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User: beelsebob

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  1. Re: Public transit on Swedish Fare Dodgers Organize Against Transportation Authorities · · Score: 1

    Uhhh, no, the uniquely high per-capita resource consumption of the USA being the demonstration of it.

  2. Re: In other parts of the world... on Swedish Fare Dodgers Organize Against Transportation Authorities · · Score: 1

    What has the government got to do with a private company, and some private individuals avoiding paying for the services they agreed to pay for?

  3. Re: Public transit on Swedish Fare Dodgers Organize Against Transportation Authorities · · Score: 2

    No, that's not socialism, that's simply public policy trying to drive lower resource consumption. The government would rather that its citizens burn fewer resources, so they make the less efficient solution more expensive, and the more efficient one cheaper.

  4. Re:Public transit on Swedish Fare Dodgers Organize Against Transportation Authorities · · Score: 1

    Or... they could just raise the fine to €2000, then they'll have to raise the monthly membership to €167 to compensate, and it'll be cheaper just to get a monthly pass.

  5. Re:PS3 Optimization: Parallelizing code 7 ways on The Technical Difficulty In Porting a PS3 Game To the PS4 · · Score: 1

    The problem with such an approach is that while you can indeed simulate it, simulating it will be inherrently slower than running it on the cell in the first place. While you do on the PS4 have one x86 core per SPU on the PS3, they're running at half the clock speed, and for very specific tasks, the PS3's SPUs had great IPC, so simply getting a core on the PS4 to do the same thing as an SPU on the PS3 will simply be slower.

  6. Re:Shitty code on The Technical Difficulty In Porting a PS3 Game To the PS4 · · Score: 2

    No... You're not talking about some code that's designed to be portable, you're talking about code that was targeting exactly one piece of hardware, and trying to make the output look better on that exactly one piece of hardware than anyone else developing for that same exact one piece of hardware. Because of this, games for consoles have an insane level of optimisation for that one piece of hardware. More so in this case, you're talking about a piece of hardware that had one of the most exotic CPUs in decades. Porting from that to x86 is a huge challenge.

  7. Re:They've been pushing this angle for a while on Should Tesla Make Batteries Instead of Electric Cars? · · Score: 0

    He said initially. Initially they didn't make the model S, they made the roadster only.

  8. Re:$529 for the smallest on OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD Hits 1.8GB/sec With Standard Toshiba MLC NAND · · Score: 1

    Not that I'd recommend buying this SSD, but an SSD is in 99% of cases the largest tangible gain you can get in a computer. The fact that random reads (what slows down your system the vast amount of time) are 3 orders of magnitude faster than with a hard drive makes that the case in almost all cases.

    Compilation: My Core i7 used only 2 cores while compiling reading off my HDD, it gets pegged to all 8 now, and compiles much much faster now.
    Booting: Not that you do it often, but booting a machine is near instant with an SSD, including all applications loading.
    Loading games: loading screens in games basically disappear with an SSD, or in the most intensive ones become very short.
    Any time swap gets hit: Not that hitting swap doesn't slow your system down, it becomes tolerable with an SSD. It's rare, but it does happen occasionally, and it no longer kills your system.

    Seriously, an SSD was the biggest gain in system performance I've seen in years.

  9. Re:No. Absolutely not. on OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD Hits 1.8GB/sec With Standard Toshiba MLC NAND · · Score: 1

    Actually, they are legally required to honour it. Part of buying the company is that you end up in all the contracts that the old company was in, and you absolutely must honour them. You can't get out of contracts you have with people simply by setting up a new company, and buying your old one out with it.

  10. Re:Recycling on Is Carbon Fiber Going Mainstream? · · Score: 2

    So you have a choice - less energy use (and hence less food consumption) via lighter bikes, or easily recyclable bikes. Where is your particular environmental itch?

  11. Re:Huh? on London Black Cabs Threaten Chaos To Stop Uber · · Score: 1

    I've never heard of a taxi company with navigators. In the UK at least they just require taxi drivers to have learnt every single road in London to be licensed.

  12. Re:Oh goody on SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year · · Score: 1

    Writing every sector once will not kill the drive. Typical cell endurance is 1000-3000 writes on a current TLC drive. I assumed the worst case scenario of 1000 writes. Please learn to read before you tell people to learn to divide.

  13. Re:concentrated writes on SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year · · Score: 1

    You are assuming that the drive will do nothing to map "hot sectors" into a wear levelled pattern. In reality, this is pretty much all the SSD controller spends its time doing.

  14. Re:Git can be seen as his more important contribut on Linus Torvalds Receives IEEE Computer Pioneer Award · · Score: 1

    Plus, git was only really the most popular of many darcs copies. We wouldn't really be any further back without it. If anything, further forward, because darcs gets the semantics of a DSCM more right (and doesn't need hacks like rebasing).

  15. Re:Oh goody on SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year · · Score: 1

    Actually, it's likely to be written... very occasionally. It's likely that when the OS has time to do something other than what you asked it to do, it'll start writing out dirty memory to swap, just because that means that if you do need to swap at a later date, you don't need to page out.

  16. Re:Oh goody on SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year · · Score: 1

    Yes it does, so that it can page things out before it needs to page things in. But no, that's not really a conceivable write rate. The average home user (even with windows' swap file involved) will be closer to 5GB a day, even developers, hammering a workstation will only be around 20GB a day in the worst case.

  17. Re:Oh goody on SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Assuming you write an average of 100GB a day to this drive (which is... an enormous overestimate for anything except a video editor's scratch disk), that's 40,000 days before you write over every cell on the disk 1000 times. Aka, 100 years before it reaches its write limit. So no... SSDs are far from the 2 year proposition that people who bought first gen 16/32GB drives make them out to be.

  18. Re:'Real' money uhu on Rand Paul Suggests Backing Bitcoin With Stocks · · Score: 1

    No, notes are not legal tender. They are legal currency, but not legal tender, which is an important difference.

  19. Re:'Real' money uhu on Rand Paul Suggests Backing Bitcoin With Stocks · · Score: 1

    Well, it's not recursive, it's just multi layered. British bank notes are not money. They are IOUs. The promise on them is a promise to give the owner of the note some coins. The coins themselves used to be backed by gold, the notes did not. Recursion would imply that the BoE could pay the IOU written on the bank note using other bank notes, which they can't.

  20. Re:Storm chasers and drones on Drone Camera Tornado Coverage Raises Press Freedom Questions · · Score: 1

    It's likely that the best approach is actually a combination of the two – use a drone to position your camera in the path of the tornado. Then you don't have the usual problem of it being *really* dangerous to try and position the cameras there.

  21. Re:News helicopters on Drone Camera Tornado Coverage Raises Press Freedom Questions · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The point being made is that just because they have to follow FAA rules, does not mean that their first amendment rights are being violated. You're not allowed to fly big human carrying helicopters over there without the appropriate paperwork filed, and that doesn't violate your first amendment right. Similarly, meeting the right conditions to fly a drone does not violate them either.

  22. Re:LAX on Researchers Find Easy To Exploit Bugs In Traffic Control Systems · · Score: 2

    No, because it turns out that the quote is right most of the time.

  23. Re:Efficiency? on Toyota Describes Combustion Engine That Generates Electricity Directly · · Score: 2

    Acceleration should be just fine. This thing just needs to run constantly producing power to charge the battery. The electric motors will have far more torque and power than this, and be able to (temporarily) discharge the battery, until you lift.

  24. It's still a mess on C++ and the STL 12 Years Later: What Do You Think Now? · · Score: 1

    It still has a billion and one corner cases to deal with. C++ does not need more stuff added to try and cover up the cracks, it needs a complete rethink of how to target the market needing high performance type safe programming.

    Thankfully Rust is targeting this, and has far less cruft involved.

  25. Re:Maybe not extinction... on Are Habitable Exoplanets Bad News For Humanity? · · Score: 1

    You've never heard of the dark ages, have you? You realise us losing hundreds of years worth of scientific and technological advances has already happened at least once in our history, right?

    Wood is not anywhere near as good a source of energy as coal, gas and oil, and can't be made to burn anywhere near as hot, or as explosively. It would be substantially harder to bootstrap society from there.