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Comment We need your help - fusionfuture.org (Score 1) 244

Hi all, Geoff Olynyk here, one of the interview participants.

It was linked in the interview, but I wanted to point out that some of us have put together a website, fusionfuture.org with information about fusion and a really easy-to-use link to urge Congress not to cut fusion funding in the 2013 budget. They are planning to shut down the MIT fusion experiment (Alcator C-Mod) this fall!

If you go to the website (www.fusionfuture.org), and click the "Contact Congress Now" button at right, it literally only takes a minute to send letters to the Department of Energy and your Representative and Senators. We need your help to ensure that this important research continues in the United States!

Thanks everyone.

Comment RAID 5 + external hard drive (Score 1) 304

I use just a three-level hierarchy:

1. Photos and documents are on my RAID-5 array (4 × 1 TB Hitachi enterprise drives) in my desktop, backed up occasionally (every month or so) to a Toshiba 1 TB eSATA external drive sitting on my desk

2. Music, movies, TV shows, are on the RAID-5 array, not backed up

3. Windows and programs are on my 80 GB SSD, not backed up.

So I'm not protected at all against my house burning down, but this has worked for me for the past 10 years. (For my old system, which ran 2003–2010, it was a WD Raptor, not an SSD. And the RAID 5 was 4 × 200 GB.)

Comment Re:Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score 3, Interesting) 440

Haha, I guess that's true. Maybe what it most says is that Canadians are insecure because we wring our hands over a single big company falling from greatness :) But on the other hand, didn't Nortel go much the same way?

I guess it's a problem for smaller countries where their is only one world-class player in a given market. China or the U.S. doesn't agonize over a single big enterprise stagnating because there are several more waiting in the wings.

There must be consternation in Finland over Nokia akin to the parochial concern for RIM in Canada? Or are the Finns more confident.

Comment Boggles mind to think about how they squandered (Score 5, Interesting) 440

Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.

But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.

Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country? I sometimes wonder - even if RIM had had a clue and tried to come up with something iPhone- or Android-like, could they have done it without the California engineer and developer community? They had the money, but could they have enticed the brilliant graduates of top American schools to move to Ontario? And I don't mean to say that Canadian engineers aren't good, but that Apple and Google have access to a global talent pool - did/does RIM? (Fascinating question: How much does snow and ice have to do with the fortunes of a mobile phone developer?)

It's a sad but interesting story all around. I hope they can turn things around but I don't see much chance of it at this point.

Comment Re:I don't care about aspect ratio, just pixels (Score 1) 399

iPad 3 resolution = 264 ppi

On a 24" 16:10 monitor that's a resolution of 5376x3360, well above the capabilities of DisplayPort 1.2. Unfortunately! I would love a high-ppi screen. People always complain about how apps break, blah blah blah, get some high-ppi screens into the hands of vocal consumers and app makers will fix that shit right quick.

Comment Influence on price of equipment to do real work? (Score 1) 399

Dammit, accidentally posted this as AC just now. Reposting as myself.

Honestly I'm fine with the idea that someday my phone will be my main computer, and that I'll "dock" it to a keyboard and monitor at home. (As long as everything is constantly backed up to some cloud storage somewhere so when eventually I drop my phone or a jackass friend pushes me in a lake, I don't lose the past few days of work!)

But one thing I do wonder about is what this will do to the price of "real" workstation class equipment. Already, 4:3 monitors (which are much better for engineering work, spreadsheets, etc. -- think MATLAB, COMSOL Multiphysics, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, CST Microwave Studio...) are far more expensive than to 16:9 panels (which have the economies of scale from being the aspect ratio of broadcast TV). Even Dell's fantastic U2410 and U3011 LCD panels are 16:10, not 4:3.

So yeah. I'm fine with the day that most people's only computers will be a phone and a tablet, with a docking station for a mouse/keyboard/monitor. But for those of us that need more horsepower than a mobile processor can provide, it's not going to be good. Hopefully there'll still be enough gamers to subsidize the high-power graphics card and desktop processors so that technical people can afford them!

Comment Re:Copyright and patent laws reform, here I come (Score 1) 181

The problem is that such reforms will probably (in order from most to least important): (a) break EU rules, (b) break some treaties that Finland has signed with other non-EU countries on required length of copyright, (c) piss off the U.S..

Other than that, I fully support you, and I hope that something exactly like what you suggest goes ahead!

Hardware

Submission + - Lytro: Why it might succeed in spite of its camera (extremetech.com)

MrSeb writes: "After much hype and furor, the Lytro light field camera is now shipping to those who pre-ordered it. The initial response (from those who haven't been taken over by fanboy fever) isn't fantastic, though. Its odd shape, lack of video, 1MP final resolution, and the effort required to make images that really work well with Lytro’s special re-focusing “Living Picture” viewer, all combine to create the potential for the blogosphere equivalent of buyer’s remorse over initial predictions its camera would come to rule the world. Let's not forget that the Lytro camera only works with Macs for the time being, too; there will be a lot of disappointed Windows as they unwrap their Lytro pre-order cameras later this week. Fortunately, though, Lytro has a lot more up its sleeve than just cameras. To create light field cameras, Ren Ng, the founder and CEO of Lytro, also had to revolutionize lenses — and if you're an SLR user, you'll know that lens technology has been stalled for years. There's no reason that Ng's lenses couldn't be used on the front of an expensive camera. Then there's sensors: Sensor vendors are close to producing gigapixel models, but with conventional lenses diffraction rears its ugly head long before reaching that resolution. The first light field camera might suck, but rest assured that there's better things to come."
Science

Submission + - President's budget slashes domestic fusion energy research (fusionfuture.org) 5

Sgs-Cruz writes: "There is a huge problem with the Obama administration's budget request for fiscal 2013, announced a couple of weeks ago. Essentially, the government is trying to fund its share of the ITER construction (capital) budget out of the operating budget of the U.S. magnetic fusion energy research program, instead of increasing the funding to pay for ITER construction. One of the three tokamak facilities, Alcator C-Mod at MIT, is being closed entirely, and the other two are facing huge cuts and will have to lay off many staff. In a few years, this will swallow up the domestic fusion research program entirely. Given that magnetic fusion is one of the best hopes for abundant clean energy in the future, this seems very shortsighted on the part of the government. There is a letter-writing campaign under way to get Congress to reverse the cuts."

Comment If you go outside, there will be a record of it. (Score 4, Insightful) 148

While the commercial uses of these UAVs are cool (hunting feral pigs tearing up your crops using an IR camera on a drone and then radioing the location to your brother with a shotgun! That would be something that only a few militaries in the world could do a decade ago...) the real impact is going to be on the complete loss of privacy for just being anywhere outside in public.

I've long thought that the ease by which something can be obtained really does matter. I mean, things like divorce records have always been "public", but for most of history, that meant going to the city offices and having some surly clerk find the records for you in a basement filing cabinet. Which meant that strictly speaking, they were public, but in practice most people would never go to that trouble. With online records, finding out juicy details about your neighbour's divorce can be as easy as clicking a link. So the change in ease of obtaining records really does change the meaning of "public", even if it doesn't change the definition in a strictly legal sense.

It's the same thing with being outside. The advent of huge networks of computerized cameras on the street, on business fronts, and now perhaps on ubiquitous flying unmanned vehicles... it means that while you had no expectation of privacy in public before, in practice it meant that you could generally go places without anybody knowing about it, as long as you didn't just happen to run into somebody that knows you. Before long, an unblinking computer eye will see you everywhere. The idea of going somewhere without anybody knowing about it will be a thing of the past.

Now, is this, overall, a good thing? That I'm not sure about. Good and bad sides to it, I guess. (I'll be very interested to see its impact on strip clubs and massage parlours, though! Especially if divorce lawyers can subpoena the records.)

Comment Not a bad thing (Score 1) 58

Insurance companies typically force the insured company to be proactive, i.e. start thinking about cyber-security (or fire safety, or employee driver training, etc.) *before* something catastrophic happens. Like think of how your home fire insurance rates are lower if you install an automatic sprinkler system... same idea here with cyber-security. I have no doubt that the big insurance companies will be looking closely at companies' security policies before writing them a $200-million policy.

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