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Comment ARM (Score 1) 73

Big/little is a lazy way out of the power problem... Because instead of investing in design and development and in fine grained power control in your processor, you make the design decision of, "Heck with this -- silicon is cheap!" and throw away a good chunk of silicon when the processor goes into a different power mode... You have no graceful scaling -- just a brute force throttle and a clunky interface for the Kernel. So, not all ARM licensees have been convinced or seen the need to go to a big/little architecture because big/little has that big disadvantages of added complexity and wasted realestate (and cost) on the die. Unlike nVidea (Tegra) and Samsung (Exynos), Qualcomm has been able to thus far keep power under control in their Snapdragon designs without having to resort to a big/little and has thus been able to excel on the phone. So far, the Qualcomm strategy seems to be a winning one for phones in terms of both overall power savings and performance per miliwatt -- where on phones every extra hour of battery life is a cherished commodity. Such may not be true for tablets that can stand to have larger batteries and where performance at "some reasonable expectation" of battery life may be the more important. http://equipmentbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment malpractice (Score 1) 119

"clean relatively safe nuclear power." I don't think I would consider "safe" any industry where an accident or malpractice could result in a place being uninhabitable for 10,000 - 100,000 years. It is immoral to saddle future generations with this burden, however slight you perceive the risk to be. Nuclear apologists need to wake up. Human error is always going to be a problem. Untill the world gets its act together and starts deploying more CANDU type reactors which by design cannot meltdown, I for one will still fight against nuclear power. You have an industry that deploys proven flawed designs from 40-60 years ago, and then runs the plants way longer than recommended lifetimes. The way the world currently does nuclear power, more accidents are inevitable. http://equipmentbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment laptop (Score 1) 57

I'm not sure this meets the standard criteria for a laptop these days. That doesn't mean it isn't a valid, useful device, but if you think about the things most people buy a laptop to *do*, they're going to be secondary to the function of this machine. When you say "Laptop" people think "Sophisticated operating system, wide range of available software, media player, useful for software development, gaming machine (maybe), interfaces with wide range of modern portable devices, etc). This sounds like it's got a rather different set of capabilities in mind. Apple probably wouldn't like "HackBook", but it seems to fit better. Reply to This Share http://equipmentbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment VGA (Score 1) 67

Why does it still take fucking drivers, patches, and voodoo to fucking hook up a regular printer and make it function? Shit, I can plug in a VGA 13" or a 42" flat panel and the computer runs that just fine. Printers, I guess, are beyond the average PhD at Microsoft and Apple.http://bastcomputer.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment productive. (Score 1) 185

It's interesting that the author uses a time killing game as a yard stick for the waiting period - as if the time spent while printing was 'dead' and couldn't possibly be used for anything productive. That's his point - for the purposes of using the makerbot, it is dead time. You can't iterate before you have something, and you can't have something for 5 hours with a 33% chance that hardware failure was the problem and not the design. What we're really seeing here is the impatience of the Now Generation. What? You have to wait -thirty minutes- for something to be produced?? OMG! That's basically the same as having to wait 5 hours, right? Have these people any idea how long it takes to produce something through conventional CNC, let alone hand fabrication? How many amateurs are willing to burn virtually all of their free time for a day to do those things? Very few. Comparing your professional abilities and patience to his amateur abilities and patience is unfair (to put it very kindly).http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment PowerPC (Score 1) 54

Spend some time looking through the Linux kernel archives, or actually USING one, and you'll see that quite the opposite is true. What was a tolerable architecture for low-complexity embedded designs has serious flaws in cache coherency and clock-for-clock is painfully slow compared to a 464 (or, even, 440) PowerPC. Because the ARM lacks the useful complexity for cache coherency and memory, and memory-mapped IO, barriers, and a quite small page table entry cache, it does have a power consumption advantage over the PPC, though. Maybe (hopefully, really) the 64-bit versions won't be quite so crippled. Reply to This Sharehttp://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment Solidoodle (Score 1) 185

I've tried a few times to do unattended long prints on my Solidoodle but often enough something goes wrong partway - not only is the print ruined but a heap of filament gets wasted. Generally I stay close by and work on something else, and a couple of those times I managed to catcha problem that might have damaged the printer (e.g. snagged filament). Anyway, it's not completely dead time, but it does require a fair bit of nursing. Im slowly improving some of the mechanics and operating parameters so maybe it will get better, but it's far from foolproof yet.http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment ENORMOUS UPS (Score 1) 109

sure. not to mention the atrocious efficiency of wind power. Just pump water to a reservoir instead and let it out when you need it. I think that the article is trying to be clever, but missing an important point in doing so. Energy is generated from the compressed air using a more conventional turbine/generator setup... not a wind farm. This system is just an ENORMOUS UPS.http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment breathless (Score 1) 224

When you hear breathless talk about new paradigms in management social structure it's always people grasping at straws attempting to pin the tail on the contributory factors to their synergy. Good shit comes from selfless people, and selfless people attract parasites and tempt honest people in to taking advantage of the situation when their feelings get hurt.http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it Frosty Piss for everyone. Reply to This Share

Comment wood battery (Score 1) 120

This "wood battery" is an interesting concept, but this problem has already been solved by a team at MIT. They've been developing the technology over the last several years, and are now in the process of commercializing it. The first "commercial" prototypes are expected early next year. The details are in this video lecture [youtube.com] by the inventor, Donald Sadoway. This technology has great potential to revolutionize the way we produce and use energy. Worth a look... -- XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AChttp://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

Comment worth of equipment (Score 1) 254

they proceeded to physically destroy $170,500 worth of equipment, including uninfected systems, printers, cameras, keyboards and mice. OK, be honest now, who among us hasn't wanted to do this? Admittedly, destroying mice and keyboards is a little excessive, but I bet there's not a single person here who isn't dreaming of needlessly destroying a large quantity of computer gear in a very dramatic manner. -- Lost at C:>. Found at C. Reply to This Sharehttp://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it

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