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Comment: Overblown (Score 1) 205

by GoRK (#38251228) Attached to: Apple, Android Devices Swamp NYC Schools' ActiveSync Server

$1MM of iPads represents about 2500-3000 users depending on the discount they received. First, I'm presuming that these users already had mailboxes and it's just the additional load of ActiveSync that is causing the trouble. If that's the case, with the types of discounts that government and education receive from microsoft and hardware vendors this is like a $15,000 problem at best. In the scope of a million-dollar project a 1.5% budget problem represents poor planning, but I've seen much much worse.

Comment: Passive cooled GPU (Score 1) 205

by GoRK (#38251180) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Parallel Cluster In a Box?

Don't use high end GTX cards; twice as many lower end passively-cooled GPU cards will provide more than the equivalent performance with far less cost and failure rate. If your application really benefits more from additional threads vs single thread execution speed, this is the way to go. Most GPGPU clusters that aren't built using Tegra use this approach.

Comment: Re:But weren't they on anyway? (Score 1) 621

by GoRK (#30303402) Attached to: SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation

Wait, you really don't believe this? I have a kill-a-watt and can assure you he speaks the truth. I don't have a ridiculously high end computer, but I can get its power consumption to vary by more than 300W between it being idle + LCD's in DPMS power save and me actively pushing the cpu and gpu with something. Putting it into S3 suspend will break off another 50W or so.

Now 10 year old hardware pushing 40W delta between unloaded and loaded not including a CRT going to sleep or something? Doubtful. Maybe 15-20W tops. But then again some of that school district's hardware was much newer and $0.06/kWh is a pretty decent utility rate too. I'd say $1 million is a pretty good round number here even though it probably represents a modest 10-20% increase over the bill were 5000 machines simply left on and idle. But consider if this guy who had enough control to install software on 5000 machines had simply set them to go to S3 after a couple hours of not being used? He could have saved the school district millions on power just as easily as he wasted it.

Comment: Re:Standard Calculus (Score 2, Informative) 369

by GoRK (#30014478) Attached to: Radar Beats GPS In Court — Or Does It?

The real answer here is it depends a great deal on the GPS itself, then it depends on how whatever software is reporting and logging this information post processes it.

GPS itself is capable of reporting an instantaneous velocity vector calculated by measuring the doppler shift from each satellite. (Comes in as a GPVTG sentence in the NMEA data) So if the receiver is tracking a lot of satellites with a good distribution and there isnt a lot of multipath problems, the accuracy of this vector is ridiculously good. Also, a receiver may not support GPVTG.

Now you can also get velocity data from a GPRMC (ie normal position data) sentence too. According to the specification, the bearing here is supposed to be calculated based on position track angle (presumably so that you dont have to be moving to have a GPS bearing).. The spec seems silent to the origin of the speed reported in this sentence -- seems like it could be calculated as track speed (average speed over the interval) but could easily be reported as instantaneous speed as well.

Of course I haven't tested any, but I imagine in practice, GPS receivers would normally report track/position averaged data in GPRMC and instantaneous data in GPVTG. Any software that is supposed to present this data to a user would have to determine how to aggregate and filter it to provide for its intended purpose. If you really intend to beat a speeding ticket with GPS I would suggest that you need data points of either type (instantaneous or averaged) with at least 1Hz if not 5Hz granularity along with knowledge of what the data represents and how the raw data is filtered and processed. This 30s interval business in this case is just dumb, and nobody ever bothered to determine anything about the nature of the data it seems.

Hardware Hacking

How To Play Poker With Your Rock Band Guitar 121

Posted by timothy
from the jumprope-can-be-hifi-if-it's-got-usb dept.
An anonymous reader writes 'Sean Lind over at PokerListings has written a really interesting piece on how to configure Rock Band (or Guitar Hero) instruments to use them as controllers for playing online poker. The instructions given in his how-to could really be used to configure the instruments for any game.' Or how about a genuine chording keyboard?

Comment: Re:Iridium? (Score 1) 438

by GoRK (#29458863) Attached to: (Near) Constant Internet While RV'ing?

Thank you; very good information here; I didnt realize a station had to reply inside of the same frame. There IS therefore a timing issue but the BSS could counteract it obviously as you said by maintaining an additional frame offset internally. So this explains a 35km limit on GSM itself but do the 3g GSM technologies attempt to pack additional data in by shortening the guard period? If so that would explain a smaller distance limit, but I don't think data would be rejected; seems you'd just fall back to EDGE or GPRS?

Comment: Re:Iridium? (Score 1) 438

by GoRK (#29447151) Attached to: (Near) Constant Internet While RV'ing?

You are sure of this? Can you give some reference material? I would really like to know how or why this is true. I have hit EDGE data over some pretty impressive distances (10 miles) with the proper equipment. I really can't see how the BSS would reject a distant signal if it were good enough. The distances aren't great enough to cause any timing issues.

Comment: Re:Who Cares (Score 1) 364

by GoRK (#29303341) Attached to: Game Over For Sony and Open Source?

Since the Linux kernel only interfaces with the virtualized devices presented by the PS3 hypervisor, and since this hypervisor presents exactly the same interfaces to GameOS as it does to OtherOS (where it simply blocks many hypervisor calls) this is exactly what I'm suggesting. No shit!

If Sony is actually realizing cost savings by dropping this feature, it's certainly not happening in development, but in QA, Support, and Legal. It's still sad to see it go, and I hope they bring it back.

Life. Don't talk to me about life. - Marvin the Paranoid Anroid

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