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Comment product differentiation (Score 1) 217

Like all hackers, people sometimes ask me what make or model tech product they should buy. iPhone or Android, Mac or PC, Windows, iOs Linux, etc. I tell them the brand doesn't matter, because you are probably using the device for browsing the web, reading email, listening to media, and so forth, and all those devices do those tasks in a way that is close to identical. Maybe one is faster or slower, or bigger or smaller storage, or bigger or smaller screen. But it should make little difference to you whether gmail is running on Mac or Windows or Linux.

I'm a hacker, and it makes a difference to me whether I write system software for an Apple or Windows or Linux environment. But for a user, no.

Regarding Macs being better than Chromebooks, really? Does Wikipedia or whatever cloud app run better on a Mac than on a Chromebook?

Comment Re:Commas? (Score 5, Informative) 60

1) TTY model 33s had no lower case characters, but they did have commas. 2) The UNIX creators did not use TTY model 33s. You know how UNIX filenames and C source code is full of lower case characters? Think about that.

The UNIX OS tty (terminal) subsystem did support upper-case only terminals - look at stty(1) and search for uclc and xcase. But yecch.

Comment Re:give the user controls (Score 1) 347

Wrong type of smoothness. This isn't intraframe smoothing and noise reduction, it's interframe motion-interpolated frame synthesis for the purpose of frame rate conversion.

I understand that there are different types of sharpness/smoothness involved here. I assume that the designers of an HDTV UI don't want to give average users more than one smoothness (or sharpness) knob.

The same way that the lossy JPEG algorithm has different parameters for controlling compression (choosing a DCT and quantization matrix, figuring out how much to trim the quantized data), but most UIs give you a single setting from 1-100.

Comment beautiful USC ISI data center (Score 1) 62

The most beautiful data center I ever saw was the USC ISI data center in Marina Del Rey, California. It's been there since at least the 1970s, and was part of the early creation of the Arpanet/Internet. It's on the top floor of a 12 story building, that at least in the olden days had no other tall buildings around it because of earthquake risk. It was easier to cool because it was near the roof air conditioning compressors. It has panoramic windows all around overlooking the beach and the ocean. There were special rails to keep hardware from falling out the windows in case of earthquake.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.isi.edu%2Fabout%2Fhist...

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