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Comment Re:Be as nasty as you want to the Baby Boomers... (Score 0) 480

No. You are taking an extremely superficial view of the problems and claiming that we know the solutions. If you take your points together then they claim that we can build a viable closed eco-system. The experiments that have been conducted so far show that we cannot. We still do not know how to engineer a closed-loop that can survive for more than a few months and every experiment so far has had to shut down or risk killing the participants.

Sure we know how to build bunkers - do we know how to do large scale construction in a hard vacuum? Can we build a fission reactor large enough for a small city, launch it by rocket and land it on another orbital body? Or is it so easy to assemble it over there using our well-developed space construction skills?

It must be some utopian blend of crack in that pipe that you are smoking. Nobody is claiming that we can't learn how to do these things given the will and the experience, but to claim that they are already solved problems is just ridiculous.

Comment Re:Revert back to what worked (Score 1) 432

Indeed, just because binary was good enough for the first few millenia of civilisation did not stop the invention of octal in the 19th century. It did not stop the widespread adoption of decimal across the world in the '60s (apart from america), and hexadecimal is currently being established as an international standard. Who knows? By the mid-century we may have progressed as far as a base-25 system.

Comment Re:Who cares... (Score 1) 563

Oh dear, you don't seem to grasp the point so well. If I replace a single processor that performs a task with a set of parallel processors then I cannot claim the power is reduced just because the time is shorter. The energy consumed depends on both the time and the power use of the set of processors. Given the discussion that followed in that thread it is quite clear that understanding the distinction would have added something.

Comment Re:Who cares... (Score 1) 563

Your logic is flawed:

the less time the machine spends active the more time it can spend in idle which quite obviously results in less heat and power consumption.

The caveat is that power consumption must not increase during the shorter period of operation for this to be true. In the case that we are offloading work from the CPU to the GPU then it is not only the length of time that is important, but the relative power consumption of the two devices while drawing the text. It may be that offloading the text rendering to the GPU reduces power consumption (Microsoft claim that in the article), but it does not logically follow from the claim that the operation can be performed in less time.

Comment Re:Were they bored? (Score 4, Informative) 105

What would calculating the theoretical peak tell them about the (real) sustained performance?

Partitioning the problem in chunks that can be distributed to the nodes in the cluster adds overhead. Assembling the finished results does the same. It is kind of hard to predict what this over will be as it depends on the interconnect. In this case they used 100Mb/s ethernet, but there was contention from running NFS over the same network. Building it and measuring it is the only way to find out what kind of performance you really get.

Comment Re:Awesome! (Score 0) 713

Wow. Really?

I can't believe that you missed the point of his post so completely. Did you really read it, or just skim the first couple of entries, miss the painfully obvious pattern and then post the most self-humiliating reply that you could? Try reading it again. Maybe see if the words are familiar between items on the list and see if he is making some kind of wider point...

Comment Re:As if there were no touchscreens before Apple's (Score 1) 141

You need to lift your finger to flick between home screens. Nothing in the claim about lifting your finger, just moving above a velocity threshold

Says who?

verb/flik/
flicked, past participle;flicked, past tense;flicking, present participle;flicks, 3rd person singular present

Propel (something) with a sudden sharp movement, esp. of the fingers
- Emily flicked some ash off her sleeve

Notice that flicking something off of a surface would be distinct from flicking something across a surface, but that both are forms of flicking.

Comment Re:As if there were no touchscreens before Apple's (Score 3) 141

The patent covers something very specific: using the velocity of a swipe across a touchscreen to decide to remove an object / set of objects when a threshold is exceeds. Or in other words flicking / swiping through a collection of things, like the iPhone home screen or cover flow in iTunes. Ignoring whether the patent is valid or not (seems quite trivial to me) how is this "something we already know how to do, but on a computer"? It's a HCI gesture, not sure how it could be done without a computer...

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