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Comment Re:Thanks for pointing out the "briefly" part. (Score 5, Informative) 461

They do both.

I live in Berlin. It can be damn cold there in the winter. My apartment building is around a hundred years old, but it's been fairly recently refurbished, so it's well insulated. As a result, my heating bills are around €100 a year. The only radiator I really use is in my bedroom, and it only gets turned on halfway at most.

Comment Re:taxes will lead to kludges (Score 1) 238

Pretty much, yeah. Toyota designed an Atkinson cycle engine, which is much more efficient than the traditional Otto cycle. The problem is that it doesn't produce much torque, meaning that it doesn't take off as quickly as people would like. So they added an electric booster to make up the torque shortfall. The fuel savings from running on battery are minimal - the internal combustion engine usually kicks in within seconds of setting off, and stays on unless coasting. Conventional cars don't use fuel when coasting anyway, so you don't save anything there, and in fact lose a bit into recharging the batteries.

Comment Re:Really? I saw exactly where MS fucked up. (Score 2) 248

I don't know about that. The reaction where I was was "that's the way it should have been done all along". I had had several pre-iPhone smartphones and they were all nowhere near good enough. The market was there for the taking, but Microsoft's usual "why try harder?" attitude meant they hadn't the balls to go for it.

Comment Re:Don't over inflate! (Score 1) 431

But then again, tyres on modern cars are generally massively overspecced. People like the fat look, and they seem to think what they want is a car that grips and grips and grips and then suddenly doesn't. So we could probably afford to lose a bit of grip, really. Certainly your more eco-friendly vehicles tend to be equipped with thinner rubber.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 70

They're inching ever closer together. Witness OSX's braindead implementation of fullscreen apps, which don't allow you to do things as ingrained into the Mac way of working as dragging and dropping files from the Finder into apps. They did this to get their desktop OS closer to their tablet one, and it makes very little sense.

Comment Re:ethernet dongles (likely at added cost on $2k+) (Score 1) 683

Right, but that 1600x1200 screen was 17" diameter, and there's nothing useful in that sort of size any more. I don't want to have to buy a monitor that big just to get the resolution I need. This thing is the answer to my prayers because it fits more vertical pixels than any other screen into an eminently portable package.

Comment Re:Everyone ignores Commodore (Score 1) 301

Man, I remember when you could buy a Mac emulator on a cartridge for the Atari ST and it would run faster than a Mac Plus, and all for a lot less dough. The Mac was so far out of reach for most of us mere mortals it might as well not have existed. In the UK at least, they barely existed outside publishing houses and university campuses until, ooh, the iMac, probably.

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