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Comment Re: NASA (Score 1) 119

Funnily enough, so were the satellite, mobile phone, trips to the moon, voyages to the bottom of the sea etc.

Now if the OP had referred to "Type" rather than level, he would have been referencing the Kardashev scale which is a genuine metric...the fact that it might we have evidence of only a single civilization to measure using that metric is immaterial.

Comment Re:Why are our tax dollars going for this crap? (Score 1) 96

I seem to recall reading that the return on investment for the US economy from the 1960s space program was something like 100-1. Today government investment in a space program acts as investment for private companies to develop new technologies - and I would be unsurprised to discover that the return is still not above 10-1 from an economic perspective.

If you really want to attack waste of money spending there are FAR better targets.

Comment Re:Identify and present options for reducing budge (Score 1) 146

I would mod you up (except for the stupid mod system that means I never have mod points when I want to mod).

Sadly this is "business" 21st century style ~ 50% politics, 10% luck, 10% corruption, 30% actual work. Many failing companies could be turned around in short order by removing the top heavy bonus culture for a more equitable system (e.g. look at Germany for a viable model) with all the long term benefits that brings but in cultures where next quarters earnings report matters more than whether the company will still be in business in 10 years, thats never going to happen.

Comment I love my nook... (Score 1) 330

its just a pity that B&N only have about 0.0001% of the available books (i,e. of those that have been electronically published in any format) available through their store, and what they do have are vastly overpriced. I'd still rather own a paper copy of a book and pop it on my bookshelves, but at the same time I would love to be able to start reading an e-version immediately hence my last book purchase went through amazon and the errmmm less than kosher e-version onto my nook while the physical ones arrived.

I wouldn't have minded paying a (small) premium for that, even though I think it should be done by default. I wouldn't have minded buying the e-version if the price reflected the significant savings of not having the expenses of physically distributing the books to retailers, the retailers mark up, the printing costs, the warehousing costs etc. etc.....but in the end, the paper copy was cheaper than the e-version!

It's sad really...all the out of print books that exist, all the various opportunities to innovate and instead we see companies driving themselves to the wall from greed.

Comment Re:Sony Hackstation (Score 3, Informative) 457

I'm amazed no one has said "HUMA" - Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access, and that this fundamental difference between the architecture of PCs and the PS4 is likely to make it an uphil struggle for PS4 emulation. It *may* be a different story when it comes to AMDs Kavari (?) APUs since they use a HUMA architecture themselves.

Personally I think the best to expect is that we may see more games ported to Linux ....

Comment Re:Old timer (Score 1) 153

Define "better" please.

My boss would have defined better as the 10x programmer who got done in 1 month what I'd said would take 10 but left zero documentation, unit tests or comments; and code so brittle that the slightest deviation from spec brouht the entire mess crashing down around our ears. Sure he was 2x as expensive and it took me nearly 12 months to sneak something past the powers that be that reduced my daily support request queue back to what it was prior to him coming and working his magic but goddamit he got 10 months of work done in 1, it was obvious that he was "better".

In all seriousness though, I find myself looking at a lot of the work I do these days and being aghast at the lack of optimization but with interpreted languages that are only an order of magnitude (wth a good headwind) slower than C and bandwidth that flows like the aftermath of an all-you-can-eat chicken vindaloo from the cheaper side of Rusholme, it just doesnt matter anymore.

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