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User: White+Flame

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  1. Re:Not the first, not the last on A New Concept in Supercomputers · · Score: 1

    Plus it only draws <200W. I'm sure the torque placed on the earth from this XCP spinning an older power meter would not be insignificant.

  2. Re:Limited graphics on Carmack Speaks On Ray Tracing, Future id Engines · · Score: 1

    Except now the surface of the sphere during realtime will be rough voxels instead of tessellated triangles.

  3. Re:Fresh Kimchi? on Kimchi in Space · · Score: 1

    I see they were taking it already canned, but why not get it freshly fermented? The hard part about Kimchi is the fermentation step. Since you can't bury it in the ground as tradition requires, they've fortunately come up with a patented fermentation system [freepatentsonline.com]:
    TFA says they do not want the fermentation bacteria and other related microbes up in space. So, no.
  4. Why use fossil fuels for production and refining? on Biofuels Make Greenhouse Gases Worse · · Score: 1

    Wouldn't those be moved over to being powered by biofuels as well? Seems stupidly obvious to me. It'd only be in the very beginning that the machinery used in production would still be running on petroleum products.

  5. Re:Difference? on Affordable Workstation Graphics Card Shoot-Out · · Score: 2, Informative

    Another difference that at least existed in the past, and probably still holds true today, is that workstation cards have more geometry pipelines, whereas gaming cards have more pixel pipelines. The gamer stuff puts out very pretty but a lower number of polygons, whereas workstations often just use kajillions of tiny untextured polygons. It's a tradeoff that affects silicon size and internal chip bandwidth, and explains why games and workstation apps run slowly on the wrong 'type' of card with their different demands.

  6. Re:Suicide and LSD on Two AI Pioneers, Two Bizarre Suicides · · Score: 1

    Chris McKinstry was apparently already an LSD user.

    With all the railing against religion as being a crutch for the weak-minded, why aren't mind-altering drugs considered the same lunacy?

  7. Replies are missing the point on Telecommuting Can Be Bad For Those Who Don't · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Read TFS (or TFA) again! This is NOT showing problems of telecommuters, it is showing problems of those who do not. It's saying that those who work in the office get worse as others start telecommuting, and that "the health, life, and work benefits for those who can telecommute are undeniable".

  8. SCO is dead! Long live SCO! on SCO Receives Nasdaq's Delisting Notice · · Score: 1

    ....wait, ignore that last part.

  9. JIT design on GNU Octave 3.0 Released After 11 Years · · Score: 1

    I've seen a number of projects, from VMs to stuff similar to this project, roll their own JIT solutions all the time, causing it to work well only on a limited number of platforms with a limited number of optimizations. Hopefully if they go this route they'll use something like LLVM and not reinvent the wheel yet again.

  10. Re:If you have to ask ... on Students Power Supercomputer with Bicycles · · Score: 1

    I've seen ballpark prices mentioned deep within Google searches:

    SC5832 = $1.5m
    SC648 = $200k
    SC072 = $15k (from SiCortex, obviously)

    That should be ballpark for a runnable system with included basic RAM and HD amounts.

  11. Re:Why does the universe appear empty? on Solar System Date of Birth Determined · · Score: 1

    If we really are the first intelligent beings in the universe, perhaps it's our duty to fill the universe with life.

    Our duty to whom?

  12. Fine grained vs Coarse grained parallelism on Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Fine grained (spread your for loops across processors) and coarse grained parallelism (different independent actors exchanging messages and working on tasks separately) are two completely different approaches, though they generally use the same mechanisms. Everybody always focuses on the fine grained and how that affects algorithms, but I personally believe that personal computing yields more benefit from coarse grained parallelism, where nothing in your program blocks because every task that it's performing is independent. Having modal, sequential operations that you have to wait for your computer perform before you get control back for an unrelated task in the same program is absolutely absurd in this day and age.

    The few instances where a personal application does spend significant time in a single task (media manipulation, mostly) could use fine grained parallelism, but that is not the common case. Stop whining about algorithm parallelism and get your system/application design broken out into independent components and tasks properly.

    Besides, as others have said, neither is particularly difficult to do properly. It's when you try to hack in threaded shared access without having properly contained the mutable data that you shoot yourself in the foot.

  13. Word of mouth, duh on How Do You Find New Non-RIAA Music? · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty astonished at all these responses. Just talk about music on any online music-related forum and you'll get acquainted with all sorts of stuff you've never heard of before. That's how I heard about all my favorites.

  14. Use TOR hidden services on Spying On Tor · · Score: 1

    I've never seen that much of a use for TOR's exit nodes. If you're going to set up secret/private communications, keep it within TOR via hidden services routed by .onion addresses. That way, TOR becomes both your anonymity and encryption layers, for both sides.

  15. Three to five years? on Study Warns of Internet Brownouts By 2010 · · Score: 1

    Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years.
    Cool, in three to five years all of the 100000x-better vaporware products will be released to deal with this vaporcrisis.
  16. Re:moderation on The Obesity Epidemic — Is Medicine Scientific? · · Score: 1

    The recommended amount of exercise is 30 minutes per day

    Also this doesn't have to be working out, elliptical machine, running, etc. Just hand-washing your car, doing chores around the house, fixing things, and other such physical activity just to keep you non-sedentary can fulfill your exercise requirements. At least according to the official articles/hearsay I've seen...

  17. Re:What's the mystery? on The Obesity Epidemic — Is Medicine Scientific? · · Score: 1

    And there is some evidence recently that fat people die less of many diseases.

    Is that because in general they die from the effects of being overweight before the diseases can get to them? Or that their overworked system will fail easier before the disease has shown its full effects and is not classified as such? Overweight people may have stronger legs and can weather cold and hunger better, but there really aren't too many other benefits.

  18. Which of course is just a cheap imitation of... on What Are The Best Free Games Online? · · Score: 1
  19. Re:SF writers got it wrong about "androids..." on Robot Becomes One of the Kids · · Score: 1

    Human beings are sufficiently capable of anthropomorphizing... or empathizing... to treat even obviously non-humanoid things as human. (As witness the bonding between humans and pets).

    Forget pets, look at some guys and their cars. Though I'm not sure if the proper description is treating any of these examples "as human" or as a "peer", but it seems more to be a nurturing dependency sort of relationship going on, where the object needs you in order to stay in a state in which you can enjoy it.

  20. So the big question is... on 38% of Downloaders Paid For Radiohead Album · · Score: 5, Interesting

    did they make more or less profit than what they would have made with the standard sales method?

  21. Re:Smartcar + streetcar (+ shopping trolleys) = on MIT Offers City Car for the Masses · · Score: 1

    2.) the SMART was rediscovered by people who wanted a cheap car, with low space requirement and less fuelconsumption*

    Huh? This is really where it fails. While it is small, you don't get all the benefits of small. Namely, the 40mpg it gets is attainable with a number of Japanese non-hybrid cars (even sedans), and its handling is reportedly terrible. If you're looking to reduce your fuel expenses, this won't do it if you already have a standard car with good gas mileage, so there's no reason to pay the higher price for a Smart, and the extra cargo space, seating, and hopefully better/safer handling in the normal car comes for free.

  22. Re:Could someone explain the jargon? on Ultracapacitors Soon to Replace Many Batteries? · · Score: 2, Funny

    1.21 jiggawatts!

  23. Re:EEEPC vs Ipaq on Review of Asus Linux-Based Eee PC 701 · · Score: 1

    A real (enough) keyboard, x86 binary compatibility, being able to sit down with it for extended periods of use.

  24. Re:Very, very hot on Origin of Cosmic Rays Confirmed · · Score: 5, Funny

    6,446,700,000,000,000,000 degrees! That's 6.4 billion billion degrees.

    But how many Libraries Of Congress On Fire is that?

  25. Re:Only a third are religious? on Paranormal Investigations and Belief in Ghosts · · Score: 1

    Depends on what you mean by "ghost", as dead humans that linger around on earth to spook people and throw dishes around, vs just any vague non-human supernatural/metaphysical/etc living presence.