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Comment Re:Alphine Stereo for sale (Score 1) 257

haha, I had a roommate in the 80's that once bought an "Alphine" car stereo. He went to some traveling electronics market and came home all excited with his purchase. "Alphine" was the first thing I noticed when I saw the box, and I think that put a slight damper on his day.

I also have a brother that bought a digital camera from some guy at an Arby's. It's the only digital camera I've seen that takes 35mm film!

First Person Shooters (Games)

Quake 3 For Android 137

An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''

Comment This only effects the newer 1TB+ WD Green drives (Score 1) 258

It appears that this does not effect the older 1TB+ Western Digital Green drives such as the WDC10EADS. Those use 333GB platters and are native 512-byte sectors. The newer (newest) Western Green drives, like the WDC10EARS, use 500MB platters and have 4K sectors. One way to tell the drives apart with a quick glance is the old Green drives had 32MB of cache and the new ones have 64MB of cache.

Comment Re:My battery died (Score 1) 206

I agree. Dell must have used magic to make their old batteries or something. I own an old Latitude C600 with Intel P3-1GHz CPU, and have two batteries for this laptop. The batteries are 7+ years old, but each is still capable of powering this laptop for 2-3 hours with average use. As far at battery life is concerned, it's pretty amazing.

Comment Re:For most people ... (Score 1) 289

anything more complicated than adding a few numbers, it's easier to open a spreadsheet than to learn how any particular calculator functions.

Not if you use the Google Apps spreadsheet program. It doesn't round by default and gives weird results to some of the simplest math. Play around with it a bit and you'll see.

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