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Comment: 5 Things (Score 1) 630

by TPoise (#41309183) Attached to: Is a Computer Science Degree Worth Getting Anymore?
If you want the best and brightest, you only have to do a few simple things:

1. Be willing to pay them obscene amounts of money. Yes, this means more than the next employer is willing to pay. No matter what folks say, size does matter. Salary is just a way of keeping score.
2. Creative Freedom - don't do endless micromanaging on coding style, and restricting open source from being used.
3. Free energy - ample supply of caffeine and sugary snacks goes a long way
4. Technology Stipend - Good craftsmen understand that they need the best tools to do their jobs. Don't stick them with some random corporate IT-issued desktop with Windows98 on it.
5. Stroke their ego about once a week.

The truly good companies that are able to attact and retain the smartest developers are all good at some combination of the 5 items above.

Comment: Intel QuickSync is the true winner (Score 1) 158

by TPoise (#39936335) Attached to: The Wretched State of GPU Transcoding
So basically the article says GPU rendering is bad, but QuickSync is good enough for prime time.

Duh. QS is made to do a very specific task (encoding/decoding video) and it can do it super fast at decent quality rates. There's always the tradeoff of quality vs. encoding time. With QS, I can rip an entire 50GB Blu-Ray in 12 minutes to a 1080p MKV @ 8000kbps. It takes about 16 hours doing the same task with a normal x264 encoder such as Handbrake even though the quality is a little bit better. Is it worth waiting around 16 hours for me? Nope.

With enough bitrate, anything looks good. The key is to just bump up the bitrate in MediaCoder when using QuickSync for encoding to something very high.

Comment: Re:Uh, what? (Score 5, Informative) 141

by TPoise (#39120333) Attached to: Why Corporate Cloud Storage Doesn't Add Up
The problem is that file storage is so dad-gum expensive these days. 15cents a gb at Amazon makes it $150 per month for a terabyte of storage. You're better off buying the 1TB drives yourself and rotating it to an employee's house every night. Sure there are some cheaper alternatives ( but even at 6cents a GB with Nimbus, you're still better off buying the external drives yourself.

Comment: QuickSync is Intel's Secret Weapon (Score 1) 497

by TPoise (#39087667) Attached to: AMD: What Went Wrong?
Intel still has the advantage of QuickSync for super fast decoding/encoding/transcoding. Besides gaming, the most CPU intensive applications is probably centered around mobile media. E.g., transcoding that blu-ray you got from Redbox so you can watch it on your iPad. Sure the quality isn't great, but AMD has no answer for it in the near future.,2833-5.html

+ - SOPA and PIPA Dead. Now it's OPEN's turn->

Submitted by Antarell


Link to Original Source
United States

+ - Steve Jobs Told Obama Made-in-the-USA Days Over 9

Submitted by theodp
theodp (442580) writes "At his Last Supper with Steve Jobs, reports the NY Times, President Obama had a question for Jobs: What would it take to make iPhones in the United States? 'Those jobs aren't coming back,' Jobs replied. The president's question touched upon a central conviction at Apple: It isn't just that workers are cheaper abroad; Apple execs believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that Made in the U.S.A.' is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. 'The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,' a former Apple exec gushed, describing how 8,000 workers were once roused from company dormitories at midnight to address a last-minute Apple design change, given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. 'There's no American plant that can match that.' What's vexed Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its hi-tech peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays. 'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems,' a current Apple exec is quoted as saying. 'Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"

+ - Gigabyte Board Sets Intel X79 Overclocking Record->

Submitted by
MojoKid writes "Renowned overclocker "Hicoookie" achieved a new high clock speed on the Intel Core i7 3930K processor by cranking the chip past 5.6GHz using a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard, the first mobo in the world to achieve a mulitplier of 57x. There was a bit of a scandal with Gigabyte recently when a YouTube video showed one of its X79 boards going up in smoke. Gigabyte released a BIOS update for several of its X79 boards to prevent such incidents from happening, and there were outcries that the new F7 BIOS would essentially gimp overclocking performance Hicookie's achievement should erase those concerns."
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+ - SOPA Blackout Simulator->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "I've written up a quick and simple client-side Javascript function that obscures DIVs, or any other CSS selector you like, to show what the Web would look like if SOPA passes.

You can build this into your websites and give people a real sense of what an arbitrary and capricious SOPA web censorship regime might look like."

Link to Original Source

+ - Juror's Tweets Overturns Trial Verdict-> 1

Submitted by D H NG
Link to Original Source

Line Printer paper is strongest at the perforations.