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Comment Re:oh Linus you so funny (Score 2) 464

As far as I know, ISA is still used for some legacy hardware, e.g. PS/2 keyboard, PC speaker, floppy controller, but it's almost purely conceptual by now. The ISA bus might not even exist outside a single chip (e.g. SuperIO controller.) I don't know about MCA, but I think that was only on some 386 and 486 IBMs, so that would certainly be irrelevant to have in by now.

Comment Re:Le sigh. (Score 3, Informative) 552

Except that they don't. If you write Metro apps in C++ you don't use .NET. If you write them in JScript you don't use .NET. They were careful at the //build conference last year to explain that the WinRT API is native C++ but there is a transparent marshalling layer to the .NET runtime. The host for JScript/HTML apps is presumably also native code that marshals the objects.

But yes they must run on all the platforms, of which C++ is the only that will need to be built for every platform.

Comment Or maybe it's used to change speed limits (Score 1) 422

In the US, speed limits are legally to be set after the 85th percentile of actual speeds. So if everyone is speeding, the speed limit should legally be changed such that at most 15% of drivers will be speeding at that stretch of road.

This kind of data might just as well be used to help determine areas where the speed limit is wrong.

Comment Re:Confusing symbols (Score 1) 1268

I remember seeing this kind of notation in my grade school textbooks. (I'm from Denmark by the way.)
Though usually it'd be presented with otherwise marked fields, rather than parentheses, and accompanied by short instructions. In earlier grades accompanied by a drawing representing the kind of problem solving needed, instead of written instructions. Like this:

Fill in the blanks, so both sides are equal:
4 + 3 + 2 = ___ + 2

In later grades, regular equation notation was then introduced, substituting x and y for blanks to fill in. Then you'd get a question like this:

Find the value of x in each equation:
4 + 3 + 2 = x + 2
x = ___

Comment Re:FLOSS software? (Score 1) 356

My following argument might not work if you follow it through, but consider it anyway.

Every time you consume a plant, you might deny an animal a source of food or a space for living. What if you eating an apple caused a sparrow to die of hunger, who could otherwise have survived off that apple? In this way, consuming plants might also negatively affect animals.

Comment Closed source? No. (Score 5, Insightful) 372

Huh?

H.264 is not "closed source", it's an open standard with open source encoders (famous x264, everything points to it being the best quality encoder available anywhere) and decoders (libavcodec), it's just that a bazillion companies have patents that cover every corner of video coding. It might be "unfree", but it's certainly not "closed source" or "closed standard" or "proprietary".

Comment Re:14k buys a lot of film. (Score 1) 347

Last time I had a 35mm film developed (which was late last year), apart from the negatives, I got digital prints of it. I didn't ask for it, but it's what I got. Naturally the negatives were developed chemically, as that's required, but after that most shops will scan the negatives and produce digital prints from that. And it isn't even cheap. Don't get me started on the price of getting low-resolution (about 5-6 MP JPEG) scans burned onto a CD, it's ridiculous.

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