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User: Rob+Bos

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  1. Re:So, 200m vs the longest of today at 80m long on Scientists Are Developing the World's Biggest Wind Turbine With 656-Ft. Long Blades (latimes.com) · · Score: 1

    As a Canadian, we see this shit all the time. "Now add 454g of flour" .. that number is WAY too specific. Yep, 1 pound. A coke is 591ml or 355ml, a cup is 240ml .. argh.

    Payback's a bitch. :)

  2. Because apparently timothy thinks we're too stupid to understand 'nanometre'? ugh

  3. Re:Science is Settled on NASA Study Shows Net Gains For Antarctic Ice (google.com) · · Score: 1
  4. Re:Martian soil is like toxic.... on A Real-Life Space Botanist Comments On the Potato Garden In 'The Martian' (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Perchlorates weren't a confirmed thing when Weir wrote the novel, I'm fairly sure.

  5. Andy Weir, in the Nerdette podcast, called it the Uncanny Valley effect applied to fiction. You can swallow spaceships and teleportation, but by God, your Martian had better have a pressure suit.

  6. Re:I hate to be THAT GUY... on Review: The Martian · · Score: 2

    A lot of this is covered in more detail in the book. The slingshot maneuver is complicated because /Hermes/ is a constant-thrust vessel with powerful ion drives, not a point-thrust craft, so it's nontrivial to calculate an exact departure vector.

  7. Re:Game controllers on Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux · · Score: 1

    It's probably more important to ask about vendor support for Linux, not Linux support for vendors. It's likely that a random gamepad or gizmo won't work, because the vendors aren't yet taking it very seriously. The solution here is not to buy a random gamepad or gizmo; do your research first. It may eventually happen, but we have to demand it.

  8. Re:Decent performance? on Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux · · Score: 1

    Part of the problem is a bias from the user; if Linux performance sucks for a game, it's Linux' fault; if the Windows performance sucks, it's the vendor's fault. In reality, it'll almost always be the vendor's issue, either because the video card manufacturer's drivers suck or because the game did not properly optimize.

    In either case, it's a matter of time and will to make it happen. Hopefully it does. I counsel patience and pressuring the appropriate vendors when you have the opportunity.

  9. Re:Why? For the PR i guess? on Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux · · Score: 1

    Small percentages can hide large numbers. 1% of (say) a hundred million users is a market a million in size. Once you've saturated your sales on the Windows side of things and your sales start to slow to a crawl, maybe you're selling a trickle, you can get a healthy bump from selling to that smaller portion of the market a year down the line.

  10. Re:Steam has been great for Mac too! on Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux · · Score: 1

    Similar for Linux games; once you've ported to MacOS, Linux is going to be significantly cheaper, since the hard work of agnosticizing your code is done.

  11. Re:Those I play on Thanks To Valve, More Than 1,500 Games Are Now On Linux · · Score: 2

    I haven't had any problems with WoW for the best part of a decade in WINE, if you need a data point. I don't even remember whatever hacks I needed to get it working. Except that I run it in its own desktop session to simplify fullscreen mode. Similarly Diablo and Starcraft. I ran HotS a few times, seemed to work well enough. No idea about Hearthstone.

  12. Re:Electric lawn tools on Making Liquid Fuels From Sun and Air · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, the set of cheapass crap lawn tools and electric lawn tools have a lot of overlap.

    If anything, electric tools can have more torque, more cheaply, than a gas tool, but they're just made with as few corners as possible. Pretty tragic, if you ask me.

  13. Re:Just say on Tiny Pebbles Built the Gas Giant Behemoths · · Score: 1

    brought to you by the same people who gave us 591ml bottles of liquid and 454g bricks of butter.

    I hope they find it annoying to be on the other side for a change.

  14. Re:Tell the old dogs on City of Munich Struggling With Basic Linux Functionality · · Score: 1

    The numbers change pretty fast once you leave the desktop market, obviously. Home routers, phones, tablets, servers. It's a varied ecosystem, capable of adapting and being adapted to new niches with minimal overhead. So I don't sweat the desktop market much, personally. It has succeeded for my desktop, and I'm happy with it there.

    1.7% is still a lot of desktops in absolute terms.

  15. Re: Idiocy. on City of Munich Struggling With Basic Linux Functionality · · Score: 1

    I've run into situations with people with your requirements. I'd give you administrative access, make a note of it in our wiki, and give you the brief schpiel about how if you break it, the most likely outcome is your machine getting re-imaged from bare metal, so keep backups. No sweat. Administrative access isn't a huge deal IFF the person can give the shibboleet, so to speak.

  16. Re: Idiocy. on City of Munich Struggling With Basic Linux Functionality · · Score: 1

    What's your current ratio of staff to desktops? We have four people for about 600 machines, and we don't allow our staff admin access.

    It's been my experience that the people with administrative access are more work, generally, since they get themselves into trouble more easily, even if they know what they're doing. Also, having staff waste time solving IT issues themselves is generally going to take more staff time, overall, than having a few dedicated people solving those issues on a broader scale; ie, one person taking 30 minutes to update and test Java is better than 1000 people spending 3 minutes each doing it, even if nothing goes wrong. In theory the IT person has a shot at being able to intercept potential issues with a critical app before it goes live.

  17. Re:Oh boy, here we go... on Obama Unveils Major Climate Change Proposal · · Score: 2

    British Columbia implemented a revenue-neutral carbon tax in .. 2006, I think, or thereabouts. It's been a while. It's been used to reduce income tax. It's been super effective, our carbon emissions have gone down by quite a bit.

  18. Re:I work there and haven't heard about this on Adblock Plus Reduces University's Network Traffic By 25 Percent · · Score: 1

    The study was done by the SNF New Media Lab at SFU and involves about six computers studied over a few months and does not reflect general SFU policy.

  19. I work there and haven't heard about this on Adblock Plus Reduces University's Network Traffic By 25 Percent · · Score: 1

    I do desktop support for one of the larger departments on the SFU campus, and this is the first I've heard of it. It is in no way universal to SFU; I'm pretty sure I would have heard about any large-scale test deployments of this nature.

    I have pitched this idea a couple times, though. If someone else on campus has approved it, that's a huge boost to getting it done in my department.

  20. Re:What's good for GM is good for America on How Elon Musk's Growing Empire is Fueled By Government Subsidies · · Score: 1

    It's funny you should say that, because the railroad companies received subsidies in the form of land grants and rights-of-way. Quite a lot of them.

  21. Re:Another Significant Hazard: Toxic Mars on How To Die On Mars · · Score: 1

    (chock full)

  22. Re:Terraforming potential? on How To Die On Mars · · Score: 1

    Or we could skin over the planetary atmosphere with some kind of membrane. Might be easier than impacting the odd rock. Long as we're dreaming. :)

  23. 0.5 pirate-ninjas on Opportunity Rover Reaches Martian Day 4,000 of Its 90-Day Mission · · Score: 1

    Impressive power generation.

  24. Re:200 miles underground is really deep! on Signs of Subsurface 'Alien' Life Found In Antarctica · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Credulous writer interpreting "m" as miles would be my guess.

  25. Re:beware of tangents on First 26 Pages of Neal Stephenson's New Novel "Seveneves" Online · · Score: 1

    The diversions and tangents are totally the best part.