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Comment Re:It was pretty cool in its day (Score 1) 192

I wrote a bunch of software for the Amiga back in the day and they all tend to run really well on a emulator on any decent modern PC - actually often better than on the original systems when I designed the game. Sometimes I get nostalgic and play them in an emulator.

The Amiga 500 had 512K of RAM and even expanded to 1MB, it's still less than the cache on a modern PC so you can emulate the entire machine in cached memory - combined with instruction througputs and current clock cycles, a current PC is something like 10,000+ times faster for 32-bit integer operations involving memory.

Comment Re:HDMI has killed the need (Score 2) 502

Why bother? you cannot dismiss the hardware in the middle that GENERATES the audio... if your integrated hardware is poor -- your quality receiver amplifies poor quality audio.

HDMI can output DIGITAL Audio. MS has very good digital audio software mixing and playback algorithms. And many games use a library like FMOD which does software mixing and a DAC output anyhow.

You really only need to worry about a sound card if your PC is outputting ANALOG audio to HIGH QUALITY Amp & Speakers.

Comment Re:Metromile Automotive Insurance (Score 1) 353

They do things like limit the number of miles per day. So you're charged per mile but the maximum number of miles is capped in a single day. This means if you do a road trip where you do a lot of driving in a single day, your insurance won't suddenly go through the roof. This only works if they collect mileage data per day. But they also collect other info like speed and braking which could determine whether or not you're at fault in an accident (and if you're not at fault, could possibly help you?).

Comment Metromile vs Automatic (Score 1) 150

I bought the Automatic for $99.95. I had a number of issues with it. When I found out about Metromile for free I decided to give that a try as well.

There were a number of things I liked about the Automatic app but the Metromile just seemed to work much better (didn't lose trips) and it was free. If you're gonna be tracked while driving, I'd recommend the Metromile device.

Comment Re:Summary of techniques used? (Score 1) 54

FFMPEG is a program that supports hundreds of Codecs. It's likely they used a H264 or a compatible variant as the actual codec because a) its currently the most commonly used advanced video compression algorithm, b) there is plentiful hardware and software support for encoding / decoding, and c) it has a very good tradeoff for quality, bitrate, and processing horsepower required.

There is no guarantee you will get keyframes using H264 if you are compressing video without detectable screen cuts. Some H264 compliant codecs, like the very commonly used x264 library (used by FFMPEG), do not even need to have dedicated keyframes at all but rather use a technique called Periodic Intra Refresh to encode videos without keyframes. Periodic Intra Refresh provides much better streaming /live capture performance since it lowers both encode and decode latency for transmission and it lessens the incidence and severity of data rate spikes when using variable bit rate compression schemes.

Comment Re:Hello automation! (Score 1) 1040

Unfortunately this will hit teenagers the most. Contrary to what the supports of the home cherry pick, those who earn minimum wage have the least amount of experience.

Did you know that in the 1980's you could make minimum wage and pay for rent, food, and your college tuition? In fact, minimum wage in the 1980's was around twice the average college bills for in-state tuitions. (While the article I linked was for Ohio, it holds true for most of the country at the time and certainly in WI where I went to college).

Imagine being able to work a minimum wage job part time through college and come out with a degree and little or no debt. While it sounds ludicrous in today's world, this was the reality of America only 30 years ago.

Comment Re:now I never looked into it (Score 1) 420

The difficulty is not the ability to do it, it is that the energy requirements make it economically uncompetitive. Boiling that much water and then collecting the condensation generally takes a LOT of energy which is quite expensive in most cases.

It's worth noting that you can use the energy released by condensation to preheat water before it's boiled as well as use the temperature difference between just condensed water to preheat intake water. If you have high enough efficiency in your heat exchangers, you can significantly lower your energy requirements to boil water.

Comment Re:OPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS (Score 1) 144

You're referring to the exploit-mitigation-mitigation in OpenSSL, which indeed couldn't be disabled, as per tedu@openbsd, but OPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS was a separate option that noone has volunteered to claim of not working.

OPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS has since been made the default and only option in LibreSSL, and the heartbeats were removed.

But even with OPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS, if you are using a faulty allocator that lets you read data that has already been freed, you will still may be able to come up with other exploits (which are highly likely to exist in complicated software) that will let you read that data that you thought was "gone".

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