El_Segfaulto's Favorite BestNetTech Posts Of The Week
Last week, el_segfaulto scored a rare double win, getting both “most insightful” and “funniest” comments of the week — on two separate comments (it’s been done on a single comment before). Given that, we figured he easily deserved to write up this week’s “favorites” post…
Good weekend everybody. Welcome to the recap and another round of favorite posts. When Mike first asked me to write this, I started brainstorming ways of doing it fairly. I wrote an algorithm to compare the number of total comments to the percentage of those that I find troll-like for each article. I solicited opinions from coworkers, friends, the crazy homeless guy that hangs out on the route I take to get coffee in the morning. Unfortunately for you all, I realized that all of that work was for naught and I decided to simply list off the articles that I enjoyed reading and the articles that elicited the best comments. A big thanks to Mike for the opportunity to write this up and for letting me have a little extra time to get everything in order.
So…without further adieu, let’s geek it up a notch!
Honorable mentions:
- Another viewpoint – Another View Of The Netflix Price Hike: It’s Speeding Up The Shift To Online Streaming
- Government out of control – Feds Say They Can Search Bradley Manning’s Friend’s Laptop Because They Can
- Comic Relief – Judge Waxes Comedic On Whether You Can Trademark Quilted Diamonds On Toilet Paper
- A sudden outbreak of common sense – Apple Does Not Have More Cash Than The US Gov’t; Stop Saying That It Does
10) I wanted to start with an encouraging article. As was noted throughout UK Government Announces Copyright Plans, the UK seems to be taking a surprisingly reasonable route towards copyright reform.
9) Apple Continues To Scream To The World How Competitive Samsung’s Tablet Is By Getting It Banned In Australia in a number of tech blogs throughout the internet. It’s always fun to see the Apple fans come out in droves to protect the mothership. Unfortunately most of the BestNetTech readers kept it civil and calm…next time I want flames.
8) More good news! Apparently the Economist is starting to recognize that patents have become far more of a hindrance than an incentive to create. The Economist Once Again Worried About Our Innovation-Hindering Patent System may not have brought out a ton of comments, but the story itself was interesting and the comment thread good, albeit a little meandering.
7) I try to avoid reading too many patent articles if at all possible (they anger up the blood) but reading Hulu Sued For Violating ‘TV Guide’ Patent led me on a long rant at work so I felt it deserved some recognition.
6) 20th Century Fox Claims ‘Dice Age’ Game Sounds Too Much Like Ice Age Movie was a good read, but for whatever reason a lot of the comments had me in stitches.
5) Is Google Antitrust Investigation Simply A Repeat Of Wasteful Microsoft Antitrust Effort? brought up a lot of good points and actually changed my opinion of the software behemoths slightly, and that’s all anyone can ask from a written work.
4) For some reason I find that reading about multinational megacorps going at it reminds me of watching a Godzilla movie, no matter which monster wins the citizens of Tokyo lose. Amazon Stops Accepting Apps In Germany Due To Apple’s App Store Trademark Claim is a great story and thread of trademarks gone amok.
3) Really Bad Idea: Make ISPs Liable For Cybercrime Efforts was a good read and, as always, the comments failed to disappoint.
2) The infuriating post of the week has to go to Court Shuts Down Zediva: Apparently The Length Of The Cable Determines If Something Is Infringing. Hearing a court make this kind of judgment made me die a little inside.
1) As a security geek my favorite post of the week has to be Defense Department Pretty Much Incompetent In Dealing With Online Threats. Over the past year there has been a multitude of hacks and attacks throughout the world. Although I’m not convinced that the DoD is that inept, it was an eye-opening article with a ton of insightful comments.
If you’ve gotten this far…congratulations! Thanks for reading and enjoy the summer, while it lasts.
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I think Facebook's datacenters could qualify.
Re: Re: Words Fail Me
I always loved the quote attributed to Nixon regarding his presidency, "The power was nice, but I could have used more power."
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When I was in grad school, the viz researchers had an Open Suse system with 4 workstation class ATI cards that they used for Blender (real-time stereo vision and and as a render farm). They always swore by ATI. I'm a server jockey and a code monkey and Nvidia's CUDA libraries have a lot more support for offloading processing intensive tasks. I'm not really a gamer or a designer, for me the graphics card is more like a math coprocessor than anything else.
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Really glad to hear that! I haven't been keeping up with the kernel development as much as I used to. Like you I'm stuck with Nvidia's proprietary garbage where even compiling the driver with DKMS enabled is a crapshoot, it's annoying having to recompile my video driver every time I make a kernel adjustment. Looks like I'm AMD bound on my next hardware refresh!
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It's still a two horse race. In my experience (involving CAD, GIS, and GPU accelerated processing) Nvidia seems to have fewer hiccups on X than ATI does. As always, your mileage may vary.
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Still too little too late for me. I used to keep a single virtual machine for running the occasional Windows only application. Now I'm at the point where I will not run anything that isn't open source (video card drivers being an annoying exception).
Do you want the terrorists to win? They're everywhere, and they despise us for our freedoms and whatnot. I can't walk down the damned street without getting 3 Jihads and a Fatwa placed on my head. If anything the NSA is showing far too much restraint. I propose that we will not secure until every home is equipped with televisions capable of showing agents what's going on in the homes of every American.
To truly combat terrorism we must also combat our own language. English is far too nimble of a language, it enables us to form abstract thought and frame our worldview in whichever context we feel is right at the time. I believe a new language is in order...a new way of speaking. With this Newspeak (I like that!) it will be impossible to form unpatriotic thoughts, thus removing the shackles of ethics from our government, allowing them to finally decimate Eastasia, with whom we've always been at war.
Re: Wow...
Since 2001, the U.S. government has used the boogeyman of 'terrorism' to justify any number of human rights atrocities and unprecedented spying upon its own citizens. I used to find it ironic that they told us that the terrorists hated us for our freedoms, now I see it as a brilliant stratagem! If we have no more freedoms, the terrorists won't hate us and will stop trying to kill us (despite the fact that you're statistically 4 times more likely to be struck by lightening than hurt in a terrorist attack).
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I'm pretty sure we're at war with Eurasia...hmmm, I see a van from Minitruth outside my door. I wonder what they want.
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Wow, I got married a few months ago. Hopefully my liver can repair the damage that I did to it in my 20's!
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InComprehensibly corrupt charlatans creating certain cash cows for their corporate chiefs. Crapping over the constitution is certainly how capitalism chews through our culture.
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Netflix does an amazing job with video compression, however the crux of the matter is that none of this would have been possible if the country was still on dial-up. Data transfer is like a goldfish (stick with me on this one), it tends to fill up to expand its environment.
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The problem is that the advertised speed is megabit while our operating systems use Mebibytes [2^20] (compared to the Megabytes [10^6] of hard drive manufacturers). Your 35Mbps connection is about 4.5 MiBps. That is enough to stream a reasonably HD movie from Netflix, but if you have somebody else in the house wanting to stream, play an online game, or browse in a snappy matter you'll be out of luck. I have 50 Mbps service with Charter and am actually pretty pleased with it. But saying that you'll never peg a high-speed connection is just showing a lack of imagination.
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Personally, I think this is a long time coming. When I was a younger man I used to pop little white pills like candy, until I started hallucinating that ghosts were chasing me. Later in life I was involved in underground street fights until I got my face bashed in by an Asian girl with gigantic thighs. And the final tragedy...me and a bunch of friends got together to collect a bunch of crystals to help save the world. I don't mind telling you, if it weren't for the copious amount of phoenix down that we had, it would have been much worse. Stop violent video games now!
Why All The Hate?
Oh Mike. Laws, due process, and individual rights are for those who hate freedom. You don't hate freedom...do you?
Re: Re: Re: You keep mistaking what sue-crazy lawyers do with copyright.
I think most sanitariums frown on blogging.
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I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but in my mind the U.S. Constitution doesn't grant natural rights but recognizes them. As in they're inherent. The 4th Amendment not being recognized outside of our borders is as troubling as the 13th Amendment not being recognized beyond the border.
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Based on all of the "LOLs", "ROFLMAOs", etc I think you should get upstairs quick! Your mom is no doubt done making your lunchtime sandwich (no doubt with the crusts cut off!). After that take a few hours to finish that blasted Kirk/Spock slash-fic. These things don't write themselves.
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I don't know...the Oakland Raiders calling themselves a football team is pretty creative. ZING
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And another crime (via DMCA) that can be used against you if the powers that be get tired of your shenanigans.