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Comment Re:Get a TV (Score 1) 186

For gaming (not text or web) if the refresh is high enough (30 hz is not), scaled resolutions look fine. We've hit high enough resolutions where certain scaling operations just look like anti-aliasing instead of blurring.

Scaling rightfully got a bad name when it was upscaling 800x600 content to a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 17" monitor. It looked blurry. Scaling 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 on a 27" monitor looks really good. I'm more interested on the gaming side if these 4K TVs will take 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 at 60 hz and maintain refresh rate (technically if it is 120 hz it should, but I have my doubts about their scaler). Doing productivity work at full resolution would mostly be fine at 30 hz, if occasionally annoying.

Comment This shouldn't be a win for open data (Score 1) 286

This should be a throw the damn meter maids and other officers who were writing tickets for that spot in jail for conspiracy. They should have been turning in work orders for the the roads department to fix the paint arrangement.

Same fate should befall any judges who were presented with pictures of the spot as defense by people ticketed there.

Most of our government problems can be quickly remedied by apply the law equally to government agents. Arrest them regularly for fraud and conspiracy when it is easy to prove and the incentive to be corrupt goes away.

Comment Re:Who gives a shit? (Score 1) 593

Diverse might mean all men versus men and women though. Give a similar age range, experience level, and size of group; an all white males group are unlikely to come close to a group of white males and females. Competition for mating opportunities works in the workplace amazingly well. This is fine as long as the engagement term of the group is of a length where no poisonous amorous relationships or jealousies develop... so in the software world of 3-6 month long projects, it's great.

The effects can be further exaggerated on shorter projects by using more single and unwed males and females of similar backgrounds.

Comment Re:Deja vu (Score 1) 311

The bumpy surface they have is going to be horrendous for noise pollution and suspension damage. An amorphous glass surface with a friction texturing is probably also going to cause more tire wear than concrete. They only vaguely guess at lifespan of the friction texture and don't address how it handles loading up (bits of rubber and car oil getting caught in the pores)

Further the bumpy surface will likely cost commuters more in mileage due to being a rough road than it will produce in electricity. It's an economy of scale thing where everyone loses a few tenths of a mile to a gallon, but that adds up quick over thousands of cars per day.

The implementation cost issues are being completely ignored. We use asphalt and concrete because of economies of scale. This technology is orders of magnitude more expensive per mile.

Comment Re:What he's really saying is (Score 1) 422

An interesting remedy would be a "code view" mode for spreadsheets where calculations were displayed as nested operations and such. It would require a stronger intent manager that could recognize the same sequence of code running on rows 4-53 until column N, but it could work. Sure, this mostly sounds like a database, but instead give it the modularity and ease of current spreadsheets and everything works out.

Comment Re:Very Easy (Score 1) 56

True, but inventory management and reporting don't have any need to coexist on the same network. It's easy enough to have the POS side running on one VLAN and a one-way replication of aggregate sales numbers pushed to the inventory management and reporting side. Heck, just replicate a copy of the database with all of the customer's personal information and CC#'s stripped out.

An odd angle to why Target got hit with such a huge data loss breach was the fact that they were getting too nosy about their customer habits. They used analytics to tell when individual customers were pregnant and send targeted advertising (pun not intended): http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

These kinds of data leaks occur because they were playing the big data game and combing obsessively over personally identifiable data repeatedly to create better consumers. How much harder is it for the admin to secure the network when the folks in marketing want giant swaths of data they lack the responsibility to handle. The data breaches at Target were easy, because it had become too much of a hassle to try to secure data half the company was rooting through. I doubt eBay was any different, and if anything had an even more haphazard attitude given their model is not be responsible for the products they sell.

Comment Very Easy (Score 1) 56

All of this can be simplified by architecting purpose designed networks, and for a minimum of cost. You have a firewall (and possibly switch). There are 2 VLANS. On one (let's say VLAN 100) is the free Wifi, Pandora feed to the house audio, and internet connection at the workstations the managers blow time at. On the other (let's call it VLAN 222) are the network connections for the POS equipment. On VLAN 222, the firewall allows no inbound connections with the slim exception of VPN secured traffic. Outbound connections on VLAN 222 are restricted to OS/AV/POS update hosts on SSL or similar and CC auth processors. Generic internet access is banned on VLAN 222. The back office POS software runs in a VM that only has access to VLAN 222. The manager workstation runs the VM if necessary as well as has it's own access to the internet (if necessary). The POS terminals, even if they are those hip, all the rage, iPads, do not have internet access.

This is more or less (minus VMs, DSL, and iPads, and replace VPN with dedicated password protected dial-in) the way we designed POS security in the late 90's when I was doing POS. As far as I can tell, it is mostly PCI compliant.

The issues we're seeing is people getting all manner of malware (from pr0n/etc.) on the manager back office workstation, similar from the POS terminals, and using Logmein / Teamviewer with weak passwords on the back office server. We knew better 15 years ago, so anyone who is getting hit by such garbage is a lame hack.

Comment Not just cost issues (Score 3, Insightful) 409

The uptime from various cloud vendors is pretty poor. Sure the server is up, but some networking or SAN component is sketchy a lot more than in-house managed servers. Cases in point:
1) I've worked with several virtualized storage architectures on Amazon AWS and we've had instances lock up due to brief, hard to track down SAN drops.
2) I had a customer have to force shutdown 2 VMs in CBeyond's cloud because their SAN latency went up enough that databases started dropping offline. It took CBeyond 2 days to get their SAN back to full operational status.

I do wish the cloud providers would modify their storage model a bit. When starting an instance / VM, use the SAN to copy the whole image to an available server's LOCAL storage array. This fixes a great many latency problems and does not make the servers that much more expensive to build / operate (just a tad more storage in RAID 10 per server). The only drawback to this is for big data users who need beyond a couple dozen TB for a server in the cloud. Most of those situations are already using clustering software that is resistant to failure of a few nodes.

Comment Copyright Holder Responsibilities (Score 3, Interesting) 329

How about we make the copyright holder responsible for providing suitable replacements as part of their copyright renewal process. It would be preferable to require a new stamping off a master every 5-10 years and provide identical media replacements - certainly to the Library of Congress and other designated archives (CD for CD, Book for book, VHS for VHS). I could see some wiggle room where digital downloads of equal or greater quality be made available to consumers.

Even if we say fuck the consumers, the copyright holder should certainly be responsible to provide replacements to archives as part of the copyright registration. I would see such as minimal evidence for copyright enforcement.

Comment Re:No Threat To Thunderbolt (Score 2) 355

Of those examples, they are still mostly video accelerator / transcode acceleration area, and a couple have USB 3.0 / SS versions. Outside of the die hard MBP/MP users, anyone with a non-Apple laptop who works in industries where such hardware is necessary will have a dedicated render station to run those cards. You seem to forget that a MBP is going to have CPU, RAM, and I/O buses which simply can't match a regular desktop much less server-class workstation motherboards.

The other part that you are ignoring is the fact that anyone who deals with video or CG at that level is going to need serious storage. Even a 1TB SSD option isn't going to cut it. Sure you can plug storage in via ThunderBolt, but the cost just spirals up getting all these niche parts.

So your use case still boils down to Mac Pro users, which while selling alright, comprises a smaller portion of the PC sales market than desktops with Linux pre-installed.

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