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Comment: Re:I generate my power with solar (Score 1) 507

by ottffssent (#34473208) Attached to: Annual power consumption at your residence?

Actually, yes. I can tell you exactly how much (electrical) energy I've been billed for every month for the past several years. In theory this tracks closely with actual energy consumption. I can further tell you that my energy consumption from gas for heating slightly exceeds my electrical energy consumption, but they're quite close (within 1% for the past 12 billed months). My condo association dues include hot water, so my true energy consumption is somewhat higher, and specifically underestimates gas.

I also burn on average 1.4gal/day of gasoline, or about 18.7MWh/yr, which exceeds the combined gas and electric usage for my home by a comfortable margin. There are further energy expenditures at work and of course in the production and transportation costs of the food and other materials I consume on an annual basis. Plus miscellaneous other expenditures of smaller magnitude.

Comment: Use your local computer store (Score 1) 606

by ottffssent (#33929394) Attached to: Generic PCs For Corporate Use?

If you're saving money by building machines yourself, you're paying too much for your computers. Which you knew, having asked the question in the first place.

Find a local computer store that builds whitebox machines. My workplace is lucky enough to be next door to such an outfit, and they build our machines for us. Basically, for the Newegg price of the components, we get an assembled, tested (they have a burn-in suite that runs for a day) machine with a 1-yr system warranty and our custom drive image installed. Customer support is great - walk over there and talk to a real person who isn't following a script and knows what he's talking about.

Your local computer store may be crap, but it's easy to tell, and if you have a good one it beats the hell out of buying from Dell.

Comment: No shipping IE results (Score 4, Insightful) 203

by ottffssent (#32452390) Attached to: Clashing Scores In the HTML5 Compatibility Test Wars

TFA: "The first table is a summary of the test results with the May 2010 IE Platform Preview and each of the major shipping browsers running on Windows."

So...IE8 isn't a "major shipping browser" that runs on Windows?

If IE8 scores so terribly that Microsoft is embarrassed to post its scores, that's fine, but it would be less dishonest and more informative then to include recent betas of their competitors' browsers in addition to the latest shipping version.


Swine Flu Kills Obese People Disproportionately 661

Posted by timothy
from the super-size-someone-else-please dept.

Comment: Re:Isn't this a little overkill? (Score 1) 436

by ottffssent (#28538413) Attached to: Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For HTML5, Speed

Sure I leave my browser running all the time. FF runs from a few minutes after I log in until Windows gets flaky and slow weeks-to-months later. Browser tabs are a great to-do list, with context and history. Why would I ever close my browser? 5 seconds to load it up (or 3 minutes, if it's restoring my ~100 tabs) is a waste of time, and RAM is cheap.
