Comment Re:Tell it to the plastic clown (Score 4, Funny) 837
yeah, maybe someone should ask why management isn't wearing department specific garments that say "management" on them.
What do you think a tie actually is?
A garrotte in training?
Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242
likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."
Comment Re:Literate Programming (Score 1) 477
Yup. I'd go as far as saying readability is more important than correctness; fixing or improving easy to understand programs is trivial compared to trying to decipher spaghetti code. You write code for other people, and that other people might be you a few years from now.
Can I hold out for testable as well as readable? Tthe efficiency and quality gains you make from being able to run a suite of unit tests that confirm that the code still works as intended, or as you intend it to when you change it, shouldn't be underestimated.
Comment Re:The OS would only matter if the device is open (Score 1) 542
I thought those were just a myth!
You inthenthitive clod! How dare you take the pith out of my lithp!
LG Presents Solar Powered E-Book 139
MikeChino writes "At first glance, e-readers offer a great set of benefits over paper-bound books – they’re light, versatile, and a great alternative to lugging around a tote full of dead tree tomes on your next trip. However these new reading mediums have one glaring fault — can you imagine the frustration of running out of juice mid-sentence and halfway through Infinite Jest? LG's new solar e-book aims to address this issue by harnessing the sun's rays to power its display. The device features a 10 centimeter wide thin-film photovoltaic panel that can power the reader for a full day's worth of reading after 4-5 hours spent sitting in the sun."
Open Source FPS Game Alien Arena 2009 Released 142
Alienkillerrace writes "The open sourced, freeware FPS game Alien Arena 2009 has been released (Windows and Linux). The improvements to the game engine are very significant, and have surely raised the bar for free games of this genre. All surfaces in the game are now rendered using GLSL, not only improving the visual quality, but the performance as well. Interesting new effects like post-process distortions using GLSL have been implemented, as well as light volumes, better per-pixel lighting (reminiscent of UT3), and shaded water. Equally notable is that the sound system has been completely rewritten using OpenAL, allowing for effects such as Doppler, and adding Ogg Vorbis support. The game is free to play and available for download on its official website. It has a stats system and a built-in IRC client in its front-end game browser."
Comment Re:And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable? (Score 1) 308
I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked
Actually, blu-ray is getting more secure as time goes on. The current crop of releases have been secure for at least the past few months and I think Slysoft (authors of AnyDVD, the guys who generally lead the way in these matters) have said they won't have a working crack until something like Feb next year.
Ah, thanks for that. I suspect it's not a problem that's going to bother many who don't ravel with a portable device but it does suggest why Apple haven't dived in. If their user base is going to have problems getting content onto their iPhones from their shiny new blu-ray disks then it's something they want to manage properly.
I think you're quite right that this is a big hurdle to adoption. Right now blu-ray is being driven by the massive number of HDTVs being sold - even average people are preferring 1080p "FullHD" sets here in the UK - but that doesn't do anything when it comes to portable video devices.
That includes me. I just replaced my old Sony flat screen with a Viera and only have standard definition content coming through it. It's still better than I thought it would be but I keep looking at blu-ray players and wondering... But I really don't want to go back to the old days of VHS with one player in the front-room and nothing else
There's not much point in having a HD portable media player as screen sizes are generally smaller plus lighting conditions are never ideal on the move. I reckon they should implement a mechanism for allowing people to make SD rips of BDs or even put a one-time code in each box for a non-DRM SD download, ideally an x264 mkv with a full selection of DVD quality audio streams & subtitles. It'd be a great incentive to buy new rather than used but it'd take far too much common sense than the film industry has these days.
As you say, it would be too much like common sense but it would solve all my problems with the format.
Comment Re:And when will Blu-Ray players get afforable? (Score 1) 308
I've been thinking about blu-ray adoption and there's a bit of a different hurdle it needs to get over at the moment, as I see it. In my house, we have four laptops, each of which can play DVDs but only one can play blu-ray. Now, yes, I can rip blu-ray, I suspect because I haven't looked, but it's my wife's laptop and she's not going to stand for a lot of that kind of use/abuse of her pride and joy. And even then, her laptop's a year ol spec machine but it can't play a DVD without the lights dimming in he house.
My point is that when DVD replaced VHS, it was usually supplanting one device in the house. Blu-ray is replacing and "obsoleting" potentially many devices. In the case of laptops, until we cycle through and replace all of them with blu-ray capable versions, it's a bit like going back to VHS - one place in the house were we can watch content. OK, so there are usb Blu-ray players on the market but that kind of defeats the object of having a laptop you can carry around and stick a dvd in any time you want, as my daughter does.
I'm not for one minute suggesting that Blu-ray's not going to be successful but I do think there are some other obstacles to its acceptance that didn't affect the VHS to DVD switch.
My point is that when DVD replaced VHS, it was usually supplanting one device in the house. Blu-ray is replacing and "obsoleting" potentially many devices. In the case of laptops, until we cycle through and replace all of them with blu-ray capable versions, it's a bit like going back to VHS - one place in the house were we can watch content. OK, so there are usb Blu-ray players on the market but that kind of defeats the object of having a laptop you can carry around and stick a dvd in any time you want, as my daughter does.
I'm not for one minute suggesting that Blu-ray's not going to be successful but I do think there are some other obstacles to its acceptance that didn't affect the VHS to DVD switch.
Comment Re:Don't want to dilute the elixir (Score 1) 805
But setting that aside, if there are bugs in Windows drivers and there aren't in OS X drivers because there are fewer of them and the combinations are easier to test, doesn't that just prove the point?
No bugs in OS X drivers? Please, don't be absurd.
My bad, speaking personally I've not experienced any but then I've no tended to stick complex additional hardware on the iBook/MacBook and MacBook pros that I've owned.
Searching for "buggy osx driver" produces plenty of hits; Apple doesn't have some magic wand to prevent bugs.
Well of course not.
And of course searching for buggy anything in Vista is going to return a lot of hits -- the Vista user base is far larger than the Mac user base, and people only post when there is a complaint, not when things work perfectly.
So are you saying that there's no stability problems with Vista and the large number of apparent problems are all down to the large number of users?
Submission + - Not a story but a follow up to the BBC DRM story
UnxMully writes: It seems that the EU agrees that the use of a proprietary video format isn't necessarily in the public's best interest http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6236612.stm
