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  1. Mercutio

    Something Random

    No one outside of certain parts of the right wing blogosphere is suggesting Sharia Law is viable in the United States. Even in places with the highest concentrations of Muslims in the USA, like Dearborn, Michigan and St. Paul, Minnesota, the level of traction that idea has is approximately the...
  2. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Also, as further rejoinder to Stereodude: The wording of the law signed by President Clinton is such that it only applies to government agencies and employees (e.g. the Federal Government, as an employer, will not force an adherent of Islam go out and inspect hog farms or punish Native American...
  3. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Who cares? No one is saying that religious people cannot observe their faith in their home or in their church. The issue here is that religious people are demanding that the secular world conform to their expectations, which is particularly ironic given the frequency with which religious beliefs...
  4. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Project Spartan was added to Windows 10 as of last night's Windows 10 update. There's no ad-blocking, no sign of any add-on support and not even A9 search plugins can be added. The UI is very similar to Chrome and Firefox, only without all those confusing options and settings; there are only...
  5. Mercutio

    PC Gaming = World of Suck

    It's not exactly PC gaming but I watched it on a PC so whatever. Wil Wheaton, Aisha "LANA!!!!" Tyler and Overly Attached Girlfriend play Cards Against Humanity. Not even remotely safe for work.
  6. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Gay people can be married by civil authority or in churches with tolerant views of human relationships. What happens in a church is the purview of its faith. What happens in secular life, outside of the church, is a matter of law. These are distinct issues. If a person of faith feels that their...
  7. Mercutio

    Cat5e vs Cat6 for new home

    Also, there are standards for doing just about everything that involves wiring over Cat5 or better cable. You can wire HDMI over Cat5, for example. Another reason to do extra runs of cabling is to make sure you have essentially universal cabling for whatever else you might want to wire.
  8. Mercutio

    Something Random

    If your religion is so easily transgressed by interacting with the secular society, yes.
  9. Mercutio

    Something Random

    If your religion is so easily transgressed by interacting with the secular society, yes.
  10. Mercutio

    Cat5e vs Cat6 for new home

    Just expense. Though installers WILL try to get away with using the cheap stuff if they think they can get away with it. Where are you moving, anyway?
  11. Mercutio

    Something Random

    It's a matter of specific wording. The party of small government has specifically and deliberately remove rights in places where they had already been granted. This is particularly troubling as religion really is a matter of open interpretation and self-identification. And yes, Muslim taxi...
  12. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    As a rule of thumb, the more often the word Enterprise is used in a press release, the more likely the product is to have a price that can be likened unto the Flagship of the United Federation of Planets.
  13. Mercutio

    Something Random

    ... and I just spoke to someone on my office line whose name showed up on caller ID as "LEGAL ANAL" which is of course extra hilarious for reasons that we can explain to sedrosken when he's a little bit older.
  14. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The Indiana law is explicitly different from other laws because it includes language overriding local statues. Communities like South Bend and Indianapolis that already included sexual preference as a protected class just had their laws invalidated. Those in smaller communities may now find that...
  15. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Knoxville is on the other side of the state. Kinda like how San Francisco and Sacramento are not that far apart but couldn't be more different.
  16. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I'm thinking west coast or Tennessee, where my parents are. I'd probably do better generally on the West Coast.
  17. Mercutio

    This is the thread for the discussion of interesting apps.

    One of my favorite tabletop games is Sentinels of the Multiverse, which I bought through my Kindle, but is only available on PCs through Steam. I've really been enjoying it, but boy does it kill my battery. That was a bit of a drag, so I started messing with Android Emulators again. Unlike a...
  18. Mercutio

    This makes me glad that I'm not an AT&T customer

    Sure, if you're dumb enough to use them without sticking a router of your own on the internal interface. I usually have my customers have provided devices flashed to modem-only mode if possible. Comcast actually no longer gives end users - even businesses - any administrative control over...
  19. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Indiana is not a good place to live. I'm relatively certain the current governor, in spite of signing the "Indiana is just peachy with bigotry" bill, will be re-elected. I really do need to move someplace else. I spent a while today looking at plans for Tiny Houses. I think I'd be perfectly...
  20. Mercutio

    This makes me glad that I'm not an AT&T customer

    They can't do anything internal to your LAN unless you let them. Worst case, you can always make SSH tunnels between all your clients.
  21. Mercutio

    This makes me glad that I'm not an AT&T customer

    I can very easily see AT&T moving your billing to the "enhanced privacy" plan if you signed up and then routed all your traffic through a VPN, too.
  22. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    Correct. These are the DM units.
  23. Mercutio

    Acer Predator XB270HU

    I'd pay that for a 27" Ultrasharp, no problem. Just not Acer.
  24. Mercutio

    Acer Predator XB270HU

    I might hope that a premium product would have better quality control than the $100 POS screens I'm used to. It certainly does annoy me to have to toss a 14-month-old monitor though.
  25. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    Try writing a 50GB file and watch write speed. I've only been testing with my spare drive, but they all seem to exhibit slower sustained writes over time. 4GB might not be enough to see the slowdown.
  26. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    Could be. I suppose it's only a serious problem if you're expecting high write performance. I wouldn't want to write large backups to one, for example.
  27. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    The 5TB drives don't seem to drop out of arrays the way SOME drives do, but alone or in groups, they have a very odd behavior where they'll write at full speed for a while (150MB/sec for a single drive) then slow down to something more like 40MB/sec for sustained writes that last more than...
  28. Mercutio

    Acer Predator XB270HU

    $800 is awfully dear for a 27" display. I know the appeal is the high refresh rate, but that's somewhat higher than I'd expect given that we aren't talking about an Ultrasharp or Cinema Display. I'm sure that would be a sweet consumer-class monitor, but my experience with Acer panels is that...
  29. Mercutio

    Merc's Useful Tools of the day

    I don't know where the line was drawn, but if you're throwing in random Clevo resellers like Sager, I suspect the list could very rapidly balloon beyond the point of usefulness.
  30. Mercutio

    Merc's Useful Tools of the day

    In case anyone ever wants to do it, to restore the Pre-Firefox 34 search: Go in to about:config and set browser.search.showOneOffButtons to False.
  31. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    The XP to Vista upgrade took hours and hours and it failed fairly often. Remember that there were some pretty huge structural changes to user profiles and the driver model between XP and Vista, and it could be that there were enough points of failure that MS simply decided not to support the...
  32. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Apparently Ubuntu derivatives have a compatible bootloader, though the hardware support isn't perfect. I'm surprised that it boots at all but at the same time, when was the last time you used a Linux machine where the pointing device was the thing keeping your machine from being useful?
  33. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    That might present a problem for consumer laptops. I could very easily see Acer or HP shipping crippled product. On the other hand, Mint will boot on a Surface Pro, so even a locked down machine might be made usable for *nix if the right people decide to address the problem.
  34. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Probably a very long time. Vista is still entirely viable now. XP is only mildly problematic for some notebook PCs, though application compatibility is starting to become an issue. There's no reason to think that there's a change in driver model or major shift in hardware requirements on the...
  35. Mercutio

    question What are the advantages of using both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz router bands?

    If you can segregate traffic, you'll both more aggregate bandwidth for each user because 802.11 bandwidth is split among connected devices. Two different radios = two pools of bandwidth. Typically, 5GHz bands offer higher bandwidth, but at shorter range. 2.4 has a serious advantage in terms of...
  36. Mercutio

    Nvidia's Titan X is coming soon.

    You'd let someone else build a rig for you? o.O
  37. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    I've been running Windows 10 at home on my TV PC, an Intel NUC with a wired connection and no particularly strong demands placed on it, but on Day 2 of having Windows 10 on my Thinkpad and here are my thoughts now that I've completely set up my environment: 1. This shit is SLOW. I'm on an i7...
  38. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Office 2016's preview edition launched on Monday as well. Looks like most of the major enhancements are in Outlook, but it looks like the ribbon items have a little more contrast in the new version.
  39. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    I don't think Microsoft would be able to operate as a corporate entity if it were disclosing the content of local files not stored in OneDrive. It would be sued into a bloody pulp. At the same time, it probably does collect metadata about that content.
  40. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Windows Search forcing the use of Cortana/Bing and Windows Defender's default behavior of overriding the hosts file are fairly huge privacy concerns, plus letting Microsoft analyze the content of your OneDrive account if you're using that. But most of us disclose the same information completely...
  41. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Microsoft is apparently so serious about "free upgrades" to 10 that it also applies to pirated copies as well. I finally got around to putting it on a laptop with a mic so I could try Cortana. It's practically worthless. Basically it searches Bing for things. It's not capable of opening...
  42. Mercutio

    You guys need one of these

    Speaking as someone who just put 30TB of drives in a machine on Saturday, "one" might be slightly underestimating my need.
  43. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    Not that it's going to be available forever, but this is a $50, 2-bay NAS from Lenovo that supports 4TB+ drives. Somebody here might be interested in such a thing.
  44. Mercutio

    Fast CPU for video transcoding? Xeon?

    I haven't found anything that supports hardware encoding to that degree. Handbrake has limited support for it during a small part of the overall process, but their docs say that it doesn't help on fast CPUs and I've never bothered to turn it on. In the past, the software I found with full...
  45. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    Like timwhit, I'm waiting for prices to return to the realm of reason. I got a good enough deal on the 5TB units to pull the trigger on those instead.
  46. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    I used a small flathead screwdriver and a couple pry tools. It took about two minutes per drive and cost a few of the plastic tabs. The only screws were used to stabilize the drive to rubber grommets, not hold anything down.
  47. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    I just deshelled and installed 6x 5TB Seagate drives in my file server. They're in a double-parity array, but I have concerns about how well they'll work in an array since I'm almost positive they're 5900rpm units. If they don't work, they'll get turned back in to externals. 5TB is big enough...
  48. Mercutio

    Fast CPU for video transcoding? Xeon?

    It certainly doesn't look BAD. My test encode was the Zeffarelli production of Turandot, which has a crap-ton going on on-screen. Lots of blacks, lots of difficult to compress complexity. I can see small differences side by side on frozen frames, but it's nothing to complain about, though I may...
  49. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    I tend to be conservative with overvolting since I want it to be as quiet as possible. Oddly enough, if my machine boots at high OC settings, it's fine seemingly no matter what I throw at it (mostly lots and lots of Handbrake). I haven't had it bluescreen even once. It's just that the board...
  50. Mercutio

    8TB and no helium

    Lunar, what RAM are you using to stay stable at 4.5GHz with 64GB installed? I can stay stable at 4.5GHz with 2x8GB Crucial 2133 sticks, but the minute I put the other two back in, I need to be back at 3.8GHz or else it's a 50/50 chance that my rig won't even boot. Are you just overvolting the...
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