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Comment Re:Application design issue. (Score 1) 569

Not quite, the article states that they disabled swap (for some reason)

The reason for disabling swap is to induce memory pressure.

The goal is to make the OS handle low memory situations more gracefully. Ideally it would remain responsive, allowing the user to kill unneeded programs to free up memory. That improvement would also apply to scenarios where swap was enabled.

Businesses

Ross Perot, Founder and Former CEO of Electronic Data Systems and Perot Systems, Dies At 89 (cnbc.com) 149

Ross Perot, a self-made billionaire, independent presidential candidate, and philanthropist, has died at the age of 89 after a five-month battle with leukemia. Perot rose to fame after founding his first company, Electronic Data Systems, in 1962 with just $1,000 in savings. More than two decades later, he launched information technology services provider Perot Systems, which was acquired in 2009 by Dell for $3.9 billion. CNBC reports on his political accomplishments: As a disruptive third-party candidate for president, Perot ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility and protectionism. He won nearly 19% of the vote in the 1992 race -- by far the biggest slice of the electorate for a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party in the 1912 election. Perot stood out from the political crowd for his quirks as much as his business credentials and lack of experience in establishment politics. "I don't have any experience in running up a $4 trillion debt. I don't have any experience in gridlock government, where nobody takes responsibility for anything and everybody blames everybody else," he said in a 1992 presidential debate. The shifting of U.S. jobs to Mexico created a "giant sucking sound," he famously said during the campaign. Perot was also a bit of a pack rat, collecting everything from whimsical toys to priceless artifacts. Perot owned the only Magna Carta ever allowed to leave Great Britain, which he loaned to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and in 2007, sold it for $20 million.

Comment Re:We need Amdahl's law for climate change (Score 1) 250

Almost all of "other" is electricity production

Which can be easily met with a few dozen nuclear plants, but the greenies won't have any of that.

You're short by an order of magnitude. Annual world electricity production is over 25 TWh, around 65% of that is fossil-fueled. With large (let's say 5 GW) nuclear plants at 90% capacity factor, over 400 would be needed to replace all fossil fuel electricity production.

Comment Re:How many grams per day? (Score 1) 251

The Ars Technica article says "produces 15,300 t/y of methanol" (doesn't specify short, long, or metric tons).

Divide by 365 to get t/day, divide by molecular weight of methanol (32.04 g/mol), multiply by molecular weight of CO2 (44.01 g/mol), I get 57.6 t/day of CO2 extracted from the ocean.

Does your "1200kg of CO2 per kW of solar capacity" assume that fossil energy is used to produce the panels? I couldn't readily find such a number, everything is about CO2 per kWh of energy produced over the lifetime of an installation. At any rate, the article says 24 MW of power, so (using your number) 28,800 Mg of CO2, which would make it 500 days of the 20 year projected lifetime to break even (assuming t is metric tons), and a lot of methanol would need to be stored somewhere.

Comment Re: That's 170,000 "facilities", btw, not panels. (Score 1) 251

The article says each complex of 70 "islands" (I guess artificial floating islands sounds better than anchored barges, which is what these would be) would generate 24 MW.

It says "we would need approximately 170,000 of these solar island systems", so 1,190,000 barges, with a total output power of 4080 GW.

The single nuclear plant would need roughly 640 times the capacity of the current most powerful fully operational nuclear plant.

It would truly be a sight to behold.

Comment Re:All manufacturers could do this easily. (Score 3, Insightful) 178

This isn't anything new. Anyone over 40 or so remembers when we use to have returnable soda bottles. Anyone over 60 remembers glass milk jugs from "milk men". Beer bottles used to be returnable for deposits. Why can't we go back to that model instead of this dumb recycling one?

Glass containers are heavier than plastic, thus requiring more energy to transport.

Glass containers are more prone to breakage than plastic.

Glass containers are more expensive to produce.

The trade-offs are complex; for some products the old model might actually be better.

Comment Re:Do like it (Score 1) 288

Hey I've got an idea, just a big square screen! I mean.... why not?

In another post, I suggested using a square image sensor, so the device orientation when recording wouldn't matter.
Show crop lines while recording if the videographer wants to target a different aspect ratio.
There is precedent in taking 6 x 6 format photos on 120 film.

Comment Re:The better question is (Score 1) 288

Why are so many people taking pictures in portrait mode rather than landscape? When outdoors landscape is preferable!

Laziness? Can't hold the device comfortably in landscape mode? Spend their entire life on the phone and can't comprehend that others might watch the video on a landscape screen?
The solution is to use a square sensor, record all of the data (video or still), and crop as needed.

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