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User: Calinous

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  1. Re:Microsoft found making PR-FUD-ing research on Vista Security Claims Debunked · · Score: 1

    Wish I had mod points... Haven't thought at this before, but it rings true

  2. Re:Damned inefficient on The British Steam Car Challenge · · Score: 1

    Yes, there is an amazing amount of conversion loss there. Why?
          First, on a mile long track (with maybe ten more miles to "spool up") even such a big 4MW won't use so much fuel, and so much water. As such, the cost (in mass penalties and aerodynamics of the car due to radiators) of a condensing component was ruled too great (the Doble car had such systems in the 1920s, and got 14 miles per gallon of fuel oil, for a car weighing 5500lbs).
          Second, a two stage steam turbine has a lower mass but a lower efficiency than a turbine with more stages. Power-plant steam turbines have a better efficiency.
          And third (already mentioned), is the probable low efficiency of the burners/boilers - again, compromising between efficiency and total mass
          And maybe there are other reasons too

  3. Re:Wal-mart on Which All-in-One Inkjet Printer is Cheapest to Use? · · Score: 1

    I've printed more than a thousand pages with a cheap laser printer (some Canon), and it is still in great shape. When time to refill the toner will come, it might cost some $15.
          At work, one of the toners was refilled four times until print quality dropped, another was filled 2 times, and the current one is on the second refill - and prints like new. At a quarter of the cost of a new toner, it is quite cheap.
          As a comparation, we use a HP 145 officejet multifunctional for faxes, scanning and sometimes printer - and its ink is more costly than the main printer's toner9

  4. Re:I hope so-Fruit juice. on Ubuntu Linux Validates As Genuine Windows · · Score: 1

    The firewall was activated by default in XP SP2 - it existed in XP SP1, but it wasn't activated by default.
          Also, SP2 had come with some security enhancements that broke some of the existing programs - this is the reason some of the corporate clients did not upgrade to SP2 (IBM is one, I think)

  5. Re:It's good to see ... on ISS Goes Solar · · Score: 1

    The silicon used in solar panels is expensive. Also, another reason for the cost is installation cost of the panels.
          However, solar panels are subsidised in many places, for several reasons: they produce electricity when demand is highest, in places with clear sky all year long their production is constant (with very slow variations - compared to the tens of minutes a slow changing power plant will allow).
          When the production was very limited, bad silicon from microelectronic companies was used. Now, all the supply of bad silicon don't make a dent into solar panel production

  6. Re:"Electric ions"? on Riding an Ion Drive to the Asteroid Belt · · Score: 1

    It's all about mass expenditure - as one must get the reaction mass all the way out of Earth's gravitational well (it means accelerating it to more than 11km/s) and energy (solar power at least) is pretty much free (even if not strong) once you have the solar panels up there, the most costly thing is the reaction mass. The ion drive (which ejects its reaction mass at speeds much higher than a rocket engine) uses less mass for the same delta V

  7. Re:"Electric ions"? on Riding an Ion Drive to the Asteroid Belt · · Score: 1

    They are energy and mass efficient compared to rocket engines. However, they are not powerful enough - one of the first ion drives was able to accelerate its ship at a thousand of a g.

  8. Re:Efficiency as opposed to thermoelectric? on Turning Heat Into Sound Into Electricity · · Score: 1

    No moving parts, that's the advantage.
          Except the thermocouple, every device (that I know of) that convert heat to electricity has moving parts.

  9. Re:Pay or Die! on Russia Claims IP Rights In Manufacture of AK-47 · · Score: 1

    Not the rifles, the mortars.
          The NATO standard is 81mm, and the USSR is 82mm. So, mortar shells will fit in a russian mortar, but not the reverse. As for the accuracy and power... maybe the russian mortar firing NATO shells will have better range and precision as compared to a hand grenade.

  10. Re:Pentagon or Pentagram? on How the Pentagon Got Its Shape · · Score: 1

    I'd say only the Great Wall (and the Great Wall isn't a building).
          The curvature of Earth is on the order of 30 meters at more than 10 kilometers, or so.

  11. Re:The Beauty Of Closed Systems on Aluminum Alloy Releases Hydrogen From Water · · Score: 1

    Considering you don't go to the gym, you could argue for a zero-sum

  12. Re:Cost-efficiency? on Simple Chemical Trick To Boost Battery Efficiency · · Score: 1

    I don't know who modded you troll, but I think you are right:
      introducing this new technique is costly not only in increased component price, but in retooling too. There might be long-term contracts with suppliers of zinc, and changing them will take some time.
          In the end, better batteries are always good, but the change might take some time

  13. Re:massive amounts of data != FUD on 26 Common Climate Myths Debunked · · Score: 1

    Everyone knows land from planar maps - and on those, Greenland looks much bigger than it is in fact. There is not enough possible farmland in higher latitudes to make up for what would be lost on the lower latitudes

  14. Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? on Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020 · · Score: 1

    I respect the red lights and stops (ok, I sometimes as a pedestrian pass red lights if no policeman or moving car is around). With the bicycle, I tend to avoid cars and moving traffic when possible.

  15. Re:All Cars or Trucks Too? on Toyota Going 100% Hybrid By 2020 · · Score: 1

    Don't remember me - I did a half-a-mile ride in more than half an hour just the week before. And all the way I watched pedestrians zooming past me...
          My car won't reach the hell of midday city traffic soon, I tell you

  16. Re:I'm gonna vote for hurts - big time on Does Moore's Law Help or Hinder the PC Industry? · · Score: 1

    What could I do with a slow, 32-thread processor that is having a single FPU?
          As long as most of the programs I use are not massively multithreaded, I would use three or four cores, leaving the other 28 unused.
          This Sun thing was a bright idea - too bad a dual proc dual core Opteron was equivalent in performance, while finishing individual tasks faster? (by what I remember, the Opteron ran some 4 tasks at a time, finishing them in tens of milliseconds, while the Sun ran 32 at a time, finishing them in hundreds of milliseconds).

  17. Re:It's a start... on First Successful Demonstration of CO2 Capture Technology · · Score: 1

    They will sell it. There is a market for CO2 - fire extinguishers, by example, can use impure CO2, even if food/drinks industry needs much purer CO2. Also, one could use compressed CO2 for quick cooling.

  18. Re:giant rubber bands on Boeing Working on Fuel Cell Aircraft · · Score: 3, Funny

    Ships and submarines have launching facilities for cruise missiles. They miss landing facilities for them, however.

  19. Re:Imagine... on Bill Gates Talk From 1989 Surfaces · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Because in some places, ten $5,000 computers could have taken the place of a "small-iron" system costing $500,000 (with the mainframe getting extra money from support contracts).
          As a well known Mercedes Benz dealership, you won't start selling Volkswagens because some of your clients will buy a Volkswagen instead of the Mercedes Benz (and your profit will be lower)

  20. Re:These are not PC issues, but Windows issues. on How Small a PC Is Too Small? · · Score: 1

    You need Ctrl-Alt-Del to log on.

  21. Re:2 words for my business on The Future of Creative and the Sound Card Market · · Score: 1

    The way to install the Audigy card without all the crud (well, applications that shows the capabilities of the card) is to take the driver update, find a rar file in it that contains the driver only, and install this way using the Device Manager, Update driver on the unknown audio device. I did that on WinXP, and worked fine.
          The card was an Audigy gamer edition, bought because the onboard sound on the mainboard (K7S5A) had very low volume - inaudible with headphones, and very very low even with powered speakers

  22. Re:Can game developers be Divas? on Spore Dev Down On the Wii · · Score: 1

    Too funny and too true :)

  23. Re:I'd love to on GDC: The OLPC Project And Games · · Score: 1

    No, the virtual OLPC (simulated) is nowhere near sufficient to check games. Not even the Sugar interface is not running real-time on emulation.

  24. Re:It's about time on Huge Linux Desktop Deals Get HP Thinking · · Score: 1

    The only reason to buy a corporate computer with Linux preinstalled is being sure that Linux runs on that configuration without problems. Big vendors will change small bits in the systems they sell without bothering to ask permission from the customers (new BIOS revisions, new mainboard revisions, and so on). Starting from a Windows-only workstation, you might be surprised to find out that the gigabit network was changed, from something that is Linux compatible, to something that isn't

  25. Re:Pet Gun Peeve on 9 Laws of Physics That Don't Apply in Hollywood · · Score: 1

    I've fired AK-47s outdoor in a shooting range, and it wasn't bad holding the rifle. It was worse when looking (standing 15 yards behind the firing line). Also, I prefer the sound of the rifle to the one of the pistols (.303 caliber semiautomatics).