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User: evilsofa

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Comments · 91

  1. Latency vs bandwidth on AMD Considered GDDR5 For Kaveri, Might Release Eight-Core Variant · · Score: 5, Informative

    DDR3 is low latency, low bandwidth. GDDR5 is high latency, high bandwidth. Low latency is critical for CPU performance while bandwidth doesn't matter as much. On video cards, GPUs need high bandwidth but the latency doesn't matter as much. This is why gaming PCs use DDR3 for system RAM and GDDR5 on their video cards. Video cards that cut costs by using DDR3 instead of GDDR5 take a massive hit in performance. The XBox One and PS4 use GDDR5 shared between the CPU and GPU, and as a result have the rough equivalent of a very low-end CPU paired with a mid-range GPU.

  2. Here's the letter and data on Elevated Radiation Claimed At Tokyo 2020 Olympic Venues · · Score: 5, Informative

    This appears to be the letter and the data that started all this:

    http://olympicsokuteikai.web.fc2.com/encontents.html

    Perhaps the most crucial part of the letter is this:

    "Just before the Fukushima power plant accident, the mean value of the atmospheric radiation in Tokyo was estimated as 0.04 Sv/h, and radioactive Cesium was almost non-existent. Therefore, atmospheric radiation value above this level can be regarded as the effect of the nuclear accident."

    Is that a valid assumption?

  3. You'll just call attention to yourself on Ask Slashdot: Most Secure Browser In an Age of Surveillance? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Doing what you prescribe will do the very thing that you are trying to avoid - get you on the NSA's list of people who are probably not American and must be up to something really interesting.

    http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/21/1443204/use-tor-get-targeted-by-the-nsa

  4. The real reason why the divers cut the cable on Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So I ask myself, "Why would those divers cut a cable that is already cut?" And the theory I come up with is that the owners of the ship whose anchor cut the cable didn't want to get into trouble for it, so they hire some stupid divers to go cut the cable, then call the cops on the divers. Problem solved: the ship owners can now deny everything and blame the saboteurs for cutting the line. Explains everything, including the wildly improbable part where the divers get caught in the act.

  5. My mother's garden has earthworms on Global Warming Has Made the North Greener · · Score: 5, Informative

    My mother's garden has earthworms. This may seem unremarkable to you, but she has been living in Fairbanks, Alaska for over 40 years now and last summer was the first time she has ever seen earthworms in her garden. The climate is supposed to be too cold for too long for them to survive in the wild.

    I have other relatives who live in Denali Park, Alaska, in the midst of the Alaska Range and near the tallest mountain in North America. Over the past 4 or 5 decades, they have been watching the treeline creep hundreds of feet up the sides of the mountains.

  6. Person Of Interest on Researchers Convert Phones Into Secret Listening Devices · · Score: 1

    Don't worry, Harold and John will stop listening when you get hot and heavy with your date.

  7. Re:Simple on Why Can't Industry Design an Affordable Hearing Aid? · · Score: 1

    As a sound engineer I find a lot of hearing aids have had major features removed. I'm always getting more and more people who have aids that have no induction loop ("T") setting. Some now come with bluetooth, good for your mobile phone but not easy to pair to a PA system, kiosk or POS.

    I was born severely deaf, have worn hearing aids for my entire life, and found the induction loop kind of useful but not great with the old analog phones, back when anyone still had them. Otherwise, the loop was good for hearing funny buzzing sounds in certain locations. I have never in my life encountered anything else that employed them like what you describe. Now I just take out my hearing aids and use a good $40 pair of IEMs on my iPhone when I want to make a call, and that's a thousand times better than the induction loop ever was.

    As far as Bluetooth goes, in my experience it sucks. I now use a pair of good $40 IEMs when making calls or listening to music on my iPhone or watching TV, and they sound great, a thousand times better than the induction loop ever did.

  8. Kristine Smith on Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer? · · Score: 1

    Pick up Kristine Smith's Code Of Conduct, and you'll be in for a very pleasant surprise. Then you'll want to get the other four books in the series: Rules Of Conflict, Law Of Survival, Contact Imminent, and Endgame.

  9. How many raindrops are there in a storm? on US Navy's High-Resolution Radar Can See Individual Raindrops In a Storm · · Score: 5, Funny

    How many raindrops are there in a storm?

  10. Kristine Smith on Ask Slashdot: Good, Forgotten Fantasy & Science Fiction Novels? · · Score: 1

    Kristine Smith's series of 5 books: Code of Conduct, Rules of Conflict, Law of Survival, Contact Imminent, Endgame. She's probably my favorite overlooked author. I'm quite certain that 999 out of 1000 readers of this thread will never have noticed this very pleasant surprise.

  11. Re:Why the anxiety? on Ask Slashdot: Life After Firefox 3.6.x? · · Score: 1

    What application is being used? Something that cripples itself with emulation? See this: http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac-comparison-chart/?compare=all-g3-g4-g5-intel-macs&highlight=0&prod1=PowerMacG5014 - I couldn't find any i7 Macs (even the laptops and minis) that weren't at least 3 times faster than the PPC Quad Core 2.5GHz (which is really two CPUs with two cores each).

  12. Why is this a trojan horse and not a virus? on New Version of Flashback Trojan Targets Mac Users · · Score: 1

    From the Intego article about the new variant: "This malware is particularly insidious, as users don’t download anything or double-click any file to launch an installer." Yet Intego repeatedly refers to as a Trojan horse. All of the other articles I can find only reference the Intego report, and don't call it a virus either, including those who would know better, such as Ars Technica and the ISC Diary.

    But if it requires no interaction from the user, then why is it not the first true Mac OS X virus?

  13. Re:Trapped films on Tapeheads and the Quiet Return of VHS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not a film, but a very significant example of being trapped on VHS is CNN's Cold War documentary. 24 hour-long episodes covering the whole Cold War, start to finish, with an unbelievable roster of interviews including Fidel Castro, Walter Cronkite, Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lech Walesa, Aldritch Ames, Mikhail Gorbachev, and more. Never released to DVD, because the series came out in 1998. Then 9/11 hit, and material in episodes 19 and 20 that covered the Russian Afghan war were re-classified by the Bush administration; CNN would not be allowed to republish that material. The DVD market went big-time shortly after, and CNN decided not to transfer an incomplete product. If you ever get a chance to see it, do so. It's worth your time. It's a pity that you pretty much can't obtain it legally anymore.

  14. Re:Why? on Russia Approves Siberia-Alaska Railway · · Score: 1

    Latest estimate is $3 billion dollars for the Fairbanks to Nome road:

    http://www.adn.com/2010/01/26/1111745/nome-road-could-cost-27-billion.html

    "The road would pass through an estimated 65 miles of mountains, 185 miles of wetlands and require the construction of a new Yukon River crossing."

    I think that $5 million per mile estimate is way, WAY low. There are highways in the US that cost $100 million per mile, and the conditions are far, far worse in Alaska. And then you need the railroad between Alaska and the US. Alaska, Canada and the US did a feasibility study in 2007:

    http://alaskacanadarail.com/index.html

    The Phase I report there refers to a "Nominal US$11 billion investment", and there hasn't been any news about it since.

  15. DRM is not intended to prevent piracy... on DRM Drives Gamers To Piracy, Says Good Old Games · · Score: 1

    ...it's all about preventing used game sales.

    DRM doesn't prevent piracy, never has, never will, and everyone knows this, including the game companies. The money that is lost to piracy is 99% imaginary money that was never going to be spent in the first place, so the game companies don't really care about piracy, even though that's their cover story for why they use DRM.

    DRM does effectively prevent used games sales. When a used game is sold, the game company sees money trading hands that they think should be theirs. It's their end-run around the First Sale Doctrine. This is also the real reason you're seeing such a big push for books to go electronic; book publishers can't put DRM on a physical book, but they can on their ebooks.

  16. Pffft, GUI is dead, long live the FUI on The Case Against GUIs, Revisited · · Score: 1

    If proponents of the CLI feel threatened by the GUI, they must be horrified by the FUI.

    On another tack, I did a quick search and nobody seems to be calling the new interface the FUI - Finger User Interface. It seems so obvious that I can't believe I'm the first to do so.

  17. What happens to the tree? on Genetically Altering Trees To Sequester More Carbon · · Score: 1

    Stupid question time, but what happens to the tree? I mean, how does it sequester more carbon than a normal tree? Does it simply grow bigger? Is the wood more dense or less dense? Does it become more flammable or less flammable? Will increasing the size of the root system have negative consequences such as reducing the number of trees in a given area?

  18. Will deaf people get punished too? on Australia To Fight iPod Use By Pedestrians · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about people who are deaf like me? Will we get written up for walking around in a dangerous fashion and relying only upon our eyes to stay alive on the streets?

  19. DRM fights used game sales, not piracy. on Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    DRM has nothing whatsoever to do with fighting piracy. All those billions and trillions of dollars that pirates don't spend on games never existed, and spending money to chase money that never existed is, besides being insanely stupid, never profitable. Money spent on used games does exist and there is a lot of it; Gamestop alone had 8 billion dollars in revenue in 2009, and the game industry wants that money. If the game industry as a whole spends a few hundred million dollars to prevent tens of billions of dollars of used game sales, that is profitable and not stupid.

  20. Apple Supplier Code of Conduct on Apple Censors Dalai Lama iPhone Apps In China · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You would think from this thread that Apple has never advocated for human rights in China:
    http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/
    Isn't it better for Apple to do it that way than to piss off the country that manufactures nearly everything Apple sells?

  21. Live subtitles are not so great on Companies To Invade Your Retinas As Soon As Next Year? · · Score: 1

    Just turn on the subtitles for Survivor or The Amazing Race, and you'll see real-time live steno-captioning that's as good as it gets - with a 5 second delay, which is unusable even on TV, much less live conversation. I happen to know this about those shows because, being severely deaf, I managed to get a reply to a complaint about the inadequate subtitling of those shows. Believe me, I would love to have subtitles on real life, but I really don't think the tech is up to it.

  22. Re:Change all IT geeks can believe in. on US House Decommissions Its Last Mainframe · · Score: 1

    William Adama disapproves of your attitude, goes on a bender and waits for the Cylons to attack...

  23. ...like boiling the ocean... on Using the Sea To Cool Your Data Center · · Score: 1

    Another useful idiom that we'll have to put away because we made it happen.

  24. Best names ever on Suitable Naming Conventions For Workstations? · · Score: 1

    your-sister
    your-brother
    your-other-brother
    your-mother
    your-father
    your-aunt
    your-uncle
    your-cousin
    your-niece
    your-nephew

    These make great pet names, and probably make some very odd conversations in the server room.

  25. Less than perfectly ideal driving conditions? on Prototype Vehicle For the Blind · · Score: 1

    1. Rush hour downtown traffic. Account for bicycles, buses and pedestrians with utterly no regard for traffic rules. Throw in random construction zones.

    2. Icy conditions anywhere. They do get snow and ice in Virginia, don't they?

    I quit driving, and all I lost was my peripheral vision. There is NO WAY this can ever go anywhere but a closed course.