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Comment It's nice being able to compare things (Score 1) 150

Just had a click around, and can see that DFW airport emits Megatons of CO2, while the Permian basin oil field emits over 200 Megatons. I don't deal with megatons in daily life, so it's hard to compare what a "lot" is. It would be interesting if you could somehow 'turn off' emitters, and the site could predict how much effect that would have. For example, folks in this thread are getting rankled up over private planes, whether Al Gore has ever used or owned one, etc., but is that what folks should actually be getting angry at or is it totally missing the point in the larger context? Showing what effect eliminating all private aviation would actually have would be really interesting. Good work on creating this site!

Comment Re:Carbon neutral dystopia (Score 1) 35

Sure, you can also break down all the energy used to support the humans (vehicles, housing, food etc.) and skew however you want. The only truly carbon-neutral factory is one that isn't built in the first place, humans or not, and they you're one good volcanic eruption away from that not even mattering. Anyway, you can read more about optimizing energy use of robotic factories here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Do we really need another competing system? (Score 4, Interesting) 69

We have legacy geosynchronous systems and StarLink already. Any reason why there needs to be another competing system at all, or at least not one that can't interoperate with at least one of the others as a common carrier? They say this is to "deliver a small, affordable customer terminal to connect unserved and underserved communities around the world", they'd reach that goal a lot sooner if they just worked with StarLink, rather than needing to have multiple incompatible sets of satellites and terminals. At least starLink's mission is more honest, and doesn't try to pretend it's cheap or necessarily for the good of society. After all, you need plenty of rich tech workers from remote locations to get your operation at least cash-flow neutral. "Starlink provides high-speed, low-latency broadband internet across the globe. Within each coverage area, orders are fulfilled on a first-come, first-served basis." Their competition is clearly cell and terrestrial incumbent providers who have failed to provide universal coverage for decades.

Comment Re:Opt-In? (Score 5, Informative) 234

It's true. OpenBSD does not benefit from hyper-threading, at least on all Intel platforms I have tried. Having it off happens to be a small net-win for performance as well (a few percent on compile tests). This isn't just true for OpenBSD or for every workload either. Your mileage obviously may vary and should be tested.

Comment Re:Sabotaged (Score 1) 309

My Nissan Frontier and Toyota Sienna were both manufactured in the US, though it's more likely the vehicles themselves are tailored to the NA market in the first place. I've worked at companies that do a fair amount of domestic electronics manufacturing, and it is really difficult to get a big, complex design even 95% defect free when human error is involved. Designing products and packaging that can survive shipping and various installation mistakes (even domestic, first class shipping) seems to be a big portion of the nightmare. Unless you have a very high margin or volumes, RMA costs can completely erode your profit. And often by the time you've solved all of the problems, the product is next to obsolete :P.

Comment Re:X32 (Score 3, Interesting) 95

In my opinion, it is designed pimarily so that Intel's embedded processors run Android well in the short term. Atom architecture in particular benefits in that some pointer offset calculations are faster when done in 32-bit vs 64-bit. Here are some great discussion links: http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2012/06/debunking-x32-myths http://lwn.net/Articles/503412/

Comment Re:Great news (Score 2, Informative) 324

An XFI-SFI interconnect runs up to 10.3 Gbps on a single serial link. It is double-pumped (bit on each end of the clock) so the clock rate is half that. This is the connection that links a 10Gbps phy to the transceiver module. You do have to keep the interconnects pretty short though.

http://www.altera.com/technology/high_speed/protocols/10gb-ethernet-xfi-sfi/pro-xfi-sfi.html

XDR ram can transmit 8 bits per clock on a serial line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDR_DRAM

Comment Re:Why optical? (Score 3, Informative) 122

Also, note how this is not a single serial 50 Gbps link - it's 4 parallel 12.5 Gbps links. You can run light in parallel with no interference, the trick is to make sure that each independent channel uses a different wavelength instead. So, they are doing it in parallel. Some 100 Gbps ethernet standards use 10 parallel 10Gbps lasers running at different wavelengths, but they are amazingly expensive because of this.

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