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User: TechyImmigrant

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  1. Entitled much? on Fighting Tech's Diversity Issues Without Burning Down the System · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From TFA: " the applicant was escorted to an undecorated office the size of a closet. There she sat as a procession of seven guys filed in one at a time to ask her questions, often the same questions as the guy before. Few made eye contact, none offered her so much as a drink of water or a bathroom break. The whole day she didn’t lay eyes on a woman. She was there for five hours. "

    That happens to the men as well. It's not a gender thing.

  2. Re:the 'costanza defense' on Marriot Back-Pedals On Wireless Blocking · · Score: 2

    In the big corp I work for, there are lots of people who travel and we keep an internal review site for the hotels we visit. Free and working internet is the primary bit of information everyone looks for. If you don't have that, you lose business from this particular megacorp.

  3. Re:Situational Awareness on Facebook Targets Office Workers With Facebook At Work Service · · Score: 4, Funny

    Then you might have a badly managed workplace?

    Doesn't everybody?

  4. Re:wowwww on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    There's ravelry.com for more efficient stealing of crochet patterns.

  5. Re:wowwww on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    No, but it tends to have a lot of knotty problems...

    I needled all the bugs out.
    There was only one choice of hash algorithm.

  6. Re:Rule #1 of development: Know your requirements. on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    Yes. Buttons and fleece are the same.

  7. Re:Rule #1 of development: Know your requirements. on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    >After just a couple of weeks on the job, you can memorize most of a set of 4-digit codes. The clerks at a yarn store need to learn some codes.
    They do. There's codes. If you can't remember, press 'n' for 'numbers' and it'll bring up a list. Most things have the SKU written on them, but some things don't (gift cards, bulk fleeces (sheep don't have SKUs) etc) so you need to remember those or use the list.

    I actually got that part from observing a local hardware store. The primary thing is to type in (or scan) a number. No clicking or bringing up forms or anything. So the thing a POS must be doing at any time it's not doing something else (like running the charge) is waiting for you to type a number or scan. Anything that increases key strokes or modalities is bad.

    A few weeks of tweaking based on feedback from the staff and they had exactly what they wanted. This is the third tax year and I've got most of the reporting automated and I don't have to look at it from day to day.

    Hackers bang on it all the time. I presume this is true of all stores. If they ever got in, they'd find we don't store credit cards on a computer and move on.

  8. Re:wowwww on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    thats quite a leet yarn store POS you have

    The product of a PhD who quit education to run a yarn store, marrying a crypto chip designer. You get a yarn store POS that's actually secure.

  9. Re:Rule #1 of development: Know your requirements. on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    Yes. That's somewhat one of my points. There are individual problems to address, but the particular mix tends to be unique for small stores and the number of possible problems is huge, so any 'complete' POS will necessarily have a billion features that require a huge amount of UI or configuration and customization.

    Writing a minimalist POS with functions matched to the business seemed like less effort to me. A better tool might be a POS library that makes it less effort to put a custom POS together.

    I've had other shop owners who walked into the store ask where they can buy the POS software we use. I'm not into running a retail software business, but after I've abstracted away some particulars (like hardwired database addresses) I may open-source it.

  10. Re:Biased, but... on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 2

    My small business runs on python, and as much as possible, text mode and command line programs.
    The (non technical - it's a yarn store) staff quickly decided they loved it, compared to the slow, pointy, clicky software they had dealt with before (I'm guessing its usually Intuit).

    Need a point-of-sale program to check someone out? type 'checkout'
    Want an annual year end stock report for 2014 taxes? Type 'annual_stock_report 2014'
    etc.

    Eliminating the GUI eliminated huge amounts of complexity and flattened the learning curve.

  11. Re:Rule #1 of development: Know your requirements. on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    >But if your goal is to have a POS application, stop writing code right now. There exist hundreds of off the shelf POS apps all ready. For Windows, for Linux, thick clients, thin clients, web, desktop, green screen, etc...

    And they are all shit.
    So I wrote my own. It's not shit. The staff tell me it's not shit.

    POSs are shit because they have to attend to the general case, whereas each store is a special case. I our case, there is nothing that comes close to addressing the particular needs of a yarn store (SKUd and non SKUd goods, hand made goods, goods my weight and/or volume, consignment goods, classes, group sessions etc). Go into a yarn store and see if they check you out by slowly clicking and typing at some horrible POS, they usually do.

    If you took my POS and put it in a hardware store, it would be shit.

  12. Re:Go web based on Ask Slashdot: Linux Database GUI Application Development? · · Score: 1

    I read that title as meaning you'd implemented web based tools with go.

  13. Re:Just hire a CPA on Intuit Charges More For Previously Offered TurboTax Features, Users Livid · · Score: 1

    >I strongly suspect you think it's easy because your software is doing all the actual work, and all you had to do was tell it a) what you paid, and b) what kind of thing it was.

    Yes. For the same reason I think adding a million numbers is easy, because I throw it into a spreadsheet and have it do all the work.

    The details depreciation may be complex, but for small businesses such as ours, there are few items that are so expensive that you can't just write them off 100% in the year of purchase. The most expensive individual item the business purchased was a laptop, even though a heck of a lot more than that comes and goes as merchandise.

  14. Re:Just hire a CPA on Intuit Charges More For Previously Offered TurboTax Features, Users Livid · · Score: 1

    If you're self-employed, have investment income, or asset depreciation, you probably already do your taxes with a real CPA. If you aren't, you probably should.

    Why? It's not hard. Depreciation is just that. Investment income is easily handled with the standard reporting.

    Employment is hard. We pay a CPA to do the stuff for our 2 part time employees. But the taxes I just drop into Turbotax.

  15. Re:Way to Elevate the Debate.... on Ted Cruz To Oversee NASA and US Science Programs · · Score: 2

    "Conservative" is clearly a subset of "stupid."

    You've just put down 35% - 50% (depending on definition of 'Conservative') of your fellow countrymen. Good job.

    Better correct than popular.
     

  16. Re:plus don't crash on bad hardware. Hotplugged CP on Closure On the Linux Lockup Bug · · Score: 1

    Yes. Exactly this. Pulling the latches on the card generates an interrupt. In the systems I designed (for a mainframe raid disk system in this case), a little green light would light up when it was ready. So pull the latches out, wait for green light, pull the card out. The light generally lit up in a few milliseconds, so you could just rip the card out.

    I presume this is how it worked for all products from this (very large, well known) manufacturer, because that's what the spec required.

  17. Re:does not sound like closure to me on Closure On the Linux Lockup Bug · · Score: 1

    Someone with the right equipment should be able to do a hardware trace and catch the culprit.

  18. Re:plus don't crash on bad hardware. Hotplugged CP on Closure On the Linux Lockup Bug · · Score: 3, Informative

    >Hot swapping the CPU without an immediate crash had to be a million to one shot!

    With QPI interconnect and the voltage and temp supervisory circuits on chip, it's not such a long shot these days, especially on Xeons with failover support that is explicitly intended to cope with a neighbor CPU going down.

  19. Re:Conform or be expelled on HOA Orders TARDIS Removed From In Front of Parrish Home · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not in my case. I didn't see the bylaws of my HOA until I had been it's president for 18 months. It didn't help that it was in a messed up master-sub association hierarchy intended to leave the power in the hands of the developer, so there were multiple sets of rules flying around, only a subset of of which were passed to homeowners.

    Fortunately, that leaves the HOA relatively powerless if it comes to a lawsuit and my goal as president was to stop the crazies trying to use the HOA as a tool to crap on their neighbors and settle old differences.

    HOAs are evil, in that they are perfectly constructed to set neighbor against neighbor. We would be better off without them.
     

  20. Re:You know the cops are going to want it .. on Connected Gun Lets Anyone Watch What Or Who You Are Shooting · · Score: 1

    It doesn't even really assist in aiming. It just delays the actual firing of the round until its computer detects that the gun is actually aimed at the designated target.

    So it assists in capping the perp, and/or unarmed citizen.

  21. Re:Well Then on Tips For Securing Your Secure Shell · · Score: 2

    >He fails to mention why CBC isn't used,

    er. DES-CBC. It's the DES part, although CBC had a way of exposing implementors inabilities to show restraint in situations with limited entropy.

  22. Re:Well Then on Tips For Securing Your Secure Shell · · Score: 1

    Right? Since it's posted here I'm interested, yet suspicious of whether these are really good recommendations.

    Yes. They are good recommendations.

    For example, Curve 25519 is structured such that all the usual implementation problems can't happen. See safecurves for why.

     

  23. Re:Is the NSA/FBI/Local Police on that partnership on Nest Will Now Work With Your Door Locks, Light Bulbs and More · · Score: 1

    The next one is Kuching in Malaysia. I have no clue if it is nice or not.

  24. Once you know ASN.1.. on Little-Known Programming Languages That Actually Pay · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .. you understand why it must die.

  25. Re:Internet of Hype ... on Nest Will Now Work With Your Door Locks, Light Bulbs and More · · Score: 1

    However being able to set the thermostat with my phone is excellent.

    Really? It may be 'cool' if you feel it is cool to be able to do that kind of things remotely, but how relevant is it in real life that you can control a thermostat or turn on the oven or the lighting from afar? And even if it conveys some benefit, is it valuable enough that you want to pay the price? Which may, incidentally include loss of privacy or perhaps loss of property, if the remote capabilities also allow thieves easier access.

    It seems similar to the way that some cars detect rain on the windscreen and turn on the wipers - yeah, cool, but the effort it spares you consists of having to reach some 2 inches for a manual switch - is it worth paying for? It's the kind of things you would accept if they are part of a new car you buy, but you wouldn't go to your garage and pay £500 to get it fitted, would you?

    The strawmanniness of your post reaches new levels of straw and man. What does my thermostat have to with my garage? That's right - nothing.