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Comment Not as high as reward (Score 1) 129

And lots of high rent to suck it up

The extra among you can earn there more than makes up for the increased rent - I don't live there myself, but I have lots of friends that do.

Fuck you.

You don't have to live there you know, I don't. It is possible to work in the tech industry elsewhere, and if that's the kind of reactions you have to postings on an internet board you may want to strongly consider it.

Comment Re:So what's up with those bitcoins? (Score 1) 104

Traditional currencies have inflation because they are printing money faster than old bills get destroyed.

The amount of "printed currency" in circulation has almost nothing to do with the size of the money supply. It's amazing how many gold/bitcoin fans don't understand this. Heck, the US recently concluded "QE", in which a couple of trillion dollars were created by the Fed without any of it being physically printed.*

When you deposit $US with a US bank, in a savings account or CD, it can loan out 100% of your deposit. If banks offered BTC-denominated savings accounts, they'd work the same way. If you're thinking "but wait, that means there wouldn't be enough bitcoins in existence to allow everyone to withdraw their deposits", then congratulations, you understand how banking works.

There's only ~$1.3 T in physical US currency, but there is ~$10 T in total bank deposits (of various kinds). That wouldn't change if we adopted gold or bitcoins as the national currency.

*To further complicate things, the money supply actually didn't grow during that time, as bank deposits with the Fed grew at about the same rate. When the banks start finding investments better than the rate the Fed pays, we'll start seeing the inflationary effects - it's a very new idea by the Fed, and time will tell how crazy it was.

Comment Re:Found? (Score 4, Funny) 104

Given the mass incompetence of how Gox was run, that's the least surprising thing. They had paper wallets scattered around the city that that only Mark knew the password to.

So, you're telling me that Magic the Gathering Online Exchange stored its assets by printing them on paper cards? I never saw that coming. I hope they were at least kept in protective sleeves!

Comment Not a myth if it really happens (Score 2) 129

Sure the chances are, as you say, low that the company you join will IPO and/or make it big.

That doesn't mea it doesn't happen though, and that the company you are joining might have an idea you like enough that you want to push to make it succeeded.

But even if you are just being cynical, there are still a lot of rewards to be had from joining a startup as (at least in CA) the pay is still really, really good thanks to large pools of VC money sloshing all over the place. There's a lot of room to navigate there in ways that mean your own personal success even if the company never hits it big.

Comment Re:Don't buy the cheapest cable (Score 1) 391

The actual spec is behind a paywall, as with most tech specs, but Wikipedia says.

cable of about 5 meters (16 feet) can be manufactured to Category 1 specifications easily and inexpensively by using 28 AWG (0.081 mmÂ) conductors.[107] With better quality construction and materials, including 24 AWG (0.205 mmÂ) conductors, an HDMI cable can reach lengths of up to 15 meters (49 feet).[107]

You may be right, and this is just the physical consequence of the spec, but 28 AWG is quite thin wire. (One poster said his long cable has a booster, so maybe that's another way, but that's not "cheapest" either).

Comment Re:"This could help extend the lifetime of the pho (Score 1) 59

You mean Samsung would know when to tell the phone "not" to open as per their planned obsolescence policy.

Hey, now, this isn't Sony we're talking about. ("Sony timer" was a common phrase in Japan for a few years, with a strong urban legend that actual timers were built in to pop the day the warrantee expired. My favorite urban legend was that Sony employees carried a remote that could expire all your Sony timers early if you annoyed them.)

Comment Re:Don't buy the cheapest cable (Score 2, Insightful) 391

If offered a $45 HDMI cable over a $2 one, save your money and go cheap, heck by 3 of the cheap ones incase it breaks while installing it, you will be money ahead and you won't hear the difference EVER.

I hope you don't work with technology in any way. Sure, buy the cheapest cable that meets spec, but remember the first rule of engineering: the vendor is a lying bastard. There's a reason the cheapest cable is the cheapest cable. Paying $45 for a 6-foot HDMI cable is silly. Paying $45 for a 50-foot HDMI cable isn't.

Also, for HDMI specifically, the different numbered specs matter depending on use case. If your doing "4K" video, you'll want the HDMI 1.4 (or above) cable. If you want high color depth for a specific application, you'll want at least 1.3.

Sure, cheap is good, but as always in life, avoid the cheapest crap in the store.

Comment Re:Don't buy the cheapest cable (Score 2) 391

I've had cheap longer mini-jack cables fail - just break inside the insulation. I've had cheap RCA cables break, short, and most annoyingly have the center-pins break off and get stuck in my equipment.

Yeah, avoid the $40 job with the weird connectors, but a $4 patch cable can save a lot of headache over a $1 cable.

Comment Don't buy the cheapest cable (Score 5, Insightful) 391

This comes up whenever audiophile cables are discussed, but it's worth repeating: don't buy the cheapest cable.

There may be no useful difference between a $10 cable and a $1000 cable, but very often there's a real difference between a $10 cable and a $1 cable. Even for digital data, really cheap cables often don't meet spec, and can cause frustrating intermittent problems. You don't need anything exotic to avoid that, just avoid the bottom tier.

An example from my living room: I use a 45 foot HDMI cable to plug my TV directly into my HTPC (for reasons of convenience that aren't that interesting). The spec calls for thicker-gauge wiring for HDMI cables over 30 feet (IIRC), and you'll quickly see the price jump between cables that meet that spec and cables that don't. Don't buy the cheapest junk possible, that's all it takes.

It used to be that Dayton Audio was the only "solidly built, not too expensive" brand I knew about for cables, but Amazon changed that - now there are a bunch of options, including some sort of Amazon store brand that seems to be fine.

It's worth paying a bit more for solidly-built cables that meet spec (and especially for Ethernet cables, for some guard on the cable that keeps the clip from snagging or breaking off it you need to pull it through a tangle). Anything beyond that is a bit silly.

Comment Re:May you (Score 2) 330

Let Paris implement its own Grand mur de la France, behind which it can spend what it takes on a search engine with a Forget Me feature.

France did try building a Grand mur de la France once, of course, but then the Germans just went around it. Google search results are already filtered in France as needed to comply with French law, but France seems to be upset here that the Germans (or French with a VPN) are getting around it. Somehow, I don't think they'll learn this time, either.

Comment Re:IE all over again (Score 3, Interesting) 371

I'm pretty sure this was arrogance, but not malice, on MS's part: they really want to shift the IE userbase to Edge and drop IE support in some future release. Can you blame them? But in their arrogance they didn't remember (or didn't care) that quite a large portion of Windows users don't run IE in the first place.

Comment Isn't HoloLens way more useful for this? (Score 1) 45

Glass, it seems to me, is inherently far more limited than actual VR systems like the HoloLens. With the HoloLens you could choose where to put the small square of information you can see, plus of course there are all of the options of overlaying more info on top of physical objects you can computationally recognize...

I guess one big draw would be battery life, Glass you would think would be a lot better in that regard than the HoloLens.

Comment When the Man In the Middle is You (Score 2) 54

Crazy that the phone is not just some kind of passthrough ,but instead somewhere in he binary contains enough rights to do anything it likes with your car... the device must be just convincing the app that OnStar said it was OK to use it's unlimited powers to unlock the car and start the engine or whatever.

On the other hand, perhaps that ALSO means the attack cannot work with any arbitrary car, but only with an instance of an app you have already paired to your car so it was given the right credentials? If so it's a much less serious attack than it would seem at first.

The real issue would be, if a rooted Android or iPhone device could have the car-specific credentials scraped, to use at a later time with thier own OnStar app.

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