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Comment Re:You'd think they'd have learned their lesson. (Score 1) 530

True, but... Multithreaded design is hard (except in shell scripting). Watt usage will be important for the vast majority of the market, namely laptops and smaller, and even now power is getting expensive enough to move me to my laptop for all light usage. Streaming instructions are best for problems that would already benefit well from multiple cores and OpenCL in many cases. Not saying your wrong, just adding some counter detail.

Comment You'd think they'd have learned their lesson. (Score 2) 530

Not to knock ARM, but A: I don't know that they have a design for a desktop processor yet (most of their designs seem to be in the Atom/Bobcat realm tops) B: With the absolutely massive amounts of money Intel put's into their Tick-Tock development cadence they have both pretty much the most optimized desktop/laptop architecture their is, and probably the most significant process advantage in the history of semiconductors. Honestly given the way both Intel and AMD have been able to use out-of-order execution and pipelining to achieve multiple Instructions Per Clock and multi-gigahertz clocks on a CISC-backed-by-microcode architecture I'm not convinced RISC actually has an advantage in practice. In addition Apple is stuck with the foundries, the same as pretty much anybody but IBM, and so pretty much CAN'T begin to produce a chip that will compete with Intel's best when comes to raw performance or performance-per-watt. For those reasons this would be pretty foolish any time in the next several years. Even if a decade from now they can work past it they will still be stuck fighting off the suspicion that they don't have the advantage they claim to, the one that more or less was true at the end of their use of PowerPC chips.

Comment Re:Flint is extremely sharp (Score 1) 287

Could you provide links and details? Mostly to satisfy my curiosity. Steel is NOT a singular substance. If you vary the formula you get different hardnesses and different grain sizes and structures. And last I saw some flint it looked pretty grainy. I could easily believe that obsidian could take a sharper edge than surgical steels for at least a single cut (especially since it looks like they may be formulated for hardness and corrosion resistance resulting in large grains). I bet you though that a good high-vanadium alloy or similar like the stuff in some high-end pocket knives probably attains a sharper edge than surgical steel with a good sharpening technique. And after a few cuts it probably has a better edge than the obsidian. Absolute sharpness is probably NOT the overriding market consideration for surgical steels. It might be worth noting that Wikipedia's pages for steels seem to be much worse than they used to be.

Comment Less than useful - it uses EBL! (Score 1) 142

Honestly why does no one seem to notice the part about this where the salt is being used in a "photo" resist for Electron Beam Lithography. That's beam - as in every single surface feature needs to be drawn by a beam of electrons one at a time. The amount of time and expense that would go into the construction of even one 3.5" platter is staggering. Yes it's cool and all but only a military application or James Bond could justify it; ever. An improvement to a mass-produced technology that makes it impossible (and I do mean impossible unless someone comes up with a magical quantum mechanical wave interference pattern that forms the magnetic regions all at once or something) to mass produce is no improvement at all.

Comment You can tape my punchtape when you pry it... (Score 2) 117

Am I the only who seems to notice that the old system apparently ran off ticker tape somehow? WTF! How do you even make that work? If these people have been working on such a system that long no wonder they have trouble training them to a new system, it must all be reflex by now like driving a stick shift.

Comment Re:Top Ten Things to do with FBI Tracking Devices (Score 1) 851

How about use the FCC ID on the thing to look up the manual and other related documents. Apparently it's meant for surveying work originally. "The GRS receiver is a single-frequency, GPS+GLONASS L1 L2receiver and hand-held controller built to be the most advanced, compact, and portable receiver for the GIS surveying market. An integrated electronic compass and digital camera make the GRS an all-purpose, GIS field mapping unit." https://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm?mode=Exhibits&RequestTimeout=500&calledFromFrame=N&application_id=933914&fcc_id='O9EQ2438F-M'

Comment Re:HDR? (Score 4, Informative) 287

They used more of a dragan-ish style of HDR here. They set it up to preserve local contrast at the expense of actually mapping brightnesses linearly. That's why it looks so freakish: some tones are brighter than other tones that should have a physically higher brightness.

Comment Re:funny (Score 1) 254

That almost sounds like a similar amount of CO2 to Earth atmosphere, with everything else stripped away. With enough nitrogen and enough water that almost sounds to me like you could grow some sort of photosynthetic life. Not that you'd ever have enough oxygen for much animal life.

Comment Re:Will the same happen to phones? (Score 1) 394

Nobody likes netbooks, because of a lack of margin, so they keep trying to make newer more expensive models which I'm not sure are ever purchased. They would like to believe that they are insufficient for most users, but they aren't. A system that I can watch television-quality streaming video on (Hulu stutters alot more than Youtube) is not underperforming. They've been making bank for so many years on expensive desktop replacements that they really don't like the idea of people switching to a cheaper, better desktop for power and a cheaper, better netbook for portability like the geeks have been doing and killing all their margin.

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