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Comment Re:"NAS" hard drives? (Score 4, Informative) 190

Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?

Pretty much yes. The Red have better vibration tolerance, and the firmware is tweaked to fit a NAS workload better. For example, a Green will park the head as quickly as it can which for always-on machines can lead to a Green disk reaching its "Load/Unload Cycle" tolerance in months and die prematurely. The Red will not do this.

There's also a difference in how they handle unreadable sectors and such errors which makes the Red play nicer with hardware RAID controllers. An unrecoverable read error in a Green can cause the whole array to go down.

Comment Re:Syntax looks gnarly (Score 1) 194

You have to get used to that. In functional programming, parentheses are usually used to denote function calls.

I really have tried, but it's just too terse for me.

At this stage I'm pretty certain I won't grok a functional language until someone invents a functional language that doesn't look like some variation of Brainfuck or similar.

Comment Re:Syntax looks gnarly (Score 2) 194

Looking over the official tutorial pages, the syntax is really different than anything I've done before. It looks hard to learn.

Indeed. And what's with this obsession amongst the functional language developers to try to use the least amount of characters possible? We're no longer in the 1960's where verbose source code took a lot of valuable space.

For example, when I read

fun double n = 2 * n

I see a function called double which implicitly takes a parameter n and returns true if n = 0, and false otherwise. Would it have killed them to separate the parameter from the "body", and used proper names? For example:

function double(n) = 2 * n

Comment Re: These idiots remain idiotic (Score 1) 388

You'd need offline viewing capabilities, and Netflix has said they will never offer that.

No you don't. The vast majority of people who watch "pirated" movies are online 24/7 with good enough pipes for streaming.

I've got Netflix and HBO (Nordic). Last sunday I wanted to watch the new XMen movie with my gf. Brick and mortar stores aren't open here on Sundays, so no chance there. And of course neither Netflix nor any other similar streaming service available to me carries it yet. But the pirated Bluray is out there, and it would have taken me just 15 minutes or so to download a rip and start playing it on my TV.

No, what I think they need to do is to make a "movie-Steam" Netflix hybrid. That is, a rich catalog of movies for a monthly fee. Then allow me to pay money for early access to new releases. Once I pay I get to keep access to that movie.

And by early access I mean when the first Bluray hits the street. Because that's when people can get the pirated version.

Comment Re:RTG (Score 2) 88

That would depend heavily on the radioactive material used, no? For example, Wikipedia lists Pu238 to have just a ~16% drop in output after 20 years.

I'm guessing cost and weight were the key factors for picking solar over an RTG.

Comment Re:What's the FPS of diminishing returns? (Score 2) 30

There are several things at play here.

One is the latency as mentioned, which is very important for VR. Heck even playing with a mouse and a regular monitor I can feel the difference between 60 Hz and 120 Hz, not to mention 30 Hz. At 30 it feels like my mouse is submerged in honey. At 60 it's decent but if you switch suddenly to 120 it you do notice that 120 is quite responsive in comparison.

Then there's also motion blur. Due to the way most LCDs currently operates, they introduce a lot of motion blur. This is beause the image is shining for almost the entire frame ("sample and hold"). The eyes tracks the motion, expects to find the object has moved but get's conflicting data because the monitor is still displaying the same old frame. This causes a perceived motion blur.

This is unlike "modern" CRTs for example, where the image faded quickly (within 2ms or so). For the rest of the frame the monitor was effectively black. That is much better for the eyes, and results in smoother perceived motion at the same framerate.

Even at 120Hz motion isn't completely smooth if you use sample and hold. Newer LCD monitors can strobe the backlight to get an effect similar to CRTs and thus reducing motion blur.

Comment Re:"Leftover" high energy electrons (Score 1) 93

The LHC has about 115 billion protons in each bunch, and was designed for almost 3000 bunches at a time (I forget how many they ran before the shutdown).

Only a fraction of these protons collide, so there'll be plenty left when the beam quality is low enough for them to dump the beam and get a fresh one.

Comment Re:Changes require systematic, reliable evidence.. (Score 1) 336

At work we have a 100/100mbit internet connection (fiber), "business class" from a very solid ISP. We're 10 people here. Not long ago internet was horribly slow to the point that it took literally a minute to load my usual news site. Ping was up in the 1-2 second range.

Turned out one of my coworkers was downloading the some Windows ISOs from Microsoft.

If we didn't have QoS on the VOIP I'm pretty sure we would have noticed quite quickly.

Comment Re: We really need (Score 1) 533

I'm in Norway on a 100/10 connection (which is plenty for me), and when surfing more obscure music videos on Youtube for example I definitely notice when I hit non-cached content. Even 480p can take up to a minute to start playing, and often has to pause to catch up.

For cached content 720p or 1080p is just there, instantly.

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