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Comment Re:Wind Electricity (Score 2) 413

My understanding is that wind exposure increases temperature change. If the air temperature is below your body temperature, wind will actually cool you down faster (hence the weather report's inclusion of a 'wind chill factor' during the winter months). That said, if it's warmer than your body temperature, exposure to wind will increase your body temperature, and in warm climates (like India) such temperatures are entirely possible.

Air cooling is almost always effective for devices like your computer's CPU/GPU as they're generally much warmer than air temperature.

Comment Re:Online network OK. But what about the Wii-U? (Score 1) 111

I've heard rumors that Nintendo might go to an app-store model for the Wii U that would presumably be a lot more open and XBLIG-ish than their current system (wherein they won't even consider giving you a dev kit unless you're an established development company with a dedicated office, etc.). If they actually did that they'd have to eat a bit of crow, though; Iwata and co. have come out against the app store model in the past pointing at all the crap that winds up making it through. Perhaps they're realizing that being an 'established' company doesn't prevent one from dishing out the shovelware, though, even as they lose out on indie hits like Tiny Towers that might not have made their licensing cut.

Comment Really? (Score 2) 692

The continued popularity of the iPad (and decent success enjoyed by Asus and Samsung with their respective Android tablets) would tend to put the lie to this claim. Acer's own entry into the tablet race was by all accounts a bit crap, so this sounds like some serious sour grapes to me. Also, I haven't heard from anybody in the real world who's excited about these 'ultrabooks' ; they sound like a sad marketing scheme from Intel, along the lines of their old 'Viiv' branding.

Submission + - Nintendo posts loss, cuts prices (yahoo.com)

Raenex writes: From the article: Shares of Nintendo Co. shed a fifth of their value Friday after the Japanese video game giant posted a deep loss in the latest quarter, cut its full-year forecasts and slashed prices on its new 3DS handheld device. Nintendo on Thursday posted a net loss of 25.5 billion yen ($324 million) in the April-June period, worse than the 25.2 billion yen loss a year earlier. For the fiscal year through March 2012, Nintendo expects net profit of 20 billion yen, down 82 percent from its previous outlook, on sales of 900 billion yen. The 3DS will cost 15,000 yen in Japan starting Aug. 11, down from 25,000 yen. In the U.S., the price drops to $169.99 from $249.99 on Aug. 12. Nintendo does not set suggested retail prices for Europe but said it would lower wholesale prices by about a third. Such a big price cut so soon after a product's launch is unprecedented for Nintendo, and it's likely to annoy the loyal fans who have already bought the device, said Eiji Maeda, an analyst at SMBC Nikko Securities in Tokyo.
Australia

Submission + - ALDI sells Conficker-infected hard drives (zdnet.com.au)

mukimu writes: "Supermarket ALDI has been selling malware-infected hard drives in Australian stores, prompting the country's Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) to issue an security alert to users on behalf of the government.

ALDI has had to issue a recall on the products, which contained components of Conficker, and remove the product from its stores.

AusCERT noted that the worm should be picked up by antivirus given it is extremely old and past its hey day when it infected Australian Banks and transport infrastructure."

Comment Re:And so the horde of twelve year olds yells (Score 1) 223

To be fair: Nintendo has come up with something of a solution re: the "nine-year-old's difficulty" bit. Their more recent games (Mario Galaxy 2, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Ocarina of time 3D) have all had "super guide" functionality - basically, a system that will optionally take over and play part of the game for you if you suck at nine-year-old levels. Seems like they've used that as leverage to start making their games properly challenging again for the rest of us. (Good thing, too; I don't think I died once during Twilight Princess or Wind Waker.)
Earth

Arkansas Earthquakes Could Be Man-Made 264

oxide7 writes "The small earthquakes that struck north central Arkansas could be from a combination of natural and man-made activity. Some experts think that pumping water into the ground as part of the extraction process of natural gas could cause local seismic events."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Is Setting Up an Offshore IT Help Desk Ethical? 3

theodp writes: 'Except for a few odd jobs,' wrote an advice seeker to The Ethicist (NYT), 'I had been out of work for nine months when I was offered a job setting up an [IT] offshore help desk. Would it be ethical to accept the offer?' Randy Cohen, who pens The Ethicist column for the Times, not only advised the job seeker that it was indeed okay to help co-workers lose their jobs, but also seemed to suggest that it would be unethical for him not to offshore the jobs, saying: 'Some people feel we have a greater ethical duty to those closest to us — our neighbors — but in an era of global trade and travel, that is a recipe for tribalism and its attendant ills.' The job seeker, who noted his father's auto-industry job was outsourced, chose to ignore Cohen's ethics advice — as well as his own wife's — and declined the job out of principle. He continues to seek work. Comments?
Graphics

Submission + - The sands of time - simulated (i-programmer.info)

mikejuk writes: A new simulation method makes sand flow realistically for a small fraction of the computational cost of more direct methods. The idea is based on the well known approach of simulating the flow as a fluid but in this case the equations used include more realistic terms to model the way particles interact with each other and with solid objects. The results are impressive.

Comment Re:Giant goliath convector heater of sorts (Score 1) 201

If we had unlimited power all the other problems are probably solvable through application of more power (for noise reduction, for instance, some sort of active noise-cancelling system, like a giant pair of Bose headphones). It would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would probably cause nasty environmental problems in the colder parts of the world (barring further application of our hypothetical unlimited power source).

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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