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Comment all too common view on Snowden (Score 5, Insightful) 289

Politicians are quick to say the NSA has gone too far, but none of them have the balls to say Snowden should be pardoned. Grow some balls. He apparently tried several times to bring his concerns to his superiors, only to be shut down. If he didn't do what he did, we would not know what we know, or even be having this discussion. There's no need to make him a martyr. He did what was right.

Comment Re:Next up: a direct detection (Score 1) 269

A direct detection of a gravitational wave moving the mirrors of a large scale interferometer is up next. In the next few years, Advanced LIGO (US), Advanced Virgo (Italy) and KAGRA (Japan) will come online with the hope of directly detecting gravitational waves from sources such as supernovae and coalescing binary star systems. With this kind of network, it will then be possible to coordinate both electromagnetic and gravitational searches of our sky. This is useful for many reasons, one of which is that it lets us listen to the sound of black holes colliding where no light escapes.

Exciting times!

Plus we'll finally be able properly calibrate that DHD we found...

Comment Re:the one flaw in that (Score 1) 860

I was wrong about XP needing to map all 3 GB of video RAM.

It is more accurate to say that Windows XP limits the GPU to a 256 MB window. The GPU would perform a lot better if all of its memory was mapped for direct access.

The newer pieces of GPU hardware and drivers are using zero-copy direct memory access with addressing that is the same on the GPU and the CPU which allows sharing of data structures without copies or modifications. That can't be done in a 256 MB window, or if it can, not well.

Comment Re:Necessary sometimes (Score 1) 572

How do you expect the keyboard is attached? USB. I've actually seen this, in person. A machine with sealed USB ports ... and a USB keyboard and mouse. Really. What was IT thinking?

I bet the IT guy who did the job was a contractor. 'Uh yeah, here's a work order to seal up all the open USB ports.' "What about the keyboard?" "Doesn't say. Don't ask questions: its 20 hours of easy work at $60/hr."

Comment Re:Getting rid of XP would mean I can't do my job (Score 1) 860

No the problem is in the hardware.

If there are super specific timing requirements then invent a new standard with the commands you need. Then put a little microprocessor on the serial port end in charge of waiting for some particular signal and responding in precisely 23 milliseconds. Or whatever.

Comment Re:Necessary sometimes (Score 1) 572

Well, if I was really into industrial espionage I might do something like bring a USB stick loaded with my zipper program, but instead of storage set to look like a keyboard. Plug it in, open Notepad and have it type the executable out into a file.

I've noticed that a lot of places disable USB storage but don't disable file execution from writable directories.

Comment Re:Getting rid of XP would mean I can't do my job (Score 1) 860

Sounds like the real answer to this problem is an improved USB to serial dongle. If this is a serious problem for electronics engineers, they are the perfect people to fix it. Whatever the problem with the USB to serial interface is, fix it. Then sell your improved serial port adapter for $100. Profit!

Comment Re:the one flaw in that (Score 1) 860

Windows 8 doesn't slow anything down. Check some benchmarks. It is faster than XP in most things. Here's one from a casual Google: http://itnews2day.com/2013/02/...

Windows XP is 32-bit only. Windows XP does not like hyperthreading or quad core CPUs. XP doesn't perform well on high bandwidth WAN connections. Its old SMB file transfer speeds are atrocious on gigabit LANs. It doesn't allow threaded GPU accesses and only supports old DirectX versions. It doesn't understand Advanced Format hard drives or SSDs. USB 3 on XP is buggy as hell. (in my experience)

If you installed a super modern GPU with 3 GB video RAM on XP, it would fall over and die because it has to map those 3 GB into 4 GB of space.

So, in at least this case, the OS didn't slow down. And without it new hardware wouldn't work at all.

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