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Comment Re:aka "A stock pumper" (Score 1) 74

An analyst is generally not a person eating his own dog food, it's a person trying to sell his insight of the market to third parties as investment advice. What it means in practice is that you're trying to make a lot of statements that make you seem smart in hindsight but don't compromise your credibility when they don't pan out. Like in this case, if the Oculus Rift doesn't launch in 2015 this won't even be a footnote. If it does launch, he can point to this statement and say "Look, I wasn't sure but I had a hunch this would happen". You don't need to make any elaborate theories of stock manipulation, this is simply one analyst trying to pump up his own career.

Comment Re:and... (Score 0) 299

This isn't stupidity, exactly, it's obstinacy. And actually, it's cognitive dissonance. Typically, when you see someone passionately arguing against their own best interests, that is what at fault. In this case, one of the people ranting against solar and storage is arguing that if this were a good idea, it would have been done already, because they want to believe that they are more intelligent than Elon Musk, every PG&E employee, and the majority of slashdotters who have woken up and recognized that batteries have gotten immensely better within our lifetimes â" and will likely improve just as much in the next thirty or forty years.

You use a lot of big words, I don't think you know what any of them mean. What I argue is that there's structural differences that makes this a better idea to to centrally than at home, regardless of how good or cheap the batteries get. If it's cost effective for you to store the power in a battery and use it in the daytime it's going to be more cost effective for them to store the power in a battery and sell it to you in the daytime. The very reason they sell it cheap at night is that there's no cost effective way to store the excess power for later, if there were the low night prices would go away. You're on the wrong end of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, buddy.

Comment Re:So, Microsoft is a social leech! (Score 0) 103

Scenario A: Google back when they initially developed Android ran into a design roadblock. They saw no way to solve the particular problem until one of the developers read a MS patent that solved their issue. MS is therefore paid royalties on their patent.

It's not about finding a solution. It's about taking what somebody has worked on, experimented with, done usability testing, put in a product and convinced the market to use and have a second company come in and say thanks for all the hard work, in a month we'll have a cheaper clone doing the exact same thing.

Scenario B: Google developed Android without ever having heard of any MS patents.

...and not knowing of any product using any of the MS patents, even if they were unaware it was patented and by who. Particularly in the same business, it's rather hard not to know what features the competition is advertising. It's certainly hard to prove you didn't know about them. Submarine patents are a different story, but for example when they made Android they probably couldn't claim ignorance of any features the iPhone had. Even the business requirements and feature requests can be "contaminated" by other products, it's not a feature you'd have added unless someone else had done it first.

Of course sometimes you get unlucky and develop the exact same solution, but that also means you're reinventing the wheel. Do you want a medal? Or you might feel it's obvious and widespread now, but was it that obvious when it was patented? Ten years ago is a long time in the tech industry, things that I go "well, duuuuuuuuh" to today maybe wasn't. If they were, I'd like to go back and redo my investments. I'm sure you all remember the warm reception the iPod get, boy was that right on the money...

Comment Re:and... (Score 3, Insightful) 299

Cue Slashdotters claiming it is either impossible or a really bad thing in 3..2..1..

Impossible? No. Economical? I don't see how, if it were why isn't the power company doing this centrally? Then they could average it out across everyone on the grid, instead of just you as the problem is usually production not transmission capacity. I guess it might make sense if you're producing your own power with solar panels and don't have to transfer power into the grid when it's sunny and out of the grid when it's dark, but the price seems steep for what you're getting. I mean this tech already exists but only for solar powered cabins off the grid, it's really expensive per kWh and usually just to power light bulbs and such.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 2) 304

And why would anyone willingly submit themselves to this abuse? I absolutely will not be adding hardware that only serves the purpose of limiting what I can do with my PC.

Does your computer have a HDMI/DisplayPort or DVI port made in the last 10+ years? You got DRM. Nothing keeps you from running the RMS-approved distro of choice and play all the creative commons content you like though, you won't notice it's there until you try to play protected content. And that's why boycotts won't work, the only reason to buy a DRM-incompatible version of the same hardware is so you can try to play protected content and bitch about it not working, kinda like buying a Mac and complaining it won't play PC games.

You must understand that the entire movie industry is in a "now or never" mode, DVDs was broken, BluRay was broken and these 4K discs will rival the cinema master (DCI 4K) in quality. If the standard is established enough they can't just ditch it and the DRM is broken, they won't be able to do one better. So they're trying to make this the most unholy DRM abomination ever, because if it fails it's game over. It's really that simple.

Comment Re:This never works (Score 2) 304

He shouldn't have said in the home - probably more the school yard and campus. We used to pirate stuff on floppy discs and later burned CD-Rs with MP3s. Before online activation was possible as a requirement you could just install as many times on as many PCs as you wanted. And it wasn't like we hoarded it, here's my collections of MP3s for your collection of MP3s just pick anything you like and if you don't want the rest just delete it. But I think that's a bit 80s and 90s thinking, then you had Napster and the 00s. If there's "casual copying" like we did today, it's a secondary effect of a torrent download, one downloads and spreads it around to friends and extended family. That seems quite likely to still be going on.

Comment Re:This product reminds me of... (Score 2) 174

You know the famous quote.

This one?

"As a general thing, I have not 'duped the world' nor attempted to do so... I have generally given people the worth of their money twice told."

The one you're likely thinking of is irrelevant here, because I've spent more on dinners than I did on my Sport watch that's due for delivery today. You say "suckers", I say "people who don't mind spending $350 on a watch they'll be using every day and that's easily worth the money in sheer entertainment value".

Comment Re:Someone contact Chris Hadfield! (Score 4, Funny) 172

I averaged my location (frame of reference, Earth) and find my average location to be the Center of the Earth.

Lucky you, I averaged with the sun as my frame of reference and over a year my average location is the center of the sun*.

* Assuming a spherical and not elliptical orbit, if you don't get the desired results tweak the model.

Comment Re:"Full responsibilty?" (Score 1) 334

Careful what you wish for, the flip side of war being declared is that all the war-time powers of the president, FEMA etc. are invoked. If you don't want that to happen, you have to somehow define it as non-war military action and then it wouldn't be in violation of the Constitution, you can't have it both ways. And the amendment says only Congress can declare war, but the President is commander-in-chief of the military and there's really nowhere that explicitly states he can't commit acts of war without approval by Congress. It seems implied, but technicalities might matter.

By the way, if you're arguing the person at the top is violating the law then that naturally flows down the chain of command and as we learned in the post-WWII trials, following orders is no excuse. So if the President should go on trial for violating the constitution, the soldier shooting should go on trial for manslaughter. Possibly even murder, because you clearly meant to kill and that you happened to kill a few that weren't the target is like an assassin's collateral. I doubt that goes under manslaughter, really.

Comment Re:Dell, HP, Panasonic (Score 1) 417

For wired machines, sell iSCSI, 10gigE, and the ability to boot from the NAS (well, used as a SAN in this case.) One drive array then handles all the home files, and is easily backed up and managed.

Your understanding of "easily" may differ from most people, besides you're thinking too limited. People want access to their data on the go, visiting friends and family, at the cabin or on vacation or business trips or whatever. Sharing movies between the upstairs and downstairs TV isn't exactly the biggest problem. Even though you might hate the buzzword "cloud" they certainly want cloud-like functionality. And then you're talking an Internet-facing service with all the fun that entails.

It might be wise for EMC/VMWare to get with hardware makers and put ESXi into BIOS of computers

Almost all desktops computers are able to do decent software virtualization already, at least for a single user case. Who is really waiting for ESXi outside of enterprise servers?

SAN functionality like snapshots, copying backups on the array level, deduplication, and other tools would be useful on PCs. Malware can't touch previous backups if done on the snapshot level.

Only if it's done by another process they don't have access to, just like backup files they can't alter. They steal your credentials, so if you can delete your own snapshot so can they.

Time to bite the bullet and move to SSD wholesale, at least for the OS. HDD bays are still useful, but the machine should at least boot, if not run its apps and data from SSD.

They'll stop providing HDDs when the market stops buying them. Lack of choice isn't going to sell a lot through extortion, because unlike Apple buying their hardware isn't the only way to run the same software (Hackintoshes excluded).

Consumer level backup media. Malware isn't going away anytime soon, and there is nothing out there that actually gives resistance from malware overwriting backup media, except for CD/DVD/BD-R drives. What would be ideal would be some form of inexpensive tape drive with the media able to be write-protected, maybe even WORM media available

Except it doesn't exist. Except consumers often treat their media like shit. Except it's that manual process users never bother to do. Most can't even be arsed to copy-paste it to a thumbdrive/second HDD/NAS/whatever as backup. If you got one online backup (anywhere but at home) and a disconnected USB HDD next to your PC you're better off than 99% of the population. The chance of a fire/theft destroying your offline backup and a virus/trojan destroying your online backups at the same time are pretty slim.

You can't backup a 4TB drive to DVD-R. Or I guess you can, but it'd take forever both to do and restore. Same with tape backups, you're not going to swap ten tapes to back up/restore one drive and the kind that could back up large parts of a drive is $$$.

Comment Re:Not a Piece of Shit (Score 3, Insightful) 128

People are stupid if they don't realize a password is like a key.

They do, and the problem is that they treat it exactly like one. When you buy a lock, do you immediately re-key it? No: you use it as-is. Now maybe if the key looked very suspicious, like say it was a perfect sine or square wave or it was completely smooth, then you might ask the blacksmith whether that's normal. I bet those shopkeepers would be asking the same of their POS installer if the password was "123456" or "111111".

But to their (and my) untrained eye, "166816" looks reasonably random. It looks as random as my Schlage house key does. Maybe there's a locksmith forum where experts are making fun of me for not changing my obviously default lock. After all, they can tell at a glance that I have the standard factory issue! How stupid am I for using it without making my own pattern!

No, I think you're exactly wrong. People think of these passwords as keys. They use the ones manufacturers give them. They hand them out to the same staff that have keys to the front door and cash drawers. They don't routinely change them when people quit. They don't audit their usage. They treat them just like the little medal danglies on the ring in their pocket, no more, no less. We've done a very poor job of telling them why they should think otherwise.

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