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Comment Sheevaplug PSU problems (Score 1) 68

Remarkable timing for this story, as my Sheevaplug suddenly died last week after just over 330 days of flawless uptime. Turns out, there is a known issue with the original power supplies that were shipped, and they die pretty frequently after 8-10 months of use. This is so common that Globalscale now sells the PSUs separately for ~$10 USD (plus another $15 for shipping, of course).

Comment Re:Short term career (Score 1) 504

Well, I released the rewrite under the BSD license. I did the rewrite on the weekends, on my time. I cleared that with my boss before hand. He seemed ok with it as long as it wasn't our production code.

The project wasn't licensed as BSD or GPL before hand, but 12,000 lines of it came with me to the job. He seemed to feel that since our product was now based on it, that he should have control over whether it would be open sourced.

They didn't want the responsibility of maintaining an open source project. Given the complexity of the code involved (real-time multimedia processing etc...) they felt that there was a much higher likelihood that instead of receiving the benefits of the open source community, they would instead bare the burdens of it. In hindsight, the point was valid. They had nothing to gain from open sourcing, so they'd prefer that it weren't a distraction.

As a result, I spent my weekends rewriting instead of improving what we had, but it also gave me a great sandbox to experiment in. This way I was making major architectural modifications to the open source project... (which I just check isn't even online anymore :() so this way I was able to prove the code before implementing the changes in the company's product.

I'm doing something similar now, actually writing a C++ alternative to GStreamer, having a blast doing it and although I maintain two copies (one for the office, one for my open source project) it's great since the open source to-be implementation is really very versatile while the one we use at work is more specialized as it is optimized to work on DSPs (which require entirely different optimizations from x86). I'm looking forward to releasing it soon as well. So far, it's a pretty reliable platform for IPTV (transport stream, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 etc...) and it's REALLY easy to code for. It'll be modified BSD something like "if you use it, please put my name in the license somewhere" kind of thing.

Comment Re:wow (Score 1) 247

It's because we actually say the 'C' in 'facto'.

But it seems it will be unified: its use will be optional. Which means we'll all probably continue to write as we do now. Also, it'll be valid to either write 'acadêmico' and 'académico', 'oxigênio' and 'oxigénio', etc.

Comment Re:Perfect game in less than 90 minutes? (Score 1) 142

Lets presume the company accurately modded the game mechanics of major league baseball. Perfectly reasonable given its heavily statistics based.

MLB has maybe 1 perfect game a year, or every other year. Lets say once every 2 years to be generous. There's 32 teams, playing 180 games (roughly)...thats 16 matches x 180 times x 2 years with a chance of producing a perfect game. So statistically, a 1 in 5760 chance of producing a perfect game.

Presuming this is a moderately successful game title, they sell...say, 100,000 copies in the first month.

The chances of this happening on the first day of sale were actually fairly good. Certainl within the first week.

If i was on the board of directors, I'd recommend summary execution for the marketing rep.

Comment Re:Gee, didn't someone get lynched for saying that (Score 1) 310

The PS2 also did what Sony wanted the PS3 to do - it rode the wave of a new movie format. Why buy a DVD player that can only play DVDs, when for only a little bit more (at the time) you could get a PS2 that would play DVDs (and DVDs were amazing compared to video tape), play PS1 games, and play PS2 games?

The Wii is only good for playing Wii games, so the potential market is smaller.

Comment Re:Not revisionism (Score 1) 850

BTW, on the Apple-talking-about-DRM thing? It's not like Apple has never lied to the public before. Remember when .Mac was supposed to be "free forever?" Turns out, in Apple language, "forever" is about 2 years, then it costs a hundred bucks.

Comment SLAPS rationales for risk-aware kink photos (Score 1) 263

For someone who's looking for information on how to safely practice bondage or erotic asphyxiation, the pictures might be of high educational value. Might even save a life.

Legal tests such as fair use and SLAPS have a strong element of weighing one value against another in court on a case-by-case basis. But fortunately, MediaWiki sites have file description pages, which are a convenient way to collect rationales to help an image pass these judgments. Say you have some images intended to document methods of risk-aware kink. Each image's description page should declare for what articles it is intended, much like non-free images on Wikipedia already do.

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