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User: jtownatpunk.net

jtownatpunk.net's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:Carnies on High TechCarnival Aims To Entertain, Inspire, and Educate · · Score: 1

    I'm picturing neck beards, utilikilts, and non-traditional piercings.

  2. Re:So what's the problem? on MS To Indie Devs: You Have a To Have a Publisher · · Score: 1

    [blink][blink][blink]

    Well that's the dumbest thing I've heard this month. And I've heard some dumb things this month.

  3. So what's the problem? on MS To Indie Devs: You Have a To Have a Publisher · · Score: 2

    Set up a company called AAA Publishing. Problem solved. "You want a publisher? Fine. Here's our publisher. It's a freak coincidence that the president and CEO of our publishing company share the names of the president and CEO of our development company. Small world, I guess."

  4. Kit? on Man Creates ATLAS Detector From Lego Bricks · · Score: 0

    When I was a kid, I had a bucket of Legos and an imagination.

  5. Re:I'm confused. on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Prove an IT Manager Is Incompetent? · · Score: 1

    If your scenario was representative of what was happening here, there wouldn't be a post on /. The company that hired him would have pointed him at the schmuck with hints of what he should "find" in his report. He'd write a report fingering saiid schnuck, get his check, and be on his merry way to the next gig.

  6. Re:I'm confused. on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Prove an IT Manager Is Incompetent? · · Score: 1

    I have been asked by a medium-sized business to help them come to grips with why their IT group is ineffective...

    Sure as heck looks like it's this person's job to determine what the problem is.

  7. I'm confused. on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Prove an IT Manager Is Incompetent? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it's your job to determine what the problem is, you should already have the skills necessary to thoroughly evaluate the situation and communicate your conclusions. If you've already determined that this person is the problem, what is left to assess? If you don't know how to objectively determine that this person is the problem, how have you concluded that this person is the problem? If you don't know how to evaluate someone's competence and can't explain your conclusions to the people who hired you, how can you be qualified to tell this company what's wrong with the department?

  8. Just to be clear. on Asteroid Passes (Just) 65,000 Miles From Earth · · Score: 2

    We almost got rid of Tasmania?

  9. Seems like overkill on Chinese Firm Approved To Raise World's Tallest Building In 90 Days · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Shouldn't they work on filling those empty cities before they build more stuff? Or maybe reduce pollution?

  10. Re:Not-so-accurate source on BBC Clock Inaccurate - 100 Days To Fix? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems simple until you start working through it. First you have to start tracking every goofy fall/spring variation in the world so you don't display a time that's an hour early or late. Then, do you just trust that the user has the correct time zone entered on their computer? Maybe they're travelling 3 time zones away. Do you use ip geolocation to get their approximate physical location and display that time? Say you do that. What if they're in NYC and surfing through their company VPN in Los Angeles? I guess on a tablet or phone, you might be able to get the location from the GPS. Wating for location fix...waiting for location fix...waiting for location fix.

    At some point during the discussions, someone pointed out that it's a silly thing to worry about since any device accessing their website already has the time displayed or available at the gesture of a mouse or finger.

  11. Re:meh on Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro · · Score: 2

    A Core i7 CPU at 1.8ghz and an Atom CPU at 1.6ghz aren't even in the same ballpark. That's like comparing an MLB team to your 6 year old's T-ball team. They both hit balls with sticks and run but that's where the similarity ends.

    If you want to split the difference, Woot's got an 11.6" Core i3 computer for $300 right now. It's not the latest generation but it's inexpensive, light, and more powerful than a netbook with a reasonably sized keyboard. I type on an 11.6" and the key spacing the the same as my standard desktop keyboard (minus the number pad, of course). It even has a touchscreen so you can get the full Windows 8 experience.

  12. Re:meh on Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro · · Score: 1

    Cheap, powerful, small. Pick two.

  13. Re:50" 4k costs 1/4 the price of the 32" on 4K Computer Monitors Are Coming (But Still Pricey) · · Score: 2

    Who wants to stare at 30Hz on their computer all day? Is this 1992? That's the last time I saw an interlaced display on a computer. That's the best you'll be able to do at 3840x2160 on the HDMI connection on that 50" Seiki. There's currently no way to run them at 60Hz using the available connections on the computer and display. At best, they'll get Nvidia and AMD to support using dual connections to treat the single monitor as dual monitors with no bezel correction.

    Check the bandwidth of various video connections and you'll find that this is a hurdle that will need to be overcome before these monitors make significant inroads onto desktops. We need HDMI 2.0 and/or DisplayPort 2.0 to drive these things properly.

  14. Re:Ehhh, who cares about DRM if it's trivially bro on DRM: How Book Publishers Failed To Learn From the Music Industry · · Score: 1

    Your analogy is bad and you should feel bad.

    When I strip the DRM from my purchased ePub documents, it's gone. There is no lingering death. There's nothing else to "cure". It's gone. I can access the contents of those files on any platform that can read ePub and I can convert the content to any other relevant format if I've got some weird device that can't read ePub.

  15. Better be an open system on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If they only charge Tesla vehicles, that would be like building gas stations that only sell proprietary fuel for Ford vehicles. Maybe sell the juice cheaper to Tesla owners but they need to provide high current plugs for all of the major electric vehicles.

    Cross-country travel is still gong to be a hard sell, tho. They're talking about 30 minutes to 50% charge. So call it an hour to 90% and 1.5 hours to 100%. And I assume they're talking about the small Tesla pack to get the best numbers. And non-Tesla vehicles will have to be charged at a more conservative rate so they're going to have people hanging around for an hour or two charging their vehicles. That's a lot of time to kill.

  16. Re:Sweet on FiOS User Finds Limit of 'Unlimited' Data Plan: 77 TB/Month · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If only it was always that easy. Comcrap put me on 6 months of "probation" a couple years ago. "You're moving too much data. If you don't stay below 250 gigs per month, we're shutting off your service and blacklisting you for a year." This was their first contact so I figured no biggie. Let's just switch me to a business account. What's the monthly limit on those. "I don't have information on business plans but you can't switch because you're on probation. Call back in six months."

    That's when I realized ISPs don't want you to pay for the data you move. They want you to pay for data you don't move. They want a bunch of octogenarians who fire up the computer once a week to check their email for pics of the grandkids.

    They quietly stopped enforcing the 250 gig cap around the time my probation was up so I'm back to my old patterns on the normal residential account. If they'd been smart enough to let me switch to business class service instead of spanking me like a child, they would have been collecting more money all this time.

  17. I'm confused. on Happy Culture Freedom Day! · · Score: 1

    Do I get free yogurt or not?

  18. Re:uh... on Amazon Buys Sunlight Readable Color Display Company Liquavista · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, they're not. It's not eInk at all. It's a new method of building a color LCD panel that is reflective. Entirely different.

    Color eInk already exists. Google the Etaco Jetbook Color. 4096 colors and slow refresh rate (like B/W eInk). Not the same thing other than they're both reflective, color displays.

  19. I must be missing something. on Apple Deluged By Police Demands To Decrypt iPhones · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary talks about decrypting the data on the phones. The articles talk about getting past the lock screen on the phones. Those are two entirely different things. On my phone, I have to first enter the decryption code before I'm presented with the lock screen.

  20. Re:Super DURRRRRRRRR! on Snapchats Don't Disappear · · Score: 2

    I don't see how notifying the sender does anything to change the fact that I now have a permanent copy of their junk. Or I could get a 3rd party screen capture program that doesn't inform anyone that the images has been saved.

  21. Super DURRRRRRRRR! on Snapchats Don't Disappear · · Score: 1, Redundant

    What morons thought their claims were even remotely possible. You don't even need to be a techie to save the images forever. Just snap a screenshot while the image is being displayed. Done.

  22. I can't believe it, Jim. on Backdoor Targeting Apache Servers Spreads To Nginx, Lighttpd · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    That girl's standing over there listening and you're telling him about our back doors?

  23. Re:Just how much storage capacity would one requir on Former FBI Agent: All Digital Communications Stored By US Gov't · · Score: 2

    Pshaw. I've got 26 fault-tolerant terabytes just for my media. Every piece of hardware is available from regular vendors like newegg, amazon, microcenter, etc. It fits in a mid-tower case with room to spare and the capacity could be doubled by switching to 4tb drives.

    Google was expected to pass an exabyte of data years ago. Amazon's somewhere around that range with their cloud services. Facebook claims a petabyte of duckface pics and videos. And those are companies that are designed to be making a profit. Government agencies don't have to worry about things like profit.

    The question isn't whether it's feasible to store that much data but whether the government is capable of managing the creation of such a data center. They don't have a great record when it comes to IT projects. At least not public-facing ones.

  24. Depends on the device. on Is Buying an Extended Warranty Ever a Good Idea? · · Score: 1

    For about 10 years, I rolled over Circuit City extended warranties on a series of portable audio players. Tape players at first, then CD players. It was pretty much guaranteed that the headphone jack would get loose before the 2 year warranty was up and portable CD players would start skipping. I'd bring the device back to CC and get the choice between a replacement or store credit for the original purchase price. I'd take store credit, pick the latest and greatest portable device (which was usually about the same amount I'd paid for the old and busted model) and add $20 for another 2 year warranty.

    Doing the math, I paid a little over $2/month for the initial $150 purchase and bi-annual $20 warranty purchases. I'd say it worked well for me at the time. I know people will say "rabble rabble rabble anecdotal rabble rabble rabble" but that doesn't change the outcome for me. I came out way ahead of paying for a new device every two years.

  25. Absolutely not. on Ask Slashdot: Would You Accept 'Bitcoin-Ware' Apps? · · Score: 1

    This isn't like the days when ramping up a Pentium 3 to full power meant an extra 20 watts. These days, the difference between idle and balls-out on my gaming rig is hundreds of watts. Eventually, the AC will kick in to keep the room comfortable. Even at idle, it's a pig. I don't run that thing unless I'm playing games. Or if it's a cold night and I want the waste heat to warm the room.