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User: Chirs

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  1. hydrofoil sailboats on Mazda Announces Breakthrough In Long-Coveted Engine Technology (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    The current Americas Cup boats are dual-hull hydrofoil boats with semi-rigid sails. Depending on what direction they're travelling relative to the wind they can reach speeds of 3-4x the wind speed.

  2. for long trips crunch the numbers on gas/electric on Mazda Announces Breakthrough In Long-Coveted Engine Technology (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Depending on how frequently you need to make long trips it may make sense to buy a gas car. It may also make sense to buy an electric car for local trips and rent a gas car for longer trips.

    The tradeoff between the two depends on the relative prices of the cars and their "fuel", as well as how frequently you make long trips.

  3. rent a gas/diesel vehicle for long trips on Mazda Announces Breakthrough In Long-Coveted Engine Technology (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Seriously, if you drive mostly shorter trips and have occasional need for a long-range vehicle, it may very well make more sense to rent it than drive it all the time.

    Personally I drive a smallish car and own an a covered cargo trailer. The odd time that I need a minivan or pickup truck I rent one.

  4. I *did* pay more for engineering. on Should College Tuition Vary By Major, Based On the College's Costs For the Major? (qz.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    At my university (in Canada) 20 years ago they charged different rates depending on the college offering the class. I just checked the current fees and they continue to do this. At the low end is Arts at $192 per credit unit, Computer Science is $219, Engineering is $227, Applied Music is $290, and interestingly Law is $420.

  5. Not true...do some research. LG has the G5, V10, and V20 with removable battery. There's also the Moto G4 Play, the Samsung J7, and probably others.

  6. There's no reason why you couldn't structure the municipal broadband such that it has to break even over some suitable period. That would prevent it from continually being subsidized by the local municipality.

    Where I live one of the main local telcos is owned by the province, and rather than being subsidized it consistently provides a profit back to the provincial government, while simultaneously being highly competitive with the big national telcos.

  7. Re: Cold, heartless liberal bean counters on Google Search Results Have Liberal Bias, Study Finds (thedenverchannel.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think that many people on the right behave the same way, just about different topics.

    And it's annoying no matter who is doing it.

  8. Re:government regulations on No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, CVS (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    You don't...so you have to buy the plant and squeeze it yourself.

  9. Re:Apart from the Porsche's 918 Spyder on Tesla 'Easter Egg' Makes the World's Fastest Car Even Faster (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Bah, never mind. Was thinking about another comment about it being the fastest production car. It's true that the 918 is faster.

  10. Re:Apart from the Porsche's 918 Spyder on Tesla 'Easter Egg' Makes the World's Fastest Car Even Faster (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    The 918 isn't in production anymore.

  11. Never had this happen on Once Thought Safe, DDR4 Memory Shown To Be Vulnerable To 'Rowhammer' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    As far as I know I've never had this happen on any of my machines. Laptops, tablets, Android media boxes, or desktop. It just hasn't been an issue.

  12. not a problem for productivity stuff on Building a Laptop Enclosure To Last (makezine.com) · · Score: 1

    The integrated video is now capable of running multiple high-res monitors. It's entirely valid for office work including photography stuff.

    I wouldn't want to do gaming or full-on 3D CAD work, but for just about anything else it works just fine (and draws substantially less power than an external video chip, which is nice in a laptop).

  13. was readily apparent last time I checked on Ask Slashdot: Cost Effective Way To Soundproof My Home? · · Score: 1

    I auditioned a half-dozen different speakers for a sound-reinforcement system in a church. The Bose speakers sounded okay, but didn't sound like the person that was speaking. Some of the other brands (Meyer and EAW) sounded just like the person speaking, only louder.

  14. They're not compressing it, they're simply condensing it on a cooling coil. And I assume they're going to need some form of refrigeration for that, so I'm not sure why they talk about getting rid of chillers.

    Also, the chip surfaces are shown to be vertical, so the bubbles will rise along the surface of the chip, likely creating a convection current in the process.

  15. Re:Can the SSD stand the heat of Data Center? on Samsung Demos PCIe NVMe SSD At 5.6 GB Per Second, 1 Million IOPS (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    It seems to me that as long as you have protection against power outage, it should be possible to get equal reliability from software RAID. Fundamentally a hardware RAID card is just a processor with a NVRAM or battery-backed DRAM cache, and it's limited to a single PCIe bus connection.

  16. warranty vs advertising on Samsung Demos PCIe NVMe SSD At 5.6 GB Per Second, 1 Million IOPS (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    It's not like buying an extended warranty, it's holding manufacturers/retailers accountable for promises that they make.

  17. General-purpose cord-and-plug connected items are allowed to use the full 15A. (This is why power tools can be 15A.) 14AWG copper conductors are actually rated for 20A for static loads like electric heat, they just downrate them to 15A for general circuits because of the possibility of multiple devices being plugged in at once and to allow for motor loads.

    As for why appliances don't use the full allowed amperage...most people don't care so they manufacturers don't either.

    That said, it is possible to get 1800W toasters, toaster ovens, coffee makers, etc. in the USA. They're just hard to find and you'll likely end up paying more.

  18. handy for debugging on Bad Programming Habits We Secretly Love (infoworld.com) · · Score: 1

    The "single point of exit" can make some types of debugging easier since you can hook the exit with less work.

  19. example is trivially simple on Bad Programming Habits We Secretly Love (infoworld.com) · · Score: 1

    Now do the nested version when you're trying to allocate multiple resources independently and need to clean up all of them if any of them fail. Oh, and it needs to fit within 80 columns due to other coding rules.

    Gotos are a clean way of doing error handling.

  20. Doesn't always help. on Bad Programming Habits We Secretly Love (infoworld.com) · · Score: 1

    Comprehensive unit tests don't help when the thing only breaks in integration testing.

    Maybe the sqlite database you use in your unit tests behaves slightly differently than the PostgreSQL database you use in production.
    Maybe the refactored code adds a race condition that the unit tests don't cover.
    Maybe the refactored code runs slower in certain scenarios that turn out to be important.
    Maybe the unit tests missed a corner case.

    Sure, in an ideal world these wouldn't happen. But they do.

  21. what about OS's or small footprint? on Ask Slashdot: Is it Practical To Replace C With Rust? · · Score: 1

    There's really no reason ever to use C over C++ if you have a C++ compiler available.

    What about for something like an OS? Or for tiny little embedded stuff where memory is an issue? (Honestly curious, I'm not current with the latest C++ developments.)

  22. Why aren't they using Intel's DPDK? on BBC Optimizing UHD Video Streaming Over IP (bbc.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Intel's DPDK library is specifically built to bypass the OS and provide high-speed low-latency networking. Sems like a natural fit.

  23. the above is wrong on BBC Optimizing UHD Video Streaming Over IP (bbc.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Standard linux distros support timestamping of the packet by the kernel when the packet is received. When userspace reads the packet it can also obtain the kernel timestamp of that packet.

  24. Re:Why would anyone be shocked? on Researchers Unable To Replicate Findings of Published Economics Studies (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How hard could it be to design real-world economic experiments that actually yield useful and reproducible results?

    I'm guessing that most countries wouldn't want to be the subject of a real-world economic experiment...

  25. kind of need them... on Matthew Garrett Forks the Linux Kernel · · Score: 1

    "He is a recipient of the Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation for his work on Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel". Ah! All the bits that I *don't* want in the kernel.

    It's sort of hard to boot on modern hardware without UEFI support, and hard to boot on Secure Boot systems without support for that too. Theoretically there's nothing wrong with Secure Boot as a concept, as long as you pick motherboard vendors that let you add your own signing keys.