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User: Doppler00

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  1. but the motherboards! on Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Poor motherboard manufactures still have to support all the existing legacy devices, even though new devices uses new I/O standards. I always find it amusing to see serial, parallel ports, and floppy connectors on new motherboards. Of course, until DVD drive manufacturers switch to SATA, we'll still see IDE connectors on mothboards. Do the SATA controllers really cost that much more?

  2. Re:First Column! on Are 80 Columns Enough? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Your 80 columns are an insult to my 24" screen, let alone those who have 30". Especially when you start using Java style notation where EveryVariableNameIsLikeThis() 80 columns is ridiculous.

  3. Re:Congressional testimony on Hot Fuels on Motorists Sue Over 'Hot' Fuel · · Score: 1

    Yeah, they are stored underground, but they are delivered in huge tanker trucks that are exposed to the hot sun during the day. I also bet you there is something that acts as an insulator on those tanks. Given how often they fill those tanks, I bet the temperature is somewhere above 60 degrees F.

  4. Re:150,000 deaths per year on Exxon's Brute Squad Hacks the Yes Men · · Score: 1

    So there is a 0.000000000001% decrease in benefit to you due to pollutants in the air? I go without a vehicle to get to work because I chose to do that out of economic and health reasons. I can actually calculate the gas and vehicle maintenance savings from living so close to work and that's why I chose to live there. Not because I got a very immeasurable benefit from the atmosphere or random climate change. If you can't really quantify the benefit, it's just an emotional statement.

  5. Re:Did they forget about the law? on Massachusetts Makes Health Insurance Mandatory · · Score: 1

    I think supply and demand still comes into play to a certain extent. For example, there are these proton source machines that can be used to accurately treat cancer more efficiently than radiation methods. Problem is, they currently cost $100 million dollars each. If universal health care is in place, are we required to treat everyone with these machines since they would have the best chance to live? There must be some cost/benefit analysis here. You cannot spend an infinite dollar amount for the health of every person. There must be a line drawn somewhere.

  6. Re:Yes its broken on Massachusetts Makes Health Insurance Mandatory · · Score: 1

    Since when is getting drunk an accident? Hmm...

  7. Re:150,000 deaths per year on Exxon's Brute Squad Hacks the Yes Men · · Score: 1

    So you refuse to own a car because you can't find a value added reason to have one? Or are you doing in simply out of spite?

  8. Re:Legal matters on Exxon's Brute Squad Hacks the Yes Men · · Score: 1

    A fact huh? You really think that a company is directly responsible for deaths to due to natural disasters? Did you ever think about how many lives Exxon may have saved by bringing or keeping people out of the third world through the creation of petroleum based products? Or the ability of ships to send food to nations that need it? In either case, you can't quantify "death" or "life". It's just a emotionally charged argument to get attention.

    Environmentalists == Unceasing pessimists.

    That is all.

  9. Re:Overhyped on Supercomputer On-a-Chip Prototype Unveiled · · Score: 1

    Actually, I later found the website for the development board and found that it was the xilinx 4. I'm just surprised they used SmartMedia on the board instead of CF or SD. Hardly anyone sells SmartMedia anymore and it has limited capacity.

  10. This is just an old FPGA development board on Supercomputer On-a-Chip Prototype Unveiled · · Score: 1

    http://www.dinigroup.com/index.php?product=DN8000k 10pci
    There you go! It's just a vertex 4 development board. Nothing special. I mean, if they would have used this graphic http://www.dinigroup.com/DN9000k10PCI.php it would have been a little more impressive.

  11. Re:Overhyped on Supercomputer On-a-Chip Prototype Unveiled · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yeah this article is pretty week. "Woohoo! Look we took a picture of a last generation FPGA development board and wrote some nifty programs for it that prove our pet project!" I think very little of things like this make it outside of academia. I'm not saying this research is unworthy, just not news worthy.

    And "parallel extension of von Neumann" exists. It's called OpenMP and it still takes a skilled programmer to understand.

    Look at that board... it uses "SmartMedia" yeah... that means that:

    1. This is OLD research
    2. The board developers didn't have a clue
    3. A very old development board is being used.

  12. Re:Hey, they never claimed it was! on Nuke-Proof Bunker Turns Out Not Waterproof · · Score: 1

    Well, it wouldn't have been possible to make it waterproof but if they dug it about twice as deep and filled it with gravel and designed it so that the water drained to the city sewer system it could have easily survived those 50 years. My guess is that whoever the city contracted in 1957 didn't really care knowing they wouldn't be there to pay the consequences of a failed vault.

    Actually, the only real way to keep a vault like that dry is to have a sump system / level failure switch and have regular maintanance. Of course, this would kind of defeat the purpose and mystery of the whole digging it out of the ground 50 years later thing.

  13. Re:Make the FCC try something new... on Google et al. Want 700 MHz Auction Opened Up · · Score: 1

    I'm trying to figure out if you were being sarcastic or you really believe everything you said there. My guess is you're one of those HAM radio operators that thinks you're entitled to the RF spectrum you have as your own personal play thing. Problem is, there are millions of people in this country who deserve equal access to this same spectrum. This isn't 1970, where RF spectrum must be carefully controlled by administrative means. All the logic needed to enforce fair use of the spectrum can be encoded in very complex software defined radios.

    As far as people playing with software radios, isn't that the FCC's job to enforce laws against them like they do already?

  14. Make the FCC try something new... on Google et al. Want 700 MHz Auction Opened Up · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why not just leave the spectrum completely open to the public like 900MHz and 2.4GHz? Although, require that the spectrum must use intelligent radio devices that comply to a single standard (through IEEE for example).

  15. Re:Not gonna happen on Space Elevator Company LiftPort In Trouble · · Score: 1

    I don't see how something better than carbon nanotubes could ever be invented. I mean, we know enough about the atomic physics of materials that the simulation of all possible materials should have been completed by now. I mean, aren't there only so many types of atoms, and so many structural combinations that really we may have already discovered the best materials there are? Unless there is some exotic, revolutionary material based on subatomic forces that have yet to be discovered, I think we are stuck with what we have.

  16. auction! on IPv4 Unallocated Addresses Exhausted by 2010 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Same thing that happened when popular domain names started running out. I'm sure IP addresses will go up for auction. Seems kind of silly though considering the space available in IPv6. But if you have people that need these addresses, someone will be willing to pay for them. I imagine some of the big names that got them free from the start will be making a lot of money, such as MIT.

  17. Re:Unlimited SMS.. on Texting Teens Generating OMG Phone Bills · · Score: 1

    I totally agree. The main problem is that the FCC auctioned off all the air waves without accountability to how they are used. Charging a customer $1,100 for maybe 5 seconds of access to a small frequency band is price gouging. I would contact the Better Business Bureau about it myself. Of course, I wouldn't make that mistake. At least with T-Mobile, you can press #MSG# and get your current usage.

  18. Re:The Beauty Of Closed Systems on Aluminum Alloy Releases Hydrogen From Water · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, once the reaction takes place you have Alumina, i.e. Aluminum Oxide. Although you could say this item is "recyclable" it's actually quite worthless to do so. It takes an incredible amount of energy to convert it back to aluminum, not to mention the process of creating aluminum from alumina oxide requires the reaction of a carbon anode which generates carbon dioxide. Also, the electrolysis has to occur at high temperatures which are probably generated with coal. My guess it would be far more efficient to just continue using the alumina that is efficiently mined and transported in bulk than to try recycling the byproduct from each vehicle. The gallium might be much rarer, I don't know.

    So, pure hydrogen on the other hand can be generated by a simple science experiment. Just try making your own aluminum at home and see how easy it is.

  19. Re:Dev Kit? on FCC Approves iPhone · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Windows Mobile already lets you do this. Has GPRS/802.11, and a skype client available is available. I don't understand why people get excited about the iPhone as a geek toy, when really it's being marketed to the same folks that buy the stripped down Razor and iPods. Just as much innovation is happening at HTC and Nokia with phones as with Apple, but I never understood why the main stream news media has such an obsession with Apple.

  20. Re:Radio Schematic on FCC Approves iPhone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well.... if they were to do that the schematics would be grossly complex now days. You'd have a circuit schematic with 100's of pins per chip.... would be very impractical and useless to all but a dozen people. Besides, the schematic doesn't really say how it works, since all the circuitry is integrated into proprietary IC's. THOSE are the schematics Apple and other manufacturers keep to themselves.

  21. Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? on Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    U.S. cities are inherently designed to be anti-pedestrian (err... pro car). From my own experience: very limited bike lanes, narrow sidewalks, traffic lights that never turn green for bicyclists, freeways that divide a city in half so you have to ride an extra FIVE MILES to get to the other side, neighborhood streets and homes that block logical straight through paths so you have to ride around to get to the other side, forced zoning laws that place industry/commerce tens of miles from residential. Just to name a few complaints.

    This "problem" won't be solved until either gas is $10/gallon or we move to some kind of lighter transportation vehicles as the standard. Not likely to happen in my lifetime though...

  22. Re:Sampling? on Hybrid Cars to Get New Mileage Ratings · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Coasting to the red light would be nice if it wasn't for all those jerks that think they have to accelerate, pass me, and slam their brakes in front of me all while the light is still red. And I'm afraid that around where I live, if you don't drive aggressively enough you might be shot for making those jerks mad at you.

  23. Re:Sampling? on Hybrid Cars to Get New Mileage Ratings · · Score: 1

    One word: Repeatability.

    If a new car model comes out claiming improved efficiently how do you test it? You'd have to do a huge sample test again. Also, the driving habbits of say a soccer mom in a minivan are not going to match a sports car for weekends or a econobox commuter vehicle.

    The best way would be to do a sampled test of all drivers, of all vehicles (or a class of vehicles) to generate a driving behavior profile. Then, create an automated test based on that profile. Done!

  24. vs. PC fps? on Bungie Vs. Miyamoto - Fight! · · Score: 1

    I don't know, I tried playing Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer and couldn't get into it. I guess it didn't help that I was playing it on old CRT television with 4 way split screen. The controls are just not as intuitive as a mouse (relative vs. absolute positioning). One thing for certain is Halo brought FPS's to the masses. I'm more exciting about Unreal Tournament 3.... maybe they can make the PC and XBOX360 versions compatible. Would be great to see how well the XBOX controls do against PC players.

  25. Re:Wow... on A "Bill of Lights" to Restrict LEDs on Gadgets? · · Score: 1

    I actually have a setting on my LG monitor to disable the power light. It only comes on for about 5 seconds when it's first powered off and then it stays off. Otherwise, a dim green LED power light is okay. It's just those bright blue monstrosities I can't stand.

    Biggest problem with computers? NOISE! Until we solve that, forget the stupid blinking lights.