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Comment: Re:OCZ (Score 1) 128

by scalarscience (#37785316) Attached to: OCZ Releases First 1TB Laptop SSD
Maxtor had so many QA issues in their latter days that it contributed greatly towards the purchasing price that Seagate got when they bought them. Of course the CEO Bill Watkins promptly moved a huge bulk of the Seagate drive ops to the same plant (as a cost cutting measure it was presumed) that had issues for Maxtor and denied the 'bricking' issues that resulted for AS and ES series drives for at least 9 months... until the Seagate Board of Directors fired him and replaced him with the former CEO from 2004 (and subsequently addressed the firmware issues too.)

I flashed all 3 of my ES.2's to SN06 'just in case' while all of this was underway, and though it was denied that they had issues in my serial # range quite a few reports cropped up down the line of ES.2's outside the reported serial range having problems also so I'm happy I did, they still run fine in an array to this day.

Comment: Latest in AV Software... (Score 1) 74

by scalarscience (#37710722) Attached to: Air Force Comments On Drone Malware
My favorite quote from the article: “We continue to strengthen our cyber defenses, using the latest anti-virus software and other methods to protect Air Force resources and assure our ability to execute Air Force missions,” Cook said in a statement. “Continued education and training of all users will also help reduce the threat of malware to Department of Defense systems.” Why do I get the feeling that Norton/McAffee are offering their 'latest anti-virus software" to "strengthen our cyber defenses"...which will inevitably lead to a 2-4 year staged upgrade of all systems to bring them back up to their 'speeds' before they were "strengthened"..while software from ESET, VIPRE & AVAST are only found on the laptops of off duty personnel that have a clue. Given that DARPA sort of kickstarted this whole thing we're using these days you might think there'd be some military-grade software in use but I've yet to see any hint of that in any of the 'cybersecurity' discussions that find their way into our shared discussions on the 'tubes'.

Comment: obviously why SB-e not arriving until Q1 2012 (Score 2) 271

by scalarscience (#37688822) Attached to: AMD 'Bulldozer' FX CPU Reviews Arrive
Well now I know for sure why SB-E (sandybridge-e) is not arriving until Q1 2012... Intel is just going to continue to milk SB parts for the time being. Sad because I really wanted to get an Ivy Xeon rig to replace my current dual proc mobo, but I'm not sure I can wait until 2013!

Comment: Re:Policy City-State (Score 1) 961

by scalarscience (#37534698) Attached to: Conflict Between Occupy Wall Street Protestors and NYPD Escalating
You're right the Hiibel case (moortak also identified it in a reply above) is the actual case that stands on the books but the Nevada Supreme court referenced a 1979 Texas case Brown v. Texas noting that the Supreme Court declined to address the issue of identification and decided that being asked to identify yourself didn't incriminate you if it wasn't specifically in reference to a crime. So I was perhaps overstating things a bit in my formerly caffeinated state, but the inaccuracy was misremembering the Nevada case stemmed from the Texas case and not the other way around. It's only been 7 years since I read the articles on that you'll have to forgive me =]

Comment: Re:Policy City-State (Score 2) 961

by scalarscience (#37531256) Attached to: Conflict Between Occupy Wall Street Protestors and NYPD Escalating
Well the supreme court decision that has directly led to "papers please" in the US took place in Texas, a man on his own property with his truck (NOT on public land or a public road) was asked for ID by a police officer and declined, was arrested and subsequently courts sided with 'the law' that you must provide identification at all times including on your own property....so yep Texas isn't exempt from police state status. Incidentally how are the speed traps in rural TX these days?

Comment: Re:Not so realistic (Score 1) 191

by scalarscience (#34670460) Attached to: If the FCC Had Regulated the Internet From the Start
Not only that but it equates things like interfering with the Comcast+NBC merger to stopping someone sitting in their bedroom with the 'next big idea'. I'm not sure the author intended for that level of poetic irony...

I remember when most Comcast networks were ATTBI, and ATTBI decided 'not to renew' their @home contract, subsequently putting @home out of business. 3 months later AT&T was authorized to buy said network?? And kept most of the network @home built out (for the future) dark while letting people stay on the constricted backbone they erected for that 3 month duration for years in some areas? Ah yes good for the consumer & investor that was (of course Excite played a role there too...)

And when hulu was a relatively 'new' thing I remember how sluggish it sometimes was on comcast, even though a trace showed that there weren't an ungodly number of hops things would still get somehow 'congested' (not visible to a trace) and hulu would sit there rebuffering...and at the time I still paid for *all* of comcast's channels (including HD) and still preferred to sit online where I could choose what I wanted when I wanted without having to navigate a menu structure that was intentionally slowed down over the stock code to improve 'ad impressions' for their own services (which is what comcast has done with each UI i've seen...) Netflix had buffering issues as well, and with 6-7 machines here to test general connectivity there didn't seem to be *any* other issues. I sat there with their techs (and with some clearchannel techs in relation to an audio program I was having issues with that I subscribe to) and the routing itself seemed fine.

Then came the news about sandvine routers affecting p2p, but there was little talk about the issues with sustained streaming content (3-4 hour movies or continuous audio/video streams were often stalled just the same as p2p apps.) I have in fact upgraded my net to the top tiers available at every step of my comcast contract for the last decade, and while I can generally find ways to 'steer around' issues with open source & p2p software, fixing issues with endpoint services like netflix & premiereradio networks proved to be more difficult (because the lack of acknowledgement on the part of Comcast made it impossible for the responsible party to fix things!) Of course once the p2p throttling came out and comcast 'promised' to stop throttling those issues went away as well (curious that, though I still can't "prove" anything.)

I don't usually have issues with netflix now either (even though comcast is apparently doing 'network management' again), but Hulu--as my wife has observed a few times over the last few years without knowing 'why' she 'likes it now'--seems to work better than ever in terms of speed. Part of this of course is flash gaining video accelleration during the intervening time (so the UI feels 'better' to her and video can do HD with ease) but we don't get the rebuffering we used to either. So I explained to my wife the day Hulu was bought why we should still support netflix too, and I wondered what backdoor relation NBC & the other investors had with Comcast to magically get such good service (did they change to better edge hosting perhaps like netflix did with akamai back then or something simple on a technical level--a reasonable explanation?) Low & behold more time passes and now Comcast & NBC are merging...

Meanwhile my choices since 2002 have dwindled to Comcast & high speed or DSL with Qwest on an MSN backbone that still gives 768kbit as an entry level pricepoint, and 7MBit if I want to spend the same amount I'm spending for the 30mbit tier on comcast. In any case anecdotal evidence doesn't = data (oft repeated here) and I'm sure tl;dnr; in terms of a post length but I don't have high hopes for allowing companies to have 'managed services' and 'managed mergers' of monopolistic dimensions is going to benefit me much at all. I certainly fail to see how it's going to enable the next garage business to turn into a multimillion/billion dollar affair as the article seems to imply.

Comment: Re:Pure Fantasy (Score 3, Insightful) 191

by scalarscience (#34670364) Attached to: If the FCC Had Regulated the Internet From the Start
Every time I've seen the 'suits' attempt to create 'channels' in an attempt to market something on top of a layer of tech, the technology underneath it moves so quickly that any attempt at a static, controlled form of it winds up being obsolesced rather quickly. Remember having screensavers with feeds pre-rss as if we'd all been waiting for CNN to enter every idle second we had? And apps you could run at the top of your screen (which were early forms of spyware in some cases, logging basic user metrics before anyone care about such things.)

Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours 154

Posted by Soulskill
from the first-in-line dept.

Comment: Re:Not reliable? (Score 3, Interesting) 261

by scalarscience (#31835990) Attached to: Feds Question Big Media's Piracy Claims
Actually my guess is that this is how they're going to finally 'open up' about the ACTA. They need justification to pollute the airwaves/media outlets with false claims that there is no hard data on 'how bad this problem is' since we can't yet track the statistics via beurocracy, so therefore we need mechanisms like 3-strikes so that we can begin to collect info on 'how bad things really are'.

Comment: Re:Crappy Nvidia driver has multiple issues (Score 4, Informative) 155

by scalarscience (#31369550) Attached to: NVIDIA Driver Update Causing Video Cards To Overheat In Games
This issue is related to automatic fan control not working due to improper registry keys, and so GPU's that run warm (9800 series for instance) can quickly overheat and potentially suffer damage. I'm having no issues with mine, but I set fan profiles manually as I'm using a machine that has a very hot MCH & fb-dimms (2008 Xeon) and don't want the gpu contributing more. However for anyone interested (and using a GT200 or at least G80/G92 on up) here's the fix: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161767

Comment: Re:Just a new complication. (Score 1) 250

by scalarscience (#29020613) Attached to: Music Labels Working On Digital Album Format

I would say the album was an outgrowth of singles not only because it was more convenient for consumers & because pressing technology had matured to where you could reliably fit 45-60 minutes on a 12", but also because of the appeal it had for artists to tell a fuller 'story' for a while. 2-3 decades later it was used as a way to push as much music as possible in a format that was simple to mass produce and incredibly cheap (vinyl isn't as simple and certainly isn't as cheap to make/ship/stock.) As albums turned into more & more filler, people started turning to programmable CD changers and the like to have more ability to pick & choose just the material they wanted to hear, or in the order they want to hear etc.

Now that I can get get to that 30% that I want to hear without accepting the rest, and can carry around hundreds/thousands times more than I could with a CD book (and catalogue even vaster amounts at home) it doesn't follow that I'm only going to buy 30% of the music I used to. That's something these fat cat major labels have yet to figure out. I'm consuming more music than I ever have (and producing more as well!) but the money and attention is going to the people who can deliver what I'm looking for as quickly as possible, with reliable quality to me in a selection that suits my interests. Interestingly enough I DO still buy albums, though often in mp3/flac/mp4 format (and rarely of major label backed work), and I also buy more vinyl these days, both as a result of the my musical exploration in digital singles & online streaming music.

It seems to me that playlists for 'ripped' mp3's are a direct outgrowth of that (a maturing of the random access that CDs began to introduce to listeners), and our modern digital formats have been unencumbered from the 'filler' material used to justify propped up prices. Once you've been able to pick and choose (and for those not ethically opposed, sample things here & there before you buy) it's very hard to go 'back' to just accepting that you may only like a small percentage of the overall music you're buying when you considered purchases not by number of tracks but rather by the the packaging (CD/LP/EP/Tapes etc).

So this particular article (which was brief and had NO technical info about the format) reads as, is the studios said "hey in the early days of vinyl we went from singles to albums and made a bundle, we can't sell albums now but maybe if we turn the file format into an album the good days of old will return!" To the technoliterate it seems to be ignoring the fact that 1. you can easily package things into albums now using a cue file plus single compressed file with embedded artwork in the tagging is the easiest for a fully blended/mixed 'album', or of course just have a bunch of files in directories. But of course this is about PR, marketing and atttempts at restoring 'profit margins' (and if DRM laden, control.)

It seems like the encumbent tends to resist change, constantly trying to adapt existing marketing & formatting decisions by changing thigns as little as possible. The middlemen are disappearing, the amount of inexpensive gear available to your average 'home' artist & enthusiast mean that the bookings in studios are thinning out and fat cats aren't as necessary if you don't need to pay for 40 days of studio lockout time to be able to produce an 'album' anymore. So the whole era of largesse & slow return on investments is gone, fading with the fat cats now that you can put in a minor investment of time and yield incredibly fast delivery/turnaround on getting stuff into the market. Also it seems to me that live music is thriving more due to the variety of music in people's palette these days, although economically depressed there seems to be more activity now that promoting yourself & connecting to fans has the benefit of the online mediums.

Weekends were made for programming. - Karl Lehenbauer