Posts by Voland's right hand

I have yet to see one that cannot

XvMC + vlc (you had to tweak the build options on the older vlc) delivers 1920x1080 video on any netbook I have tried. This means no h264 though. MPEG4 :(

Close but no cigar

It the business plan of any _SANE_ company - build what people _WILL_ want and guess what they are _LIKELY_ to want _TOMORROW_.

The idea of building what people WANT today makes no business sense because by the time you are building it someone like Apple comes along with the correct guess of what they will want tomorrow and you are out (or nearly out) of business.

Nokia was building "what customers wanted" and had mandated all of their design process around the "customer connected" mantra. Look what it did to them.

So all in all Apple is right to build cool things and make you want them. That's a swell business plan.

A bit difficult

It is the season for a S.A.D. person to be sad in the northern hemisphere :)

If the only way to communicate is the Internet...

It is not a human right yet...

It is however on its way to become one by the nature of being the only way (or the only sensible no/low cost way) to do things.

Try fencing saber

Try fencing saber (especially without full protective gear). Hint - it hurts even with the protection.

It is also total bollocks

"Activity" and "Activity oriented workspace" are sheets of the _ANDROID_ songbook, not Apple's. Both KDE4 and Gnome 3 are such a trainwreck because of copying _THAT_ obsession without copying any of the state management and workstack management which goes with it. iOS is still application based, not Activity + Intent based.

Just read the frigging Android and iOS developers manuals for crying out loud, look at the changes in KDE 3-4 and iOS and it becomes immediately clear who copied whom.

Whatever

If you decide to shell 2k on plane tickets from EU or USA it ain't going to be just for the sunset.

The switch to driving on the left is interesting though. Someone should show that one to Polish legislators (I know that safety has little to do with them sprouting bullshit and banning registration of right wheel drive - it is all to protect those precious "indigineous" car manufacturing in violation of the EU treaties).

What do they teach kids in school nowdays

Take two very nicely defined and clearly visible stars from the edge of the _BIG_ dipper, draw an imaginary line and the first bright star is Polaris.

The problem with finding the small dipper is that most of its stars are fairly non-descript and not particularly bright. So the method using an extension of the big is what they used to teach on survival (and civil defense) courses throughout the northern Hemisphere. At least outside UK. I remember having this explained to me in the 3rd or fourth grade and repeated several times later on.

So despite being unable to locate the small dipper (or most of the constellations) I can still find you Polaris straight away.

So the name is right - it should be the "Big" not the small dipper.

Agree - enough is enough

The USPO's default position should that the patent is *not* granted unless the *applicant* can show that it is novel

Correction your honour

IT should be:

The USPO's default position should that the patent is *not* granted unless the *applicant* can show that it is _WORKING_. No working prototype - no patent. No more "patent style numbered graph diagrams". Picture or it did not happen.

By the way, the usual "garage inventor" argument is invalid here, because garage inventors _ALWAYS_ try to build their stuff. It is "researchers" in large companies which invent mental concepts and patent them before they are built. As far as parity between big and small anyone who has had to deal with POC budgets in a big corp knows that it is often easier to build your prototype with your own money buying bits of eBay than to get the muppet in charge to allocate you budget and sign your requisitions.

This will solve it once and for all/

They are meaningless

As a comparison to the previous GPU they are meaningless - different arch altogether.

Abandoning VLIW is interesting though. This leaves Itanic as the last survivor in the Jurassic forest.

All of their phones I have had so far use MicroSD

I have a couple of Experias - they all use microSD

I think we skipped it

We skipped it somehow.

We are straight into the "timid", "politically correct", "no tits on display" days of the Vizantium post- Julian the Apostate.

Time, effort and sobriety

Time, effort and sane evaluation of what can be done, what makes money and whatnot.

RedHat is more of a posterchild of pragmatism and "make money instead of going on about 'just how cool is this'".

Dynamic IP by any chance?

1. Are you on a dynamic IP?

2. Does your ISP do transparent proxying?

The globe is small

The container shipment economy has made it small. There are however a number of disproportionately high cost elements. Crossing the Panama canal which is needed for Far-East to Brazil is one of those.

Depends on how do you count failures

Russians landed _FIRST_ on mars - 1971. However not a single one of the scientific experiments on board of Mars 1 and Mars 2 worked. The orbiter components worked in both. Ditto for Mars 3-6 launched in the 70-es: all returned some data but lander components did not manage to complete all of their program.

NASA numbers are correct at some level - not a single Russian mission managed to fulfill its complete scientific programme. However out of 17 around 6 managed to return something useful and most importantly new from a scientific perspective - f.e. the discovery of some level of ionosphere, etc.

Now let's revisit that thought

Quote:"Do we know it was actually being flown over Iran? It is possible that the Iranians are not being entirely truthful here."

Now, let's hold that thought for a while. All NATO airspace assets above Afghanistan playing pocket tennis while a Be-50 (or whatever DIY Iranian equivalent was used here) is flying in Afghan or Pakistani airspace on top of a Predator drone (probably with escort) and retransmitting GPS signals at 10-20db above what they should be.

I know my tax dollars are being massively wasted but that massively? Surely not...

Some people are sufficiently popular not to need Googling

So Steve's position in the zeitgeist not surprising.

Not all cars have a TC off button you know.

Not all cars have a TC off button you know. I can think of at least one major make which had dispensed with the TC off button on their major model lines.

The fact that you and me agree that this is a criminally stupid idea does not mean that 10%+ (more for fleet cars) out there are not from said manufacturer.

Hanlon's razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

Same as today - your fan spins into hovercraft mode on webpages where the cretin designing them has put a "DIY" ad in javascript without waiting between frames or has made a "DIY" adobe flash ad or has put flash videos for no reason whatsoever.

They use BBM instead of texts - it is usually flat priced.

You are indeed correct - the hoodie is the new BB core market and it is one market it will be able to rely on long after everyone else has switched to a touchscreen slab of some description.

Calm down, it is just the vehicle manufacturer lobby speaking

See, if it is installed by a vehicle manufacturer it is OK. If not you are at fault.

So now, vehicle manufacturer bundles LOUSY bluetooth integration with their own LOUSY SatNav with 6 spoke alloy wheels gold plated sign "I am an arsehole" and puts it only on the "Clarkson-Approved Invincible" model of the vehicle. They also price SatNav at 600+, Bluetooth at 400+. You should not forget the mandatory "Daemon" wheels for 1200 more too. They also have the Bluetooth deliberately crippled so it does not take announcements from the SatNav so you actually buy and use theirs instead of that on the phone.

You should not complain about big corps using politicos to mandate their source of income. That is how the world is supposed to run. You are a consumer. Consume and shut up. Capiche?

In any case, texting while driving is a pickup truck is a Darwin award. 2 tons of metal (unladden) require some respect when operating. I drive mine at 60 mph as a truck most of the time (despite it being perfectly capable of more and tested at 90mph on the Autobahn in cross-EU trips).

Gawd how did you come up with this one

The horrible sight is still in front of my eyes... Aaaagghh... Need decontamination now...

It was not entirely their choice

Medical software is built by muppets who always built windows only. So in a lot of cases NHS has little or no choice in using Windows.

And how much does a decent PC cost?

And how much exactly does a decent PC with a decent Nvidia card to play it cost nowdays?

North of 600.

And how much exactly does a decent PC usable for daily non-gaming use cost nowdays?

South of 350.

That is without taking into account power consumption, etc.

If you do the _FULL_ math the numbers end up in favour of the onLive for anyone who plays less than 4h a day. If you are playing more than 4h a day... Well... Can you tell me who is your employer, I would like a job where I can spend 4h+ a day playing too.

It may be less nefarious then you think

If you look at the pics it is blurred because it is spinning to produce artificial gravity in flight. You do not really want to open the window in that case as the centrifugal force will throw you out and the Mothership will depart without you.

You are in to listen

You are not in to control.

Only the video feeds were unencrypted. The control channel (IIRC) was not. So the bits from laptop in itself would not be enough to control it.

Cockpit is no place for democracy

"Averaging" between inputs is a terminally bad idea. Better to have priority in cases like this and the captain being able to flip it if need be from the back seat.

If it is not, why is it written this way?

Well, if it is not "malware" why the hell does it use undocumented Android functionality which prevents removal?