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User: Agripa

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  1. Re:What benefit does MKV have? on Oh, What a Lovely Standards War · · Score: 1

    AC3 is an officially registered codec, with the code "ac-3".

    It is now for .mp4 but apparently not originally and only after AC3 support was well established in .mkv files.

    I started using .mkv in favor of .mp4 just because I could copy the audio from the source instead of transcoding it. It was years before .mp4 would have allowed that with AC3 encoded audio.

  2. Re:Consistent Histories? on Physicists Discover How To Teleport Energy · · Score: 1

    The whole house becomes the receiver - you move into the garage!

  3. Re:Still gonna suck. on Dune Remake Could Mean 3D Sandworms · · Score: 1

    Fuck Integral Trees! If you want to make a Niven novel into a movie, do Protector in the style of Kubrick's 2001.

    I would rather see Footfall or Lucifer's Hammer. With the later, the challenge will be how many special interests can be enraged over a movie about a bunch of farmers trying to save the last nuclear power plant (in California no less) from a cannibal army made up of army deserters, religious fanatics, and environmentalists by using weapons of mass destruction.

  4. Re:Still gonna suck. on Dune Remake Could Mean 3D Sandworms · · Score: 1

    Today you could do the whole thing with CGI. Ringworld has a big backdrop, but it is actualy about the characters not the place. Characters are easy.

    The characters are the problem unless you plan on just filming the first book. At a minimum Speaker's restraint in the restaurant and later on the Ringworld needs contrast. He is not a cuddly Klingon who smells like ginger and cinnamon (Except at Louis' lawn party). Do not call him "cute". Ever. As soon as you move beyond Ringworld, you have to deal with the relationship between humans and Pak, whether breeding for luck actually worked, and a whole host of other aspects of the Known Space universe. A lot of the last a knowledgeable script writer can ignore as irrelevant but are there any? Besides Niven himself, how many people could write a script who know Known Space well enough?

    The only big problem to solve in my view is homo habilis although I have thought of at least one good way to handle it such that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, maybe.

    At least Star Trek is good for something this time. It has created an expectation of rishathra that will not completely shock a north American audience.

    "When challenging a Kzin, a simple scream of rage will suffice. You scream and you leap." - Speaker-to-Animals

  5. Re:32GB MicroSDHC on Intel-Micron Joint Venture Develops 25nm NAND · · Score: 1

    4GB is maximum for SD, and there was a short time when you could buy 4GB SD or 4GB SDHC, but now 4GB SD are hard to get.

    A lot of SD only devices choke on 4GB SD cards. Was the interface specification vague?

    It seems incredible to me that the original SD card specification did not look far enough forward. Twice. Does every generation have to learn this lesson?

  6. Re:Cheap SSDs in my lifetime? on Intel-Micron Joint Venture Develops 25nm NAND · · Score: 1

    SSD has one significant advantage: Moore's law, so every 18months (roughly) the size doubles or price halves.
    That means, there will be soon 300Gb SSD for 200$.

    Kryder's Law applies to hard drives but the real advantage of SSDs is access time and throughput relative to capacity. Hard drives suffer from a worsening density to throughput ratio because the later only scales to the square root of areal density. SSDs have not reached that point yet but they will. As chip capacity goes up, it will take fewer chips for a given capacity and less interface parallelism will slow performance. They will always be faster than hard drives but I would not count on them gaining a greater capacity for a given price. Of course, SSDs only have to be large enough.

  7. Re:No sir, I don't like it. on Intel-Micron Joint Venture Develops 25nm NAND · · Score: 1

    NAND flash can only be accessed as a block device, so you can't tie it to a CPU at all easily; it has to go through some kind of controller so the OS can pretend that it's a disk. I suppose you could slap a load of DRAM and a separate MMU and DMA controller on it and have something that would look like a big blob of RAM, but the performance characteristics would be horrible to work with.

    There are a couple of execute in place NAND memories available now from Samsung and at least one other company that escapes me. The do about what you describe internally by caching the Flash pages in SRAM for random access through a NOR type interface. They are good for saving space in compact designs.

  8. Re:8GB per chip on Intel-Micron Joint Venture Develops 25nm NAND · · Score: 1

    Hard Disks aren't growing as quickly any more, so Flash is catching up, all the same, it will probably be 2020 before Flash drives match hard drives for cost.

    I have not seen any slow down in hard drive capacity increase since GMR heads were introduced. Track density might have been a problem going forward but dual stage actuators are being introduced.

  9. Re:hp48 on 7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators · · Score: 1

    Luckily for me my HP48g lasted until the HP50g became available. It still works but the keyboard has become somewhat unreliable.

    The things that I like about the HP50g include the nicer display, SD support, USB support, 4 x AAA instead of 3 (I'm using low discharge NiMH cells without problems), and user replaceable lithium coin cell memory backup. My Yaesu FT-530 shares that last feature and it has really worked out. The keyboard arrangement has some differences which took me a few days to get used to but is acceptable. Any deficiencies there can probably be made up for with some customization which I have not gotten around to yet. I would have preferred full documentation in book form.

  10. Re:hp48 on 7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators · · Score: 1

    I bought an HP50g recently to replace my aging HP48g and have no significant complaints. The only change I made was to shorten the keyboard de-bounce time. I guess the earlier run of HP50g calculators had marginal keyboards but mine performs very similarly to my HP48g.

  11. Re:This has its perks on Making It Hard For Extraterrestrials To Hear Us · · Score: 1

    Your descriptions seems very much like the short science fiction story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove.

  12. Re:What is the bandwith to iceland anyways? on Iceland's Data Center Push Finally Gets Traction · · Score: 1

    Some of those were even in the same city in Germany as our equipment. The ones that sent me traceroutes showed that they were being routed from Germany to New York, and then back to Germany.

    Well, how would the NSA be able to snoop on that traffic if it weren't routed through the USA? :)

    That traffic is not going to search itself for illegal drugs you know.

  13. Re:I don't quite get it... on Intel Fires Back At FTC In Antitrust Suit · · Score: 1

    I periodically see the x86 is holding us back discussion and find the arguments on the other side more persuasive. x86 (and ARM because it was designed as a 6502 replacement) offer a higher level of abstraction than the later RISC architectures and this ends up producing a performance advantage over time even without recompiling. Exposing low level details like delayed branch slots, memory ordering, and pipeline interlocks became a disadvantage after increasing integration allowed the higher abstracted x86 to accelerate these functions in hardware without instruction set changes.

  14. Re:enforcement of engineering code on Disaster Recovery For Haiti's Cell Phone Networks · · Score: 1

    I always think about this during disasters too. Yes, complaining about the permitting process is a favorite sport. When 50,000 die someplace else and fewer than 100 die here in a similar event, then you understand what it's all about.

    The permitting process may start out that way but all too often it is captured by other interests and becomes a political tool for rent seeking.

  15. Re:How Thick is the Display? on Forget LCDs and LEDs, Here Come LPDs · · Score: 1

    Also, why use phosphors if the lasers are already RGB?

    Lasers by themselves lack persistence which the phosphors can provide.

    Having a patterned screen would require convergence calibration with the beam.

    I thought this to be a much larger problem then correcting for the inherent pincushion distortion. Offhand, I suspect there are some techniques from astronomy (phase conjugation?) which would allow the beam to read back its position on the screen so that convergence could be maintained. Unfortunately their laser is unlikely to be coherent over the distances involved but it should still be possible.

  16. Re:Pigs on The 9 Most Tested Lab Animals · · Score: 1

    Having had minor surgery under local anesthesia, I can positively say that pig is NOT the only thing that smells like sizzling bacon. There is a reason cannibals refer to "long pig".

  17. Re:It's even worse on Minnesota Introduces World's First Carbon Tariff · · Score: 1

    Also, there must be a gun-free zone around schools so a kids can go on field trips to other states to go shopping. The supreme court actually struck that one down (in 5-4 decision).

    And congress promptly passed it again with an added "insofar as the firearm has moved in or otherwise affects interstate commerce" clause added.

  18. Re:Who cares? on Blu-ray Capacity Increase Via Firmware · · Score: 1

    Nothing else comes close in terms of longevity or durability. Magnetic media degrades over time.

    Magneto optical comes close and is likely much better.

  19. Re:Pushing the spec... on Blu-ray Capacity Increase Via Firmware · · Score: 1

    How far could the spec be pushed using a decent CD-ROM laser. Could you squeeze 1GB out of a CD drive that was specked to 700MB before?

    Plextor has a feature on their older drives called GigaRec which allows adjusting the data rate up or down. A 80 minute CD can be adjusted from 406 MB to 925 MB. I have used it a couple of times to burn data that was slightly larger than the CD.

  20. Re:Lots of evidence for higher frame rates on Framerates Matter · · Score: 1

    When the OP said they're constant current devices, that was engineering shorthand for "LEDs have a maximum continuous current rating based on their ability to dissipate heat and environmental specifications".

    LEDs are considered constant current devices because their forward voltage changes significantly with temperature and between units and they present as a rather low impedance load. All of these things make for more convenience if driven with a high impedance source (current) instead of a low impedance source (voltage).

    LEDs are rated based on current because that is how they are expected to be used.

    True constant current supplies are (relatively) expensive and typically not very power efficient.

    What?

    Take a standard buck regulator with a voltage divider on the output for feedback sensing and remove the top resistor and ground the load into the remaining resistor. With some minor adjustments to the frequency compensation, you now have a constant current buck regulator of roughly the same efficiency if you lower the sense voltage. The output inductor current becomes the current through the load. If the inductor is sized for the regulator to operate in continuous conduction mode, then the output ripple current can be made arbitrarily small within reason.

  21. Re:Don't say "NAT" on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    I have had IPv6 through tunneling for a couple of years now without problems. Except that the MTU size is smaller, I would never notice the difference.

  22. Re:Demand IPv6 and it will come on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    Do you know of any other routers that have IPv6 support from the vendor? I'm not really an apple guy, but if they're the only choice they're getting my support.

    There are a couple of embedded x86 routers with BSD based m0n0wall installed and it has full IPv6 support. They tend to be just under $200 or higher though so I do not really consider them in the same class as the cheap consumer routers. Consumer routers hacked to run one of the Linux based WRT variants are probably the cheapest but I do not know of anybody selling them in that configuration.

  23. Re:Bono should be pleased... on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    However, I don't know of a single Linux or BSD distribution that enables Teredo by default, or at least makes it easily accessible to the user, unlike Windows, where Teredo is enabled as soon as an application attempts to connect to an IPv6 address.

    Teredo has the advantage of working through NAT without any configuration but most people running Linux or BSD are sophisticated enough to use Protocol 41 for tunneling IPv6 directly over IPv4. It can work though NAT but the router has to be configured to forward protocol 41 to the correct machine and a lot of cheap consumer routers won't. The various BSD or Linux based router packages like pfsense or m0n0wall work great in for this and the later has full support anyway.

  24. Re:Don't say "NAT" on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    You do not have to wait. There are multiple ways at this point to get a full /48 or /64 IPv6 connection through tunneling over an existing IPv4 connection.

  25. Re:If it's not broken, why are you fixing it? on Russia Plans To Divert Asteroid · · Score: 1

    The problem is, who is going to fund all of it? Russia's space agency is operating at a shoestring budget, NASA since the cold war ended isn't getting tons of money, and I'm not sure about the ESA but it seems kinda tiny when compared to NASA and the Russian space agencies.

    The asteroid will hit the least funded space agency.