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Comment: Re:Eagerly awaiting ickle benchmarks (Score 4, Interesting) 46

I wonder if the differences are due to extracting the result from the GPU. There is no doubt whatsoever that doing 2D with OpenGL on the GPU will be faster than a software rasterizer - what kills the performance in these tests is having to copy the result back to the CPU so it can be displayed in an X window. Once X windows are fully composited and output graphics never leave the GPU memory, the hardware acceleration will no doubt prove to be the fastest.

Comment: Jerks don't follow rules (Score 1) 130

by Chemisor (#46398371) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Automatically Logging Non-Computerized Equipment Use?


Comment: Re:Or not. (Score 1) 116

by Chemisor (#46395941) Attached to: Popularity On Facebook Makes People Think You're Attractive

Nobody uses a facebook profile to determine if a prospective employee is a good fit - they are instead looking to determine if the prospective employee is a bad fit. With so many candidates for every position, there is an increasing need to disqualify people, and facebook is an excellent place to find dirt on them. If a capital offence can be found in six lines written by the most honest of men, anyone with an active facebook profile is entirely worthless.

Comment: Names are for communication (Score 4, Funny) 97

by Chemisor (#46313381) Attached to: Naming All Lifeforms On Earth With Hash Functions

I think I'll go hunt some af7caaf1e73a2d24924371a370b4ef9b so I can feed my 362842c5bb3847ec3fbdecb7a84a8692 and a nice quiet evening with my 34b46c8cf192431e84ea81109660367b, chatting about the difficulty of talking about a474fb23f886eeaa16223eba872e53b1 that some socially inept scientist decided to name with a hash function.

Comment: Saurez-Potts Open Source Stone Soup (Score 3, Funny) 33

by Chemisor (#46305413) Attached to: Louis Suarez-Potts Talks About Making Money with FOSS (Video)

Once upon a time, there was an open source developer who published an open source project on GitHub and declared that he was going to make a lot of money from it. People were curious; how could he make any money from what he gave away for free? So they asked him what his secret was.

He thought a moment and said: "You too can be making money from your free software project. All you need is to become a consultant."
"Really?" exclaimed the people "We never thought of that! What do you consult about?"
"I consult companies on how to make money from their open source projects"
"Oooh. That's clever. Uh... but what do you use your OSS project for?"
"Sometimes those companies sometimes hire me to write something for them."
"Your OSS project?"
"Well, no. They usually want something different made."
"But it's open source, right?"
"Uh, no."
"So your advice is basically to put your OSS project on your resume so companies know you can code and then will give you a job?"
"Well, yes..."
"So you are not really making any money from your OSS project, you are just using it to get a job?"

Comment: Can't sell it to developers (Score 2) 389

by Chemisor (#46278415) Attached to: Windows 8 Metro: The Good Kind of Market Segmentation?

It is worth pointing out that all developers are power users, and will write applications first for themselves unless they are paid to do otherwise. The reason Windows is so popular is the sheer number of applications available for it. Once the "newbie" interface is segregated from the "power user" interface, there will be a lot fewer applications written for the former due to everyone but the big companies leaving for more useful environments. Fewer applications, and the unlikelihood of anybody writing any anytime soon, is what is killing Metro. If you aren't selling to developers first, you will lose - nobody buys Windows to run Windows.

Comment: Keep it (Score 1) 78

by Chemisor (#46270857) Attached to: New Encryption Scheme Could Protect Your Genome

Encryption can be broken, especially the kind that exposes useful information about the plaintext as this one does. A much simpler alternative is to keep your genetic information in your own control, processing it on your own computer with open source software. You know, just what we already do with other sensitive information like passwords.

Comment: Re:Its too bad.. (Score 1) 357

by Chemisor (#46254261) Attached to: Under Armour/Lockheed Suit Blamed For US Skating Performance

> more about your tech than your personal ability

So how far are you willing to take that argument? Some of us, like Bolt Usain, have longer legs and so can run more efficiently. Some, like Michael Phelps, have big feet and a swimmingly efficient body shape. Whatever personal ability you may have, their genetic advantage will beat you every time. They may not be engineered, but they are all freaks, because that's what you have to be to win in today's olympics. I don't know why people bother watching it - it's kind of like a freak show, but less entertaining. I mean, why would I care that one freak can run a course 0.01 seconds faster than another? The olympics are dead. We should just get rid of it.

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.