Posts by defiler

Re: Litter bugs

I was going to mention that. Did it ever get that fine paid?

Re: Who's been copying AMD's homework?

It's this the point I should be waving around articles on Pentium Pro? I know it was just the cache, but it was still a separate chip within the same package.

Or go further back to the discreet floating point coprocessors back in the day, and you're on to the problem of making them talk to each other.

I suppose if you really wanted to stretch it, you're pretty much looking at the CPU interconnects in old supercomputers, just made very short and much faster. (For given values of "just".)

Nothing new in the world. Get off my lawn.

Re: Lego 928

Sorry, guys. 6980 for me.

9-year-old me was delighted by the dual cockpits, the slotted wings, and all the other things that KSP has taught me are totally impractical on a spaceship! :)

Re: Sata

Loving the way people are attracting spurious downvotes for stating facts here.

Also, I hopped onto eBay and get PoE adapters that just dangle in-line with the Pi. No moving parts, awh then I got them the official ones were being pretty shonky.

Anyway, have an upvote to balance the silly downvote.

Re: Curious ...

Morning, Charlie. To be clear, my movie library is H.264. Whenever I've got a 4k BluRay I've got a pack with a 1080 disc in it as well, basically because I'm running it all on Pis which are limited to 1080p (until yesterday!). Hence all my HD stuff is in H.264, with a few VC-1 outliers that required me to buy that codec key (2001, I'm looking at you...).

Yes, if I recoded it to H.265 I could save space. Yes if I recoded it to AV1 I could perhaps save space again. But unless I'm recoding them from the source each time I'll be hitting accumulating artefacts which build up surprisingly quickly when you change codecs about.

I'm a little bit away from 4k video here, as I'd have to upgrade the Pis, and also my amp. I know, I could use HDMI ARC, but I hate the interface on the telly for dealing with that nonsense. Come that day, though, I'll just use the H.265 from the discs again.

I have a mate with his video library parked on USB drives in a Raspberry Pi server. He balks at my profligate waste of drive space, and recodes everything - I'm not here to judge what he or anybody else does, and if that fits somebody's use case that's fine. If it comes to TV recording / time-shifting, slamming it all to a more efficient codec isn't a bad idea because the picture quality is rubbish anyway - I hadn't thought about that!

Dunno why we're both attracting downvotes on it all, though, because it's literally a case of personal preference. There's no right or wrong answer - you choose the tradeoff you're happiest with.

Re: Curious ...

But you're back to throwing away detail. It's not much, I grant you, but storage is cheap. I avoid transcoding completely.

Yes, space saving yadda yadda. But lossy each time you change vs £88 for a 4TB drive...

Re: Curious ...

Perhaps, but H.265 is on 4k BluRay discs, so if you're running on straight rips off the plastic (saves losing discs, kids mangling discs etc) then it's plenty.

Of course other people have other use cases - I'm not one for downloading movies, so AV1 is a new thing to me. Others, I'm sure, would choose to recode their disc rips to reduce size. I gave up on that game after the third time ripping all my CDs and just went lossless...

Re: Curious ...

Dunno about others, but I have Pis around the house to do all the smart TV stuff.

4k video playback and H.265 would be nice.

Re: People's belief in value

Reading further, they've raised the money by selling Eos coins. They got some mugs to spend Ethereum coins on them.

So they sold a bunch of unicorn farts, and the buyers paid in pixie farts. But if you tried to actually spend $4Bn cash, you'd come out with $4Bn worth of goods (HP acquisitions notwithstanding). If you tried to actually spend 7.12M Ether, you'd collapse the value of the currency. In fact, their valuation assumes $561 per Ether coin, which has dropped to $280 anyway.

So - not as much dollaroo as they'd like to think...

Eos has taken much the same bath in much the same time.

And this is why this site is popular. It answers the important questions.

Re: People's belief in value

But it seemed to me from the article that somebody's just plucked a figure out of their arse for the value of this cryptocurrency. And massaged the numbers to suit and to make themselves look grand.

If it turns out that they have all of the funds in one cryptocurrency (let's call them Pishcoins for brevity), and nobody else owns Pishcoins, that means they get to pluck any old dollar value out for a Pishcoin. It could be $1==P1. And who's going to argue? Certainly not the people who have an investment in it being true. It's only when you actually try to release some Pishcoins that the market will fix a value on it, which will probably be $0.

Also, countries tend to have standing armies which can help to prop up their fiat currencies. Just saying...

You've not seen us in Scotland. We're blue.

In July we turn purple for a couple of weeks, and then back to blue again.

Also, surprised you got a mortgage without government ID. Having worked in Financial Services, the FCA money-laundering regs require photo ID to prove you're you. Or did back when I was involved.

The usual script - two utility bills and a photo ID from the proscribed list. It was a short list...

Re: Dunning Krugerands

Well, recently it was "Sorry that handle is already taken.", but historically DrXym first raised the term on this site in 2014, and still credited it onwards.

Still a perfect name.

And yes, I'm buggering about a bit this morning...

Re: Really?

But they'd run out of ports, and that would have meant a whole extra USB hub...

Re: Really?

Exactly what I was thinking.

Nothing wrong with doing simulations on the parts in the first instance, and then physical tests later - I can't see the FAA letting them get away without physical tests. But with that said, they should have kept a lid on this for at least another year.

Re: Boffins advice?

Me. You've not seen the burn at the back of my house...

My dad managed to upset a whole island once by being in charge of the site building a water treatment plant in Orkney. Then they capped the well that the bar manager drew the water for the whisky from.

I don't imagine it stayed capped for long after the construction crew left.

Re: What fraction of a gram ? @Duncan

Fair enough - I didn't know that. Still don't need pearlescent shampoo, though. That's your low-hanging fruit right there!

Re: Oh, I forgot to put a title in

Last time I used satellite internet was in some lovely shiny new flats in Edinburgh. West Harbour Drive - look it up. That was all a brownfield site and they slung up these homes. Broadband was just intolerably slow to the whole lot of them.

Satellite connection, and they were suddenly looking at 25Mb/sec (what they paid for) rather than about 0.5Mb/sec on ADSL2+. Latency was a pig though.

That was a specialised case where it definitely did make sense. The guy I was helping to set it up did others in the Western Isles, Highlands and other remote places - those were the obvious options. It was remarkable, though, that in new build homes in a city the broadband was so awful.