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User: Eristone

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Comments · 246

  1. Re:Smart Cards on Ask Slashdot: Convincing My Company To Stop Using Passwords? · · Score: 1

    Chevron's SmartBadge system was kind of nice - it was just a pain when you needed to log into more than one machine at a time...

  2. Re:"One" is the new "i" on Windows Kernel Version Bumped To 10.0 · · Score: 1

    OneRing - to rule them all, and set up the next round of fights. (damn I've gone cynical this week)

  3. Re:Capitalism does not reward morality on Is a Moral Compass a Hindrance Or a Help For Startups? · · Score: 1

    So you are saying Machiavelli got it backwards? :)

  4. Re:Beware the T E R R O R I S T S !! on Republicans Block Latest Attempt At Curbing NSA Power · · Score: 2

    This has been happening in the Middle East for more than 1000 years. If you think ISIS is something new then you really need to get an education.
    Murdering each other is a way of life in the Middle east. Their holy books demand you kill non believers

    Christian Bible (2 Chronicles 15:12-13) - "They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek
    the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman."

    Christian Bible (Deuteronomy 13:7-12) - "If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. Your hand shall be the first raised to slay him; the rest of the people shall join in with you. You shall stone him to death, because he sought to lead you astray from the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. And all Israel, hearing of this, shall fear and never do such evil as this in your midst."

    Christian Bible (Deuteronomy 17:2-5) - "Suppose a man or woman among you, in one of your towns that the LORD your God is giving you, has done evil in the sight of the LORD your God and has violated the covenant by serving other gods or by worshiping the sun, the moon, or any of the forces of heaven, which I have strictly forbidden. When you hear about it, investigate the matter thoroughly. If it is true that this detestable thing has been done in Israel, then that man or woman must be taken to the gates of the town and stoned to death."

    The difference between the Christian sects are trivial.... etc. Although I am in agreement with you about bringing peace to the Middle East being more or less futile, at least until the day some faction detonates a nuclear weapon at Mecca and/or Jerusalem.

  5. Re:How did your senator vote? on Republicans Block Latest Attempt At Curbing NSA Power · · Score: 1

    That actually wouldn't be that bad an app to build - hmmm.

  6. Re:Wrong analogy on Google's Lease of NASA Airfield Criticized By Consumer Group · · Score: 2

    Yes, but it would cost NASA a fortune to clean up the site before it could be auctioned off. El Toro Marine Base was just taken off the Superfund list after 24 years and $165 million dollars to clean up the land after the base closed. Considering Moffet Field has been an experimental site as well as a military base, you can use the El Toro cleanup as a baseline - so instead of leasing the land to Google, making NASA money on the deal and also getting maintenance paid for, the suggestion is to spend $200 million and leave the land useless for the next 20 years or so while the cleanup takes place.

  7. Re:Have to take personal time to vote... on US Midterm Elections Discussion · · Score: 1

    Interesting - according to this here, employers have to give you time off to vote. Check your state to see which law applies to you.

  8. Re:News For Nerds? on US Midterm Elections Discussion · · Score: 1

    Not really - every green card issued during the 2005 fiscal year will be expiring and a replacement card (assuming renewal) issued. In addition, new cards will need to be issued for people who qualify for one through the regular channels (marriage, business sponsorship, lottery) and there will need to be replacement cards for those that are lost, stolen or damaged/destroyed. 4 million/year is what they expect and there is an option to buy an additional 20 million, just in case there is a need for it. (That way, they can have them on hand instead of scrambling.)

  9. Re:It's not first and foremost about you on Debate Over Systemd Exposes the Two Factions Tugging At Modern-day Linux · · Score: 1

    And as a somewhat full-time server admin (who made his money on the Windows side of the house and is only a somewhat okay Linux guy in his less than humble opinion) - your comment makes me cringe and reach for the Tums. The phrase you are looking for is "single point of failure". Faster boot times for servers that you don't have to reboot (we're talking Linux, remember - the Windows systems are the ones you have to reboot with security updates, although they've gotten better) - it is a non issue. When you spend more time waiting for the raid controller to spin up the hard drives and the memory count to finish than the server to get to a point where you can log in, boot speed is not that much of an issue.

  10. Re:zomg singularity! on Machine Learning Expert Michael Jordan On the Delusions of Big Data · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, I don't qualify for the Long family - only one side is long lived, and only had one grandparent alive when I was married. If I had married at the age Maureen did, however I would have just made it. :)

  11. Re:zomg singularity! on Machine Learning Expert Michael Jordan On the Delusions of Big Data · · Score: 1

    gweihir - the GP could actually be in their late 20s and worked straight through to their doctorate. 2086 - 2014 = 72 years. Rough estimate using average high school graduation at 18, bachelor's at 23 (5 year plan), doctorate at 29 (6 years). That puts him/her at age 101 in 2086 which would be well within the range of possibilities. Move any of those numbers down (graduated high school early, did bachelors in 4 years, doctorate in 4) and that puts him/her in their late 90s. Life expectancy in their family may be longer (a for instance - my grandmother died when she was 100, her younger sister and brother are in their 90s and oldest daughter is in her 80s - and this is all for people who were born and lived before we had things like x-ray machines and vaccines) so it is plausible.

  12. Re:Why is shitload spelled sh*#load? on Torvalds: I Made Community-Building Mistakes With Linux · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Vellmont - it isn't that we aren't all adults (or pretend to be adults) - it is the various filtering software of the places we may be reading from might flag the whole site (or at least the content we are trying to look at) as inappropriate for our location if it is riddled with the uncensored versions of what is considered profanity. That is the main reason you see the self-censoring of messages.

  13. Re:Boycott will end this in less than a week on Netflix Video Speed On FiOS Doubles After Netflix-Verizon Deal · · Score: 1

    Actually for most people in the U.S., the cost of gasoline at $4.50/gallon is the tipping point - this was proven the summer before the market went boom - gasoline consumption dropped. As far as boycotting - it is going to have to be something besides price pressure, unless you are able to start nailing the providers who are doing this sort of thing for monopolistic practices.

  14. Re:Suspension of Disbelief on A Critical Look At Walter "Scorpion" O'Brien · · Score: 2

    There's a simple answer to this one from Oglaf:

    http://oglaf.com/ornithology/

    (note - while this particular entry is safe enough, in general this comic is *highly* NSFW - and may flag depending on which blockers your employers use)

  15. Re:Google's forgoten its obligation to shareholder on Google's Security Guards Are Now Officially Google Employees · · Score: 2

    This move means that the Security staff is now Google employees. It would not be in a Google employee's interests to sell company secrets, inside information or other things that might make the company not be able to keep Google employees on the payroll. This increases shareholder value because employees have a vested interest in seeing the company succeed whereas contractors do not have that impetus. In addition, it actually makes it less likely that the Security staff will unionize, which in turn also benefits the company. Finally, the increased community goodwill is an intangible factor but it does make the bottom line in that Google will now be able to say the company demographics more closely match the community (see the stats in the article regarding ethnic makeup of Security staff).

  16. Re:we are DOOOMED!!! on Microsoft Announces Windows 10 · · Score: 2

    Slaves weren't their intended customers. Chains and whips appealed to 90% of slave owners. (Keep this in mind when you consider Facebook and end users aren't the intended customers....) :)

  17. Re:Missed opportunity on Microsoft Announces Windows 10 · · Score: 1

    Can't call it Windows X - too easily confused with X Windows.

  18. Re:I could make a fortune on Microsoft Tip Leads To Child Porn Arrest In Pennsylvania · · Score: 1

    Weird Al already has this covered. :) Even has an instructional video...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  19. Re:not likely on Cable Companies: We're Afraid Netflix Will Demand Payment From ISPs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I must be missing something - you are unable to provide the bandwidth you advertise to your end users and you are complaining that the companies they are requesting data from are at fault? This is the same as saying that the concert at the stadium is at fault for the traffic backups. Wouldn't the fault be more with the road providers? Especially when the concert people are saying "Hmm, we know this is possibly a problem - we can put a live hologram local to your people so they don't have to get on your roads" and instead of saying "yes", you say "no, it's all your fault we can't provide it". Your end-users are your customer - and should you start throttling because you're unwilling (or unable) to provide the bandwidth, they are well within their rights to nail you to the wall for failing to provide SLA data throughput if it is correctable by you.

  20. Re:I really really hate on Microsoft CEO To Slash 18,000 Jobs, 12,500 From Nokia To Go · · Score: 1

    You beat me to it - thanks. (posting because my mod points expired yesterday so giving you props this way.)

  21. Re:This type of proplem on Sony Forgets To Pay For Domain, Hilarity Ensues · · Score: 1

    The thing you aren't taking into account is things like reorgs and reductions in force. You have the process and procedure - and a distribution list is set up for domain-renewal@mycompany.com which has as members the manager Jane and the senior sysadmins John, Jill and Juan. Jane gets promoted and the group gets put under a different manager - Scott from Business Systems. Scott says "why am I getting all this junk from this address -- take me off the list" - he's the new manager and they follow instructions. Juan moves to a different group with different responsibilities and is not replaced. John and Jill are both laid off because they became redundant with the staff from the Bangledesh office. Now the list is an empty list that no one sees the mail going to it. Mail administration *might* catch this, or they might not - or it may get removed automatically because company policy has some silly rule like "no lists with less than 4 members" or "empty lists are removed if they remain empty for 30 days". So through policy, you've now shot yourself in the foot and don't even realize it.

  22. E-mail lost to SOP on IRS Recycled Lerner Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    I am still laughing at all this because people forget to go back to the basics and remember that this is government/corporate and not your home mailbox. This is not Google's mail where it was revolutionary when they offered unlimited storage space. This isn't a technology company that treasures email communication like gold. This is a place that still is operating under late 90s/early 00s rules.

    1) Storage is expensive - so (assuming) that they are running Exchange and somewhat recent (2003 - switching to 2007 would have taken too long when everything is working fine and made more sense to wait to 2010), they don't have a lot of storage space on the back end. Yes, I know you're bragging about terabyte drives and the like but the equipment on the back end is going to be circa 2005 and enterprise storage would be sitting around 72gb or 144gb SCSI, or maybe a NetApp or EMC device to allow clustering but it will still be limited.

    2) Mail box sizes are going to be dictated by that same ancient policy - which means that they are going to be set at something like 100 MB or maybe even 250 MB. If they were *really* progressive, they'll be at 500 MB maximum size.

    3) Standard IT procedure when the mailbox is full - archive the older messages to a PST file.

    4) Standard IT policy is going to forbid putting PST files on home drives or any other networked drive because they are going to take up needed space. (remember, storage is still expensive in corporate/government world - we can't go down to Fry's and just get a few disks and pop 'em in a server without killing anything that resembles a support contract)

    From here, all it takes is a crashed hard drive, a virus infected system (wipe and restore), moving to a new computer and doing a less than good job of moving the files from the old one to the new one or even PST corruption and that stuff is just gone.

  23. Re:but LEGALLY, how do you proove on IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation · · Score: 1

    Everyone keeps asking "how do you lose it" -- and it is fairly simple actually. They are running Exchange so they implement a maximum mailbox size of 100-200MB. There isn't even a need to have a message retention policy. Mailbox fills up, the end user is told to move mail to a .PST file. .PST files are stored on your local system ("do not put .pst files on the shared storage because that space will fill up too quickly" - remember that statement?) and then just have the local drive crash, or the user move to a new computer and not get everything transferred over. Standard IT policy and it all goes bye-bye and there isn't a conspiracy to make it happen.

  24. Re:Caps Are Definitely Coming on Comcast Predicts Usage Cap Within 5 Years · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The vast majority of ISPs in this country do not have the vast majority of customers. The vast majority of end users (you know - ma and pa Facebook user) are on Comcast, Verizon, AT&T or Time Warner (soon to be Comcast). Comcast and Time Warner are content providers as well as bandwidth providers. Verizon and AT&T are the old phone company monopolies (AT&T and GTE). With that oligarchy of companies, policies and pricing set will drive the market. As far as the majority of money going to fees - the last year each of the companies mentioned didn't exactly have losses or even just make a couple bucks. Record profits - not quite.. but definitely in the range so the race to the bottom is still putting the gold plate on the swimming pools. As far as streaming - how many of those Facebook posts have videos attached to them? 25 cute cat doing something adorable videos a day will start to knock on those bandwidth caps fairly quickly. And lately those videos don't require you to click on them to start - they run quietly in the background and you don't notice them until you turn up the sound.

    Don't mix up business users with consumers - different animals with different use patterns. And for a history - look at cell phone - and land line usage. (wondering if you're old enough to remember when calling cross-country was a once a month thing to talk to grandma instead of doing so on a whim)

  25. Verizon using the Vader Playbook on Verizon and New Jersey Agree 4G Service Equivalent to Broadband Internet · · Score: 1

    And New Jersey, I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.