Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:Not even close (Score 1) 186

by PKFC (#38926791) Attached to: Canada's Internet Among Best, Report Says

I live in Calgary and there is a business park that is Telus only - no Shaw. They won't run the lines out unless it is at cost to the business. Considering the normal situation is free install for residential, the infrastructure is obviously in place for that, but it would cost them thousands of dollars to have them lay cables for let's say a block away. The word from the complex owner about internet is "too bad" and no other businesses wanted to split the cost across all of them for something better than Telus there. I don't know the details on both provider's service map, but a city of a million should have each block lit up...

Comment: Re:Honda's bait and switch (Score 1) 633

by PKFC (#38630746) Attached to: Another Stab At Sorting Hybrid Hype From Reality

I have a 2008 Civic Hybrid in Calgary and the update was applied in January 2011 iirc. I was getting 46.6 mpg on a good tank (the mission was to always get the L/100km to read 5.0 not 5.1).. Now it's around 33 mpg with winter, new tires ( http://www.goodyear.ca/tire/assurance-fuel-max/ which you would think would be good...?) and the firmware update all worked in. It went in for a B12 service a month or two ago and after that, the car now revs to 2500 rpm pretty frequently. Thought it was another update like that, but they explain it with just a replacement to air filters.. Ugh..

Although there's also this story: http://ca.autoblog.com/2011/12/21/honda-extends-2006-2011-civic-hybrid-warranty-over-gas-leak/ which I don't know if that helps.. When asked about that a couple days after that was posted, the Honda service rep I had didn't know anything about it. Could be a Canada difference too. (For whatever reason [sales], only the US got 2009-2011 Civic Hybrids.. I'm still waiting to see about test driving a 2012 Civic Hybrid. My car is paid off though so no need to do anything)

Blackberry

UAE Police Claim BlackBerry Outage Made Roads Safer 206

Posted by Soulskill
from the keep-your-thumbs-at-ten-and-two dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Road traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi and Dubai plummeted last week — and the local police have a theory as to why: drivers' BlackBerrys weren't working. Police in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have claimed that last week's worldwide BlackBerry outage, which frustrated business people around the world who were unable to communicate with their colleagues, had one positive result — less texting and reading of emails by people who should have been concentrating on driving instead. There could be other factors at play, however. For instance, popular UAE soccer player Theyab Awana was killed in a high speed crash near Abu Dhabi in September, amid claims that he was sending a message on his BlackBerry when he hit a lorry. The football star's father, Awana Ahmad Al Mosabi, made an emotional plea to people not to use smartphones while driving, and a Facebook campaign against the use of BlackBerry Messenger while driving has grown in popularity."
Graphics

Intel Details Handling Anti-Aliasing On CPUs 190

Posted by timothy
from the upping-the-spec-of-normalcy dept.
MojoKid writes "When AMD launched their Barts GPU that powers the Radeon 6850 and 6870, they added support for a new type of anti-aliasing called Morphological AA (MLAA). However, Intel originally developed MLAA in 2009 and they have released a follow-up paper on the topic--including a discussion of how the technique could be handled by the CPU. Supersampling is much more computationally and bandwidth intensive than multisampling, but both techniques are generally too demanding of more horsepower than modern consoles or mobile devices are able to provide. Morphological Anti-aliasing, in contrast, is performed on an already-rendered image. The technique is embarrassingly parallel and, unlike traditional hardware anti-aliasing, can be effectively handled by the CPU in real time. MLAA is also equally compatible with ray tracing or rasterized graphics."
Transportation

Marking 125 Years Since the Great Gauge Change 426

Posted by timothy
from the railly-good-effort dept.
Arnold Reinhold writes "This month ends with the 125th anniversary of one of the most remarkable achievements in technology history. Over two days beginning Monday, May 31, 1886, the railroad network in the southern United States was converted from a five-foot gauge to one compatible with the slightly narrower gauge used in the US North, now know as standard gauge. The shift was meticulously planned and executed. It required one side of every track to be moved three inches closer to the other. All wheel sets had to be adjusted as well. Some minor track and rolling stock was sensibly deferred until later, but by Wednesday the South's 11,500 mile rail network was back in business and able to exchange rail cars with the North. Other countries are still struggling with incompatible rail gauges. Australia still has three. Most of Europe runs on standard gauge, but Russia uses essentially the same five foot gauge as the old South and Spain and Portugal use an even broader gauge. India has a multi-year Project Unigauge, aimed at converting its narrow gauge lines to the subcontinent's five foot six inch standard."

Comment: Re:Well, there goes Nintendo... (Score 2) 287

by PKFC (#35930504) Attached to: Nintendo Announces Wii Successor for 2012

I thought you trusted that Nintendo didn't release hardware just for the sake of releasing hardware. The 3DS is a speed bump, but does add 3D, a gyro from the wiimote tech and a pedometer from the pokewalker. The play coins are a cool feature and improves upon the chances of finding someone to streetpass which is also a cool feature. No one knows the feature list of the next home console (being more important than the spec sheet) and so no one can really say. That said, it is disappointing to know that there are games that are still in development for Wii (like Dragon Quest X) and will look outdated after a new console comes out..

Comment: Re:Not all that impressive, really. (Score 1) 101

by PKFC (#35190164) Attached to: NESBot: Tool Assisted Speedrun On Real Hardware

And I had a dream to build a mechanical setup to control a 360 controller to "TAS" Trials HD. That game begs to be demonstrated as a perfect play. But alas, I don't have any skills like that so the dream is dead.. I suppose it would be easier to try to take apart a controller, learn the signalling and basically have a minute long macro button. Any takers?

Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it.