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User: Mad+Merlin

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  1. Some people spend 50% of their free time gaming so coughing up a few extra bucks is justifiable.

    Only 50%? Filthy casual.

  2. You obviously didn't read the summary. In the Bay Area, there's not enough people to fill low wage entry level jobs, probably because you can't possibly hope to survive on that wage in that area. People with more education could take those jobs if they wanted, but they're choosing not to. If you look at the country wide stats you'll see that the trend reverses, and those with more education have drastically lower unemployment rates.

    Also, if the first few years immediately after high school are your most productive (zero knowledge required manual labour jobs?), your job is probably going to be automated away within the next 5-10 years if it hasn't already.

  3. Re:Always wondered what this was on Motion Impossible: Tom Cruise Declares War on TV Frame Interpolation (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    So why not just record the movies at 120 frames per second? Then there's nothing to interpolate

    It's too fast at 120 FPS. Just drives up costs for no real benefit. You cannot see much more than about 50 FPS at reasonable distances.

    This is baloney. Oft repeated baloney, but baloney nontheless. Human eyes can readily tell the difference between refresh rates up to at least 240 fps. We're not yet sure what the upper bound is, but lab tests suggest it may even be beyond 1000 fps. Try some of the tests here with a 144 or 240 Hz monitor and tell me you can't see the difference.

    24 fps is utter garbage. I wish we could get away from it in film, every time I see a camera pan in a movie, it makes me want to vomit because it just looks awful.

    The reason we started with 24 fps was due to technical limitations of the film format which haven't been an issue for at least 50 years. The reason we're still on 24 fps for film is due to people's completely misguided perception that smooth motion = cheap and choppy motion = expensive.

    As the YouTube generation grows up watching 60 fps+ streams, perhaps we can finally get movies shot at 60 or 144 Hz. We may need to wait for a couple older generations to die off first though.

  4. If you're jaywalking and a car has to slow down, swerve or otherwise change course to avoid you, then you deserve to get hit by that car, the end.

    If you can't even bother to attempt to preserve your own life, why should others be expected to?

  5. Re:My E5-1680 V2 has 8 cores, and HT... on Intel's 9th Gen Processors Rumored To Launch In October With 8 Cores (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Do you mean this E5-1680 v2, that launched Q3 2013?

  6. Re:Cheap service, cheap results on 'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, extremely elastic loads are also a good example of where cloud makes sense. In my experience, they're not that common though. Even if you look at something extreme like a Black Friday sale for an online retailer, they're probably not going to see more than, say, 4x the load of a normal day (numbers estimated, few retailers would share them). Also, find me an online retailer that doesn't see Black Friday coming from a mile away and I'll find you an online retailer that's going out of business soon.

    What is more common is people deluding themselves about how elastic their workload is going to be, like the startup that claims their business is going to grow 50000% next week. Congrats if it does, but it probably won't.

    If you want to brute force some encryption, then sure, spin up a billion cloud servers for a day or two. Few businesses find this a worthwhile endeavor though... except for the NSA, who already has several entire DCs of their own doing this around the clock (making it not particularly elastic anymore).

  7. Re:365 vs. Apps Story on 'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com) · · Score: 1

    It's one example that I was personally(-ish) bitten by. The free tier was a non-starter as it doesn't offer the XML based API that GSS used to offer. Luckily we already had a replacement for GSS ready to go before the announcement, but I'm sure not everybody was so well prepared.

  8. Re:365 vs. Apps Story on 'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, they did this to Google Site Search. There was a paid tier that no longer exists as of April 2018. If you used features that were exclusive to the paid tier (for example, no ads), you're SOL now.

  9. Re:Cheap service, cheap results on 'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com) · · Score: 2

    Guess what, having someone else manage the hardware for you is only a teeny tiny portion of the workload involved in managing IT infrastructure. Everything you build on top of said hardware still falls on your plate to maintain, cloud or not.

  10. Re:Cheap service, cheap results on 'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com) · · Score: 2

    Cloud hosting is seldom cheaper than renting space in a DC and throwing your own servers in. The most common exception is if you're really small scale (ie, you would only use one or two physical servers). Most of the time, cloud hosting is quite a bit more expensive.

  11. Valid points. But the Model S will outperform the Bugatti in the driving that most of us do in the real world. The Bugatti is a nice piece of extreme automotive engineering but it's not a car that makes sense for many people to drive.

    Of course, the Chiron is only practical for extremely narrow definitions of practical. I'd still love to drive one though.

  12. The Bugatti Chiron is kind of hilarious. They invested untold millions eeking out the last bit of performance from their fossil fuel engine, and it's still slower than a stock Model S from 0-60. Also, it costs 20x as much.

    Sure, vs the P100D in ludicrious mode, it's slightly slower 0-60 (2.3s vs 2.28s). But low end torque is the #1 advantage of electric motors, and one of the biggest weaknesses of ICE. However, now go and look at the quarter mile numbers for the two, and you'll find that the Chiron blows the P100D away (9.11s vs 10.44s). Or, you could look at the top speeds for the two cars, where the P100D also gets blown away (420 km/h (limited by today's tire technology... perhaps as high as 500 km/h) vs 250 km/h).

  13. Re:Re, the motor: on Tesla Model 3 Torn Down, Hacked and Set On a Dynamometer, Exposing Unusual Tech Details (electrek.co) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Having a private car isn't sustainable. It is a luxury for the 1% in the world. I know, you are going to get really upset by that (but "mah freedom"). Nothing is wrong with having a private car, but to say it is "sustainable" is a joke. Having it cost $75k - $150k is just more of a joke.

    Sorry to burst your bad math bubble, but there's over 1 billion cars on the road right now, worldwide. Even if you choose to ignore the fact that many of those are shared by a family of more than one person, you're still looking at ~18% of people that have exclusive access to a car.

    Perhaps what you meant to say is that the Bugatti Chiron is a luxury for the 1%?

  14. Re:It almost seems as if... on Game Industry Pushes Back Against Efforts To Restore Gameplay Servers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    But why don't you have the balls to admit the truth? Because I have seen your type a million times, you are a thief who is trying to justify his stealing by adding a layer of "sticking in to teh man!" bullshit. either that or you are one of those ancient farts that haven't played anything released since windows 98 and therefor have an opinion worth less than nothing since you don't even buy the product you are railing against...so which is it? Please don't tell me that you are one of those crackpot FOSSie that want to tell us all we need is Tux Racer and a million Q3 Arena rip offs, because I thought those died out in the early 2010s when everyone stopped giving a shit about Linux after google ripped it off and turned it into the DRMpaloza that is Android and ChromeOS.

    I play video games on a daily basis and own 125 DRM-free games on GOG, plus another ~300 on Humble Bundle (specific count is more difficult there as they don't list a count and some of the items on the library page are soundtracks or videos). I've kickstarted Pillars of Eternity (1 and 2 (although 2 was technically on fig.co)), Torment: Tides of Numenera, Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, and The Bard's Tale 4. I've run Linux exclusively for over 15 years now. I also have a standing boycott against Steam since they popularized always online DRM with Half Life 2.

    Try again.

  15. Re:It almost seems as if... on Game Industry Pushes Back Against Efforts To Restore Gameplay Servers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    Nice strawman argument. However, if you go back and read my post you'll see that nowhere do I claim DRM is effective. Anybody who thinks DRM is effective is clueless, lying, or both.

    Let's say that every time you bought something from the grocery store, the cashier punched you in the face. You keep going back because hey, the pain only lasts 15 seconds or so, and it heals on it's own, all you have to do is wait! Plus, you're getting crafty and sometimes you dodge the punch. Although, sometimes the cashier surprises you and kicks you in the stomach instead, what will they think of next? In this case, the violence is DRM and the store is Steam. Violence is a great analogy for DRM here as it is a net loss to everybody involved (well, except perhaps for masochists).

    Personally, I don't like getting punched in the face, nor do I enjoy getting kicked in the stomach, so I won't shop there. Also, guess what, if nobody shops there for the same reason, they'll either change their policy on senseless violence or go out of business. Vote with your wallet.

  16. Re:It almost seems as if... on Game Industry Pushes Back Against Efforts To Restore Gameplay Servers (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 2

    You would think people would clue into this, but they don't. Most Steam users talk about it like it's the second coming of Jesus, even though paying for something on Steam is to rent it for an indeterminate amount of time, such that your rental can be cancelled at any time for any reason that Valve wants without needing to return your money or any of your saved data.

    Do you like DRM? Well, buying things on Steam is voting for DRM.

  17. If you rear-end somebody, it is your fault 100% of the time.

    Wrong. No one falls for that bullshit line anymore. That line of thinking was so prevalent years ago that it birthed a common scam called the "brake job".

    Guess what... if you're not tailgating someone and paying attention, then that doesn't work on you. Magic!

    If you're tailgating and/or not paying attention then you've sealed your own fate.

  18. If you rear-end somebody, it is your fault 100% of the time. The only possible exception is if their brake lights are out. If you're close enough that you can't react in time to an instantaneous stop, you're too close.

    Mostly agree. However, another exception is if the fool behind you crashes into you so hard that despite comfortably coming to a stop without hitting the car in front of you, you are then pushed into the car in front of you by the car behind you. Hasn't happened to me, but I know someone it happened to.

  19. Re:How could this be abused? on 'Kernel Memory Leaking' Intel Processor Design Flaw Forces Linux, Windows Redesign (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When you cheap out, you lose.

    You're assuming that the cloud works out cheaper. Sometimes it does, but for many cases it does not (and it's not even close).

  20. You are wrong. Not only will it run at max turbo on single threaded code all day every day, it'll barely use any power doing it. Idle cores use very little power.

  21. The Pentium 4 was also only a single core (or dual core if you count the short lived Pentium D line, which was based on Pentium 4 cores glued together) with vastly worse IPC. These have up to 18 cores and will chew through multithreaded workloads something like 50x faster than the fastest Pentium 4, while using comfortably less than double the power at full tilt (the i9-7980XE uses more than it's TDP at full load, around 195W, but recall that the Pentium 4 had a 115W TDP). Also, the idle and lightly loaded power usage on the i9-7980XE is dramatically lower than any Pentium 4. Unless you're running the CPU in part of a render farm that works 24/7 or something, it's going to be drastically quieter and use less power overall than any Pentium 4, not to mention absolutely obliterate it on performance.

    Having said that, I'd still opt for a Threadripper over one of these if I was building a computer today. The extra raw performance from the i9-7980XE over the 1950X (between low single digit %s to around 40%, depending on the test) is nice, but when you consider the weaker X299 platform (fewer PCIe lanes, no ECC) and the toothpaste under the IHS in the Intel (meaning it's impossible to properly cool it without delidding and potentially destroying the CPU, not to mention the runaway power usage even with a mild overclock) for double the cost, Threadripper seems like the obvious pick.

  22. Re:A poor carpenter... on Equifax Blames Open-Source Software For Its Record-Breaking Security Breach (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Proper Security it tough, if you are going to be 100% secure then chances are you will not be able to perform your business.

    There's no such thing as 100% secure, and there never will be.

    Even if you use a one time pad for encryption (which if implemented perfectly, is unbreakable from a ciphertext analysis perspective), it can still be broken in a multitude of other ways (flawed/predictable RNG for generating the pad, (accidental) pad reuse, a wrench, etc). Plus, the practicality of actually deploying one time pad encryption properly is so cumbersome that it's pretty much unused.

    Perfectly implemented one time pads aside, if you had an infinitely fast computer, you could break every known encryption algorithm and decrypt every encrypted transmission ever sent. While we don't have infinitely fast computers (yet), the performance delta between a computer today and a computer 20 years ago is practically infinite. Similarly, the performance delta between your $300 laptop and a determined state level attacker or large botnet is rapidly approaching infinite.

    There's far more to security than just encryption, but the basic tradeoff involved in encryption (how much computing power do I need to spend to make it relatively impractical for an adversary to brute force a decryption within $x timeframe) mirrors most security topics well.

  23. OP specifically said quad socket motherboards hadn't been made since the Athlon 64 era (10+ years ago). I provided two examples of current generation quad socket servers that are on sale today.

    Sure, Google and Facebook probably don't run quad socket servers (they're not built for that kind of thing), but your bank probably does.

  24. Fun fact: Quad sockets are SUPER-RARE.

    Go ahead. Try and Google for a quad motherboard. They haven't made them since like... the Athlon 64-era Opterons.

    Really? You should tell all the people that are making quad socket servers today.

    Maybe you should try following your own advice.

  25. Re:What about long-term data integrity? on How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive · · Score: 2, Funny

    It doesn't matter what RAID level you use, rm -rf / will still dutifully delete all of your data for you.

    Repeat after me, RAID is not a backup.