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User: Samantha+Wright

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Comments · 4,268

  1. Re:Science on The Cybersecurity Industry Is Hiring, But Young People Aren't Interested · · Score: 1

    Actually you can still get a part-time job and earn arbitrarily small amounts of money, you just have to be paid $10.40 per hour. And there are other exceptions; grad students often make less through their stipends.

  2. Re:So, I ask: who's making good printers these day on Ask Slashdot: Best SOHO Printer Choices? · · Score: 1

    Can't really comment on that particular format, but there's decent off-brand TN-360 on Amazon and in copious seedy small ink refill stores.

  3. Re:hire me on The Cybersecurity Industry Is Hiring, But Young People Aren't Interested · · Score: 4, Insightful
  4. Re:Stallman ain't gonna be happy on Torvalds: SteamOS Will 'Really Help' Linux On the Desktop · · Score: 2

    RedHat's done pretty well for itself selling little more than support contracts, as have many other server distro vendors. A sticker price isn't the only way to make money from providing software. And given that Ubuntu embraced advertising a long time ago, it's a bit of a strawman (or at least quaintly archaic) to argue with the GNU Foundation's core principles.

  5. Re:Not happening on Torvalds: SteamOS Will 'Really Help' Linux On the Desktop · · Score: 2

    The driver improvements are actually what Linus is talking about if you RTFA. That's how desktop Linux will benefit.

    As for why SteamOS: about a year ago (I think) Valve demonstrated that you could get superior performance on Linux because the code was open. It's a lot easier to do optimizations on a platform when you have comprehensive documentation on how it works—and where the bugs are. Valve's devs were also greatly elated to discover that they could actually fix said bugs instead of just working around them, like they had to do on Windows.

  6. Re:So, I ask: who's making good printers these day on Ask Slashdot: Best SOHO Printer Choices? · · Score: 2

    I bought an HL-2170W a few years ago after comparing consumables prices; out of consumer brands, Brother definitely came out on top. You do have to replace the drum eventually too, which can get a bit pricey relative to the cost of the machine, but it helps that the machine's completely no-nonsense—it doesn't try to foist any fancy interfaces on the home user, and it's got a somewhat disturbingly long list of ways to submit print jobs when running in network mode (directly to the printer via FTP? what?) And it's easy to get off-brand replacement toner that's high-quality and cheap, too; they don't invent new cartridge types for every piece of equipment they make.

  7. Re:I gotta admit on Apple Announces iPad Air · · Score: 0

    Hint for your anarcho-capitalist kneejerk playbook: "be open" isn't the kind of regulation that impedes a free market.

  8. What a title! on Book Review: Minecraft · · Score: 1

    Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and the Game that Changed Everything. That's a lot of scrubbing. "Soap stains, Mark. How do you remove soap stains?! They're the end game!"

  9. Re:Probably a downmod coming but.. on Experian Sold Social Security Numbers To ID Theft Service · · Score: 2

    The bill would die immediately after being introduced, if not because of its blatant immorality then because of corporate lobbyists. I find it strange that people fantasize so much about a legislature comprised almost entirely of corporate lapdogs turning on its masters.

  10. Re:People could already move car to car on New York City Considers Articulated Subway Cars · · Score: 1

    In Toronto all of the platforms are just over six cars long, so there's really no point in going for a longer train—instead we make the much lower-effort/lower-energy decision to just run trains more or less frequently. (And while the T35A08/Rocket's cars aren't detachable, other articulated trains can be.)

  11. Re:People could already move car to car on New York City Considers Articulated Subway Cars · · Score: 2

    The benefit is that it means there are no longer places where you can get trapped with only one exit. With separated cars, it's a lot easier to get stuck at the end of the car behind someone slow-moving or immobile; articulated cars give you another exit. This is mostly a problem at stops with light traffic during rush hour; everyone gets on down town and then has to wait for a minute at the next stop while a few people crammed in the back trickle toward the doors.

  12. Re:People could already move car to car on New York City Considers Articulated Subway Cars · · Score: 2

    A big point of articulated cars is that the space between the cars is usable passenger space for standing. The accessibility of the doors is unimportant when it comes to train capacity, and vastly inferior to articulated cars when it comes to loading/emptying times.

  13. Re:Terrists on DNA Sequence Withheld From New Botulism Paper · · Score: 1

    Argh, you're right. I did look at a bunch of cell-free protein production references, but threw them out when I found that one. Nucleotide microarrays are often printed one base at a time in layers, so I assumed it was an analogous process.

  14. Re:I know the scientist... on DNA Sequence Withheld From New Botulism Paper · · Score: 2

    Well... normal C. botulinum is BSL-2, but it's plausible that this is BSL-3 or even 4 since no vaccine is available yet. If it is BSL-4, even just temporarily, then there are only a handful of labs in the world that can actually work on it. and about 30% of them are in the US, so the information can be shared without much security risk and still be well-analysed. I would guess they'd be making the sequences available upon request to anyone they deemed trustworthy.

    If it's only BSL-3, there are something like two thousand such labs in the US alone, and it's definitely a bottleneck, but I doubt most of those groups would actually care. It's not like revealing the details of a remote execution vulnerability in OpenSSH causes every software developer in the world to offer a hand to fix it!

    (Also, points for the Excession sig. A lot of people disfavour it over the others, but it's probably my favourite Culture book.)

  15. Re:Terrists on DNA Sequence Withheld From New Botulism Paper · · Score: 2

    We're there, but it's not cheap and there are a lot of limitations. The shapes of the ribosome and its buddies are important for correct folding in many proteins.

  16. Re:Nonsense on Advances In Cinema Tech Overcoming a Strange Racial Divide · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Gamma. The difference between a light object in full light and a light object in shadow is greater than the difference between a dark object in light and a dark object in shadow. Human eyes adjust automatically across the range and trick you into thinking the shading difference is more normal, but the gamma curve on a camera exacerbates the difference. This is why totally black fabric appears to be slimming; your eyes can't pick out the shape as well and you're left with just the silhouette. It's more or less the same phenomenon as in HDR photography.

  17. Re:Correction - 30% in under 48 HOURS on Myst Creators Announce Obduction · · Score: 1

    First of thirty. As in "one." (And it wasn't 30% yet last night when I checked!)

  18. Re:Should read on Myst Creators Announce Obduction · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Given that they've almost met 20% of their funding goal in the first of thirty days, I wouldn't give up on the ol' girl just yet. The core Myst franchise fanbase is exceptionally devoted—they've been keeping the Uru Live servers going for a few years now entirely through donations.

  19. Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods on Sleep Is the Ultimate Brainwasher · · Score: 1

    ...actually, let me start a journal so this doesn't get cluttered. Here.

  20. Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods on Sleep Is the Ultimate Brainwasher · · Score: 1

    Depends! Pick the conditions?

  21. Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods on Sleep Is the Ultimate Brainwasher · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's the other link you want; that article only details artificial patterns. In short: it's normal to wake up briefly in the middle of the night, and take about 9-10 hours from when you first go to bed till when you last wake up.

  22. Re:Running key is dead... Long Live the One Time P on Book Review: Secret History: the Story of Cryptology · · Score: 1

    Ideally you'd combine the two tactics.

    I actually don't think that's so impossible; you just need to rely as heavily as possible on context and put all sentences into a normalized form. English is a bit lame for this, but it should be trivial to do in a Lojban-like language that avoids all particles. As a trivial example: number all verbs and number all nouns separately. If a verb is transitive, then the next two numbers are its nouns, if not, then the next number is its subject and the number after that is the beginning of the next sentence. Have different numbers for verbs and nouns that take different numbers of dependents, for example the transitive and intransitive verbs of 'walk', or versions with or without destination clauses.

    This might be trivially crackable on its own by using word-frequency analysis (low likelihood of a noun and verb with the same number both being used frequently, although ideally you'd design the dictionary to encourage this kind of confusion), but absolutely impossible to guarantee correct plaintext through brute forcing a very long XOR key.

  23. Re:Found in shale sediment. on Fossilized Mosquito Has Blood-filled Abdomen · · Score: 1

    Just assume the haystack's full of needles—for example, in getting this mosquito, they may have narrowly missed uncovering the three hundred million year old remains of a Buick with tomorrow's winning lottery ticket in the glove compartment.

  24. Re:Socialism run amok on Finland's Algorithm-Driven Public Bus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Personally, I'm excited to hear more detail about how mathematical procedures have been turned into a tangible energy source. Those must be some pretty fancy denotational semantics.

  25. Re:Like your own product on Oracle Attacks Open Source; Says Community-Developed Code Is Inferior · · Score: 2

    Well, think about it—Oracle's selling RedHat support for less than RedHat does. If they succeed in sucking away all of RedHat's customers (which they won't, because RedHat's customers aren't all that stupid, but just if) then there's no more RedHat, Inc. to keep working on RHEL. Then, either Oracle has a low-end captive market or, more in line with their usual practices, a vulnerable target for forcible up-selling to Solaris or something.