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Comment Acer Predator 21 X (Score 2) 300

From PCWorld, "The Predator 21 X features a full-height mechanical keyboard using Cherry MX brown switches. Acer isn't the first laptop maker to integrate full-height mechanical keys, of course, but it's a nice touch. The keys are individually RGB-lit, too. If you don't like the colored WASD keys, Acer includes more sedate black keys in the box." It's probably not the laptop you want, but that seems like the answer to your question in absence of additional constraints.

Science

CERN's LHC Powers Down For Two Years 71

An anonymous reader writes "Excitement and the media surrounded the Higgs boson particle for weeks when it was discovered in part by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But now, the collider that makes its home with CERN, the famed international organizational that operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory, is powering down. The Higgs boson particle was first discovered by the LHC in 2012. The particle, essentially, interacts with everything that has mass as the objects interact with the all-powerful Higgs field, a concept which, in theory, occupies the entire universe." We covered the repair announcement last month.

Comment Fixed Refresh Rates (Score 4, Insightful) 230

A display (television or monitor) has a fixed refresh rate. Assuming vertical synchronization is turned on to avoid tearing, you're pretty much limited to a framerate which evenly divides into the true refresh rate of the display. If the refresh rate is 60 fps, possible targets include 60 frames per second (providing 16.7 ms of computation time per frame), 30 FPS (providing 33.3 ms of computation time per frame), 15 FPS (providing 66.7 ms of computation time per frame), and so on. Anything below 30 FPS is kind of a joke, so nobody reputable would consider allowing more than 33 ms computation per frame in a shipping game.

Comment Accomplishment? (Score 1) 308

Do you feel a sense of accomplishment after having finished reading a novel, or watching a movie? Not every interactive piece of entertainment has to have a sense of accomplishment associated with it. A game can be interactive in a way that's interesting and entertaining without requiring a player to pick up a whole set of skills and really master them. You've missed the parent poster's point entirely. Some people prefer skill-based games, but not everyone does.

Comment Seriously? (Score 5, Interesting) 405

For a serious computer user, an SSD has been worth the money for a while now.

* If you need to do serious disk I/O with a mid-size or smaller notebook, RAID isn't even an option for increasing speed.
* Running multiple virtual machines? Want them to boot quickly? An SSD makes them feel native.
* Running Windows as a native operating system, and have more than one or two programs that you legitimately want to launch at boot, and can't/won't disable? An SSD makes your computer usable within tens of seconds as opposed to multiple minutes.
* Doing compilation? Syncing of filesystems with a system such as Unison? Doing anything filesystem heavy? The speedup is insanely awesome.

If all you care about is running Your Web Browser and editing Word documents, or storing a few photos, obviously an SSD is a more questionable upgrade, and probably will be for the foreseeable future.

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