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User: barc0001

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  1. Variants are known as ScottyTime or the Scotty Principle. Especially important in jobs where ad hoc troubleshooting of critical problems is a common function. If you don't Scotty Time most of your day to day task estimates you'll be working 12 hours+ regularly with emergency items thrown in.

  2. Re:Trolling Douchebags on FCC May Stop 911 Access For NSI Phones · · Score: 1

    The "cost effectiveness" he's talking about is that rather than hiring more 911 operators and emergency staff to handle the additional volume (and create jobs at the same time), they instead look at eliminating all calls from NSI phones to keep volumes manageable, at the cost of cutting some legitimate users of 911 out.

  3. Re:first, don't let them put their shit on YOUR ph on Worker Fired For Disabling GPS App That Tracked Her 24 Hours a Day · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's a great plan. Then she could instead be fired for not taking calls from customers 24/7 on the phone in the tin box instead. Brilliant!

  4. Re:Simple on NASA Will Award You $5,000 For Your Finest Mars City Idea · · Score: 1

    So if you came down with cancer and the treatment had a 1% success rate you'd just not bother?

    No offense, but Stephen Hawking thinks it's worth the bother, and some guy on Slashdot named itzly doesn't. I'm going to go with Hawking's recommendation

    http://www.space.com/8924-stephen-hawking-humanity-won-survive-leaving-earth.html

  5. Re:Simple on NASA Will Award You $5,000 For Your Finest Mars City Idea · · Score: 2

    They were able to survive *some* of the huge impacts. There were a few, including the one that created the moon that would not be survivable by any digging. But it's not just impacts. There are a whole host of other disasters that could take out a one planet humanity.

  6. Re:Simple on NASA Will Award You $5,000 For Your Finest Mars City Idea · · Score: 1

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU1QPtOZQZU

    Where should we build it? On the part of the continent that gets flattened by the impact, or the continent that gets turned to lava by the thermal shock? If you can build something that would allow a breeding population of humans to survive something even a fraction as bad as that I think it'll be far more expensive than a Mars colony.

  7. Re:Simple on NASA Will Award You $5,000 For Your Finest Mars City Idea · · Score: 1

    Until that extinction level event rock comes cruising along and wipes out humanity because of the whole "all our eggs in one basket" thing....

  8. Re:Battery life non-issue on Apple Watch's Hidden Diagnostic Port To Allow Battery Straps, Innovative Add-Ons · · Score: 1

    Maybe that's because your standard for impressive is a little different than other peoples? The last watch I wore had a battery that lasted a couple of years. I find the idea of a watch that needs a weekly charge, let alone a daily charge to be abhorrent. MAYBE if it was a replacement for a cellphone I'd be all right with daily charging, but it's not even that. It's a little extension for those people for whom pulling their phone out of their pocket is too much of a bother.

  9. Re:Sort of dumb. on Recruiters Use 'Digital Native' As Code For 'No Old Folks' · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Exactly right. I'm a year younger than you and I've been a "digital native" since I was playing around with my TI-99/4a and converting programs in Byte magazine to TI-basic in 1981. Far too many of these millennial "digital natives" are about as deep as a kiddy pool. They've used one or two technologies that work for them and that's it. Hammer-nail syndrome.

  10. Re:Sort of dumb. on Recruiters Use 'Digital Native' As Code For 'No Old Folks' · · Score: 1

    Unless you work in a company that has any sort of data ownership oversight and rules that they need to follow, like HIPAA compliance. Then EC2 and similar cloud providers are absolutely verboten because to be compliant you have to own the environment end to end. Which means you need to roll your own, or in other instances run on bare metal to maximize bang for buck. Then you need hardware knowledge once again.

    "the cloud" has been promising to kill customer premise data centers forever. "the cloud" never will. For web based businesses perhaps, but there are a ton of non-web based systems in many to most companies that will never leave the premise.

  11. Re:This again? on New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive · · Score: 2

    Except he in involved with all the tests and sets the parameters. This has been replicated by 3 different teams using their own manufactured cavity chambers and one of those teams works for NASA. Just a wee bit of a difference.

  12. Re:This again? on New Test Supports NASA's Controversial EM Drive · · Score: 1

    Nice snark. Explain why they're still seeing observed results in testing then. The latest test in a vacuum chamber is the interesting one as a lot of people expected it to fail as they surmised the other teams were observing thrust from convection. Now that it has succeeded, things look exciting. Obviously it doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe, but it's also apparent nobody knows WHY it works just yet. More study is needed.

  13. Re:This never works on Microsoft, Chip Makers Working On Hardware DRM For Windows 10 PCs · · Score: 1, Funny

    Of course they care. You're supposed to buy it on DVD/BR to watch on your TV, then buy another copy in iTunes/Play to use on your tablet. Duh! You just cost them a sale with your tricksy format shifting ways. Won't someone think of the poor entertainment execs who have to slash their coke and hookers budget due to piracy like yours?

  14. Re: Figures on iTunes Stops Working For Windows XP Users · · Score: 1

    >If you leave insecure connections open for XP clients, you are leaving insecure connections open for anyone as it's likely trivial for the client to say "Yeah, i'm using XP honest, gimme the insecure shit so I can hack away"

    If you already own the client box, why are you bothering to listen in to their iTunes connection? Surely you can do something far more productive like mine for bitcoin or scan the hard drive for credit cards or encrypt pictures of their mistress and hold the decryption key for ransom or similar?

    And a certificate expiring doesn't make the protocol stop working, but sure there would need to be a bit of extra code for XP in iTunes to allow the expired cert. Still doable.

    Again, in this case it's largely a customer service question. And it seems Apple decided that it was easier just to cut off all their paying XP users than spend a modest amount of resources to accommodate them.

  15. Re:Cheap in which universe?! on Intel 'Compute Stick' PC-Over-HDMI Dongle Launched, Tested · · Score: 1

    Nice, but the average lifespan of electronics I've purchased in the past from DealExtreme makes me very leery. I'll spend the extra $40 less shipping on getting a part from a vendor with a solid reputation, thanks.

  16. Re: Figures on iTunes Stops Working For Windows XP Users · · Score: 0

    Sure, and why is that, exactly? Did some invisible sky wizard change the gravitational constant of the universe on any PC running XP or something? No. Apple updated their services to exclude those clients, probably to fix an SSL exploit by turning off older SSL protocols for all clients. If Apple really wanted to, they could have left that version of SSL running only for XP clients and updated iTunes to not use that protocol on any non-XP OS, but they didn't. Poor customer service if you ask me.

  17. Re: Figures on iTunes Stops Working For Windows XP Users · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, because I am very anxious to buy more shit from the company that just locked me out of content I purchased from them prior with a forced upgrade.

    Oh wait...

  18. Re:Cheap in which universe?! on Intel 'Compute Stick' PC-Over-HDMI Dongle Launched, Tested · · Score: 1

    Well, your comrade just posted one at that price point that has half the memory and storage, so maybe a bit. Everyone still isn't getting the memo though. You don't buy a dongle for portablility and you don't buy a tablet to hook it up to a TV. They're two different devices with different use cases.

  19. Re:Cheap in which universe?! on Intel 'Compute Stick' PC-Over-HDMI Dongle Launched, Tested · · Score: 1

    Oops, should have looked at all the pictures before commenting. I see the mini HDMI port on there so that's nice. Still half the RAM and storage though. And I've never heard of this company before so rather than taking a chance on some unknown, I would recommend you get an HP Stream 7" tablet:

    http://store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/us/en/pdp/tablets/hp-stream-7-tablet---5701#!

    I have one of these and it does what it says on the tin and it has 32 GB of storage. No HDMI out though.

  20. Re:Cheap in which universe?! on Intel 'Compute Stick' PC-Over-HDMI Dongle Launched, Tested · · Score: 1

    So for $110 it comes with a microhdmi cable that also leaves a USB port free, or do you need to also buy a hub and hope that doesn't cause interference with the video signal out? And what does that do for OTG function or are you just entirely SOL on that with the display plugged in? And of course how does one mount that neatly and out of sight to their TV/retail display for free? Duct tape or something a little more elegant?

    It's also worth mentioning that this tablet has half the storage and half the memory of the Intel stick. So it's not really apples-to-apples spec wise other than the processor.

  21. Re:Specced too low, weird form factor on Intel 'Compute Stick' PC-Over-HDMI Dongle Launched, Tested · · Score: 1

    I think one of the main markets for this are store displays, trade shows or similar where it does indeed make sense to plug it into a large display, fire up a local media file and let it loop or run a simple interactive terminal for entering addresses and the like. For those kinds of tasks a Chromecast or Apple TV won't work and a NUC or Brix is both overkill and you also now have a little box that needs mounting whereas this thing just slots into an HDMI port and it's done.

  22. Re:Cheap in which universe?! on Intel 'Compute Stick' PC-Over-HDMI Dongle Launched, Tested · · Score: 3, Informative

    These HDMI sticks are meant for a certain thing, and replacing a tablet isn't one of them. But try taking any one of those cheap tablets and connect it neatly to your TV and let me know how that's working for you. I am betting none of them have HDMI out capability at that price point.

    The point of these sticks are to be a media device, or a low power workstation/presentation device and to be relatively simple to integrate into a large display for both uses, which it is.

  23. Re:So? on Futures Trader Arrested For Causing 2010 'Flash Crash' · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Read Flash Boys. There is an absolute metric fuckton of orders that are generated each day that are not intended to be fulfulled and are purely there to manipulate pricing.

  24. Ah Europe! Many places here (North America) now do equal time off for overtime. Some places here would maybe do 150% time in compensation, but paying money for overtime hours at all, let alone at 150% rate? That's the day hell freezes over.

  25. This is one of the most bizzare conversations I've ever been in. I worked hard, *and was compensated for it.*

    Found the source of your confusion. The tech companies we're talking about are the ones who like to pay people for 40 hours of work and want 60-70 hours of work once you get in the door. Which is unfortunately way too many of them.

    One place I worked at when I was younger had a 3 month death march to launch a new version of the packaged product and when it was all over I did the math on the hours we all worked I realized we would have made more working at McDonalds because at least McDonalds would have been forced to pay time and a half for all the overtime.