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User: Guspaz

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Comments · 4,511

  1. Re:Economy on Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop · · Score: 1

    Canada Post, Fedex, and UPS all have freight divisions or subsidiaries who would be happy to ship a pallet of dirt for you.

  2. Re:FTA on Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop · · Score: 3, Informative

    Because Amazon Canada's selection is pretty terrible compared to Amazon USA. Best Buy sells the ROG Swift monitor for $900, with free shipping or local pickup. Amazon doesn't sell the monitor directly, has it for $1000, and doesn't offer free shipping at all (due to them not selling it directly).

  3. Re:Monopoly on Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop · · Score: 1

    I never had that problem. In fact, they seemed to consider it a special case where they'd beat each other's prices immediately without any hassle because they didn't want to be called out on being the same store.

  4. Re:First RadioShack, now Future Shop!? on Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop · · Score: 1

    What was once Radio Shack in Canada is still operating today. They're called "The Source" today, and they're just as bad as Radio Shack ever was, with terrible selection and insane prices. I never see anybody in the stores, so I don't really understand how they're still operating. I'd say they were a mob front (my normal explanation when a store or restaurant stays open despite having no customers) except they're owned by Bell Canada these days.

  5. Re:A long time coming for some stores on Best Buy Kills Off Future Shop · · Score: 1

    This was also true where I grew up. They opened a Best Buy there more than a decade ago, right across the street from a Future Shop. They've been operating like that ever since. I can imagine it's one of the places that they're going to close the future shop, even though it's a better location (smaller mall, easier access, bigger store) than the Best Buy.

  6. Re:in further news show tanks on Jeremy Clarkson Dismissed From Top Gear · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The only other form it has existed in was cancelled, and the only reason the franchise survived was because they relaunched it with Clarkson. It has yet to be proven that any other form of the show could succeed in the UK without him... particularly if the three hosts end up going elsewhere to host a similar show. Many viewers could consider such a successor show to be "the real Top Gear" even if it had a different name on a different network.

  7. Re:Wouldnt NiFe be a better battery chemistry here on Elon Musk's SolarCity Offering To Build Cities, Businesses Their Own Grids · · Score: 1

    Cost is one reason, although NiFe is already more expensive than Li-Ion, and rapidly becoming more and more so. Particularly when EV batteries are available so cheap. They also ought to last more than a year or three. NiFe's cost also needs to take into account the fact that they require a massive increase in infrastructure compared to lithium ion. What you can do with a single building worth of lithium ion batteries would require twenty buildings of NiFe batteries. That's not an insubstantial difference!

    It's also worth noting that nobody uses NiFe batteries for backups either: they use lead acid. That's not a coincidence. Lead acid is still at the point where the lower costs negate the lower efficiency, although that may eventually change.

  8. Re:Wouldnt NiFe be a better battery chemistry here on Elon Musk's SolarCity Offering To Build Cities, Businesses Their Own Grids · · Score: 1

    NiFe batteries have great longevity, but very poor performance compared to Li-ion. Lithium Ion batteries can store ten times as many watt hours per kilogram, and twenty times as many watt hours per litre. NiFe is also not any cheaper than lithium ion, and when you consider that Tesla is going to be producing a large number of "worn out" battery packs that are still perfectly usable for grid applications, NiFe will end up a bunch more expensive too.

    Also, weight and size definitely do matter. Shipping stuff around isn't free, buildings have load limits, and real estate isn't cheap.

  9. Re:Space Czar on Report: NASA May Miss SLS Launch Deadline · · Score: 1

    Musk has a pretty terrible reputation for sticking to deadlines himself. He'd get enormously more done with the same amount of money, sure, but don't expect it on time.

  10. Re:This is why NASA needs to privatize on Report: NASA May Miss SLS Launch Deadline · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Boeing is doing SLS on a cost-plus contract. SpaceX' work for NASA is a fixed-price contract.

    What that means is that, with a cost-plus, if a contractor goes over budget, then NASA will pay for the overage, no matter how much it is. With a fixed-price contract, NASA pays a fixed amount, and any overages are up to the contractor to absorb.

    There are certain justifications for cost-plus, for example a small company where a fixed-price contract could bankrupt the company if something goes wrong. In that case, NASA gets nothing, because there is no opportunity to fund the overage. But with a cost-plus, the safety net is there, where NASA would have the choice to either terminate the contract, or pay the overage.

    The problem comes when you have big companies like Boeing doing cost-plus contracts, who are perfectly capable of absorbing cost overruns without going bankrupt. They have no incentive to stick to any sort of budget or schedule.

  11. Re:Getting sued costs money on Defending Privacy Doesn't Pay: Canadian Court Lets Copyright Troll Off the Hook · · Score: 4, Informative

    TekSavvy didn't get sued. They made the mistake of trying to protect their customers' privacy, and the court decided that they should not be compensated for the costs of doing that. They never actually objected to the subpoena for customer information, they just insisted on privacy safeguards and advanced notification of customers and ensuring accuracy of the list of people they would be forced to reveal the information of and such things.

    Turns out that doing the right thing doesn't pay.

  12. Re:I don't buy it. on Internet of Things Endangered By Inaccurate Network Time, Says NIST · · Score: 1

    Call the producers of Hoarders, because for that to happen there would need to be IoT devices piled so high in my home that I could not reach the computer.

  13. Re:I don't buy it. on Internet of Things Endangered By Inaccurate Network Time, Says NIST · · Score: 4, Informative

    Exactly. The vast majority of Internet-of-Things devices can solve the problem by just installing ntpd and being done with it. My refrigerator or coffee maker or dehumidifier don't need hyper-accurate timing, and in the past year my devices running ntpd have never been more than around a tenth of a second off, which is still more accurate than anything that I actually need.

    I get that you may need hyper-accurate timing for some things, but if something is so critical that a few milliseconds of clock skew can kill people, it shouldn't be connected to the Internet anyhow!

  14. Pocket change on Target To Pay $10 Million In Proposed Settlement For 2013 Data Breach · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They're simultaneously trying to scam Canadian suppliers out of $1.5 billion in unpaid bills. They declared bankruptcy, and now they're trying to claim that they are their own biggest creditor, so all the money from their liquidation should basically go to themselves. All the while, the parent company is making billions in profit.

  15. Re:Census is mandatory and that works on Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US · · Score: 1

    The short census is still the census, and it is still mandatory. It's still several pages long. None of the questions could be determined by observation by the census person arriving at your door.

  16. Census is mandatory and that works on Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US · · Score: 1

    The census is mandatory (at least in Canada), and that seems to work well enough. If you don't fill out your census, eventually somebody shows up at your door to remind you, and if you keep ignoring it, then you get in trouble. I don't see how mandatory voting is any harder. The same number of people need to be made to do something, and it happens every roughly the same number of years (four years for voting versus five years for census, at least in Canada).

    Of course, there's also a possibility for mistakes to be made. Like how last census, I filled out the census online, only to have a guy show up at my door telling me that I hadn't filled out the census and demanding that I do so. Which meant that I had to fill it out all over again, from scratch. And on paper this time, because if you get to the point where they show up at your door, then they also make an appointment to come pick it up, so you have to do the paper version.

  17. Re:EA got too greedy (as usual) on SimCity's Empire Has Fallen and Skylines Is Picking Up the Pieces · · Score: 1

    Can you back that up with a source? I can't find any reference to the game requiring an online connection, or such a thing having been removed in a patch, and most of the reviews on launch called out the fact that it didn't require an online connection as one of the advantages the game has over Sim City.

  18. Re:EA got too greedy (as usual) on SimCity's Empire Has Fallen and Skylines Is Picking Up the Pieces · · Score: 1

    That has nothing to do with Steam. Individual games may require you to be always online. Steam does not.

  19. Re:EA got too greedy (as usual) on SimCity's Empire Has Fallen and Skylines Is Picking Up the Pieces · · Score: 2, Informative

    So, basically, it's no closer to "forced to play online" than any other game, seeing as how Steam games can be played offline without an Internet connection.

  20. Re:projecting UV images from below liquid resin? on New 3D Printing Process Claimed To Be 25X Faster Than Current Technology · · Score: 2

    Huh? This basically works the same as existing laser-based stereolithography printers (see the FormLabs Form 1), except that this one uses a projector instead of a scanning laser. Basically it cures an entire layer at a time instead of having a laser trace out each layer, resulting in a large speed increase.

  21. Re:Super computer? on GCHQ Builds a Raspberry Pi Super Computer Cluster · · Score: 1

    Define "a lot". Those are 0.9 GHz Cortex A7 cores. How much faster is a 4GHz latest-gen i7, considering the i7 is much faster clock-for-clock, and also has a much-higher clockspeed? And what about when you've got eight of those cores?

    If we assume (and I'm pulling a number out of thin air here) that the Intel chip has four times the clock-for-clock performance, you'd get a dual-processor 8-core system having the performance of 284 RPi 2 cores, which is pretty close. Now, I pulled my numbers out of my ass, but it's probably not that far off...

  22. Super computer? on GCHQ Builds a Raspberry Pi Super Computer Cluster · · Score: 1

    Can you really call something with the performance of a high-end desktop PC (or maybe a dual-processor workstation) a "super computer cluster"?

  23. Old news on A Mars One Finalist Speaks Out On the "Dangerously Flawed" Project · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most people who follow space stuff already know that Mars One is either a scam or simply delusional... although I suppose it's nice that other people are starting to notice this too.

  24. Re:1% Isn't Market Share on Steam On Linux Now Has Over a Thousand Games Available · · Score: 1

    It's still money on the table, and the effort to port a game from OS X to Linux is very small compared to the effort to port from Windows to OS X. Humble Bundle's statistics also put Linux users at a 3.7% revenue share. Not huge, but for developers already porting to OS X, or who use some middleware like Unity that pretty much does all the work for you, it's a nice little boost to your revenue.

  25. Re:Quality vs Quantity on Steam On Linux Now Has Over a Thousand Games Available · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not going to argue that every one of those games is fantastic, there is certainly a lot of questionable quality in there, but the problem isn't nearly so bad as you make it out to be.

    Steam lists 1001 games that run on Linux and have enough user ratings to give it a score, and 791 of them have good user ratings (defined by 70% or more of user reviews being positive for the title). 168 have mixed reviews (40%-70%). 42 have bad reviews (0%-40%.