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foobard's comments

foobard | 6 years ago | on: Cray, AMD to Extend DOE’s Exascale Frontier

> In a media briefing ahead of today’s announcement at Oak Ridge, the partners revealed that Frontier will span more than 100 Shasta supercomputer cabinets, each supporting 300 kilowatts of computing.

So 30 megawatts of computing, plus cooling and other supporting services. How do you power something like this? Does ORNL have their own power station (given they have reactor(s) on site)? If power comes from an external station do they coordinate with the station operator when bringing a system like this online?

foobard | 8 years ago | on: Using Google Assistant with AutoPi to enable voice control of a car

(Some?) modern cars expose a CAN bus via the OBD port. There typically are pins that adhere to the OBD2 spec as well as additional pins for the CAN bus.

On my car (Mk6 VW) there are multiple CAN buses which are separated by a gateway device. A device plugged into the OBD port has to negotiate with the gateway in order to access the other buses, but once it has done so can control the windows, lighting, instrument cluster, etc.

foobard | 10 years ago | on: Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

When I was younger, I loved physics because it bridged the gap between pure maths ("when are we ever going to need this stuff?") and the physical world. I didn't pursue it beyond high school

Now, as a full-time software engineer and part time jack of all trades, I appreciate stuff like this experiment and the work of Space X and others much as I appreciate good engineering. It's a difficult problem to solve. So many disciplines had to cooperate to grant us some small insight into the inner workings of our universe. It's marvelous, and makes me feel like a kid again.

foobard | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Are you voting?

I recently phone banked for my party for the first time and found that the voter rolls the party was working from had age, gender, race, and how many out of the previous 3 elections the voter had actually shown up to the polls.

It is no wonder that politicians ignore issues affecting of young people: they know for a fact that they don't vote in large numbers.

I voted today. I have always voted since I was of age. I get discouraged living in Florida and having my vote drowned in a sea of geriatrics. But I recognize that participating is the only way to affect change.

foobard | 14 years ago | on: Hollywood is about to repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the music industry

I can identify. I don't watch that much TV, but my SO does, and the hard drive on our DVR is so small that if I queue something it can delete something of hers.

I have a Playstation 3 which I used for Netflix, and went through the same hassles during the PSN outage. Then it seemed like every time I went to watch a movie there was a new software update I had to have. On top of that, the repeated software updates seem to have introduced a bug where it has to resync the resolution with the TV every time I power it on or boot Netflix. I'm never buying a Sony product ever again.

Netflix streaming is a great product, but has limited selection. Again, it's not that I consume that much media, but that what I want to watch usually isn't available.

At the end of the day, I have a cable TV + internet subscription, as well as Netflix, and I just torrent everything. I have a server that runs deluge, and I just drop a torrent in a folder and a couple of hours later it's ready to watch.

I though the piece was spot on.

edit: Just thought I'd add that since the legal music stores have popped up (iTunes, Beatport, Amazon) I hardly pirate music anymore. I spend hundreds of dollars a year on music. This is why the premise of the article jives with my experience.

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