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Comment Re:How about this... (Score 1) 184

H.265 is going to become the standard in the near future - not just for 4K (in which is will pretty much be the only solution) but for 1080p as well, since you get significantly higher quality (including 10 or 12 bit color

Any idea why they never did that with H.264? MPEG-2 offered 10-bit color. DVD and (I think) ATSC take advantage of it, and it makes a difference in scenes with large areas of slightly changing color (like a shot of the sky). That it wasn't available in H.264 (except maybe for some crazy-high profiles or levels not in regular use?) always seemed like a step back.

Comment Re:Don't try to piggyback on TrueCrypts popularity (Score 4, Informative) 114

If its Linux only don't present it as a successor to TrueCrypt. A very important feature of TrueCrypt is(was) that it targets Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Any archive being available to any of the three platforms.

I don't know about Mac support, but if Tomb is just a wrapper around LUKS, the volumes it creates should be accessible on Windows as long as you use a filesystem Windows knows about. Ext2IFS doesn't work on anything newer than Windows Vista, so you're most likely looking at FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS if you want your LUKS volume to be portable.

Assuming a suitable LUKS volume, you can mount it on Windows with LibreCrypt, which is the successor to FreeOTFE (by way of DoxBox). My work machine still has FreeOTFE on it, but I just installed LibreCrypt on Windows 10 at home and the encrypted volume on my flashstick mounted right up.

Comment Re:So tell us (Score 2) 74

Maybe it never tried.

That and also more importantly: because nature's idea of "better" is almost never the same as our idea of "better." I think it's wonderful that the performance example that they used, happened to be binding to cancer cells. If cancer doesn't illustrate the vast gulf between us and it, I don't know what does!

Comment Re:Degrees are worth what you put into them (Score 2) 296

Getting a college degree, you actually learn something.

I've run into more than a few people who have made it through college quite uncontaminated by knowledge.

I'd argue that there are even some college curricula that will leave their students less prepared for the real world than if they had just gone straight into the burger-flipper and barista jobs that are the only types of work they'll ever land outside academia. You can identify most of them by the presence of the word "studies" at the end.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 114

The drivers in California aren't necessarily bad, but they are much more aggressive and more likely to do something stupid out of impatience.

California drivers never heard of lane discipline. They think nothing of (as Denis Leary might put it) "driving really slow in the ultra-fast lane," or of passing the aforementioned assholes on the right.

Comment Re:Kernel size and compile reduction (Score 2, Insightful) 110

It sounds like the project you want [someone] to start, does this: reads a config file, looks at what modules ended up actually getting loaded, and then enables/disables config options, writes a new config file. Then your subsequent compiles can be faster and your /lib/modules can be smaller.

Comment Re:Google It (Score 1) 189

Damn, that's a nice program. Kudos to Brother.

I wish I could find something on their website that states what they actually do with the returned toner cartridges. All I could find is this:

We will evaluate the opportunities to recycle, reuse, reduce, refuse and reform resources throughout the life cycle of our products.

My emphasis. This is not a commitment to recycle. It's feel-good corporate-speak.

Do they actually dismantle and recycle them? Do they refurbish them, or sell them to a refurbisher? Or do they just dispose of them so that they stay out of the after-market?

I'm sorry to be cynical. Brother may very well be acting as a good corporate citizen. But when I don't see explicit mention of their actions, I start to wonder what they are.

I suspect there are two problems for them in being too clear. First, I suspect they can't guarantee to reuse every cartridge - some of them will be damaged or contaminated, I imagine; second, they won't want to validate third party cartridge refills by admitting they actually do refills themselves! I recycle my Lexmark cartridges by mailing them back (with a prepaid shipping label they include with every new cartridge); my guess is they will refill and reset perfect-condition cartridges, recondition damaged or older ones, and recover the raw materials from unusable ones, but they won't want to be too open about the details. The "new" cartridges aren't exactly cheap, admitting they're sometimes actually refills would probably hurt sales.

Comment Re:blu ray? (Score 1) 121

How is using blu ray cheaper than hard drives?

3 TB will fit on 120 25-GB BD-Rs. At 40 cents each, that's $48 in media costs. If you do like I do and reserve 20% for dvdisaster error-recovery data, you're still only looking at $60.

A 3 TB WD Green will set you back $95. (Want to spring for the NAS-rated Red drives instead? That'll be $119. Their absolute cheapest 3 TB hard drives are a couple of models from Seagate and Toshiba at $90 each.)

Comment Re:FB hardware may be lucrative... (Score 1) 121

The trick is getting BD media into the terabytes and getting it at a price point where it is decently affordable. For example, a 100 GB BDXL disk is $65, but it should be about 10% of that price in order to be a viable backup medium.

My last spindle of 25 GB BD-Rs cost me maybe $0.60 each or so. I could drive down to Fry's right now and pick up a spindle for about $0.80 each. A 4x increase in storage density isn't worth a two-order-of-magnitude increase in price. I would be surprised if Farcebook didn't arrive at the same conclusion.

Going by the numbers from the video in TFA, they're getting over 10k BD-Rs in a rack. While the basic concept isn't new, they appear to have developed it to a considerably higher density.

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