Comment Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score 1) 734
Racism is not the origin of that term. Calling a spade a spade, instead of an earth moving tool, is just pointing out that you are plain-speaking.
Comment Re:NewEgg (Score 1) 518
You mean, more deprecated tags?
Comment Re:Twenty Seconds? (Score 1) 587
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
Well, yeah. Except I stick the disc in to the machine, wander off to get a drink, or a snack, or take a piss, and when I get back the DVD is stuck on a language select screen, which is only there so that it can better serve me the copyright warning. So I still have to wait around to get to that screen, or come back and wait through the copyright messages. On a disc I've bought.
Then there are the discs that start playing the feature automatically after a short period of time, because, I dunno, they think some people are too stupid to work out how to start it running? So I stick the disc in the machine, go to get a drink, snack, or have a piss, and before I get back the film starts and I have to skip back to where I want to be.
No, on the level of frustration it's not particularly high, but it is a frustration. I only wander away from the machine because it has lots of unskippable crap. I have been conditioned to start a disc before I'm ready to watch it. This isn't right, and certainly not when I've been a good little consumer and paid for the product. I should be able to get myself ready, then start the disc, in much the same way that I do with a computer game, book, bath, car, washing machine, cooker, board game, any-other-thing. I have yet to find that I need to prime a toilet twenty seconds before I need to use it, just so that it flushes there and then and doesn't have me standing near my own filth waiting for it to be ready.
Video Introducing SlashBI 339
How Linus Torvalds Helped Bust a Microsoft Patent 103
New submitter inhuman_4 passes along this quote from an article at Wired:
"Last December, Microsoft scored a victory when the ITC Administrative Law Judge Theodore R. Essex found that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents. But the ruling could also eliminate an important Microsoft software patent that has been invoked in lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and car navigation device-maker Tom Tom. According to Linus Torvalds, he was deposed in the case this past fall, and apparently his testimony about a 20-year-old technical discussion — along with a discussion group posting made by an Amiga fan, known only as Natuerlich! — helped convince the Administrative Law Judge that the patent was invalid."
Japan Creates Earthquake-Proof Levitating House System 243
An anonymous reader writes "Japanese company Air Danshin Systems Inc. has developed an innovative system that levitates houses in the in the event of an earthquake to protect them from structural damage. When an earthquake hits, a sensor responds within one second by activating a compressor, which forces an incredible amount of air under the home, pushing the structure up and apart from its foundation. The air pressure can keep the home levitating up to 3cm from the shaking foundation below. In the wake of last year's Fukushima disaster the company is set to install the levitation system in 88 houses across Japan."
Comment Re:Great Series of shows (Score 2) 66
Um, BBC1 HD is just a mirror of BBC1, but in HD. Auntie couldn't have shown a BBC2 programme in HD except on BBC HD.
Submission + - Java apps have most flaws, Cobol least (computerworld.com) 1
dcblogs writes: An analysis of 745 applications for violations of good architectural and coding practices, found that Java applications had the most problems and Cobol-built systems, the least. Some 365 million lines of code were analyzed by Cast Software, which makes tools for this, to assess “technical debt,” or the cost to fix the violations. Java was calculated at $5.42 per line of code, while Cobol did best at $1.26. Cobol code had the least number of violations because programmers “have been beating on it for 30 years,” said Cast. As far as Java goes, “there are many people going into Java now that really don’t have strong computer science backgrounds,” said its chief scientist, Bill Curtis.
Submission + - New all-sky map shows the magnetic fields of the M (mpa-garching.mpg.de)
An anonymous reader writes: With a unique new all-sky map, scientists at MPA have made significant progress toward measuring the magnetic field structure of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. Specifically, the map is of a quantity known as Faraday depth, which among other things, depends strongly on the magnetic fields along a particular line of sight. To produce the map, data were combined from more than 41,000 individual measurements using a novel image reconstruction technique. The work was a collaboration between scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), who are specialists in the new discipline of information field theory, and a large international team of radio astronomers. The new map not only reveals the structure of the galactic magnetic field on large scales, but also small-scale features that provide information about turbulence in the galactic gas.
Submission + - New wave of ocean energy to be trialed off the coa (gizmag.com)
cylonlover writes: The researchers at Australia's BioPower Systems evidently looked at kelp, and thought, "what if we could use that swaying action to generate power?" The result was their envisioned bioWAVE system, which could soon become a reality, thanks to a just-announced AUD$5 million (US$5.1 million) grant from the Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources that will go towards an AUD$14 million (US$14,365,000) four-year pilot demonstration unit, to be installed at a grid-connected site near Port Fairy, Victoria.
Submission + - Indian minister seeks censorship for user generate (hindustantimes.com)
punit_r writes: Indian minister for Communications & Information Technology, Kapil Sibal, met officials from Facebook, Google, YouTube and Yahoo on Monday, 5 December 2011, and told them to screen what goes on the sites. He basically asked the websites to actively screen content..
How, do screen such massive amount of data? Well, the IT minister has the perfect recipe. "We'll use humans to screen content and not technology", said the IT minister.
Meanwhile, he got it back from the social media.
How, do screen such massive amount of data? Well, the IT minister has the perfect recipe. "We'll use humans to screen content and not technology", said the IT minister.
Meanwhile, he got it back from the social media.
Submission + - Osteoporosis drug makes lengthy space trips more l (yomiuri.co.jp)
An anonymous reader writes: Japanese researchers have discovered that by taking drugs normally targeted at osteoporosis sufferers they can mitigate the long term effects of weightlessness. This makes it more possible that humans could reasonably fly to Mars land there and be fully functional even after the lengthy journey.
Submission + - Kapersky quits BSA; SOPA not supportable (betanews.com)
Cmdrm writes: Kapersky to release additional information as to why it is intent on leaving the Business Software Alliance. "Kaspersky Lab would like to clarify that the company did not participate in the elaboration or discussion of the SOPA initiative and does not support it. Moreover, the company believes that the SOPA initiative might actually be counter-productive for the public interest, and decided to discontinue its membership in the BSA as of January 1, 2012", said a Monday press release.
NVIDIA Launches 3D Vision 2 76
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA just announced their next generation of 3D Vision technology that claims to deliver greater realism and immersion for 3D games, movies and photos. 3D Vision 2 is very similar to NVIDIA's original 3D Vision. The technology is backwards compatible with NVIDIA's first gen 3D emitter technology. However, NVIDIA has made a number of physical and technical tweaks that enhance the technology in a few key ways. NVIDIA's active-shutter glasses have been redesigned with 20% larger lenses and the company has worked with partners to bring new, larger, full-HD 3D Vision compatible monitors to market. NVIDIA has also developed a new technology dubbed LightBoost that ultimately results in brighter on-screen imagery and better environmental lighting characteristics in 3D content as well."
Jaguar Supercomputer Being Upgraded To Regain Fastest Cluster Crown 89
MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the Titan supercomputer. From the article: "Cray, AMD, Nvidia, and the Department of Energy have announced that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer will soon be upgraded to yet again become the fastest HPC installation in the world. The new, mighty-morphing computer will feature thousands of Cray XK6 blades, each one accommodating up to four 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 (Interlagos) chips and four Nvidia Tesla 20-series GCGPU coprocessors. The Jaguar name will be suitably inflated, too: the new behemoth will be called Titan. The exact specs of Titan haven't been revealed, but the Jaguar supercomputer currently sports 200 cabinets of Cray XT5 blades — and each cabinet, in theory, can be upgraded to hold 24 XK6 blades. That's a total of 4,800 servers, or 38,400 processors in total; 19,200 Opterons 6200s, and 19,200 Tesla GPUs. ... that's 307,200 CPU cores — and with 512 shaders in each Tesla chip that's 9,830,400 compute units. In other words, Titan should be capable of massive parallelism of more than one million concurrent operations. When the server is complete, towards the end of 2012, Titan will be capable of between 10 and 20 petaflops, and should recapture the crown of Fastest Supercomputer in the World from the Japanese 'K' computer."
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