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Comment Not a Joke, and coming to your neighborhood soon.. (Score 1) 264

Suspicions surrounds seismic activity generated by geothermal drilling is not new. There was a pilot plant shut down in Switzerland after the number of localized earthquakes sky-rocketed. This is potentially scary stuff for the people that live there. This might be long term. More here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=geothermal-drilling-earthquakes

Comment Re:VirtualBox (Score 2, Informative) 384

Second Virtual Box, however..... OP may want to note that there is limited graphics drivers support. I am able to run Photoshop CS3 in my Win XP VB install, however I would caution recommending it if you (both) use it professionally and do things that rely on GPU acceleration. VB does support pass-through 2d and 3d support, but I'm not sure how to enable that, the option has always been grayed out for me. I run AMD, you may need nVidia drivers. I have heard rumblings too that Windows after XP doesn't work so swell due to the way windows validates its key at startup. Do your research, but this may be a problem for you too.

Hardware wise, I recommend a quad core and at least 6-8 gb of RAM. You can get by with a dual-core and 4gb, and I did for years, but the price of an amd quadcore is so low these days, there's no excuse not to.

Comment Re: And? (Score 1) 158

I've missing something here.

Indeed you are missing something, as is the person who wrote the summary of the article for ./ : It should read 4GB/s rather than 6Gb/s, two very very different numbers. FTA: "So you're getting the 4GB/sec. of PCIe bandwidth, not the 5Gbit/sec. or 6Gbit/sec. SAS bandwidth. You're getting almost an order of magnitude of bandwidth to the storage internally just because you're using an interface that's capable of it," Pollack said

Granted, it was the last line, so you really had to dig for that one, read the article next time.

Comment feckless,reckless!=fearless (Score 2, Insightful) 1695

In his effort to look fearless he is acting reckless, and ends up looking pretty feckless. If he wasn't acting in a way that could get a lot of other people hurt, and people were actively threatening only him, then he would be brave. But since there are many people that could get hurt and he couldn't give two flips that makes him reckless. Our state had a campaign against reckless driving that focused on the roles that passengers can play in preventing accidents by holding bad drivers accountable and saying something when they act dangerously. Pretty similar idea here. I do hope that Government will not step in to stop this (freedoms are still important), but I also hope that private citizens and companies will not abet this nut, and that news will not cover him. Everyone has a right to free speech, but that doesn't mean that anyone else has to promote his dumb ass.

Comment Deathtweeting the new extreme sport? (Score 2, Funny) 77

I can't wait to see the new extreme sports that come out of this. My mind races. Bungie Tweeting, sky tweeting, base jump tweeting, etc. And for that matter, it's probably only a matter of time before someone tweets there own death ("going to the light #lifeafterdeath, pray for me @joan @Derrick @slashdot") if it hasn't happened yet.

Comment Re:I see nothing snake-like here.. (Score 2, Insightful) 90

Nature is a fantastic designer. Sure, she works slowly, but every project is subjected to years of testing and refinement. It’s no wonder then that we see engineers looking to nature for inspiration in robotics.

After reading this quote I was thinking the same thing, and also wondering what snake they looked at... Did it have a broken spine?

I have a 80" arboreal python and it moves nothing like that on the ground or climbing a vertical post. Snakes don't twist on the ground, and most (arboreal) snakes don't wrap around trees like that either, as it is an extremely inefficient method of motion for moving. Watching how a real arboreal snake climbs a tree would have yielded a much better climber of a robot. In my experience snakes use large bends in their bodies as hands or feet that they use to grip the sides of the object. They can release the bends muscle tension and moves up the post, squeezing again, and repeating the process downwards. It looks like an inchworm, but with the inching movement perpendicular to the direction of movement and opposed to congruent. That I would like to see on a robot, and it seems like it would also fit well with the attempts at modular design they are working with.

I understand some of the excitement about this thing, but as a snake owner I am not even close to impressed, even if it had frickin' laser eyes. This thing looks a worm after a rain, not the delicate beauty and raw strength of a snake. Whatever happened to all that hydraulic muscular research I read about years ago? This would have been the ideal application rather than a bunch of universal joints...

Comment Of course, it's not like Angle is innocent... She (Score 1) 253

got the race litigating early on when she tried to sue Harry Reid's campaign for re-posting her old website after she had changed it substantially. The situation of the purchase of articles followed by litigation is certainly some dirty business, but I just can't help but think that perhaps this is a little comeuppance??
IBM

Submission + - IBM unleashes 256-core Unix server (idg.com.au)

angry tapir writes: "BM has released new systems based on its Power7 processors, including a Unix server for large enterprises that scales to 256 cores. The Power 795 is IBM's biggest Unix server to date. It's aimed at companies that run large-scale database applications or want to consolidate multiple Unix or Linux workloads onto a single system using IBM's PowerVM virtualization software."

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

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