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User: Darinbob

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  1. Re:The difference between boys and girls on Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment · · Score: 1

    As a male, I protect my own time, and I never let my weekends vanish and totally reject any 60-80 hour week as a standard (if it happens it is entirely self-imposed).

    Men also take paternity leaves. I have seen this, many companies allow this, as well as many countries. Without this then the company is being anti-family (or family only for management maybe).

    Not sure how management works everywhere, but in every one of my jobs that managers were also developers or engineers. I've never worked for a management-only manager. This includes women managers who were developers.

    As a male, I don't put up with abuse either. I may keep quiet about it but update the resume and go job hunting on the sly.

    I've also worked on medical technology and the ratio of women goes way up than the dreadfully dull dull world of communications and networking.

  2. Re:Boys are naturally curious... on Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment · · Score: 1

    And yes you have described the stereotype correctly, while seeming to imply that it matters and that it's genetic rather than cultural and that it is large enough to make a difference. Again this ignores the problem that women did have higher CS enrollment numbers in the past.

    Sounds suspiciously like things people said in the past: women don't have the clear logical minds necessary to vote, women are caring and compassionate and are thus better suited to be nurses than doctors, women have no place on the battlefield (I agree there, and extend that to say men don't have a place there either).

    A better question might be: do we need more women in CS or fewer? Right now we're skewing things towards discouraging women in CS.

  3. Re:Slashdot, Stop Spinning the GamerGate Content on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 1

    I have a clue here, there are massive clues that it is not at all about ethics in journalism. If you think that's what it is about and everyone should just shut up, then you're missing the story.

  4. Re:Good luck with that. on Rite Aid and CVS Block Apple Pay and Google Wallet · · Score: 1

    I've never seen an NFC terminal. If it's industry standard where are they?

  5. Re:Time for a revolution on Law Lets IRS Seize Accounts On Suspicion, No Crime Required · · Score: 1

    Or just elect politicians willing to overturn the civil forfeiture. However the general public has been led to believe that this is only done for drug dealers and politicians don't want to appear soft on crime. It's basically about getting the voters informed. if you do that you won't need the guns.

  6. Re:Gruber at DaringFireball nails it on Rite Aid and CVS Block Apple Pay and Google Wallet · · Score: 1

    And what's more secure, customer doing nothing, or a customer taking positive action to spend money?

  7. Re:No thanks. on Rite Aid and CVS Block Apple Pay and Google Wallet · · Score: 2

    And a chip is more secure than NFC, which most smart people turned off on their phones within an hour of buying them.

  8. Re:Good luck with that. on Rite Aid and CVS Block Apple Pay and Google Wallet · · Score: 1

    And Apple is simple?

    I don't understand what the story is really complaining about. All of Apple Pay is opt-in, there's no way to "block" it only ways to enable it.

    For people to young to know how things work, stores did not all accept credit cards when they were first introduced either, and for decades afterwords many stores would only accept one type or another. Even today a lot of stores refuse to take Discover. So what's the big deal about not signing up with Apple?

  9. Re:Non-story? on AT&T Locks Apple SIM Cards On New iPads · · Score: 1

    Well, if you switch you still have to pay the extra money to quit the plan early (those phones are not cheap and are subsidized through the monthly fee). The point of the Apple SIM as explained to me by some who want it, is for when they travel to other countries when they explain is can be inconvenient to pick up a sim card and take it to a clerk to pay for when you can just give the phone to the clerk instead (or presumably if the infrastructure is ever in place, get the code online).

    Though if you buy an iphone outside of AT&T, can you switch to AT&T without them locking your personally bought-and-paid-for SIM card, or do they only do this on their own subsidized phones?

  10. Re:Gabe Newell is perhaps the biggest driver of th on PCGamingWiki Looks Into Linux Gaming With 'Port Reports' · · Score: 1

    Wait, there's such a thing as a cool controller?

  11. Re:Being different was a boat anchor. on How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor · · Score: 1

    In the 90's, ever workstation maker was fast compared to the plodding PC. Of course, the workstations cost tons more, whereas the PC was the cheap computer meaning you could put it on everyone's desk or even in the home, but it wasn't considered a high end product. Even some workstation makers made x86 versions of their higher end machines and they were slow as hell and unpopular.

  12. Re:Being different was a boat anchor. on How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor · · Score: 1

    I care about what chips are in it, because I liked the PowerPC (not even being a mac person) and I also like to see real honest competition in the chip market instead of an Intel stranglehold. Sure the mass market doesn't care, but I'm not the mass market and I know how these chips work and how to use them. Apple didn't choose PowerPC to be different but because at the time Intel's offerings were complete junk and the PowerPC was more compatible with the 68K systems it was replacing.

    The only place left where non-Intel chips or clones can be found are embedded systems and devices, they are no longer available on the PC or workstation market. Competittion is great, and in the high end CPU market the only competition is from clones (granted, it took a clone using backwards compatibility to get it to 64-bit, even Intel was thwarted in this by success of it's older chips).

  13. Re:It helps to actually use the thing. on How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor · · Score: 1

    True, their GCC is goofy as hell. They've migrated a lot since early OS X and now they consider the Mac to be just a dev system from iOS. They've got something called "gcc" on the system that defines __GNUC__ and yet which rejects valid gcc inline assembler because it's not really gcc on the backend.

    As for other stuff, I do cross compiling on the Mac, so the only local Mac programs I need to build are the build tools themselves, so I never cared about libraries or clang. Linux would be definitely easier to be sure overall, but as a developer system OS X is light years ahead of Windows+cygwin. It says a lot right off the bat that they weren't scared and frightened by a command line tool and that they preferred common standards to obscure stuff invented at home.

  14. Re:Confusing on How Sony, Intel, and Unix Made Apple's Mac a PC Competitor · · Score: 1

    But the PC parts were shit. Power hungry, inefficient (but supercharged). Sourcing parts was the issue for Apple, they were a small player using a CPU built by a single source company.

  15. Re:Bull on Microsoft Exec Opens Up About Research Lab Closure, Layoffs · · Score: 1

    I thought it was VFAT that had the patents that Microsoft was asserting, not FAT32. FAT32 has nothing new or novel in comparison to FAT16, whereas the techniques in VFAT (the short/long filenaming hybrid) at least is an interesting idea.

  16. Re:Bull on Microsoft Exec Opens Up About Research Lab Closure, Layoffs · · Score: 1

    Is it the closure of research labs that caused those companies to decline, or was it because the companies had started to decline that the shut down the research labs?

  17. Re: When you are inside the box ... on Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems · · Score: 2

    Right AND wrong. Right about there being communists, but dead wrong about the methods used to root them out and the assumption that anyone with communist leanings was an enemy.

    And he certainly did not rely on logic and evidence to conclude there were communists, it was a gut feeling only and he capitalized on it for political power (which backfired).

  18. Re:Slashdot, Stop Spinning the GamerGate Content on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 1

    If SJW is vile, then what about what they fight against? Sending death threats to women who "dare" to play games or create games, that's ok? Oh one of them slept with a journalist, something evil of course that men would never ever do.

    What about the neutral stand that should say treat others with respect, accept outsiders into your circles, don't create a hostile environment. Face it, there positively without any doubt is a vile and disgusting segment of gamer culture, but it gets defended because it's part of the private club.

  19. Re:Slashdot, Stop Spinning the GamerGate Content on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 1

    It sounds like a typical new style troll behavior. Anyone entering the conversation that you don't like, you then accuse of knowing nothing and telling them to stay out of it. If you're not in their peer group than they honestly want you to just go away. You're not in fight club so you're not allowed to have an opinion about it.

    It's an attitude that seems to indicate that they are trying to protect their private enclave and are worried that it's being dismantled. Possibly also an attitude that if you don't agree with them then you must agree with their enemies.

  20. Re:"Social justice warriors" are the ultimate trol on The Inevitable Death of the Internet Troll · · Score: 2

    And yet, anyone who says "treat women like people" gets labelled an SJW. The term is meaningless, saying "SJW" is about as irrelevant's and Rush's "feminazi", in that it riles up the haters but makes everyone else roll their eyes.

  21. Re:No. on Will Fiber-To-the-Home Create a New Digital Divide? · · Score: 1

    10mbps is good. A lot of people in the US have no access to anything that fast without subscribing to the local cable monopoly (if their local cable monopoly even provides that speed of internet). I get 12mbps for $50. I think it's a bit overpriced myself. Part of the "digital divide" is not just access to internet but the cost of it.

    Ie, if the local cablopoly offers 48mbps for $80 a month, why not offer 12mbps for $20, 1/4 the speed/bandwidth for 1/4 the cost, then it's only a little more expensive than dialup and vastly more affordable for most people.

  22. Re:Why South Korea and Japan can do it and USA can on Will Fiber-To-the-Home Create a New Digital Divide? · · Score: 1

    Smaller towns may not have more expensive internet, but they have less of it. More small town residents still use dialup, or have no choice other than poor quality cable. If you want good internet in the US you will find it very often in the largest cities but not in the small towns or rural areas.

  23. Re:Not "bricked" on FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors' Chips. · · Score: 1

    Well, that is indeed new since I posted. Glad someone went out to get actual evidence instead of just raging without it.
    However, where'd that source code come from, I've wanted to look at it in the past?

  24. Re:On the other hand... on FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors' Chips. · · Score: 1

    I read the initial reports. None of them report back the results of sniffing the USB bus. Instead it sounds like a bunch of Arduino owners complaining that some boards are broken. Now granted, the driver *did* screw up those boards, but I haven't seen evidence that this was malicious as opposed to a side effect, instead it's just circumstantial evidence (ie, why a new driver now when nothing has really changed in the FTDI world).

    If someone wants to sue, and all those hobbyists sure sounded like they wanted to sue, then there should be actual evidence of malfeasance.

  25. Re:On the other hand... on FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors' Chips. · · Score: 1

    I didn't say power hungry, but... Can you do everything you need for ethernet and uart? Baud rates, cts/rts, full/half duplex, 10/100/1g, things like that? If CDC can do those two classes of devices then why didn't anyone ever use it?

    I got a CDC driver once from an OS vendor when we asked for an ethernet adapter driver (it was crap, but the vendor was crap so not CDC's fault, but the vendor got our money). Did not find any device that used CDC for this at the time except cable modems. Maybe there are more of these things today though (I see lots of usb-wifi adapters, not sure if they use CDC).