed is null & (void*), says the state Supreme Court of California. Better still, the San Francisco Chronicle opines that the US Federal courts are likely to fall in line with the decision. Turns out it wasn't a high-tech case at all; just a CPA who had worked for the accounting firm Arthur Anderson (now-disgraced due to their complicity in the Enron case).

Glad we've got that cleared up after all these decades.

Comment What's the point (size)? (Score 0) 282

by drfuchs (#20097875) Attached to: Mac Users' Internet Experience to Retain Same Fonts
Five hundred plus years of non-digital typography says you are wrong. Go out and take some measurements from some old books. The formula you give is just something some programmer came up with a few decades ago, that kind of worked most of the time. Next thing you'll be telling us is that a point is exactly 1/72 of an inch...
The Media

Submission + - The Frakking Paradox 2

Submitted by drfuchs
drfuchs writes: Scientists at the CDC say that US medians for age 20-59 heterosexual activity are 6.8 partners for males, and only 3.7 for females . The press is widely reporting this, with headlines like "Men More Promiscuous", "Men Have More Sex Partners", etc. It seems to fit what we've all heard and experienced, and is generally held to be common knowledge.

But lets do the math: Each heterosexual act involves one male and one female. If it's their first encounter with one-another, then
{total_num_male_partners_that_females_have_had++; total_num_female_partners_that_males_have_had++;}
Clearly, the two totals are equal. We also know that the US has about the same number of males as females in the 20-59 age range. Calculating the average number of partners for males and females, we have the same numerators and same denominators, so there's no way around the fact that the average number of heterosexual partners for males must equal that for females.

So, that's "The Frakking Paradox." Explanations I've considered but ruled out:
  1. Guys are frakking lots of females during overseas vacations (but then they'd pretty much be dead, according to current cinema, and not be able to participate in the survey)
  2. Guys are frakking lots of female aliens who are visiting terrestrially (but wouldn't the male aliens come on a visit, too?)
  3. Guys are frakking lots of female aliens during an abduction (being probed would probably interfere, but then again, who knows?)
  4. US females change their clothes, cosmetics, hair, and even have surgery; but US males are so stupid, they think she's a new partner, while the females realizes it's the same old slob of a guy in the same pair of jeans as always. (Nah, if he's that much of a jerk, she's liable to take him out of the running permanently, if you catch my jist, which would then skew the results in the wrong direction.)
  5. There's something that males and females can do together that the male counts as having had a sex partner, but not the female. But if this were possible, then slashdot readers wouldn't be such a sorry lot. (Note that the wording of the original poll seems to rule out various asymmetries you might be getting your hopes up for.)
  6. They measured the "median", not the "average". But this only helps if there are many, many more females than males who have a wildly high number of partners. Even considering prostitution, you'd have to have almost all males going to about four different prostitutes each, and very few males going to many of them.
  7. Guys are frakking lots of females who are outside the 20-59 age range. This seems impossible given the rest of the data (age of first sexual encounter; median number of partners for 50+ females), and the relative rarity of google hits on "GMILF".
  8. Lots of people are fibbing big-time. But the study authors went to all sorts of trouble creating an environment that's supposed to avoid this sort of trouble ("Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interview ... to allow respondents to answer questions in complete privacy").
  9. Lots of people are self-deluding. But we're talking an almost 2-to-1 discrepancy here...
Any bright frakking ideas out there?

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