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Comment Re:mass in motion (Score 2) 262

It doesn't have to be at all heavy, the article mentions 6 kg. Remember that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity, so doubling rotational speed lets you cut weight by three quarters. Also, gyroscopic forces won't be a problem, you just mount the wheel horizontally.

Containing the stored energy in case of an accident likely requires some engineering thought, however. I suppose you would design the system so that it brakes the flywheel if it gets busted, converting the energy into heat just like normal braking.

Comment Re:just like my Core i3, then (Score 4, Informative) 240

The technical difference is that while your Core i3 has its GPU as a separate die in the same packaging, AMD Fusion has the GPU(s) on the same die as the CPU(s). The Intel approach makes for shorter and faster interconnects, the AMD approach completely removes the interconnects. The main advantage is probably (as is alluded to in the summary) related to power consumption.

Comment Re:Par for the course.. (Score 2, Informative) 386

The trick isn't using /dev/zero, the trick is using the seek parameter. The dd command skips nearly 8 GiB into a newly created file and writes something there. This creates a file that is 8 GiB large, but with no data (not zero, just nothing at all) in the first 8191 MiB. Therefore, the system doesn't actually write anything there, and doesn't even allocate the storage. If you read from these blocks, you will get generated zeros. This is called a sparse file.

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