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User: Bengie

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Comments · 6,462

  1. Re:Release number on Linux Kernel 4.1 Will Be an LTS Release · · Score: 1

    In the FreeBSD world, *.0 releases are very short lived, lots of new bugs discovered as everyone switches. You don't start seeing a real reduction in fixes or changes until about *.3. There also tends to be a few tweaks along the way as certain architectural design decisions weren't perfect.

  2. Re:A group of Google investors on Investors Ask How Much Google Spends On Lobbying · · Score: 1

    You do realize that anytime you call up your representative, you're lobbying, right? Voting is a form of indirect lobbying. Essentially, attempting to affect how politicians think is lobbying.

  3. Re:You Mean...? on Features That Windows 10 Will Deprecate · · Score: 1

    And hope it works. I've watched DVDs that refused to work correctly on VLC, and some that refused to work correctly with Window's one. Between the two I can watch nearly all DVDs. Even then, I sometimes find a DVD that refuses to play on either, just acts all buggy, then works fine in a standalone DVD player.

  4. Re:This is a great example. on Mystery Company Blazes a Trail In Fusion Energy · · Score: 1

    My ISP's prices have remained the same for the past 15 years and have gone from 0.5Mb/s to 100Mb/s. That's an average of 42% increase in bandwidth every year, without the bill changing a single penny. Once you include inflation, that's a 56% reduction in cost for me. 50% cheaper, 200x faster.

  5. Re:Real or Bullshit on Mystery Company Blazes a Trail In Fusion Energy · · Score: 1

    At least we reached the net energy output break even point years ago. Now we just need to do the same for gross raw energy input.

  6. Re:One connector to rule them all. on Intel Adopts USB-C Connector For 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3, Supports USB 3.1, DP 1.2 · · Score: 1

    Yet another person who has never heard of an MMU. Any modern computers will not allow DMA accesses without first getting permission from the OS or boot firmware. Even then, only DMA access to the exact memory locations the kernel assigns to the device.

  7. Re: Simplistic on Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerization? · · Score: 1

    Program computers? The day a computer is better at programming computers is the day humans will no longer need to build or program computers, leaving us with nothing to do at all because everything will be 100% automated.

  8. Re:So, what's the plan? on Intel To Buy Altera For $16.7 Billion · · Score: 1

    CPU+FPGA in $800 gaming rig sounds completely new to me.

  9. Re: Simplistic on Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerization? · · Score: 1

    as most candidates could code or design or work to specifications

    I call bs or they have a very low bar to meet "to specifications". Code that works to spec is great when it works and horrible when it doesn't work. Most people design systems that cannot be easily debugged or fail in unexpected ways. But yes, they work great when they work. It's shipped, no longer my problem, right?

  10. Re:Simplistic on Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerization? · · Score: 1

    The day my job is computerized is the day computers are smarter than humans. Maybe people need jobs that don't involve a script. Like you said, making the repetitive part of their jobs replaced with better tools to do the repetition for them.

  11. Re: Exodus on Ask Slashdot: What Happens If We Perfect Age Reversing? · · Score: 1

    There is no evolutionary pressure to live long, only to live long enough to reproduce. There is also evolutionary pressure for bad cells to self-destruct. Between these two things, there is a bias to dying early. At least this is how I think about it.

  12. Re:You know what would REALLY motivate kids? on Clinton Foundation: Kids' Lack of CS Savvy Threatens the US Economy · · Score: 1

    Do we expect kids in schools to actually WANT to learn all this? What kind of madness do you need, to want to learn about all these things?

    While I don't have first hand experience, I have a lot of theory and abstract knowledge. Nearly every new-fangled thing that's out there is just a minor flavor of what has been solved back in the 1970s. Even though I do not have any real world practice in many of these things, I have had highly regarded consultants come in and I've corrected them on design entirely from theory. Of course I learn a lot more from them, but having a strong foundation in theory and understanding the problem domain is very important.

    My posted child for applying my theory was when I helped debug a "threading" issue in a program someone wrote in go. I was given a high level explanation of what the application was attempting to do, and how it was attempting to do it. The problem that was occuring only happened with GCC-go. Coupled with my Wikipedia knowledge of how go works internally and a quick google on GCC-go, I was able to figure out the issue in about 5 minutes and gave a recommended alternative which worked.

    Armed with nothing but theory, I was able to figure out a thread scaling issue in a language that I knew virtually nothing about, that used a custom threading model, and the issue was specific to the compiler it was using. The issue turned out to be how GCC-go scheduled threads and handled blocking, which go should technically not have any blocking.

  13. Re:The title game on A Tool For Analyzing H-1B Visa Applications Reveals Tech Salary Secrets · · Score: 1

    Just because they hired someone at a lower rate doesn't mean they're not still trying to find a more qualified person at a higher rate. Good programmers are still in short supply, but sometimes you need to make do. The ratio of good vs not-so-good programmers is so bad that the not-so-good set the average.

    It takes us years to find good programmers. Yes, we could increase the advertised salary, but that just increases the noise from the number of baddies with credentials who want easy money. We find we're better off starting with a decent wage, finding a person we like, then letting their salary quickly increase via raises.

  14. Re:You don't have to go faster on Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity · · Score: 1

    Just remember, the Universe are roughly 0 total energy in it. The entire Universe is literally made of nothing.

  15. Re:You know what would REALLY motivate kids? on Clinton Foundation: Kids' Lack of CS Savvy Threatens the US Economy · · Score: 1

    I've had the pleasure of working with some pretty good programmers from other companies and they have the same problem ours does. You can offer 2x the median house hold income as a starting wage and still not fill a position. There is a big lack of decent programmers. Yes, we get flooded with applications because we're offering a good wage, but it seems like most people aren't that good.

    There is a lack of good programmers. Good for me. Without a decent selection of programmers, they just dote upon me, raises.

  16. Re:You don't have to go faster on Ways To Travel Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity · · Score: 1

    Information cannot move through space faster than c, but space itself is not limited to this. This is why we can already see galaxies moving away from us much faster than c and we'll never interact with them again.

  17. Re:Stupid on Computer Chips Made of Wood Promise Greener Electronics · · Score: 1

    They said this new material is transparent and flexible. You try bending your silicon CPU and let me know how it goes. The article also mentions that it's cheaper, doesn't need toxic chemicals and doesn't create toxic chemicals.

  18. Re:Holy hell on California Is Giving Away Free Solar Panels To Its Poorest Residents · · Score: 2

    In some areas, $60k/year is homeless.

  19. Re:free... on California Is Giving Away Free Solar Panels To Its Poorest Residents · · Score: 0

    Your overly strict definition of "free" is impossible in this Universe. Obviously a practical usage of the word is more useful than an impossible ideal version. Us normal people use the practical version.

  20. Re:Seems reasonable on Insurer Won't Pay Out For Security Breach Because of Lax Security · · Score: 1

    Follow best practices, two factor auth, only white listed executables can run, all non-system programs run in separate VMs/jails, minimum permissions, systems that store sensitive data do not have direct internet access are partitioned into a separate network with a firewall that only allows ports that are absolutely required, any program that can access the internet cannot also access sensitive data, etc etc.

  21. Re:Lets be honest here on No, Your SSD Won't Quickly Lose Data While Powered Down · · Score: 1

    You purchase crappy SSDs or are purposefully unaligning your partitions and formatting with 64KB blocks and writing programs that write to your FS without using a buffer and doing

    foreach(byte b in array)
    file.write(b)

  22. Re:Just stick to the mantra on No, Your SSD Won't Quickly Lose Data While Powered Down · · Score: 1

    A small pocket NAS isn't much of a NAS. Let me know when someone steals your server that takes two people to lift, stored down stairs in a locked room with a metal door, and will probably cause them to slip a disk in their back if they try to walk it up the stairs unless they bring a dolly. If you have a small NAS like that, hide is somewhere. It probably doesn't take much cooling. Don't leave it out in plain sight for all to see.

    Ransomware? Don't you mount all of your NAS drives as SAN block devices shared out by your FreeBSD LUN, using ZFS to snapshots, and your NAS is also running FreeBSD and all of your programs run in separate jails?

  23. Re:Java is fully open source on How Java Changed Programming Forever · · Score: 2

    Android did not write the JVM. It was an opensource project that implemented the API for most of the API except a few patented parts that didn't matter. Then Java tried to sue them for claiming it was Java. Of course Java did not try to sue the project, only Android for using the project.

  24. Re:Plant? on How Java Changed Programming Forever · · Score: 1

    Java seems to like to create objects more often than .Net. Even though it does this quite quickly, it causes the GC to kick in more often, and the GC does a stop world, and stop world is bad for thread scaling.

    A 1% difference of total CPU time spent in GC time can quickly turn into a 100% different in performance. Amdahl's law has caused me great pain when trying to reduce GC time.

  25. Re:Java is fully open source on How Java Changed Programming Forever · · Score: 2

    Until Java tries to sue you, like they did Android.