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User: 50000BTU_barbecue

50000BTU_barbecue's activity in the archive.

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Comments · 1,316

  1. CES is still around? on Why CES Is a Bad Scene For Startups · · Score: 1

    Sweet, now I can fix all the mistakes I did in high school! Diane! Wait! I really *do* like you I'm just shy!!!

  2. Re:Awesome on Inside Piston-Powered Nuclear Fusion Company General Fusion · · Score: 2
    Yes. The biggest problem of all the other fusion power approaches are the output part: how do you get electricity from fusion? Believe it or not, unlike Star Trek, we'll be using steam and turbines to spin a generator. Tokamak reactors need a complex thermal blanket on top of the complex plasma containment. GF has cleverly bypassed this by making the reaction occur in the thermal blanket.

    Again, this is my opinion so it will be modded down.

  3. Re:Awesome on Inside Piston-Powered Nuclear Fusion Company General Fusion · · Score: 0

    How is my opinion "over-rated"? I think GF has the most practical approach and isn't working on dead-ends or defense-type research reactors. They are progressing and are quietly moving along. I also like the fact they are Canadian, like me! And maybe there is some hope that Canada can still produce something besides sand.

  4. Awesome on Inside Piston-Powered Nuclear Fusion Company General Fusion · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It is my layman's barely informed opinion that this scheme has the highest chance at success in the next 10 years at achieving practical electrical output from nuclear fusion reactions.

  5. Everything old is new again on PC Plus Packs Windows and Android Into Same Machine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Bridgeboard on my Amiga, 20 years ago.

  6. What I don't get on Interview: Bruce Sterling Answers Your Questions · · Score: 3, Interesting

    is why it's called "science" fiction given how little science there is in there. It should be called "social" fiction, or so-fi (lol), since everyone is always saying "sci-fi" is trying to analyze how societies or individuals react to technology. The human element is constant, but the "science" and technologies are almost always wrong. Doesn't prevent me from enjoying reading 50 year old sci-fi that is more fantasy than science.

  7. How about seperating life and work? on Ask Slashdot: Do You Run a Copy-Cat Installation At Home? · · Score: 1

    I don't know about you, the last thing that comes to mind when I come home is "hey how can I do MORE of the same meaningless crap FOR FREE!!""??

  8. Re:This sounds like fun on Scientists Print Retinal Cells · · Score: 2

    Well I hope it's a *bit* faster than that, since it looks (haha) like I'm going to get MD later in life just like my Dad. I really wish we could the body itself to grow these cells, since obviously it was able to do it once before.

  9. This sounds like fun on Scientists Print Retinal Cells · · Score: 1

    but will they connect to the optical nerve? And once they're printed, how do you put them in the eye?

  10. Re:Ask him about Darwin on Interview: Ask Forrest Mims About Rockets, Electronics, and Engineering · · Score: 1

    The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill, although it's more of a textbook than for a kid.

  11. Re:Possible countermeasure... on Indiana State Police Acknowledge Use of Cell Phone Tracking Device · · Score: 1

    Neither am I, an expert I mean, but suspicious shifts in received RF power of a tower might be an indicator as well, no?

  12. Possible countermeasure... on Indiana State Police Acknowledge Use of Cell Phone Tracking Device · · Score: 1

    if GPS determines the phone hasn't moved, question this new "tower"...

  13. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1

    No, my point was that C= should have been focusing its engineers on ONE single successor to C64. Instead they wasted their engineers' time and then bought an external design that had nothing to do with C64 at all.

  14. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I don't doubt that. The reason for the pitiful serial performance on the C64 was that the UART was software. There was supposed to be a hardware UART in there but C= couldn't get chips in time and there was some kind of bug in the VIA chips that prevented their use. So it was all bit banged out IIRC.

  15. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1

    I have a PET4032...

  16. Re:Um, a random thought on Life Could Have Evolved 15 Million Years After the Big Bang, Says Cosmologist · · Score: 1

    Yeah, a bit of everything. Pohl's Gateway trilogy had the kulgelblitz energy creatures from the early universe trying their best to change the universe back to the early conditions. Dragon's Egg had the Cheela, overclocked living neutronium creatures.

  17. Re:Um, a random thought on Life Could Have Evolved 15 Million Years After the Big Bang, Says Cosmologist · · Score: 1

    Maybe I need to update my library!

  18. Um, a random thought on Life Could Have Evolved 15 Million Years After the Big Bang, Says Cosmologist · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Was the early universe, like the first second after the big bang, a separate "regime" to what we see today? ie the energy density of free space was so high that reactions could happen so much faster that anything that could be called life (in whatever passed for matter, or substrate) evolved, lived, learned, observed its universe, died within that second and the universe kept cooling?

    Subjectively that second would have been like billions of years to them. And could they have left traces, like manipulating the fabric of space to encourage life to form in atomic matter? Like the universe for them would have been the size of a watermelon and they'd have had energy at scales to make quasars look like a cheap eBay LED flashlight?

  19. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1
    Yes, Commodore should have started work on the C65 much earlier instead of spreading out into bizarre orphan architectures like the C16, C116, Plus/4, B128, C264 and all the other useless cruft they came up with.

    Commodore was right to abandon the C65 by 1991. Yes. I think we agree there, I'm just saying C= should have focused earlier and the C65 would have more sense in the marketplace in 1986. Granted, it wouldn't have been the 1991 C65, sure.

    But if C= had taken its engineers away from all the useless cruft they were working on in the mid 80s and just asked for a C64++, my opinion is that this would have been the correct approach.

    Oh and software. Bundling GEOS was the correct move, a GEOS for a C64++ in 1986 could have been enough to sustain C=, add a proper marketing strategy too.

  20. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1

    Hey that does sound pretty cool. Reading joysticks in BASIC V2 was crappy and not very fast. You don't have any pictures?

  21. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Commodore didn't design the Amiga, they bought it.

  22. Re:Hrmmmmm on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1

    Yup, as I read it more and more he's claiming some historically dubious things, but now you know how it feels to have history re-written.

  23. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1

    GEOS 128. The higher resolution video and faster processor helped but not enough it seems.

  24. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 1

    Ah good point, BASIC V7 was far better than 2.0. Did you use the user port or make a custom expansion cartridge? The closest I got to robotics back then was the Radio Electronics interface board to the Armatron... I never got the Armatron...

  25. Re:Mind blowing on The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128 · · Score: 2

    Things like Super Snapshot or Action Replay cartridges pretty much forced the machine into 64 mode anyhow. A better graphics chip and an extra SID on the 128 would have made it more compelling. The Apple IIgs was a powerful 6502/816 machine with superior graphics and sound so there was a market. A 640x400 interlaced display with at least 64 colors and 16 sprites and an Atari-style copper would have been awesome instead of the lame VDC.