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Transportation

Opel Dealers Accused of Modyfing the Software of Polluting Cars (deredactie.be) 147

An anonymous reader writes: Belgian public broadcasting station VRT has discovered that GM Opel dealerships in Belgium seem to be updating engine management code when Zafira cars equipped with the 1.6 litre CDTI diesel engine are brought in for service. After the software change, the nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions drop sharply, at the cost of reduced power output. Bern University of Applied Sciences and environmental lobby club DUH previously found this model to pass European emissions standards only when the rear wheels are not rotating. When the rear wheels are made to spin along, NOx emissions increase to several times the limit set by European regulations. General Motors denied using defeat devices as well as the update program that seems to be taking place. However, an anonymous mechanic at an Opel dealership states that GM started pushing updates shortly after the Dieselgate scandal broke.

Comment It's actually easy (really) (Score 2) 115

It took me less than 10 minutes to complete that crossword. It's actually easy, because the clues always give enough information to immediately place a letter somewhere with minor thinking; no tracking back is ever needed (unlike in some Sudoku grids where it's often easier to "try" a number, then cancel if an inconsistency appears).

Actually most of the clues can be easily translated to natural language and make the puzzle understandable to the average people: [^M]*M[^M]* means "there is one and only one M in this line", (RX|[^R])* means "every R in this line must be followed by an X", etc.

Comment Re:Not much point in 64 bits here (Score 1) 224

and going 64 bit has a significant memory cost -- for typical C++ code, around 33% extra.

There is no such thing as "typical C++ code" for the memory usage metric. Pointers may be larger, but a decoded 1680×1050 32-bit image takes 7 megabytes of memory on a 32-bit platform and 7 megabytes on a 64-bit platform. Remember that the web is full of images.

I work on multi-million-line C++ projects and my personal experience indicates about 5% overhead. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you really need to back up that claim with some real life figures if you're going to use the word "typical".

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