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Comment Re:SSDs will outpace platter drives (Score 1) 296

There's still a >10:1 cost difference between 4TB HDDs and 1TB SSDs and SSD prices are not dropping that fast. Current SSDs are already on the bleeding edge of processing technology with 16nm MLC so there's fairly limited density increases and big durability issues ahead. I guess the wildcard is 3D NAND, but much like going multicore for CPUs it's a substitute. However, they are taking over all normal end user uses in cell phones and tables and laptops, it's just the big bulk storage left.

Comment Re:No "standard" iPhone size? (Score 1) 730

I think Apple is dropping the ball by not even offering a smaller sized iPhone.

Unfortunately the whole market has leaped off the deep end on this one with "small" models bigger than the old flagships like for example the LG G2 Mini is 4.7", Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is 4.6" and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini and HTC One Mini 2 are both 4.5" - just as big as the new iPhone. I won't even comment on the 5" LG G3 Mini, as opposed to the full 5.5" version. In fact Apple is the only one who calls a <5" screen normal anymore. Obviously with a smaller screen and smaller phone you can't put the biggest, fastest and most features in it but I still find it disappointing that nobody takes the small sized phones seriously. I'm consider the Z3 Compact as it seems to be a decent compromise, but will wait until the reviews are out.

Comment Re:Deprecation shouldn't start at the browser (Score 1) 108

I'd love to walk into my bank

Good for you. Mine is all e-bank and I tend to like it that way. Same with most the e-tailers I shop at, the intersection with physical retailers is slim. How do you visit Gmail or Facebook? Speaking of which, people often have a different third party between them and whoever they're communicating with. You could always pretend it's not signed you know, what would you do? Send an email, asking them if that's their real certificate? Try to verify it through your "web of trust", which includes a bunch of dimwits who'll make the CAs look good? No, I wouldn't trust them for real end-to-end encryption but it's mostly good enough.

CAs takes the fradulent redirect threat down, but they could always just hack your computer and keylog everything, they could hack the bank, it could be an inside job, they could social engineer you into thinking this is a legitimate certificate update or they could social engineer the bank into thinking you've made a new certificate or whatever. It doesn't matter how many inches of steel the front door is if the rest is plywood and glass windows. Direct out of band secure exchange is of course technically the best, but also the most inconvenient. I guess you should also swap giant OTPs, wouldn't want to trust AES right?

Comment Re:Contacting BBC, via VPN (Score 5, Informative) 363

There's also that despite their public funding, which means they could give their content away for free, then instead try to leverage it for profit as hard as they can.

Tax some (UK population) and give benefits to others (rest of the world) is not socialism, generally the rule is everybody pays and everybody gets. If the former doesn't hold, you can't expect the latter to hold either so I perfectly understand BBC Worldwide charging for their content.

Comment Re:We really need (Score 3, Informative) 533

Your apparent point, that ISP rates are proportional to population density, is also wrong. Remote areas of Finland and Sweden have very low population density, yet still have more bandwidth and better prices than some large American cities.

Norway here, I just have to gloat a little, since our numbers just spiked (Norwegian) last quarter.

US population density: 32.43 pop./km^2
Norway population density: 15.6 pop./km^2
80,1% of households have fixed broadband
Mean speed: 23.1 Mbit/s
Median speed: 17.8 Mbit/s
No caps on fixed broadband

A few select areas already have gigabit, more are rolling out as new fiber nodes are ready while the old are mostly 100 Mbit/s. Actually one company has said they'll deliver 10 gigabit if anyone is willing to pay ($2300/month) but nobody's taken them up on that offer. If I won big in the lottery that'd be on my list though, lol.

Comment Re:What happened to the core-wars? (Score 4, Informative) 105

I've been stuck with my 4 core cpu for the last 6-7 years now and the only thing that has improved my rendering is the NVIDIA GPUs

6-7 years ago, that's like a Q6600 or so? Have you actually looked at benchmarks like Q6600 vs 4790K because current top of the line quad-cores are 3-4 times faster than that.

I remember 8-16 cores being announced YEARS ago, but they never ever appeared in regular desktop computers

No, because of a couple things:
1) Single-threaded performance is still huge and often the bottleneck in interactive work - big multithreaded jobs just decide how long a coffee break you get.
2) Lots of cores means big die means big costs and poor yields meaning they aren't really interested in selling it at consumer prices.
3) Companies would no doubt try to use these as cheap servers or whatever and they don't want enterprise users buying anything but Xeon.
4) You can now get i7-5960x in an "enthusiast" system with 8 cores at least, though it'll cost you $1000. Or you can buy AMDs marketing and get an "8-core" FX processor...

Comment Customers going postal (Score 1) 819

The quality of service no longer meets customer requirements, and customers are rebelling. The airlines and airports have done their best to remove any aspect of comfort or pleasure from air travel, and customers, the people who actually pay the bills, have had enough.

Entitled attitudes don't help. I ended up with bruised knees on a British Airways flight from the person ahead of me refusing to negotiate on seat reclining, with the flight attendants refusing to mediate. On a American flight the passenger next to me went ballistic and very loudly demanded to be reseated, because I was wearing perfume.

On my last long-haul flight (Vancouver to London) I did an on-the-spot upgrade to premium economy and had a good flight. I had cashed in credit card points for the ticket, so the extra $$$ was money well-spent.

I think diverting is a lousy way to handle customer disputes, but it scares me that the airlines may start accepting this as part of the cost of doing business...

...laura

Comment Re: What the heck? (Score 1) 354

You should really do technical writing or PR on the side, depending on which is true.

I wish I could get around to ever documenting anything, usually I'm too busy making systems work in an accurate, succinct and understandable way. Technical writing can only unfuck so much of a convoluted mess and I definitively lack the patience and bullshit skills for public relations.

Comment Re: What the heck? (Score 5, Insightful) 354

As I understand it Bukkit is a mod licensed under the GPL. The Minecraft server is proprietary. They don't share any code, so individually they're not derivates of anything. CraftBukkit combines the server code with the mod code. This is illegal both ways - the server license doesn't let you link to Bukkit, the Bukkit license doesn't let you link to the proprietary server. Mojang could have shut down CraftBukkit any time they wanted to. But so can any of the Bukkit developers, because it's not in compliance with the GPL either. In this case it looks like neither side has seen in their interest to shut this down - until now.

They're not using the DMCA against the server. They're not claiming they have any legal rights to the server. What they are doing is shutting down any mod or add-on that depends on illegal linking and saying the only way to make this legally compliant is if Minecraft decides to GPL their source code. If they don't all these derivates will remain illegal and the copyright will now be enforced. They're hoping that the Minecraft community has become so dependent on these illegal derivates that Mojave will cave and release the code. Yes, he is using the code for extortion by first writing the code knowing it would be used in violation of copyright and then using copyright law as leverage once it's popular. But this is all the legal kind, you can never be charged for threatening to enforce the law.

Comment Re:Same reason blu-ray didn't take off (Score 1) 204

I see comment after comment from people who are talking out of their back ends, or perhaps their eyes suck... (...) True 4k is amazing, it blows 1080p out of the water. I've seen a similar display as you did, but this was on a 70" 1080p next to a 70" 4k display, from about 8 feet away, in a store.

With all due respect, if you're seeing a huge difference then I very much suspect it'd due to the actual devices, settings and algorithms rather than the resolution. I have an 3840x2160 UHD monitor and I've taken very high resolution photos (18MP) with lots of fine patterns that makes changes in detail easy to spot and scaled it to 3840x2160 as well as 1920x1080 then made a dumb pixel doubling upscale to 3840x2160 to simulate a 1080p display and a high quality upscale to simulate an upscaling UHD display and stored all three as PNGs. That should eliminate pretty much every other source of differences since it's the same screen, same mode, same settings.

When I flip back and forth between them, sitting at a natural distance to a 28" monitor clearly there's some change in detail but it was actually a bit underwhelming compared to what I was expecting. And with a monitor you sit really, really close compared to a TV, if I doubled the distance to a 56" TV the viewing angle would be the same but that would be way, way closer than I actually sit and at couch-equivalent distances I can't tell the difference at all. I guess if I had a 100"+ TV or projector screen then 4K would make sense, so for cinemas and home cinemas I'm sure it's great but your average living room just won't benefit.

Comment Re:Imagine, a Beowulf cluster of these! (Score 1) 60

That sounds low, here's a test of the iPhone 5 and at maximum power draw they killed a 6000 mWh battery in two hours meaning a power draw of ~3W. Of course that includes the screen and the whole SoC, but if you can put a 5W processor in a tablet I'm thinking 1W in a smartphone seems reasonable. P.S. My Google-fu says that <10 mW is only if the CPU is in suspend/standby mode, basically it's off and waiting for the network or user input to wake it up again. Idle but active draw seems to be more like 30-50 mW which is the target Intel would need to reach. Not Core M territory though, they'll still make Atoms for that.

Comment Re:MOAR GPU (Score 3, Informative) 60

It looks like Intel is making the GPU larger and more powerful with each iteration.

Well, these chips are primarily for tablets. Fanless tablets. Pretty much the exact opposite of where you'd like to do any serious computing. The CPU is these things mostly exists to support it as a presentation device. I think many people haven't realized how much Intel has moved into the GPU space though, simply because they still think of it as a CPU with integrated graphics. True, they're not competing in the high end discrete graphics cards but they're eating away at the dGPU chips that used to be in all laptops, now you just find them at the very high end. If they took their EUs, put them on a separate chip and multiplied it up to a 250W power budget I wonder how far up the totem pole they'd reach.

Comment Re:Why do you participate? (Score 1) 226

Like when Penny was making fun of Leonard for being a cry baby during Toy Story 3. "The toys were holding hands in a furnace!" was his retort. When I went to see it in the theaters, there was audible sobbing during that scene.

It's okay, it's the 21st century and men are allowed to cry now. Wuzz.

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