Octel - Slashdot User

Throttle Shared Users With OS X — Is It Possible? 403

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 04, 2010 @05:11PM from the throttle-the-snot-instead dept.

whisper_jeff writes "I work in a design studio where the production director is also the owner's son (translation = he can do no wrong). He is fond of accessing a designer's computer via filesharing and working directly on files off of the designer's computers rather than transferring the files to his computer to work on them there. In so doing, he causes the designer's computer to grind to a near-halt as the harddrive is now tasked with his open/save requests along with whatever the designer is doing. Given that there is no way he's going to change his ways (since he doesn't see anything wrong with it...), I was wondering if there was a way to throttle a user's shared access to a computer (Mac OSX 10.5.8) so that his remote working would have minimal impact on our work. Google searches have revealed nothing helpful (maybe I should Bing it... :) so I was hoping someone with more technical expertise on Slashdot could offer a suggestion."

Funeral Being Held Today For IE6 194

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 04, 2010 @12:44PM from the good-riddance dept.

An anonymous reader writes "More than 100 people, many of them dressed in black, are expected to gather around a coffin Thursday to say goodbye to an old friend. The deceased? Internet Explorer 6. The aging Web browser, survived by its descendants Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8, is being eulogized at a tongue-in-cheek 'funeral' hosted by Aten Design Group, a design firm in Denver, Colorado."

Code Review of Doom For the iPhone 161

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 04, 2010 @07:42AM from the old-dogs-new-tricks dept.

Developer Fabien Sanglard has written a code review for id Software's iPhone port of Doom. It's an interesting look into how the original 1993 game (which he also reviewed to understand its rendering process) was adapted to a modern platform. "Just like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was rendering a screenframe pixel per pixel. The only way to do this on iPhone with an acceptable framerate would be to use CoreSurface/CoreSurface.h framework. But it is unfortunately restricted and using it would prevent distribution on the AppStore. The only solution is to use OpenGL, but this comes with a few challenges: Doom was faking 3D with a 2D map. OpenGL needs real 3D vertices. More than 3D vertices, OpenGL needs data to be sent as triangles (among other things because they are easy to rasterize). But Doom sectors were made of arbitrary forms. Doom 1993's perspective was also faked, it was actually closer to an orthogonal projection than a perspective projection. Doom was using VGA palette indexing to perform special effect (red for damage, silver for invulnerable...)."

Simulation of Close Asteroid Fly-By 148

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 21, 2009 @11:46AM from the close-enough-to-feel-the-vacuum-breeze dept.

c0mpliant writes "NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have released a simulation of the path of an asteroid, named Apophis, that will come very close to Earth in 2029 — the closest predicted approach since humans have monitored for such heavenly bodies. The asteroid caused a bit of a scare when astronomers first announced that it would enter Earth's neighborhood some time in the future. However, since that announcement in 2004, more recent calculations have put the odds of collision at 1 in 250,000."

Comment Explosives (Score 1) 500

by Octel on Thursday March 26, 2009 @12:42PM (#27343975) Attached to: Mythbusters Accidentally Bust Windows In Nearby Town

When I was a security policeman in the Air Force back in the 80's, I was stationed at Clark Air Base, Philippines. The base came under attack during WWII so there were a lot of unexploded bombs that would come up once in awhile. One day we were notified, along with EOD, of a bomb found in the backyard of military housing. Turns out some kid was digging in his back yard and hit the fins of one! EOD carefully removed it, then took it about 2 miles away to detonate the munition. You could feel the pressure from the explosion that far away!

Comment Re:I've never understood (Score 1) 1306

by Octel on Tuesday March 24, 2009 @04:47PM (#27317943) Attached to: Texas Vote May Challenge Teaching of Evolution

I have a coworker who is an evangelical Christian. I tried to convince him of your argument but he stated the theory doesn't fit the biblical account of creation, ie: six days to create the world, etc. We've had numerous talks on things like the distance of stars and galaxies to gauge the age of the universe, transitional fossils and the like. He's interested in the evidence but it all comes down to the Bible and how it, in his opinion, is the overriding law of everything. Centuries ago you had famous scientists like Galileo who made wondrous discoveries of the universe--only to be silenced by the church and threatened with excommunication or worse, death. Many only wanted to discover the "greater glories of God." What galls me the most is that these people don't understand how far behind we are in this country when it comes to science. If we dilute the discipline then it will make matters worse for not only the children, but the country as a whole when it comes to science.

Comment the good old days of data storage (Score 2, Interesting) 160

by Octel on Thursday March 05, 2009 @03:54PM (#27081491) Attached to: A History of Storage, From Punch Cards To Blu-ray

I had an older friend who was a CS student in college during the late 70's. He had his final semester program on punch cards. Like a typical student he was rushing to class to turn in his project but tripped on the stairs thus sending the cards all over the place. You could hear his anguish miles away!

Comment Back in the day (Score 1) 385

by Octel on Saturday July 23, 2005 @12:28PM (#13144328) Attached to: Happy Birthday, Amiga

I was in the military overseas when I got a loan to buy a new computer. The BX had the new Amega 1000's and I wanted one badly, but couldn't afford it. So I settled for a C64 and didn't regret it, but a guy in my barracks had one and I spent a lot of time playing with it. It was truely way ahead of it's time in terms of graphics. To say it was the most powerful computer at the time isn't quite true, but for the home market it had the best graphics of anything out there.

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