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User: treyb

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  1. Re:tarsnap ? on Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Cloud Backup Solutions That You Recommend? · · Score: 1

    Definitely that. I used it for 3-4 years without issues.

  2. It enables closed systems on the vehicle. on Nanoparticles Could Make Hydrogen Cheaper Than Gasoline · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everyone seems to have missed the point. With efficient electrolysis, you can build the entire system into the vehicle. You'd have a closed system that cracks the water and stores the H2 in a tank. The fuel cell burns the H2, creating pure water that goes back into the tank. You'd "fill up" at home (or office, or where ever) by running the electrolysis off of grid power (or however you get it), removing the need for the gas station. You could even use the power from regenerative breaking to crack the water again (assuming you could do it fast enough), meaning you wouldn't need to lug around extra batteries or ultra-capacitors.

    Remember: you shouldn't think of hydrogen as a fuel, but rather as an energy storage mechanism (like a battery).

  3. Re:Not likely . . . on Is the Future of the Electric Car Industry in Silicon Valley? · · Score: 1

    Tesla won't build its cars in SV. I understand they have a plant in Florida.

    Tesla's magic comes from battery management, which the bright minds in the Valley have had to deal with for a long time. Lots of folks can (and have) put together electric vehicles, but the survival of the company depends on making the battery pack last.

  4. Re:Why would Google do this? on Google Working on a Mobile Phone? · · Score: 1

    If Google builds the phone (or just the software stack), they can use your entire browsing history from the phone for ad targeting. No longer would they have to limit themselves to your Google search history (and perhaps gmail contents). They would have deep, coherent data set to mine, tying your on-line and physical worlds together in real (or near real) time. If they sold such a phone at or near hardware cost they could probably give the service away for the increased ad revenue.

  5. Re:Sure, they want to make money on Why Google's New Products Need Not Succeed · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Have you used the google text messaging service? It's incredibly useful, and probably not directly profitable for google.

    Google offers this service for the same reason they offer free WiFi in Mountain View: they have more data to correlate and refine their search for you, making their ads more targeted and thus more valuable to advertisers. They may or may not have the phone you messaged from tied to your profile, but you can bet they eventually will. If you use their free WiFi service they get to see all of your web traffic, not just the searches or other Google-branded services. Pay with Google Checkout and they know what you actually bought.

    I look at everything Google does with an eye towards how it increases the data set they have to target ads. It explains their corporate behavior very well.

  6. Re:Stack - bad for speed, good for low power on Next Generation Stack Computing · · Score: 2, Informative

    Chuck Moore (the Forth guy) came to a slightly different conclusion: good for speed and good for low power. He uses the chip real estate you want to use pipelining instructions to add another core. In the case of the SeaForth processors, he added 23 other cores. Granted, that chip doesn't pretend to do anything but target embedded devices, but he demonstrates that stack machines can run quickly and use little power.

  7. Re:Size and functionality on Next Generation Stack Computing · · Score: 1
    In Forth, we'd write:
    : -rot rot rot ;
    : addsubmul ( b c d e -- a ) - -rot + * ;
    which in many stack machines maps exactly to machine instructions:
    sub
    rot
    rot
    add
    mul
    where rot rotates the the top three items on the stack, moving the third to the first ( a b c -- b c a ).
  8. Re:This isn't your father's trilogy.. on Episode III Deleted Scenes Leaked Online · · Score: 1

    Our boss at PalmSource bought us tickets to Serenity tomorrow afternoon.

    Does that qualify as a good movie?

  9. Re:Sounds like a great way for developers... on OSS Funding through Fundable · · Score: 1

    These developers had better not hold out for too much money, otherwise some other OSS developer looking to make a name for themselves will scratch the itch for less (all the way down to free, possibly).

  10. MythTV box on PlayStation 3 HDD to Ship With Linux · · Score: 1

    If I can get Linux on a PS3, they'll sell me three units instead of just one. The PS3 should make an excelent MythTV frontend for HDTV. MythTV for PS3 will sell a lot of units in the MythTV crowd.

  11. Re:xbox on Build Your Own Linux Home Theater PC · · Score: 1

    The XBox doesn't have a fast enough CPU (or enough hardware acceleration support) to handle HDTV. The XBox 360 looks like it will have the CPU power, but we'll have to wait for the first hacks to try it out.

  12. Re:Hmm on The Future of Windows Graphic Technology · · Score: 1

    We designed the graphic driver model to support updating the drivers without requiring a reboot. The app_server already had all of the server-to-app messages to support moving between workspaces of different shapes and pixel depths. Unfortunately, we experienced a "focus shift" and I never got around to connecting the dots.

    -- Trey

  13. Re:Top 7 Myths of the New Cell Processor: on Ars Technica's Hannibal on IBM's Cell · · Score: 1
    3 Apple is going to use this processor in their new machine.

    Doubtful.

    Don't think "G5 replacement", think "Quartz/OpenGL accelerator". The Cell, some RAM, and a DVI encoder will make a heck of a replacement for an ATI or NVIDIA card. Don't forget that Apple likes to have control over its hardware.
  14. Re:Color Me Paranoid on Coyotos, A New Security-focused OS & Language · · Score: 1

    Howdy ewhac!

    We don't design capability systems to distrust their owners or operators. Rather, we design them to do exactly what we tell them and no more. With a capability system, you can configure an email client to run any executable/script/whatever that shows up in your inbox and restrict (or confine) it in significant ways: use no more than X% CPU, use no more than Y megabytes of RAM, draw into only this region of the display, etc. If the incomming executable wants other resources, a dialog box pops up and tells you exactly what it wants at which point the user gets to decide. In a typical UN*X environment, any program running as a user has all of the powers of that user, but with no practical way to let the user choose which files to protect or how many resources it can consume.

    As far as Fair Use goes, I think that requiring a network authorization for each play of a media file will educate consumers more quickly than a billion-dollar ad campaign. I expect this education to cost the sellers of such restricted media a huge chunk of their bottom line.

    -- Trey

  15. Re:Looks like more of the same to me. on Microsoft Creates Static With New Webcast Feature · · Score: 1
    Microsoft's piggy back is typical of their disregard of other people's IP, their laziness and their arrogant contempt for the legal system.

    I have less love for M$ than most (I worked for Be, Inc.) and, from reading the actual article, it appears that they've paid for the airplay data just like you or anyone else could. They run the data through a scrubber to take out songs they don't have the rights to broadcast and then mix it up a little with "similar" music. As much as it pains me to say it, I can see where some consumers might pay for such a service.
  16. Re:It's a radio. on Orac^3 -- Not Your Everyday Casemod · · Score: 5, Funny

    It doesn't need any shielding: he used transparent aluminum.

  17. Packaging on New Red Hat Linux Beta: Severn · · Score: 3, Funny

    They should wrap it in a spandex-skinsuit theme, make it boot WINE by default, and call it release Severn of Nine.

  18. Over PalmOS and PocketPC? on IBM Picks Qtopia Over PalmOS And PocketPC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't see how IBM could have chosen Qtopia over PalmOS or PocketPC since those operating systems don't run on PowerPC hardware. Rather, it appears to me that IBM Microelectronics wants another market to sell PowerPC chips into and chose just about the only viable solution that wouldn't take years to deliver.

  19. Re:what a joke on New Technique Makes Most Gene Patents Irrelevant · · Score: 1

    Every place that you used (i.e., you should replace it with (e.g.,.

  20. Re:Not as easy as you think on Space Station & Shuttle Evade Debris · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We actually have (at least) two usefull technologies for cleaning up space: tethers and wake shields. I don't know if the SVEC folks have considered building a wake shield specifically for NEO cleanup, though.

  21. Re:Aerobraking and probe intelligence... on The Art of Aerobraking · · Score: 2, Informative
    The problem with this approach is the time lag between Earth and wherever they are (which is measured in light-minutes).

    Light-minutes and light-years measure distance, not time.

  22. MSR should try researching graphic design. on Microsoft Research Turns 10 · · Score: 1

    If MSR researched graphic design, they might not have created a web site so difficult to look at. I find their color scheme headache inducing.

  23. Re:Market Niche on Ask Chuck Moore About 25X, Forth And So On · · Score: 2, Informative
    60 BOPS is a fair value for a buck. But is the power consumption ridiculous?

    From the web site: Max power 500 mW @ 1.8 V, with 25 computers running

    Or is the only way to get this high of projected performance by clocking the chip like a six year old on chocolate frosted sugar bombs?

    Again, from the website: asynchronous microcomputer core, meaning you don't count clocks like you do in synchronous logic.

    My ignorance of Forth might be showing (one of the few I haven't had kicked into me over the years) - but wouldn't "meaningful colour syntax" represent quite a nasty disadvantage for those who are either entirely or partially (red-green) colour blind?

    Chuck uses color, but you could change the colors to different fonts and/or font styles, if you want. Just as Python source uses indentation for telling the compiler about nesting levels, colorForth uses color tokens (think of it as a trivial markup language) to tell the compiler about word (aka function) definition starts, literal numeric values, etc.

  24. Re:Ahem on Ask Chuck Moore About 25X, Forth And So On · · Score: 1

    Few, if any, modern Forth implementations use this technique. I believe that ANS Forth requires support for at least 31 characters in word names.

  25. Sounds like Lagoona, only less sophisticated. on Transmeta Code Morphing != Just In Time · · Score: 1
    If you're interested in some leading edge dymanic code generation, take a look at Lagoona. To get the good stuff, you'll have to download and read the PDF files and poke around the site a bit. Here are the highlights:
    • The "object" file format is a platform neutral semantic dictionary encoding that is translated at load time to native code.
    • Doing this allows them to insert arbitrary features into the generated code, like profiling, array bounds checking, etc.
    • The first translation is "quick and dirty", with profiling enabled.
    • Once hot spots are identified, that code is "recompiled" with higher optimization.
    • Because they use a garbage collection system and have complete access to the program semantic information, they are able to dynamically re-order data structures to reduce cache misses!

    All in all, quite interesting work, and quite worth the read.