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Comment Re:Great for some apps (see netflix blog) (Score 1) 172

I guess, but he's only going from 7.5 seconds (1995 Civic Si) 0-60 to about 6.8 seconds (2013 Mustang V6 automatic), so only about a 10% improvement. I think the overall improvement from a HDD to a SSD is significantly more than that. Now if you said a mid-90s Civic LX to a new Mustang GT you might have a better point.

Comment Re:How to do real science (Score 1) 307

Yeah, the summary is inaccurate (surprise, surprise). Benefit to National Defense is one of several or statements, not a requirement for all NSF funded research. The whole thing is still really stupid and betrays a complete lack of understanding of basic research and the mission of the NSF, but that's to be expected of Lamar Smith (R-TX), nincompoop extraordinaire.

Comment Re:News Flash! (Score 0, Troll) 315

Company makes billions of dollars; wants more. Competitors not happy.

Translation: "They're doing what we would do, but they're a lot better at it than we are."

You never know how the EC will react, tho.

Of course you do. Their thought process goes something like this:

Hmm, is it a European company? No. Is there a European company that might, some day, in some form, offer a competitive product? Yes.

Complaint upheld.

Comment Re:Right... can you actually read? (Score 1) 299

You can spot the downfall of Lucasarts when during the opening graphics of X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter between the iconic logo's, there was a silly little bi-plane animation of a the 3rd party studio that got involved. And while the game offered some intresting new features, it just couldn't hold a candle to the solid quality of its ancestors. Some more disasters followed until the company was reduced to ordering totally unrelated companies to produce mods for other peoples games.

X-Wing and Tie-Fighter were both developed by a 3rd party, Totally Games.

Comment Re:Wrong lesson. (Score 1) 569

Battlefield was never a single-player game, so bad example. Oh, the first ones had a single player mode, but it was just a bot match on the regular multi-player maps. They shouldn't have even bothered with the single player "campaign" in BF3. The problem with the launch of BF3 was that they'd horribly under-provisioned Origin, which they still haven't learned from. I find it really bizarre that these companies don't make use of the abundant flexible computing resources available, and design their login servers, at least, to make use of them for rapid scaling - obviously it wouldn't make sense to build their permanent hosting system to deal with peak launch-day traffic, but it shouldn't be that hard to design it so they can temporarily run instances on AWS or whatever.

Of course, another problem was that they made it much more expensive to host a server for the game (compared to BF, BF2, etc.; I never played the Bad Company games, don't know about those), so there were also insufficient servers to play on, all of them concentrated with a few hosting companies that couldn't really handle the load (from what I've heard).

Comment Re:Mo it is 7.5 time larger larger (Score 1) 218

They already have processors that easily handle the processing aspect, so I don't think that's really it. No, this is actually aimed at improving the quality of the video recorded. When you use a whole bunch of tiny, high-sensitivity sensors, you get a lot of noise in low-light conditions. You just aren't getting enough photons hitting each sensor to create a good signal - highly variable, noisy images are the result. You can overcome this somewhat by averaging a bunch of sensors together, but you're basically averaging a bunch of known bad data in hopes of creating good data, and the outcome is often much less than satisfactory. This doesn't matter so much in still photography, where you can just keep the shutter open a little longer to collect more photons, but in video there are limits to how long you can open your shutter for each frame.

By using larger sensors, each one is intercepting a lot more photons and given the same sensitivity constraints it will create a much better signal. Anandtech recently did an article relating to this, although they were looking at cell phone cameras and one company that is deliberately decreasing MP in exchange for larger sensors in order to improve image quality for stills and video (though it is a presentation one of their writers gave, and doesn't go into a whole lot of the theory of why fewer, larger sensors can give better results than more, smaller sensors).

Comment Re:I think (Score 1) 292

Well duh, everyone knows the CIA has been in a state of undeclared war with Australia for decades, and clearly the best way to bring Australia down is by protecting their environment. I mean, have you seen Australia's environment? I figure another decade, two tops, and the nation of Australia will crumble from within due to the unrelenting assault by their natural environment, and China will be free to sweep in and exploit their natural resources.

What, did you think the CIA was working for the U.S.? Sheep.

Comment Let the users choose (Score 1) 383

At the university I previously studied at, they went through pretty much the same process when they decided that individual departments would no longer be permitted to have their own email domains. They set up a system to allow people transferring to the University-wide domain to specify their own name, with the limitation that it had to include at least one character from your first and last names (along with various other requirements). So if your name was John Smith, you could choose whether you wanted JohnSmith@university.edu or JSmith@university.edu or even ohmit@university.edu. Obviously your choices became more limited if there were other John Smiths at the university, but at least in that case you got to decide how to resolve it for your self. Presumably there was a list of banned strings, I'm not sure. In any case, I liked this solution because it allowed the user to decide what format they wanted to use and ensured that people were, in most cases, quite happy with their email address (though I'm sure some people with common names may have had some difficulty). After all, this is a university setting and there is no really convincing reason to make everyone use precisely the same format - standardizing on one format doesn't really gain you anything.

Comment Re:Headers (Score 1) 562

"Buy your fuel on cold days, you get a *little* more for your $50 than you do on a hot day (hence airlines buy fuel by weight, not volume)."

Used to be more true than it is now. Most fuel station tanks in the USA are 2-3 ft underground, below the frost line, so the stored fuel temperature stays at a relatively constant 50 or 60-something degrees even on the hottest summer days. Sure, if it's a bloody hot day at a station that isn't used much, the fuel that's actually in the pump may warm up a little, but they retain very little gas.

Unless, of course, you lived in Centralia, PA. Then....then you have a very good point.

Surprisingly, even UST's have a pretty large temperature variation. Gas is usually refined, distributed and trucked above ground, so the fuel in a 10000 gallon UST at a station may not reach ground temperature before the next delivery of hot or cold liquid if it's selling fast enough.

But it still isn't really affected by air temperature. The tanker pulls its load from a very large above-ground tank that keeps a fairly stable temperature (a 40-90,000 barrel tank doesn't fluctuate very rapidly), which in turn is generally fed by underground pipeline from the refinery (where it was probably stored for a few weeks prior to delivery). Then the tanker drives it for perhaps a couple hours at most to your local station (maybe a little longer for very remote locations). Even on a hot day 8,000 gallons isn't going to warm up a whole lot in an hour or two, so you have relatively cool fuel going into the underground tank. Likely warmer than ground temperature a few feet down (so you're right, the temperature in the UST will fluctuate), but not really affected by ambient air temperature.

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