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User: ducomputergeek

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  1. Re:What if Samsung threatens to fork? on Google Charging OEMs Licensing Fees For Play Store · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This. I think Samsung was waiting to see how well Amazons and others did. The biggest threat to Android was never Apple & iOS, but Samsung. The question in my mind has always been, what happens if Samsung forks and derives their own OS without google...

  2. Re:The point where I stopped reading on CmdrTaco Launches Trove, a Curated News Startup · · Score: 2

    The world is changing. I've been doing "year in review" stuff with clients websites the past month. A trend I am noticing is that mobile users are now half or more of all traffic to many of the sites I manage. One in particular it's 2/3's of the traffic and increasing with almost half of all visits from iOS users. It is getting to the point where we're sitting down next month and drawing up requirement docs for building an iOS and hopfuly Android App by the end of the year.

  3. Re:Quality vs OpenBSD? on FreeBSD 10.0 Released · · Score: 4, Informative

    FreeBSD's goal is to create a solid Unix based general server OS. And it's around a lot in the storage markets and routing markets, it's just not usually called FreeBSD. I know more than a few Solaris shops that have been converting over to FreeBSD after the Oracle purchase because FreeBSD had DTrace and ZFS support that Linux didn't have at the time.

    OpenBSD's goal is security above all else.

  4. The point is MANTLE on AMD Considered GDDR5 For Kaveri, Might Release Eight-Core Variant · · Score: 1

    I'm shopping for a new gaming computer on a budget. And even models shipping with this APU still usually have a R9 270x dedicated card as well, for a price point of about $850 USD.

    Where this gets interesting is if MANTLE gets widely adopted. Suddenly it can treat those 6 or 8 GCN nodes on the APU as additional GPU Processing power to be used in the queue. While maybe not as powerful as a second video card, it should give a boost in performance at no additional cost.

    Of course assuming game developers start using Mantle...

  5. Re:Engineering's biggest mistake was on Electrical Engineering Lost 35,000 Jobs Last Year In the US · · Score: 2

    Actual law is a horrible example because there has been a bubble of lawyers now and it's kept starting legal salaries actually fairly low. I know because my and I have talked about this and she is a lawyer and I went to law school, but ended up starting a tech company I sold instead. Financially we are well off enough that when we have kids she could take a couple years off. But if she does she can kiss having a comfortable job as in house corporate counsel good bye. And she has a JD & MBA.

    It's so competitive here that if she left the chances of her finding another one is next to nil. There are about 25 well qualified applicants with JD/MBA's for every corporate counsel job in the area.

    And frankly the only people who get those jobs are already corporate counsel somewhere else and are just moving companies or in rare cases move from outside counsel to in house.

  6. Re:Stand their ground on Wikimedia Community Debates H.264 Support On Wikipedia Sites. · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Depends on your traffic. I run a content rich site for a client of mine and we realized something as we did our quarterly review: Mobile users are now 60% of all traffic to her site. Of that, the biggest block of users are from iPad at almost 30% of all traffic. iPhone makes up another 18% and all Android devices make up about 13% of our traffic. There is another 6% of traffic that is iPods. So as it stands right now iOS is over 50% of all traffic.

    Think we are going to ignore iOS? Think again. Instead we've decided that it's time to add a native mobile app for iOS targeting specifically iPad.

  7. Re:Stand their ground on Wikimedia Community Debates H.264 Support On Wikipedia Sites. · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The open formats lost this round. Sorry, but with H2.64 we've finally had a "Standard Codec" and format that allows content creators to encode the media once and just about reach everyone. If the open standards offered a significant technical advantage, i.e. better compression without loss of quality or faster encoding vs H.264 then they'd be open to listening. But as I've talked to a lot of content creators over the past few years, many of whom remember the days of creating a quicktime video, a Windows Media video, a Real Player video and none of them wish to go back to it. And for these people the cost of paying for a H.264 encoder license is trivial compared to royalties they have to pay for images, video, and music.

  8. Re:Ulterior Motives? on Adobe Adds 3D Printer Support To Photoshop · · Score: 1

    And in the world of professional print graphics name me one other real world replacement...

    That's why they can go to a subscription model...

    There is no replacement for Photoshop...

  9. And how did this pass PCI-DSS & PA-DSS? on Target Confirms Point-of-Sale Malware Was Used In Attack · · Score: 1

    Seriously. At my last company we wrote point of sale software just as PA-DSS certification was coming into play and we got our software PA-DSS certified. One of the things the QSA is supposed to test is that things like the PIN are stored encrypted in RAM. Eventually we encouraged all our customers to use the Ingentico PIN pads which they customer used and should contain encryption from the processor and run the transaction without our software ever seeing any card data. Just a transaction id and amount...

    I remember this because this situation expressly came up in a project meeting when one of the young programmers questioned why it had to be encrypted in RAM. I then showed him a program that could dump and even search the contents of RAM. He wasn't aware that such a thing existed. Although I was rather shocked at how little about operating systems and hardware young CS graduates knew these days. Of course I cam from the systems admin side...so...

  10. Not surprising... on Windows 9 Already? Apparently, Yes. · · Score: 1

    Every computer in this house has Windows on it, even my macs for work have a bootcamp partition with Windows 7 Pro. They also all are Windows 7 despite the fact that I have no less than 5 free copies of Windows 8 from work or developers conferences/seminars.

    I remember being at those conferences and all the programmers and developers saying the something: we understand the logic behind having a unified UI across every platform....but the problem is every platform is different in terms of interface. Although I think part of the situation was that MS was expecting that all PC's moving forward would be sold with touch screens whether they were laptops or desktops. Which increasingly I'm seeing more and more all in one desktops with touch screens and tablet/notebook hybrids. Touch interface is great for tablets and phones. Not so much for desktops though. I saw this working for a company that wrote point of sale software. Initially we had a lot of users that had touch screens and on their next round of updates actually went to standard monitors and then keyboard/mouse for input.

    At least Apple has stuck with having OSX & iOS as separate operating systems. It's true under the hood they share a lot of the same code, but their UI's are optimized for different input methods. Apple introduced launchpad giving OSX a iOS like App launcher, but you have to click an icon or button on the keyboard to bring it up. They haven't changed how OSX is used much in a decade.

    Likewise, many people have now in business are used to the start button because that's what they have used for 15 going on 20 years. Hell there are kids entering college who never knew using a computer without a start button. The big mistake Microsoft made was wholesale change. It takes a lot of time to retrain people in the business world when you go messing with the basic UI.

    If Microsoft had left windows 8 with a standard UI with start button and then a "Metro launcher" like Launchpad making it optional to bring up the tiles to get people used to it and then eventually transitioned to the new UI over 9/10 there would have been a lot less fussing.

  11. I'm about to give up on Gmail... on Google Begins To Merge Google+, Gmail Contacts · · Score: -1

    I'm about to just go back to using the family domain I have with a no-frills shared hosting account and set up my own IMAP mailbox via Cpanel again.

  12. Re:"News for nerds??" on Federal Judge Rules Chicago's Ban On Licensed Gun Dealers Unconstitutional · · Score: 1

    And what do people think the patriots were keeping in Concord? Hint: it' wasn't muskets and powder the British was after. It was a bunch of artillery cannons...

  13. Re:I Call Bullshit on Is Earth Weighed Down By Dark Matter? · · Score: 1

    Usually because they contain fuel and thrusters designed to last the lifetime of the satellite in order to make regular course correction because those, especially in LEO, are actually falling back into the atmosphere. Although part of that may be on purpose incase the sat fails it will eventually fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. But I've heard before the other reason was the tendency for them to want to fall back to earth despite calculations saying otherwise...

  14. Re:Actually, Yes and No. on Are Tablets Replacing Notebook Computers? (Video) · · Score: 2

    Just did an end of the year analysis with a client and got to looking at their statistics and planning for 2014. I was shocked that the single largest block of users as far as OS & Browser were concerned was iPad @ 22% of all traffic. Chrome was 2nd @ 16.9% (about 1/3 of that is Android). 3rd was iPhone @ 16.2%. That means that roughly half their traffic is now from mobile devices and 1/3rd over all is iOS.

    So much for that the plans for 2014 is now to look at building mobile apps for iOS & Android.

  15. Re:Spy tools on The Startling Array of Hacking Tools In NSA's Armory · · Score: 1

    Actually, it's better to say that the NSA is a support organization of the Department of Defense. And as such are often at odds with Langley since both are competing for the same budget dollars.

  16. Re: So easy on Netflix: Non-'A' Players Unworthy of Jobs · · Score: 1

    Funny, when I was living in Germany a little over a decade ago the unemployment was around 9% and actually dismantled some of that great social net. Guess that worked out for them...

  17. Re:Advancing in what direction? on A Flood of Fawning Reviews For Apple's Latest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Couple things to note. What are you comparing this to? An average Dell/HP PC or a proper "workstation" from these companies like the HP Z820? Because if you are comparing a regular desktop, you're not comparing Apples to Apples here (pardon the pun). Chances are if you aren't looking at the Z820

    In the industries these machines are used in and targeted towards have moved to external storage arrays/SANS/NAS. What the internal hard drive(s) have doesn't matter so long as it's enough to install their main programs on. Even the smaller shops I know doing video production have at least a 20TB array, most are around 50TB these days.

    When you start comparing the MacPro's against machines like the Z820 the MacPro's pricing is competitive. I believe the Z820 with a single 3GB Nvidia Quadro card is around $4k.

  18. Re:Slashdot being a prime example of bad on Ask Slashdot: Why Do Mobile Versions of Websites Suck? · · Score: 1

    It depends on your traffic though. On one of my client's sites the iPad now accounts for nearly 30% of all the traffic. iPhone is about 12%. All Android devices account for 15% of traffic. That means over half our traffic is now coming from mobile devices. We implemented responsive design in 2012, but now it's to the point where we are debating whether or not to offer a native app.

  19. Re:The craptastic Windows 8 is Microsoft's time bo on Microsoft's Ticking Time Bomb Is Windows XP · · Score: 1

    Um say what? I just ordered a new computer for gaming purposes pre-installed with Windows 7 Pro. You most certainly can find vendors out there who will ship windows 7 on a new PC.

  20. Re:Typo in headline on Apple Pushes Developers To iOS 7 · · Score: 1

    I ain't going anywhere. iOS is now less than 50% of installs for my app, yet is still well over 80% of the revenue is iOS users. Until that changes I'll be continuing to develop iOS first, Android second.

  21. Re:no iOS 5 love on Apple Pushes Developers To iOS 7 · · Score: 1

    Apple's been pretty clear that iOS has a 3year backwards compatibility window. And the iPad 1 was released in 2010 we we're coming up on year 4. That is the nature of the beast. It's planned obsolesces, but it's another reason why you never buy an Apple product with a 1 in it. The next generation is going to stay around longer.

    And in this house hold I'm on mac, she has the windows and android devices. I have my iPad 2 I bought in 2011. She has a Galaxy Tab 10" she bought last year. We both play a game called Minion Rush. My older iPad blows her Android tablet out of the picture when it comes to side by side performance. In fact it better in terms of just about all the side by side metrics we can compare other than I'm limited to my 32GB of storage space and she can save to an SD card.

  22. Re:GM CEO Rejects Repaying Feds like... on GM's CEO Rejects Repaying Feds for Bailout Losses · · Score: 1

    The last 3 GM Vehicles I've purchased have all been great cars. The current one in the drive way is a 2004 Impala. 140,000 miles and all I've done is routine maintenance. Before that I had a 96 Saturn that got 120,000 miles on it before I bought a Malibu. Unfortunately the Malibu got totaled when a sheet of ice fell on it off the roof of a building. So I didn't own that one long enough to really say much. I guess my dad's Astro van did need a new fuel pump after 15 years and 180,000 miles. In fact it's going on 20 years old now and over 200,000 miles and we still have it. Doesn't get driven as much but extremely handy to borrow when I need to get plywood or haul something. I guess we're lucky on getting the non-shitty GM ones.

    I plan on keeping the Impala around at least another year, maybe two and let the wife finish paying off her Nissan Altima. It's paid for, insurance and personal property taxes are affordable on it.

    Am I going to be as brand loyal due to the bailout? No. But last time I looked at Ford I about got sticker shock. The cars I was looking at were priced nearly the same as an entry level BMW. I know that's before doing the sales shtick. And my wife loathes Subaru for some reason.

  23. Our household on Streaming and Cord-Cutting Take a Toll On the Pay-TV Industry · · Score: 1

    Next month the contract with the cable company expires. We're discussing because work has offered to pay for a business class internet connection into our house as I work from home most days. Between Netflix and Hulu Plus we're seriously considering cutting the cord. We rarely watch anything live anyway and usually do watch the DVRed episodes within a week.

  24. Re:Innovation?? on eBay CEO: Amazon Drones Are Fantasy · · Score: 1

    I deal on the side in vintage & antique furniture I buy from estate sales. Probably 80% of my transitions are straight cash or checks for some of the larger items. I had square for my phone, but then I got the paypal reader for credit card transactions. When I ask customers what they'd prefer if paying by Debit/credit card they'll choose Paypal 70% of the time because they know all about it. Although that is changing as many coffeeshops in the area have started using Square.

    Frankly it's a little better for me as well. I have a Paypal debit card. They can pay me and I can go 15 minutes later and get cash out or buy something with that debit card. With square I have to wait a day or two.

    As much as I may dislike certain parts of Paypal, I've yet to find a total replacement for it.

  25. Re:The article is FUD on Get Ready For a Streaming Music Die-Off · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The record labels want online streaming to die. I've not followed the pricing too closely, but the cost per stream is something like 10x the price of a terrestrial radio station. That is why Pandora I believe was trying to purchase an FM station somewhere. The rates are lower if you have a terrestrial radio signal that then also streams IIRC.