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User: afidel

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Comments · 11,418

  1. Re:Stay in School on 19-Year-Old Makes Homemade Solar Death Ray · · Score: 1

    Dude I built a carbon arc furnace and used acetone and other fun chemicals to synthesize and purify buckyballs in high school, sorry your school/teachers sucked so much.

  2. Re:I've mostly bought AMD over the years but... on Asus, Gigabyte To Replace All Sandy Bridge Boards · · Score: 1

    Dude, doing XOR on a SB processor probably uses .015% of one core at whatever MB/s the drives are capable of. EMC puts hundreds of high performance drives and even SSD's behind a single quad core CPU in the new VNX line and that processor is doing a lot more than just XOR.

  3. Re:Why the recall...? on Asus, Gigabyte To Replace All Sandy Bridge Boards · · Score: 1

    Well since it was patched around in most OS's there was no real need to replace the chips unless you would be routinely doing the affected operations and thus bothered by the slowdown from the patch. It's also why all future CPU's had micro-op patching builtin so that errata could largely be fixed without a recall.

  4. Re:The storage is cool on Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech · · Score: 1

    Not sure, I was at a lunch and learn with a VAR and happened to be sitting with some of their IT guys and they were telling me about how much high performance storage they had and I was kind of blown away since you don't think of a sports franchise having big data needs and then they explained what it was for and I though it was very cool.

  5. Re:The storage is cool on Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech · · Score: 2

    Yeah, found the article, it's interesting that they talk about the pitch thing like it's a future possibility, talking to the guys from the Indians they were already doing it in production this year.

  6. Re:A single network? on Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech · · Score: 1

    Why not? Amazon and others handle millions of secure credit card transactions over the open internet every day, why should a shared physical infrastructure be inherently less secure?

  7. The storage is cool on Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech · · Score: 3, Informative

    One thing I found interesting is that the Cleveland Indians are a big user of storage. When the player is in the hole (second next to bat) they can bring up any and every pitch they have ever received from the current pitcher and likely relievers. That means the metadata has to be fast enough to find the pitches and then the streaming media server has to be able to serve it up basically instantly if they want to view a couple of different at bats in the time they are in the hole, pretty cool IMHO.

  8. Re:I switched back to Firefox from Chrome. on Chrome Is the Third Double-Digit Browser · · Score: 2

    Actually Chrome has allowed addons to block ads pre-download since the fall. I too was unaware of this but having been informed I tried it out again and I have to say it is FAST now that it doesn't have to deal with DOM manipulation to block ads. The fact that it sync's plugins is very sweet for maintaining the same browsing experience between computers.

  9. Re:Price £135 - Meh on DreamPlug ARM Box Brings Power To Plug Computing · · Score: 1

    For a lot less money buy a router with a USB port that supports your protocol of choice for file transfer. Probably same or lower power draw and it can just replace the existing router so very little net power draw.

  10. Re:Price £135 - Meh on DreamPlug ARM Box Brings Power To Plug Computing · · Score: 1

    You have a PC that uses 150W idle? What does it have 8 HDD's and SLI video cards? My HTPC uses about 150W max (maybe a bit more now that I have a 5750 instead of the GSO 9600)

  11. Re:Go China! on China Starts Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Project · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Both, it's cheaper because of NIMBYism. Most of the cost of a modern plant is not for the physical plant itself but for all the permitting process and the cost of interest while everything is tied up in court. That's why I had hope when they started talking about guaranteed loans and type certified designs to reduce the time to implement when Obama was elected, but not much has come of it yet.

  12. Re:Go China! on China Starts Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Project · · Score: 4, Informative

    They aren't prevalent because the commercial nuclear industry grew largely out of the military industry which needed two things, fuel for bombs and small light reactors for ships and submarines.

  13. Re:Where we should have been years ago already on China Starts Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Project · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Especially since we have an estimate 400k tonnes of the stuff at $80/kg mined. I like the fact that this salt bath solution in that it is passively safe in that heat distorts the geometry slowing reaction rates and also they can drain the bath into subcritical loads quite easily (and I'd imagine you could make the drain plug out of a material that would melt above your normal reaction temp but well below critical level).

  14. How will they compete? on Malaysia Releases Genetically Modified Mosquitoes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How do they expect these shorter lived males to outcompete their wild bretheren? If the trait is to become sufficiently distributed in the population for this to make a difference then they would have to have some method of making them superior breeders to offset the shortened window in which to breed.

  15. Re:What are we doing with the old cars? on White House Wants 1M Electric Cars By 2015 · · Score: 1

    The engines of the cars in the cash for clunkers program were filled with sand that changed to glass thus permanently, then they went to scrap yards where they would eventually be recycled.

  16. Re:Up the gas tax five dollars for passenger vehic on White House Wants 1M Electric Cars By 2015 · · Score: 1

    I haven't heard even the tea party talk about changing our foreign policy which is the biggest subsidy to the oil companies so it's easier to make the change on the demand side.

  17. Re:Up the gas tax five dollars for passenger vehic on White House Wants 1M Electric Cars By 2015 · · Score: 1

    You say that like it's a bad thing....
    BMW X1 20d gets ~38mpg combined, Nissan Juke with a 1.6L gas engine with direct fuel injection and turbo gets max of 27mpg combined even though it's the lighter car. The reason I can't get the more efficient vehicle in the US this year? BMW doesn't think there's demand for an efficient diesel vehicle in the US (and they may be right). Our massively subsidized cheap gas is causing more efficient solutions to be squeezed out of the market.

  18. Re:Up the gas tax five dollars for passenger vehic on White House Wants 1M Electric Cars By 2015 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My dad said we should add 10c per gallon to the gas tax every year, in 1991 after the first Gulf War. If we had done that we would have gas prices comparable to Europe and thus have the more efficient vehicle fleet they have. Putting a huge tax on gas will get you voted out of office in the next election, put a slow but steady tax in and it will just change buying habits over time.

  19. Re:This makes me sad on Sony Wins Restraining Order Against Geohot · · Score: 1

    Actually this move is counterproductive for Sony since the information is already too widely distributed for it to go back in the bag.

    /TLDR
    streisand effect

  20. Re:Horrible. on Slashdot Launches Re-Design · · Score: 1

    I haven't made one for the new design yet. I'm giving them a couple days to tweak the layout before I invest the time. All I did was run Chrome's inspect on the elements with too much whitespace and played with tweaking things till they looked right (you can do the same thing with the Firebug addon in Firefox).

  21. Re:Was no one with wit or talent available? on Black Eyed Peas Member Joins Intel As Director · · Score: 1

    will i am is a talented producer, he's taken on some flops but he has way more platinum than most in the business.

  22. Re:Facebook discovers HTTPS on Facebook Launches Social Login and HTTPS · · Score: 1

    Twitter would only have a significant issue for those clients with a broken stack, HTTP1.1 means they can open the connection once and leave it open for the AJAX piece polling in the background.

  23. Re:Not a good idea.... on Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme · · Score: 1

    One big advantage is not having to fix everything when you swap a motherboard, with 4 ports being common on 2U server's it can be a bit annoying to reconfigure everything just because some motherboard component failed. Not to mention the fact that it leads to longer outages and is more prone to human error (the single biggest causes of downtime and data loss).

  24. Re:Application compatibility? on Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme · · Score: 1

    Unless you're trying to use wireshark to diagnose a bonding problem =)

  25. Re:Horrible. on Slashdot Launches Re-Design · · Score: 1

    There's too much padding in classic.css, I set a bunch of places to 0 and got about 40% more information on each vertical page. If they don't fix it a simple greasemonkey script should be easy enough to work out.