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User: Jon_E

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Comments · 272

  1. Oh Slashdot .. on Bradley Manning Wants To Live As a Woman · · Score: 1

    you shall now be referred to as .\

    ambiguous Reuters report referencing a statement from the NBC Today pseudo-news talk show, that has very little now to do with tech? where are your standards now?

  2. Re: This has forced the company to indefinitely su on Thailand Government Declares Bitcoin Illegal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That would be the Bitcoin Co Ltd exchange (https://bitcoin.co.th/) .. that's having issues with the Bank of Thailand (Thailand's central/reserve bank) ..bahtcoin is still open for the moment

    This appears to be ramping up - last month bitspend had it's accounts frozen from Chase citing potential money laundering, and new allegations of ponzi schemes are making all the federal regulators nervous - as they should be

  3. Re:Really ? on Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm, Star Wars Episode 7 Due In 2015 · · Score: 1

    Didn't they already do this?? .. there was the Ewoks and the Magic Sunberries in the mid 80s, and I seem to recall something with one of the olympic teams or ice capades in the late 70s somewhere around the Donny and Marie specials on network TV

  4. Betteridge's Law of Headlines? on Is OpenStack the New Linux? · · Score: 1

    I stopped reading this thread when I saw "blaw .. blaw AGI

  5. Re:What's he going to call it? on Oracle's Ellison Vows "Most Comprehensive Cloud On Earth" · · Score: 4, Funny

    yeah .. the huge one that blots out what's left of the Sun (pun intended) ..

  6. Re:Effect on Carbon dating? on What Struck Earth in 775? · · Score: 1

    (somewhat paraphrased conversation between CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein relayed by Humphrey Carpenter that I like)

    CS Lewis: "Myths are lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."
    JRR Tolkein: "They are not lies. Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power of evil."

    anyhow - read Joseph Pearce's article on the conversation and back story .. quite interesting .. http://catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0107.html

  7. Re:Effect on Carbon dating? on What Struck Earth in 775? · · Score: 1

    too lazy to login .. don't slash dots much anymore these days

    actually thinking about this more .. what really throws radiocarbon dating off now (IIUC) is the nuclear testing and bombs that were dropped to end WWII - who's to say that previous civilizations didn't reach similar states in the past and perhaps wipe themselves out? Atlantis anyone?

    the overall point being that every belief system has some degree of "evidence" and there's always some amount of faith involved in accepting said "evidence" and there's still a lot that we don't know.

  8. Re:Old news on Is the Sparc T4 Too Little Too Late? · · Score: 1

    no .. yesterday's wasn't biased enough and had too much data

  9. Re:You need to form a team of these guys. on Ask Slashdot: Compensating Technical People For Contributing to Sales? · · Score: 1

    Of course .. Because every office needs a Tom Smykowski

  10. Re:Let's look at that, okay? on Ask Slashdot: Compensating Technical People For Contributing to Sales? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It has to do with honesty and the perception that the person you're talking to has your best interest at heart. People are generally pretty good at smelling a rat, and if your engineer is in the same boat as your customer - then there's a trust that's there that's generally pretty easy to work with. The problem breaks down if the engineer or sales person doesn't have a broader view of the coming problems, or architecture changes that might be necessary as this typically comes from pure experience.

    Working for a large consulting arm of a large (now mostly defunct) technical company .. we really turned a corner when we convinced our mgmt that it was bad practice to always have to recommend our companies products - particularly when there were better products out there .. this also enabled us to work more closely with the backline engineers to either make things better, or eliminate dead weight. Honesty can go a long way in developing trust, and can help you either really believe in your product or take you to the place where you can help others understand what needs to be done for customers to believe in your product.

  11. Re:Original Source and Actual Paper on Linux May Need a Rewrite Beyond 48 Cores · · Score: 1

    dude .. Stallman doesn't use the internet .. he might connect to send/receive email, but that's about it:
    http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

  12. Re:Followup question... on Best Format For OS X and Linux HDD? · · Score: 1

    of course you could also just cross-mount NFS, or setup a central networked fileserver .. as network begins to surpass native FC speeds - it's not a bad option (but needs a bit of tuning, care and feeding)

    I played a bit with zfs-fuse too for doing this sort of thing (along with native zfs on opensolaris), but with a stall in cross platform development here i ended up upgrading my pools and obsoleting the fuse versions .. (note: also a bit tricky given the panic on detach model)

  13. Re:I feel sorry on Solaris No Longer Free As In Beer · · Score: 1

    The real thing missing that Solaris engineers took pretty seriously at a time (IMHO) is kernel panics and kernel debugging. Shapiro and Cantrill's work on mdb (and later DTrace) was huge at helping developers prove or identify key behavioural (and philosophical) aspects of the kernel and develop fixes pretty quickly. It also helped to identify key parts of the kernel that could be stripped out to prevent the amount of bloat that's quickly creeping into linux

    just a thought

  14. Re:So fork it. on Solaris No Longer Free As In Beer · · Score: 1

    I see Cantrill just updated this page yesterday .. it's still surprising to me that so many drivers that vendors open sourced for linux and worked with Sun to help develop or port are still closed .. I guess some of this just echoes from an earlier time before linux had some of the commercial vendor support and there was still a large amount of vendor FUD (and corporate FUD) around open sourcing some of your key underlying IP. After 12 years in the Sun bubble you really begin to see that innovation really comes from freedom and just a few talented developers (not armies) .. here's to hoping that Oracle doesn't stifle that freedom in the interest of improving Larry's boats.

  15. Re:MySQL isn't nearly worth the losses Sun is taki on Sun Microsystems To Cut 3,000 Jobs As Oracle Deal Drags On · · Score: 1

    I don't even know why Sun paid a billion for it in the first place.

    easy .. to screw Oracle over (who was in turn screwing over their customers to turn more licensing revenue on CMT, HT, containers etc) .. if you look at statements McGnarly made just this past spring (before the IBM deal fell through) you'll find his references of Oracle as a cheap heroin dealer - which falls in line with their misguided tactic to try and take on the oracle empire .. of course now that they've accepted Larry's "drug money" - i don't understand why they don't just spin the whole thing off again .. unless they can't afford to, or there's no other tinkerbell investors who believe enough with their wallet ..

  16. Re:Is this it? on Tesla's New York Laboratory Up For Sale · · Score: 2, Interesting

    yeah - you can see the remnants of the original building from the older looking roof - i believe the windvane is still on top there .. there were train tracks that ran a separate line behind the laboratory, and yes - the octagonal shape i believe is the foundation for the tower that was blown up by the US Army in 1917 (they were worried that the Germans might use it either for a landmark for their submarines or as some sort of communication device) .. it was rumored that it took multiple attempts to actually destroy the tower given the solid construction and size of the wooden beams that were used.

    It looks like much of the connecting area between the laboratory and the tower where the tunnels/connections should be are now filled in .. presumably AGFA was dumping their toxic photographic chemicals there - i guess filling it all in with cement constitutes their long cleanup ..

  17. Re:Small Open Source project on Tech-Related Volunteer Gigs · · Score: 1

    You make a good point. Although people use open source programs and OSs for many different reasons poverty is one reason that some folks use open source materials.

    stinginess is the main reason for me personally ..

    but OSS isn't without it's share of frustrations too - i'm reminded of the many times i've caught myself before kicking in my old pentium servers after multiple complex kernel hacks trying to get poorly written and undocumented driver code to compile cleanly

  18. Re:I only want to know on Steve Jobs Issues Update On His Health · · Score: 1

    what do you think caused the hormonal imbalance? .. think about it ..

    after the ipod and apple popularity boom in the late 20th / early 21st century - there's many more women now caught up in the RDF who are finding apple products "sexy"

  19. Re:When is backing up *not* an option? on Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution · · Score: 2, Interesting

    that's where trixter needs to zfs send/recv the snapshots to an offsite location (and probably roll snapshots more frequently)

  20. iBall .. cute name on Grenade-Style Wireless Camera For Combat · · Score: 1

    could be an interesting way to paint targets of interest and then fire/forget

  21. Re:Burn Gore's Nobel Prize to keep warm on 2008 Is the Coldest Year of the 21st Century · · Score: 2, Insightful

    nah .. he already burnt most of it by throwing it at http://www.wecansolveit.org/ .. they spent it all on a crappy website, some annoying commercials, and a couple of giant fake switches that don't do anything

  22. Re:RIAA should learn... on Study Suggests Music Industry Embrace Piracy · · Score: 1

    right - so RIAA wasn't formed yet, but you still had ASCAP and the Performing Right Society of Great Britain who were using the same arguments about lost record sales and collecting royalties from radio stations .. see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#Legal_issues_with_radio

    which sounds oddly familiar to what RIAA is advocating for musicians today .. of course the measure to which music can be given away with little side effect has more to do with the popularity and (often) talent of any given band .. marketing and advertising play into this as well (as any front page iTunes artist can attest)

  23. Re:Why? on Rare Tour of Sun Microsystems' "Wonderland" · · Score: 3, Funny

    i think you're confusing this with neverland ranch you perv ..

  24. Re:Quartz? on The State of X.Org · · Score: 1

    I've always wondered why nobody makes the slightest effort to produce on open-source OSX clone (or at least an open-source clone of Quartz, Aqua, and the Core APIs, given that Darwin is already OSS), especially since Apple won't license OSX to run on normal PCs. well .. parts of Darwin are OSS - Quartz is one of those things that Apple has kinda kept to themselves, and with a look at Snow Leopard - they appear to moving more in this direction by phasing out Carbon and focusing on Cocoa .. Xorg still launches by default in Leopard for legacy apps, but I don't see apple wanting to save a dying windowing system

    having switched to a mac a number of years ago .. i must say that dealing with Cocoa/Quartz is far nicer than dealing with the layers of GTK+/Xorg extensions .. i hold that the lack of development on Xorg is probably due to the fact that it's bloated, ugly, and hideous to work with .. Apple seems to have done the right thing back in 2003 - and if they want to keep their bits to themselves - nobody's really arguing that much:
    http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612
  25. Re:This is great news.... on Sun May Begin Close Sourcing MySQL Features · · Score: 1

    For PostgreSQL :) http://www.postgresql.org/

    Would you like another round of ammo with that foot gun Sun? what .. like supporting it since 2005? or bundling it with the operating system .. they've also got quite a few developers working directly with postgresql, and have based and supported quite a few projects on postgresql

    i'm not sure i understand the level of FUD slinging that slashdot has risen to these days