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Comment: Re:Does anybody else find it funny... (Score 1) 213

by Flodis (#43915135) Attached to: iPhone 4, iPad 2 Get US Import Ban

Goodness me, that is the most chafed neckbeard I have ever seen! How do you cope?!

"iPods were popular but shit" is just a weak argument. It works better with hipster glasses, but then, I thought it was all the Apple users who were the hipsters. I get so confused!

The amount of butthurt from nerds on slashdot over the success of the iPod and subsequent iOS devices is hilarious.

oooh. Flamebait if I ever saw one. I think parent was pretty reasonable in his/her comment.

The tangible sense of "not getting it" swirls around like a dark cloud, just because something became popular that wasn't exactly what you wanted from a product, thus it is impossible to believe that the success is down to anything other than marketing to braindead consumers.

Actually, it's quite easy to come up with examples of when the general consumer... consumes... substandard stuff rather than the good stuff.

  • Beer. Budweiser (the American variant) is the most sold in the world.
  • Audio. Range compression (english term?) makes many pop songs sound loud, but make them lose in dynamic range. Consumers in general don't care.
  • Food. Fast food compared to anything else.
  • Games. Farmville compared to anything.
  • Books. Dan Brown... Sigh.
  • Films.
  • ... and so on.

So.. What makes you so sure parent isn't "getting it"?

Comment: Re:All projects need your help. (Score 1) 212

by Flodis (#43779535) Attached to: Open Source Projects For Beginners
I love unit testing. It makes me a lot more productive as a coder - especially if I'm revisiting old code. I can make changes pretty freely without having to analyse the code in detail. I hope that establishes me as a unit test proponent. Now, to visit the articles of faith;
(1) - I definitely write unit tests for, and especially involving, private methods. They are typically the most granular, allowing you to test the smallest 'unit', and are doubly interesting because they may capture objects in an 'unclean' state.

(2) I often start off writing a 'UsageTest'-method that isn't a unit test per se, but lets me imagine a usage scenario for an aspect of the class I'm about to create. The 'UsageTest' method puts me in the role of the coder going to use the tested class. It lets me get a feel for how I would want the class to work, for example see which parameters I have convenient access to, rather than which parameters the class would prefer.
The 'UsageTest' method(s) then become some kind of 'Intended Usage' documentation.
I find this to be a pretty good way to keep focus on what you need to implement to make the class work, rather than just creating methods at whim until they can be refactored and coerced into a workflow.

Comment: Re: No match for Haswell (Score 1) 128

by Flodis (#43603471) Attached to: AMD Details Next-Gen Kaveri APU's Shared Memory Architecture
Not trying to pick a fight here, but I don't think this computes unless you change your mind about the importance of the CPU's computational power, or take some other - not yet mentioned - factor(*) into consideration.

Eg: If the user intends to get a discrete GPU, as you say, s/he will have approx $150 more to spend on the GPU if s/he picks the AMD solution. A $250 GPU vs. a $100 GPU is a pretty significant difference. Thus if graphics matter, the user should pick the AMD solution.

(*) of which there is possibly a boatload to consider. Socket longevity, thermal design power, ability to build a quiet system, ability to use ECC memory, etc. Not only price, but also many 'features' favor AMD since AMD tends to enable ECC, AMD-V and such in consumer CPUs, whereas you have to step up to Xeons to get that from Intel. However, some properties such as Computational power per Watt tend to favor Intel in a significant way. Where I think we agree, is that with Intel you can get pretty much everything you can get from AMD, provided you're willing to spend the money (Eg. step up to a Xeon CPU, add a discrete graphics card).


by Flodis (#43595093) Attached to: AMD Details Next-Gen Kaveri APU's Shared Memory Architecture
You do realize that what you're saying is an argument for AMD, don't you?

both companies offer more CPU processing power than most consumers can use anyway.

Ok. Noted. Either will do fine CPU-wise.

AMD's built-in GPU handily beats Intel's built-in GPU

Ah. Great. So AMD is the better buy then.

Not only that, but it will save ~$100 on the CPU and ~$50 more on the motherboard. That's GREAT advice.

But no.. Then we hear this;

If graphics are a big concern, they should get a cheap discrete card as one under $100 will be good for most games. Thus AMD's advantage is negated.

Ummm.. First you made a good case for AMD, and now you're saying they should pick Intel anyway, and not only that, They should cough up an extra $100 on top of the ~$150 extra they already need to cough up, just to negate AMD's advantage. WTF? Why not just pick AMD in the first place then?

Comment: Re:Still fiddly if you RTFA (Score 1) 181

by Flodis (#43514067) Attached to: Ars Reviewer is Happily Bored With Dell's Linux Ultrabook
I have this same problem with a regular mouse, and would not put it down to input lag, but to the 'grip' point being so small.

I think it has something to do with the scroll bars disappearing. At about the same time it became hard to resize windows unless you grabbed in the title bar.

Comment: Re:What you need is Uclibc distribution (Score 1) 299

by Flodis (#43402487) Attached to: Linux Fatware: Distros That Need To Slim Down
I knew IBM S/390 has had it for ages, but was older than I thought; From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
"The first hypervisors providing full virtualization, were the test tool, SIMMON, and IBM's one-off research CP-40 system, which began production use in January 1967, and became the first version of IBM's CP/CMS operating system."

Comment: Re:Definition (Score 1) 332

by Flodis (#42908655) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Spreadsheet With Decent Programming Language?


I'm surprised by this.

I program primarily in C#, but I actully prefer 'End (keyword)' to the closing curly braces. This is especially true when I'm debugging legacy/spaghetti code.

Compare this:

                End Loop
            End If
        End If
    End Loop
End Class

to this


Which conveys more information?

Which makes it easier to find where to insert that pesky 'a++' that someone forgot?



If you're talking in a mobile phone, it doesn't look like you're recording, and people will probably give you the benefit of a doubt. If - on the other hand - you have a head-mounted camera, it looks like you may be recording all the time. (Which he also was, so the perpetrators' misgivings about being filmed were not only easier to understand, they were also correct.)


RTFA yourself. Images are being recorded all the time. The images published on the website were saved because they weren't overwritten. That's different from 'not being recorded'.

To me it seems the Mann guy acted like a moron, but I wasn't there, and there's only one source for the story.

One thing that bothers me about his story is the way he touts the 'paper written by his doctor'. The camera is obviously not mounted there for medical purposes, so in what way is it significant that the paper is written by a doctor? It seems Mann uses the doctor-title rather than the contents of the paper to try to trump us into believing it is significant.

Of course, what bothers me most is how he walks around visiting and filming in various places where he shouldn't, just because he himself has designed the glasses so they can't be removed. That the camera is non-removable does not make it OK.

It would be nice if someone could design an EMP generator, mount it in a non-removable fashion to their body, and then go visit this Mann chap, and dissuade any protests from him by touting a paper from a hockey goalie.
