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My point is that outside of possibly <500GB models, most people are using 3.5" drives solely for bulk storage where speed isn't necessary. SSDs changed the entire storage paradigm, to the point where anybody interested in a fast drive will just get an SSD, not a mechanical disk with a higher...

I agree that hybrid drives are a product in search of a market. I do however see less and less point to 7200 RPM drives in both 2.5" and 3.5" form factors. Real world performance increase over 5400 RPM is marginal at best. Also, at this stage SSDs are cheap enough to use for boot drives, with...

Well, it looks like I'll be getting 10,000 miles out of my rear airless tire, about twice that out of the front. I could probably live with a $2 a tire tax even though I'm philosophically against it. That would come to about 0.0267 cents per mile for me.

You aren't aware of the half of it. Dig around Streetsblog a bit to see how ridiculous the situation with bicycles has become in the US. In NYC last year one of the major news stations ran a series called "Bike Bedlam" where they implied that cyclists were causing mayhem in the city. Meanwhile...

Actually, wear and tear on the roads is proportional to weight to the fourth power, meaning bikes cause negligible wear. The only time it might make sense to have cyclists pay for infrastructure is when something completely new and exclusively for bikes is built. Even then I question charging...

More on Ed Orcutt here When one of the Streetsblog readers wrote him a letter, he apparently "backpedaled" quite a bit: First of all, let me apologize for the carbon emissions line of an e-mail which has caused so much concern within the bicycle community. It was over the top and I admit is...

I get nauseous myself just watching it. It's not so much the height which bothers me, but being completely out in the open. I've been on the platform on the roof of the World Trade Center 1320 or so feet up and I was just fine. I can't say the same had I been hanging on to a big pole at the same...

Not a phone, but my Garmin Legend HC GPS endured a couple of hits to the pavement at 20+ mph when the bike mount failed. It works just fine, although it can no longer read the map on the SD card (that problem was actually occurring intermittently before the first fall). I've since made a better...

Speaking of crapping in my pants, this would do it for me.

To add to what Coug said, motorcycle helmets would also be unbearably hot most of the time. People can tolerate them on motorcycles because they're not exerting themselves. I overheated wearing my friend's bicycle helmet when it was 38° F. I hate to think how hot a motorcycle helmet would be.

I stay safe by giving myself an "out". Basically, I assume any vehicle will do the stupidest possible thing at the worst possible moment, and leave myself enough space to avoid the situation. I'm rarely disappointed in my assumptions. NYC drivers are horrible, but at least they're predictably...

DD and Lunar, The last time I fell off my bike was in 1996. No, that's not a typo. It's been 17 years and counting since I've fallen. I never had anything worse than road rash except once (pulled ligament on my left leg). Ironically, the pulled ligament happened in a crash at only 20 mph, and...

I rode to apairofpcs place in Coney Island in mid December. 17.5 miles each way. I was fighting ~15 to 20 mph headwinds for the entire east/west legs of the journey. Both ways. The wind changed direction while I was at his place. By the time I started riding home around 1 AM, thinking I would...

I'm running 2 displays on my A10-5800K-one on the D-Sub output (1280x1024) and the other on the DVI (1600x1200). No problems whatsoever, works in both XP and 7, should work in Linux. I can even use the DisplayPort for a third display (up to 4096x2160). If you're interested in building a...

Those would make a good set for a James Bond movie.

Yes and no. You're going on the assumption that any genetic improvements allowing "immortality" couldn't also be accompanied by other changes. Also, on an evolutionary time scale 1000 years is really short. I doubt people who are born 1000 years from now would significantly differ from someone...

That's not really what I meant here. Yes, society requires people to fight basic biological urges where a man might want to screw an attractive woman he sees on the street right then and there but you can't suppress those kinds of things for years the way the Church's vow of celibacy requires...

Hence my suggestion of child robots to allow them to get their rocks off. A lot of these priests might otherwise be perfectly upstanding and valuable members of society if not for their sexual preferences. They just need a socially acceptable outlet for them. And the church needs to get over the...

I've thought about this a lot. A simple solution to the entire overpopulation issue is that you don't have any more children in exchange for immortality (perhaps making you sterile will be part of the process). That would keep you from increasing the world's population from the time you become...

That still might not fix things. The fact that quite a few priests choose altar boys (or girls) when I'm sure they would have some willing adult females in their parish (or perhaps males if they float that way) tells me they're pedophiles. The big problem with this (besides the fact that society...

There might well be hope for you (and me). The longer we can hang on, the more likely there will be advances to keep us from dying. It might go something like this: Live to 90, maybe science then will cure you of something which might have killed you, allowing you to live another decade. When...

I think "youthful brainwashing" is the major reason why religion persists. I wonder how many people would willingly believe in some faith after an upbringing which included reasoning skills and problem solving? My guess is not many. I think all forms of clergy and organized religion (as well as...

This looks like the answer to stolen packages. I'm sure if you're reasonably handy you can make something similar for under $50. In any case, it's probably less costly than putting in a bunch of security camera.

Yeah, pretty much. It'll probably be a while before much software which takes advantage of AVX is written. The latest version of Prime95 does, but that's about it as far as I know.

I have the same mindset. I generally won't even consider an upgrade unless the new stuff benchmarks at least ten times what I'm using. I actually did better than that with this upgrade-going from about 1.2 GFlops with my XP3200 to 45+ GFlops. I probably won't get upgrade fever again until we...

CPUs with AVX If your GFlops is more than number of cores x 4 x frequency in GHz then your processor has AVX. It sounds like your CPU has AVX. Even a 6 core CPU will have a hard time hitting 90 GFlops without it. I don't think any desktop CPU has hit 200 yet, but I've seen numbers in the 130...

Reading recently about CPU architecture and processor floating point performance, I was actually stoked to learn my new A10-5800K has AVX capability. It turns out AVX actually works exceedingly well in the real world. Here's Intel Burn Test with a regular (SSE?) floating point Linpack: And...

Are you talking about -30°C or -55°C? At -30°C, you probably need an engine block heater so the car will start (or use an electric car instead which should be good at any temperature the batteries function at, even as low as -40°C for LiFePO4). At -55°C you don't drive because the tires will...

For what it's worth, I've yet to see a bad stick of RAM in the 15 years I've been playing with PCs. Come to think of it, I haven't had a hard drive fail on me yet, either. Maybe I've just been exceeding lucky, or perhaps it's because I've taken certain precautions when dealing with anything...

The Montreal forecast calls for a low of -22°F on Wednesday (here in NYC it'll be a comparatively balmy 15°F). I don't like heat much myself, but these kinds of temps are starting to get a bit out of my comfort zone.

Welcome back, Merc! This place wasn't the same without you. And I glad to hear you've finally had a run of good luck!

Stretching your distances always hurts. Late this summer I was regularly taking 25 mile rides. Then I decided to try for 30 miles. It hurt. Once 30 miles was no problem, I went for 35. Again, pain. I only got as far as 40 miles by mid fall, and I think that would hurt pretty much no matter how...

Yes, please come back. Both of you.

Yes, I've tried it on the aforementioned iPhotoPlus software, and it does work. It allows a 32-bit program to access the entire 4 GB memory space under a 64-bit O/S. In case there are any issues, the original executable is saved when the patch is applied.

The under $600 price is very competitive on a per GB basis to smaller drives. I'm also thinking SSDs may eventually align themselves both for performance and bulk storage markets, with the latter being much less expensive because absolute speed isn't a priority. Even if access times are 100 us...

I've tried GIMP, and just installed Paint.net yesterday. One thing which surprised me about Paint-net was the very small footprint. Even with 60 additional plug-ins installed, it only took 32.6 MB (compared to 251 MB for GIMP. GIMP does more, but it seems Paint.net can do quite a bit of the...

The best bins of the XT-E and XP-G2 achieve ~160 lm/W @ 350 mA and 25°C junction temperature. Not quite the 200 lm/W of the MK-R, but not too far off, either. That said, I have a couple of lighting projects which are just begging for the MK-R, provided the price is similar to the XM-L2.

:drunk: Happy New Year! :drunk: Am I happy 2012 is over! It was mostly a very lousy year for me but at least it ended on a few high notes with the new system I have courtesy of the membership. I also managed to cycle 4293 miles-my second best year ever (best was 5001 miles in 1991). Hope 2013...

Playing around some more, I was able to create multiple pagefiles to use most of the ramdisk. Just open regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management key. In the "PagingFiles" multi-string value paste the following: Z:\pagefil1.sys...

Nope, no luck for me predicting sporting events. Even things I follow closely like the Tour de France I get wrong more times than I get right. Horses are even harder to predict than cyclists given that a bad day by either the horse or jockey can totally spoil the outcome.

This is definitely a hobby I would get into if I had more money and more open areas nearby.

I already have Windows 7 64 which I can use most of the time. I figured since I sometimes need to boot into XP to use my microcontroller programmer, I might as well make use of as much of my 16 GB as possible. The ramdisk driver uses PAE to access RAM above 4 GB which XP otherwise wouldn't...

I found a good solution to this problem. Since I'm now occasionally running XP on my new machine with 16 GB of RAM, I just created a ramdisk from the RAM XP can't access and placed the pagefile there, solving two problems at once. Any possible issues with not having a pagefile are solved...

I came across the Gavotte Ramdisk Utility today when googling if it was possible to get XP to use more than 4GB of RAM. While you can't (unless you have SP1 and enable PAE), you can still make use of otherwise unaddressable RAM with this utility because it can access RAM over the 4 GB barrier...

Merry Christmas to all!:reindeer:

Most of my predictions from 2004 did come true. We did have 10+ GB SSD drives in 2009, and so far we've been unable to scale mechanical drives past a few TB. It actually looks likely that memristors, not MRAM, will be the next big thing. MRAM may yet replace DRAM, although I doubt it will scale...

Mostly PIC microcontrollers but I occasionally need to program oddball EPROMs and other stuff for which USB programmers aren't available. The EMP-11 programs a huge range of chips. If all I did was PIC microcontrollers then USB programmers are readily available for about $15. In fact, I might...

I finally "solved" this issue, albeit not in the way I had initially hoped for. Before proceeding any further, I checked to make sure the parallel port was working by connecting my Samsung ML-2510. It turns out that the StarTech card didn't work at all when set to the "legacy" addresses but it...

I've been running XP for the last 6 years without a pagefile. I never had any issues that I'm aware of. Just for kicks I turned it on yesterday but haven't noticed any difference one way or another. The pagefile hasn't even been accessed since I turned it on. It seems it's not doing any harm...

A+ for balls, F- for brains. I get physically ill just looking at those pictures.