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Comment: Re:Won't do any good. (Score 1) 229

by ShakaUVM (#46488567) Attached to: Cameras On Cops: Coming To a Town Near You

>It will never happen, but if a law was passed that when the video is unavailable, the citizen's report is presumed to be true and complete, I'll bet those cameras would suddenly get a lot more reliable.

Indeed. This is the missing key ingredient.

I once got pulled over for speeding while driving doing the speed limit. I saw the cop coming down the road toward me, and had slowed down by the time he'd u-turned and pulled up behind me to tail me. I'd been speeding before, but this wasn't what he claimed in court - he said I was doing 78 (written statement) 87 (oral statement) while tailing me on the I-5.

I'd requested the camera footage of the event, but it mysteriously wasn't available to me.

So it was just the cop's word against mine, and the court will side with a cop every time, even though there was a serious discrepancy between his written and oral statement, and his video footage wasn't provided to me.

If the law stated that the presumption would go the other way (favoring the citizen over the cop) when video evidence disappears, it would eliminate the easiest source of police abuse of these tools.

Comment: Keeps Happening All Over (Score 1) 6

by stoolpigeon (#46481053) Attached to: Verbiage: Beta and Mod points

I've stopped using nbcnews.com because they went to this big box look. Then my primary source for local news in my home town switched around and now not only is it impossible to find stuff or read much information, almost all articles go to an autoplay video about the story. I have to wait for it to load and then pause it before I can start reading the article.

I'm pretty much down to the bbc site for news.

Comment: Re:Found an explanation (Score 1) 5

by stoolpigeon (#46466879) Attached to: Slashboxes Are Not Updating



Comment: Re:reduce the amount (Score 1) 955

by ncc74656 (#46465579) Attached to: How Do You Backup 20TB of Data?

With a trade-off of about 3-5 times the processing power required to decode. I learned that the hard way when trying to play movies on my old netbook with an Atom N270.

That's why you offload video decoding to the GPU. A weedy Atom 230 (or even the ARM-compatible core in a Raspberry Pi) is more than up to the task of shoveling 1080p H.264 into the GPU, which handles decoding, scaling, etc. Even the lowest-end nVidia or AMD GPUs are more than up to the task. I have OpenELEC running on an Acer Aspire Revo and a Raspberry Pi, and neither have any issues with anything I've thrown at them. (A third box runs on a Core 2 Duo E8400, which would be sufficient for software decoding of just about anything, but a GeForce 210 uses less power (fanless heatsink!) and adds HDMI output.)

What's that? Your netbook doesn't have a proper GPU? Well, isn't that special? :-P

Comment: Re:reduce the amount (Score 3, Interesting) 955

by ncc74656 (#46465395) Attached to: How Do You Backup 20TB of Data?

RAID-5 uses up 1 disk worth for striping, so net space in an 8-drive array is 7-drives worth (about 27TB using 4TB drives). The problem with RAID-5 is that you are 2 disks away from failure and rebuilds often kill the disks.

RAID-6 uses 2 disks worth for striping, so net space in an 8-drive array is 6-drives worth (about 23TB using 4TB drives). Is able to survive a double-disk failure before data loss. Still has some of the same issues as RAID-5.

I use Greyhole for media and document storage. It handles disks of unequal size (currently running one 3TB and two 1.5TB drives), and you can choose the level of redundancy you need. In my case, movies, TV shows, etc. get a single copy (one file exists on one drive), while documents and photos get two copies (one file exists on two drives). If a drive goes bad, you only lose the files on that drive...and only for the files for which you selected no redundancy. With redundancy, extra file copies are recreated on the remaining drives from the surviving copies; this process is most likely less stressful on the disk set than a RAID rebuild.

My movies, TV shows, and music are backed up to BD-R, stored in a binder at work. They hold ~20GB each, as I'm using dvdisaster to guard against media errors. When a 2TB drive failed, I brought the backup (currently about 190 discs) home and restored the files that had gone missing. Backup and restore are managed by scripts, with information about what files are on what discs held in a MySQL database that gets periodically backed up off-site as well. The initial backup took several months (on and off) to finish, and the last time I needed to restore, it took about a week, but now I just burn a disc when I have about enough new data to fill one. Burning and verifying takes a few hours, but it's something you can start and walk away.

User Journal

Journal: Couple Weeks With A Mac 11

Journal by stoolpigeon

Picked up my new 13" Retina Macbook Pro ( not the same as a plane Macbook Pro - these guys are so good at marketing.) I've been using it for two weeks. I'm learning.

My favorite surprise was when I opened up the terminal app and started trying out commands. Everything was working so I went to see what environment I was in and saw that it was bash. This made me very happy.

I think on the gui end it is o.k. I prefer but I'm getting use to the way OS X wants me to d

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