Dreadrik - Slashdot User

AMD confirms CPU bug found by DragonFly BSD's Matt Dillon-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05, @04:07PM

An anonymous reader writes "Matt Dillon of DragonFly BSD just announced that AMD confirmed a CPU bug he found. Matt quotes part of the mail exchange and it looks like "consecutive back-to-back pops and (near) return instructions can create a condition where the processor incorrectly updates the stack pointer". The specific manifestation in DragonFly were random segmentation faults under heavy load."
Link to Original Source

Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) Joins Washington Post-> 1

Submitted by kodiaktau on Monday March 05, @03:45PM

kodiaktau writes "Founder and long time cat herder Rob Malda joins the Washington Post per the announcement today. According to the press release he will be the Chief Strategist and Editor at Large working for WaPo labs."
Link to Original Source

See Robot Cheetah In Action-> 0

Submitted by

techgeek0279

on Monday March 05, @02:43PM

techgeek0279 writes "When you think of robots, especially when they are portrayed in movies, they actually move at the rate of those slow zombies you see in the old classic horror movies. In this video, you'll see that DARPA researchers have created Cheetah robot that runs at a pretty decent speed."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:screen height: (Score 1) 662

by Dreadrik on Thursday May 26 2011, @03:28PM (#36254690) Attached to: Computer De-Evolution: Awesome Features We've Lost

the greatest work station epiphany i recently had involved turning my 9:16 monitor 90 degrees

So that it became an ordinary 16:9 screen?

Comment: Re:Doesn't surprise me. (Score 1) 254

by Dreadrik on Thursday May 26 2011, @03:46AM (#36248100) Attached to: Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability

This is where the Magic Mouse shines in my opinion.
But you have to use Better Touch Tool or other software to really make it useful, because OS X's built-in gestures are just not enough.
I use two and three finger swipes and "tip-taps" to open/close tabs, navigate back/forward, turn up/down volume etc in addition to just scrolling. Best mouse I've ever had!

Comment: Re:Amiga did real multitasking with the same CPU (Score 1) 203

by Dreadrik on Monday April 04 2011, @05:01AM (#35705804) Attached to: A Multitasking GUI, Circa 1982

I saw this as a feature! :-)
I used to create sinus-tables for use by my assembler code by using Amiga-Basic.

Just do a for-loop, use the built-in sin(), and poke the result into a (hopefully) free memory-location. Then switch to the assembler/monitor and dump the memory back to either assembly notation or raw data to be written to disk. Quick and easy. :-)

Comment: Re:Amen! (Score 2) 448

by Dreadrik on Thursday February 24 2011, @11:33AM (#35300336) Attached to: Police Raid PS3 Hacker's House, Hacker Releases PS3 'Hypervisor Bible'

(2) developing tools for cheating in-game, ala aimbots that're easily adapted to new games,

Well, what did I as a PS3 gamer do to deserve this? This is precisely the reason why hackers are despised right now by most PS3 owners.
I couldn't care less about them making emulators, games, knockoffs or even copies of games, installing linux, xbmc or using the console for other awesome stuff, but what I do care about is that my gaming experience is being affected by what they do. I am not Sony, nor am I fan of Sony. I choose the PS3 because I like to play games without hassle once in a while, and in my experience, Microsoft is by far the more evil company.

So, about retaliation:
(1) Fight the DMCA. This is the real problem, isn't it?
(2) Stop buying Sony products.
(3) Stop whining. You (american hackers) knew full well that this was illegal in your country and didn't give a shit about getting caught.

It's Surprisingly Hard To Notice When Moving Objects Change 140

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 07 2011, @07:37PM
from the sorry-officer-the-traffic-light-was-swinging-in-the-wind dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at Harvard have found that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. In a paper published yesterday (PDF) in Current Biology, the researchers present a new visual illusion that 'causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.' The finding has implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots."

Comment: Backed up in the cloud (Score 1) 498

by Dreadrik on Monday December 27 2010, @09:57AM (#34675582) Attached to: What's the Oldest File You Can Restore?

I lost all my old C64 floppys when my parents moved to a new house. Felt a bit sad that every demo I ever made was gone.

Luckily I found them again when googling my own name! Turned out that someone I have never met had the time and devotion to find them, transfer them to a PC, read every scroll text and attribute every part to the correct person. They even found my real name, and my old address and phone number by dumping the memory at $3000. :-)

An important note here is that I am not a well known scener, nor was my group, and the demos were not very technically advanced or pretty. But if something ends up on the internet it seems like it will never go away.

Comment: Re:do x but not too much! (Score 1) 394

by Dreadrik on Tuesday December 07 2010, @01:57PM (#34476392) Attached to: Programming Mistakes To Avoid

That, and being able to figure out what people actually want in the first place.

Yes, this is a very important part, which reminds me of this old gem