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User: bill_mcgonigle

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  1. Re: Just in time. on Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte 'Archive' Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    Get the HGST "NAS" SATA drives, if you don't need SAS - they are much better than the standard SATA drives, meant for real storage duties - pretty much what nerds need for home. Great ZFS performance. Three year warranty is good enough.

  2. Re: We don't care how many pixels it has on LG To Show Off New 55-Inch 8K Display at CES · · Score: 1

    If I did my math right, this 8k display has more ppi than my main 24" display. This really changes my conception of what my workspace will look like in 3 years. A 55" display "wall" would be worth a substantial investment. I would save a couple grand for something that dramatic.

  3. Re: The best gift? on 2014 Geek Gift Guide · · Score: 1

    most of the "hate" posts are his sockpuppet accounts, trying to raise his profile and name recognition. Clever marketing - go follow his amazon referral links now.

  4. Re: Sounds unlikely to me on Rosetta Results: Comets "Did Not Bring Water To Earth" · · Score: 1

    Escape into space is one thing, but also far enough outside of Earth's orbital position that its gravity wouldn't keep the water in an intercept orbit for eventual return? I'm not able to find anything with my naive google searches.

  5. Is SONY breaking the law with this on Sony Reportedly Is Using Cyber-Attacks To Keep Leaked Files From Spreading · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The law applies to all, big and small.

    Which jurisdiction or period in time are you referring to? I can't think of a single example where this is true.

    Pretending life is the same as fantasy is a sign of mental illness.

  6. Re: Could be a great update! on FreeNAS 9.3 Released · · Score: 1

    If unix permissions are enough, you can max out the zfs permissions and ignore them. Pretty sure I have a post on my blog for that - it's been about three years since I did any Nexenta work though.

  7. Re:Only in America... on Apple DRM Lawsuit Loses Last Plaintiff, but Judge Rules Against Dismissal · · Score: 1

    The plaintiffs - or rather their counsel - should have done their homework better and ensured that the plaintiffs had standing, though.. and I think the judge made that very clear in their highly public statements.

    no kidding - I expect Apple to prevail, even if it shouldn't, merely based on this very rough approximation of the attorneys' degree of diligence in the case.

  8. Re: Comcast Business Class on Comcast Sued For Turning Home Wi-Fi Routers Into Public Hotspots · · Score: 1

    If you think the entire power budget for a wifi ap is the radio, you're pretty silly. They run slightly warm - more than 1W above the radio power. 8W is about median.

  9. Re: Should prefix titles like these with "Ad: ..." on Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested · · Score: 1

    if you're here you should be able to tell the difference between reviewing the first entrant in a new product category and every subsequent device.

  10. "hard to fathom" on Economist: US Congress Should Hack Digital Millennium Copyright Act · · Score: 1

    What kind of idiot economist says things like this? It's designed to enrich the corporations and take away the rights of the People. It does a great job at that. It's what critics said would happen before it was enacted and the power structure likes it just fine. You sound like a fool when you pretend it's a mistake.

  11. Re:What happens to these at the true end-of-life? on Using Discarded Laptop Batteries To Power Lights · · Score: 1

    Do the communities who benefit from the secondary-use life of these batteries have the infrastructure and culture to properly recycle the materials

    I have an idea - let's get them evening lighting they can afford, so they can be a bit more productive and start building the wealth they'll need to get into a modernized high-tech society.

    Look into the history of lamp oil prices, for instance, and its impact on economic development. Teaser: $140/gal (2014) for lamp oil before the Industrial Revolution.

  12. Re:you're doing it wrong on Overly Familiar Sci-Fi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Exactly. There is no right or wrong in fiction writing. This guy is just full of it and stuck in his own rut.

    Even worse, he feels entitled to tell writers that they ought to be catering to his preferences specifically, and implicitly that they should feel bad about writing for other people's preferences.

    He should, instead, be writing nice reviews about the authors who write the way he likes. Maybe it will catch on by increasing popularity, but the only effect the entitlement mentality ever has is to drive people away from his position. His essay will probably have no impact at all, but if it does, not in the direction he hopes.

  13. Re:Random failures on Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes · · Score: 3, Informative

    Great, so now we just need to fix the sudden random failures where the drive completely fails but it is 6 months old and showed no signs of degradation.

    Just counted - the stack on my workbench of completely dead SSD's is 13. I think I've seen one hard drive ever go completely dead. I literally don't understand how the vendors think they can get away with such junk on SSD controllers. I know flash will fail, but that's no reason to hang dead on the SATA bus and not talk to anybody. Admit defeat by SMART and move on.

    I don't always use SSD's for journals, but when I do they're in a RAID configuration. Stay speedy, my friends.

  14. Re:Owncloud option that is _NOT_ written in PHP? on Using OwnCloud To Integrate Dropbox, Google Drive, and More In Gnome · · Score: 1

    Anyone have a suggestion of a dropbox/owncloud replacement that is NOT written in PHP?

    IIRC seafile is written in c & c++ with some python bits for web. Based on the git model, but more of a pain to set up than it should be.

  15. Re:Wait, what? on 'Moneyball' Approach Reduces Crime In New York City · · Score: 1

    The database contains "more than 9,000 chronic offenders" which include "uncooperative witnesses"? Does anyone else worry about this?

    Yes, but compared that to the fact that so many of these prosecutions can only identify "the State" as a victim (aka victimless "crimes") and that 97% of them take a plea due to charge stacking and prosecutorial belligerence, when many of the accused are actually innocent, the harassment of witnesses is so minor next to the shredding of the sixth amendment.

    If the DA's really wanted to affect crime, they'd focus on crimes with victims. Really what they want to do is advance their careers, which are promoted by the profile level and count of prosecutions. Hell, if they really wanted to affect crime, they'd scrap the War on Drugs, demilitarize the police, abolish civil asset forfeiture, re-separate crime squads from vice squads, find people treatment for addiction, etc., but justice is so clearly not the end goal anymore (if it ever was). When you literally have circus courts suing houses, finding the houses guilty, seizing said houses, and only letting the owners of those "guilty" houses appeal to an administrative "court" where the "judge" is also the prosecutor, you have nothing more than a well-organized gang wearing mid-grade JC Penney suits and using assets inherited from the former Republic.

  16. Re:What about the cost of NOT having it? on The Cost of the "S" In HTTPS · · Score: 1

    Right, and you have to add the entire NSA budget to the "costs" column for web encryption or not.

  17. Re: Err, you don't "wear" a regular tattoo on How High-Tech Temporary Tattoos Will Hack Your Skin · · Score: 1

    Give it a few more years and you'll be able to get an eink sort of implant grid that will support pattern changing as the styles change. You'll have to go back to the tatoo parlor at first for the big machine, then a home unit will be developed and eventually the microcontrollers can be embedded with the pigment. The tatoo parlor device will only need one use to assign each injected pixel (pigel?) its coordinate. Long term tech support is the obvious problem.

  18. Re:Ideological purity ... on Openwashing: Users and Adopters Beware · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Rabid ideological open source are the vegans of the technology world -- mostly they piss people off and cause a lot of eye rolling as they foam at the mouth.

    Being a poor communicator helps nobody. Give those people a Dale Carnegie book - they're just hurting the "cause".

    But the ideology does have value - from it the community ethos is generated which results in transparency, helpfulness, and quality, all highly valuable qualities for a mission-critical software package. Those points are worth explaining in a reasoned and effective manor - one does not need to drop the passion to engage in a polite conversation.

    It would be nice if it weren't only rich kids who had a choice to attend a school which taught logic, reason, persuasion, and rhetoric.

  19. Re:US Centric? on Is a "Wikipedia For News" Feasible? · · Score: 1

    I'm no conspiracy nut, but how does that happen?

    Believing in conspiracy theories without any/sufficient evidence is what makes one a conspiracy nut - a type of fanciful thinking. Given sufficient evidence, the 'nut' label is no longer required. Believing that there are no conspiracies is another type of fanciful thinking.

    I stick to foreign based news nowadays. Fortunately with the internet that is easy to do.

    And if you want to specifically find foreign perspectives on US endeavors, Watching America aggregates those.

  20. Re:Then demanding decryption will not be "reasonab on 18th Century Law Dredged Up To Force Decryption of Devices · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Really, as long as only "reasonable technical assistance" is required, there is no danger. Good encryption

    The Justice Department feels that having an embedded back door into the devices' crypto is very "reasonable" and has been pushing for just that. Now they need a judge to rule on their version of the word and the corporations will fall in line.

    Throw in a Patriot Act gag order and some import/export barriers vis-a-vis patent wars, and let's make a bet about how many 2015 backdoors will be discovered in 2018.

    This is the kind of government the voters support.

  21. Re:Then demanding decryption will not be "reasonab on 18th Century Law Dredged Up To Force Decryption of Devices · · Score: 2

    From a business point of view, nope. Any corporation would drop Androids like they're penny stocks.

    Tell me about how Windows suffered by having the NSA Key embedded.

  22. Re: I don't think you know what that word means on A Mismatch Between Wikimedia's Pledge Drive and Its Cash On Hand? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's hate posts like TFS that reassure me that Wikipedia is being well-managed. The best he can come up with is "look at this evil financial prudence!"

  23. Re:Apple already uses that name.. on CoreOS Announces Competitor To Docker · · Score: 4, Funny

    "CoreOS" is the kernel and UNIX services layer of iOS and Mac OS X.

    Actually, Core OS is.

    Yeah....

  24. Re:There are issues to resolve... on Obama Offers Funding For 50,000 Police Body Cameras · · Score: 5, Insightful

    have the police face a presumption of guilt for all accusations that aren't on film.

    "On duty, on video."

    "All" that needs to be done is to remove qualified immunity when the camera turns off. Expect thousands of police union lawyers at that hearing - sometimes obvious solutions are impossible if the system isn't optimizing for solutions.

  25. Re:Why? on Obama Offers Funding For 50,000 Police Body Cameras · · Score: 1

    The article does preface the $75 million with "proposed", so like most things the President proposes, perhaps nothing will come of it.

    That's OK, really. I've been in a high orbit on the effort to mandate body cams here, and it's been mostly libertarian Republicans who have been pushing for them. Obama being out in front is a gift, and I'll be using it in my testimony in a few months.

    This should not be a partisan issue, but any issue without a 50/50 sponsor ratio turns into one in our dysfunctional system.