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Comment: Nothing at all like regulating them. (Score 1) 130

by pavon (#46468907) Attached to: US Court Freezes Assets of Mt. Gox CEO

It would be a delicious irony if people were able to recover some of their lost value due to government regulations.

You mean like what would have happened if they were regulated like a real bank?

This has nothing to do with applying banking regulations to Mt Gox. It is about applying laws about fraud and theft. The difference is that regulations put a burden on innocent and guilty alike but potentially prevent problems before they occur, whereas laws simply attempt to punish the guilty and compensate the victims after the fact. If people do in fact recover any money as a result of this, it won't be particularly ironic since libertarians fully support laws on fraud, just not banking regulations, and complete federal control of currency.

Comment: Donald Knuth also doesn't have Email (Score 4, Insightful) 297

Okay, the cybersecurity negotiator ignorance is bad, the rest less so.


        - Donald Knuth

The role of Supreme Court Justice is also "to be on the bottom of things". It is possible to understand enough about email to make good judgements about it without using it on a daily basis. The justices have to make weekly about subjects which they have absolutely no interaction with in their normal day-to-day life. From technical to finance to agriculture, no one can possibly be an expert on all the issues they hear. It is their job to constantly learn enough about a subject to know what is important from a legal and constitutional point of view. If they are failing to do this, then that is a legitimate complaint. The fact that they weren't familiar with "common knowledge" technologies before encountering them in court, or haven't chosen to incorporate them into their life isn't.

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

by pavon (#46428601) Attached to: Glamor, X11's OpenGL-Based 2D Acceleration Driver, Is Becoming Useful

The cairo-ickle blog has maintained very interesting benchmarks of the different cairo rendering backends. The short story is that every hardware accelered backend except for sandybridge SNA has performed worse than the software implementation. And in some cases the hardware acceleration is significantly less stable. I'm curious to see if this finally pushes Glamor over the hump and makes it faster than the software path.

Comment: Re:Yes and No (Score 1) 856

by pavon (#46410241) Attached to: Microsoft's Attempt To Convert Users From Windows XP Backfires

XP is over 12 years old, that's one hell of a *free* long term support package.

How long it has been since a company sold a product to their first customer is irrelevant. What matters is how long it has been since they sold the product to me. Microsoft stopped retail and OEM sales of XP in June 2008, which was shortly after Vista SP1 was released and most if it's problems had been fixed, and a bit more than a year before Windows 7 was released. Those customers got just shy of 6 years of support, which is still pretty darn good. In comparison, Ubuntu offers 3 years of support for an LTS release after it's replacement comes out, and OS X tends to be about the same. However, those both offer free or cheap upgrades so a shorter support cycle is at least somewhat justified.

For corporate customers, the support provided by a RedHat subscription is entirely comparable. No moderately sized company can get away with using OEM/retail licenses of Windows/Office; they all pay some sort of subscription to MS. RHEL 5 will be supported for just over 6 years after RHEL 6 came out. RHEL 2-4 were each supported for 5 to 5.5 years after their successor. Both MS and RH have extended support for critical security bugs beyond that, but both cost extra money. Recent Solaris releases are as good or better (depending which support phases you consider comparable).

So for corporate users, XP's support duration was reasonable and in line with the rest of the industry. For consumers it was much better for people who have to stick with older OSes for compatibility, and hard to compare once you start considering free upgrades (is an OS X point release comparable to a windows SP release or an OS release, etc).

Comment: You don't have to (Score 4, Insightful) 216

by pavon (#46372189) Attached to: Wolfram Language Demo Impresses

The way this is setup isn't that that you code everything in natural language, rather it is just a shortcut to look up the correct formal language. Instead of searching/browsing documentation looking up the exact names of the functions you want and how to chain them, you just type what you want in natural language. If it interpreted you correctly, then great it saved you several minutes, and now you know the real syntax to use in the future. If not, well you only lost a couple seconds.

The idea of mixing natural language like this isn't so weird; the first step that most programmers would take in looking up documentation when they don't even know the name of the library the functionality is located in is to perform a natural language search on web browser, and then go from there. This just takes it one step further and streamlines the process, which is perfect for a interactive language.

Comment: Re:Troll (Score 4, Insightful) 793

by pavon (#46371531) Attached to: Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience

Homeopathy is not silly; it is a lie. If you sell it, you're lying to people. So it matters that Whole Foods sells it, as it casts doubt on their grasp of science, which indicates their "healthly" foods are just marketing to the credulous.

Products in regular supermarkets are also filled with lies, and both have products that better than the other in some way or the other. Solution: make your own decision rather than expecting a corporation to base their decisions on science rather than on what sells best.

Comment: Re:Bad news for Wolfram alpha (Score 4, Informative) 54

by pavon (#46334005) Attached to: Copyright Ruling On Publishing Calculated Results: Common Sense Breaks Out

I just did some queries and the only copyright statement I see is the standard one at the bottom of their page. They do have a legitimate copyright on their pages, including the layout, design and the content which they created. That notice doesn't necissarily imply that they claim to own the facts that are being displayed. In fact, they frequently provide citations for those facts, which implies that they don't claim to own them.

Comment: Re:I remember Doom 3. (Score 1) 108

by pavon (#46291629) Attached to: New <em>DOOM</em> Game Not Dead: Beta Comes With <em>Wolfenstein</em> Pre-Order

Personally, I think the Doom concept translates poorly to modern gaming. Tolkien-esque fantasy is to RPGs -- revolutionary in its time, but bland and generic today. Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway). Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway).

I disagree. The recent Serious Sam releases were great, and showed that the old-school FPSs formula still makes for a good game in today's world. Fast paced, lots of shooting, and meaningless plot. The good character helped, but it was the gameplay that really made it stand out. The problem with Doom 3 wasn't that it failed to add all the things that modern FPSs have, but rather that it failed to replicate the fun gameplay of the originals.

Comment: Not sending history to Valve (Score 4, Informative) 511

by pavon (#46275587) Attached to: Gabe Newell Responds: Yes, We're Looking For Cheaters Via DNS


Comment: Doesn't make science transparent (Score 1) 618

by pavon (#46195891) Attached to: GOP Bill To Outlaw EPA 'Secret Science' That Is Not Transparent, Reproducible

Nothing in this bill will require federally funded research to be public access, nor will it fund archival efforts for the raw data. Rather it requires that the EPA ignore any science that isn't open access, after the GOP spent years of fighting against open access.

Comment: Depends on how you measure. (Score 1) 177

by pavon (#46164811) Attached to: At my current workplace, I've outlasted ...

If you consider just current employees, about half started before me and half after me. But if you consider everyone I have worked with at this job, probably close to 4/5 have since moved on to other jobs. Since most people here either stay all the way till retirement, or for just a few years, without much middle ground, the second measure will continue to grow much faster than the first.

Comment: Re:Range anxiety isn't really rational (Score 1) 357

by pavon (#46146299) Attached to: Tesla Touts Cross-Country Trip, Aims For World Record

Some of the older Tesla charging stations have SAE J1772 connectors, in addition to superchargers. There is no reason to doubt that he has used them with his Leaf. He's not lying, just being willfully ignorant about the difference between a supercharger and a standard slow charger.

Comment: Not a standard. (Score 4, Informative) 249

by pavon (#46104363) Attached to: Google Planning To Remove CSS Regions From Blink

The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe ... I thought standards were there to implement not argue with.

CSS Regions is not a W3C standard. It is a Working Draft. The entire point of publishing a working draft is to solicit feedback from the community. There have been several working drafts that were never promoted to final recommendations, because there was no community consensus that they were a good idea. What Google and Mozilla are doing is a perfectly constructive part of the standardization process.

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