Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Why does it cost $60K to convert to digital? (Score 1) 308

Yeah, I've never understood why there isn't a cheaper way to do digital projection. Why can't you make a 'digital film' that you can mount in front of an old projector's bulb? Might be pricey, but I'd think still way less than for a new digital theater projector. The local drive-in was begging for donations this past summer, so they could buy a new projector. All I can think is price gouging and/or collusion.

Comment Re:Fermis paradox (Score 4, Informative) 228

Er, no. Yes, it accumulates due to gravity, but it does not "set itself on fire due to acceleration": hydrogen fire (i.e. combustion) is a chemical reaction with oxygen (2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O). A 'star' is an accumulation of hydrogen until the pressure and heat due to self-gravitation are sufficient to allow sustained nuclear fusion to occur.

Comment Re:Good habits (Score 4, Insightful) 793

Having recently had to learn TI assembly to do things on some strangely designed DSP boards, I really do think it should be more widely taught. Memory management takes on a whole new meaning once you've had to fit your program (data acquisition and FFTs) and data into one shared 10kword RAM block which has some hardware-reserved blocks and various alignment requirements. I had plenty of conceptual understanding of how computers worked beforehand, but now things like shared busses, registers, stacks, addressing, interrupts, etc. have much more direct meaning to me, and I feel a lot more grounded even when coding in higher-level languages.

...Not to mention I feel grateful now that I don't often have to use ASM.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 394

You don't even need IPS, just try to test out models in-person (or look for reviews that mention rotation). I've had some mid-range monitors with the problem you mention, but others that work just fine in either orientation. Also, the most-common size I recall seeing for PC monitors is 1980x1200, though maybe that's changing with 'HD' sizes for TVs taking over.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 394

But the experts say it is so! It doesn't matter that they are talking about a limited usage in a small set of cases, it is clearly blanket applicable to all possible scenarios and people! Give in to the 80 characters! Heck, we might as well just go back to 80-col amber terminals! Anything else is just a waste.

Comment One of my biggest letdowns... (Score 1) 235

A definite plot hole and lack that will certainly get no help from this DLC is the fact that there was no fighting within the Citadel at the end. The endgame of ME1 established that the Reapers don't have any sort of 'kill switch' to clear the Citadel, and it's a huge city with a large population and a well-trained defense force (well-equipped, too, if you do certain side missions). They might have taken the indefensible central tower easily enough as in ME1, in order to close everything up, but taking the Wards should have been a real fight.

They obviously don't want harm to come to the structure (otherwise why bother moving it to Earth? Just blow it up: Crucible problem solved.) Thus they wouldn't be able to directly attack the Citadel the way they do planets, they'd just have to send in ground forces. I was expecting a fight once I got to that transport beam, a battle of attrition between forces constantly being dropped from some number of Reapers that had shut themselves inside the closed Citadel, and the CDF/C-Sec. Yet another place where Bioware failed at "your actions have consequences." Didn't do any CDF side-missions? Have fun grinding through streets littered with corpses, with no aid. Did all the missions? See the CDF holding their own. Buuut no.

The London mission as final gameplay was lame, it felt like a bad Modern-Call-of-Battlefield-War-Duty clone. Very disappointing, even before the rest of the craptastic ending.

Comment Levitating Dipole? (Score 1) 318

I saw a talk about Levitating Dipole plasma containment, and the speaker mentioned that the technique could be applied to fusion reactors that, on a similar scale to ITER, would be much cheaper (much, much less superconducting material required). Is there any money going into LDs in general, and fusion applications in particular? It seems like a very elegant configuration.

Comment Re:Stupid question why? (Score 1) 46

A number of groups down there have raw data rates far too large to store over the winter and ship back (would be 100s of TB). So they send summary plots or averaged data back, and every week or so go through and use the summaries to pick out the interesting times/sectors of data to store long-term until pickup. Better bandwidth could mean better summaries/less averaging, which can lead to better data selection. Or, you know, the winterover teams just want to be able to get Netflix. Probably a little of each.

Slashdot Top Deals

2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League

Working...