Comment Re:Agree and disagree (Score 1) 630
Problem is that since you've never been through a CS program, you don't know what you're missing, literally.
Comment 5 Things (Score 1) 630
If you want the best and brightest, you only have to do a few simple things:
1. Be willing to pay them obscene amounts of money. Yes, this means more than the next employer is willing to pay. No matter what folks say, size does matter. Salary is just a way of keeping score.
2. Creative Freedom - don't do endless micromanaging on coding style, and restricting open source from being used.
3. Free energy - ample supply of caffeine and sugary snacks goes a long way
4. Technology Stipend - Good craftsmen understand that they need the best tools to do their jobs. Don't stick them with some random corporate IT-issued desktop with Windows98 on it.
5. Stroke their ego about once a week.
The truly good companies that are able to attact and retain the smartest developers are all good at some combination of the 5 items above.
Comment Re:How about getting java code to run on java (Score 0) 304
Except after you get pestered every hour to update your Java runtime, you actually do update it and it breaks compatibility with all existing apps.
Other than that, yea WORA is great stuff.
Comment Com'on Guys.. it's only 20 seconds (Score 1) 587
It's only another 20 seconds. You already are forced to sit through 15 minutes of trailers of worthless straight-to-video trash on Blu-Rays nowadays, what's another 20 seconds? </sarc>
Comment Intel QuickSync is the true winner (Score 1) 158
So basically the article says GPU rendering is bad, but QuickSync is good enough for prime time.
Duh. QS is made to do a very specific task (encoding/decoding video) and it can do it super fast at decent quality rates. There's always the tradeoff of quality vs. encoding time. With QS, I can rip an entire 50GB Blu-Ray in 12 minutes to a 1080p MKV @ 8000kbps. It takes about 16 hours doing the same task with a normal x264 encoder such as Handbrake even though the quality is a little bit better. Is it worth waiting around 16 hours for me? Nope.
With enough bitrate, anything looks good. The key is to just bump up the bitrate in MediaCoder when using QuickSync for encoding to something very high.
Duh. QS is made to do a very specific task (encoding/decoding video) and it can do it super fast at decent quality rates. There's always the tradeoff of quality vs. encoding time. With QS, I can rip an entire 50GB Blu-Ray in 12 minutes to a 1080p MKV @ 8000kbps. It takes about 16 hours doing the same task with a normal x264 encoder such as Handbrake even though the quality is a little bit better. Is it worth waiting around 16 hours for me? Nope.
With enough bitrate, anything looks good. The key is to just bump up the bitrate in MediaCoder when using QuickSync for encoding to something very high.
Comment Re:Uh, what? (Score 5, Informative) 141
The problem is that file storage is so dad-gum expensive these days. 15cents a gb at Amazon makes it $150 per month for a terabyte of storage. You're better off buying the 1TB drives yourself and rotating it to an employee's house every night.
Sure there are some cheaper alternatives (nimbus.io) but even at 6cents a GB with Nimbus, you're still better off buying the external drives yourself.
Comment Re:Not Bad (Score 3, Insightful) 299
Or they'll just get extradited and hauled before a U.S. court on charges of distribution of copyrighted material. And let's hope their domain name isn't registered with GoDaddy...
Comment QuickSync is Intel's Secret Weapon (Score 1) 497
Intel still has the advantage of QuickSync for super fast decoding/encoding/transcoding. Besides gaming, the most CPU intensive applications is probably centered around mobile media. E.g., transcoding that blu-ray you got from Redbox so you can watch it on your iPad.
Sure the quality isn't great, but AMD has no answer for it in the near future.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-core-i7-2600k-core-i5-2500k,2833-5.html
Submission + - Filesonics disabled sharing
An anonymous reader writes: Filesonic has disabled all filesharing, can only assume it is a reaction to the raid on megaupload
Submission + - SOPA and PIPA Dead. Now it's OPEN's turn (pcworld.com)
Antarell writes: "Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) introduced H.R. 3782, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, the same day as an Internet protest when a number of high-profile websites such as Wikipedia went dark. Issa says the new bill delivers stronger intellectual property rights for American artists and innovators while protecting the openness of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has introduced the OPEN Act in the U.S. Senate.
OPEN would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC) instead of the Justice Department, focuses on foreign-based websites, includes an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that "willfully" promote copyright violation. SOPA and PIPA, in contrast, would enable content owners to take down an entire website, even if just one page on it carried infringing content, and imposed sanctions after accusations — not requiring a conviction"
OPEN would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC) instead of the Justice Department, focuses on foreign-based websites, includes an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that "willfully" promote copyright violation. SOPA and PIPA, in contrast, would enable content owners to take down an entire website, even if just one page on it carried infringing content, and imposed sanctions after accusations — not requiring a conviction"
Submission + - Steve Jobs Told Obama Made-in-the-USA Days Over 9
theodp writes: At his Last Supper with Steve Jobs, reports the NY Times, President Obama had a question for Jobs: What would it take to make iPhones in the United States? 'Those jobs aren't coming back,' Jobs replied. The president's question touched upon a central conviction at Apple: It isn't just that workers are cheaper abroad; Apple execs believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that Made in the U.S.A.' is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. 'The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,' a former Apple exec gushed, describing how 8,000 workers were once roused from company dormitories at midnight to address a last-minute Apple design change, given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. 'There's no American plant that can match that.' What's vexed Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its hi-tech peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays. 'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems,' a current Apple exec is quoted as saying. 'Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'
Submission + - Gigabyte Board Sets Intel X79 Overclocking Record (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: "Renowned overclocker "Hicoookie" achieved a new high clock speed on the Intel Core i7 3930K processor by cranking the chip past 5.6GHz using a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard, the first mobo in the world to achieve a mulitplier of 57x. There was a bit of a scandal with Gigabyte recently when a YouTube video showed one of its X79 boards going up in smoke. Gigabyte released a BIOS update for several of its X79 boards to prevent such incidents from happening, and there were outcries that the new F7 BIOS would essentially gimp overclocking performance Hicookie's achievement should erase those concerns."
Submission + - SOPA Blackout Simulator (vilimpoc.org)
An anonymous reader writes: I've written up a quick and simple client-side Javascript function that obscures DIVs, or any other CSS selector you like, to show what the Web would look like if SOPA passes.
You can build this into your websites and give people a real sense of what an arbitrary and capricious SOPA web censorship regime might look like.
You can build this into your websites and give people a real sense of what an arbitrary and capricious SOPA web censorship regime might look like.
Submission + - Juror's Tweets Overturns Trial Verdict (bbc.co.uk) 1
D H NG writes: The Arkansas Supreme Court had overturned a murder conviction due to a juror tweeting during the trial. Erickson Dimas-Martinez was convicted in 2010 of killing a teenager and was sentenced to death. His lawyers appealed the case on account of a juror tweeting his musings during the trial. Tweets sent include "The coffee here sucks" and "Court. Day 5. here we go again". In an opinion, Associate Justice Donald Corbin wrote "because of the very nature of Twitter as an... online social media site, Juror 2's tweets about the trial were very much public discussions." Dimas-Martinez is to be given a new trial.
Submission + - 2 large media companies sending false DMCA claims
bs0d3 writes: Today there's two large stories about false DMCA notices sent by large media corporations. One in which Universal tried to censor a megaupload commercial song created by many famous artists including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, The Game and Mary J Blige. Universal sent persistant notices to cause the video to be removed by reason of copyright infringement. However these were false notices as megaupload claims that they can prove that they own the copyright to their content. The other story is from a scientific video that used Jamendo audio in the back ground. All the tracks used by the video creator were creative commons licensed and not in violation of any copyright. A complaint made by the Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society has been persistant in removing these videos. After contacting the artist, "Jamendo" ; Jamendo has reiterated that the music is licensed under a creative commons attribution license and has sent a counter take down letter to youtube on behalf of the video creator.
