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Earth

The Dystopian Lake Filled By the World's Tech Sludge 215

New submitter trevc sends this story from the BBC: Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech. The city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge. ... You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking. It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals. These elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs.

Comment Re:Chrome OS is a joke (Score 3, Informative) 112

There are plenty of good options for a small laptop there. Personally I have a desktop computer that can do all the great things I want it to. For a laptop I wanted something small and light that I wouldn't have to worry about. A 13in Chromebook worked perfectly for that. I never use it for gaming or image development, usually just web browsing and email. Occasionally I'll do some development by SSHing into a Linux box, and if I really want to do something more intensive, I can remote desktop to my machine at home. It takes 6 seconds to boot, updates also take 6 seconds (and my windows are opened after), and it doesn't get loaded down with crapware. Worst case I can do a factory reset.

Now I realize some people want a mobile primary computer and this isn't the machine for them. Judging by the tablet market, people are quite happy to get machines that do one thing, so maybe it would be better if you saw this as a cheap tablet with a keyboard and USB ports.

Comment Re:Check their work or check the summary? (Score 1) 486

The experiment is a little strange. In both cases, they're trying to write a string to a file. In one case they're doing terrible concats as you guessed, then writing to the file. In the other case, they're just writing to the file. Shockingly performing the extra step takes extra time.

They even used a class called "BufferedWriter" to write to the file stream in Java - what did they think that might be doing?

Don't worry though, they did throw a flush() in there right before the close()

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