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User: BenJeremy

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  1. Should have filed in Nevada on Goldman Sachs Demands Google Unsend One of Its E-mails · · Score: 2

    ...and used Microsoft's legal team. They would have gotten the gmail.com and google.com domains and then it would just have been a matter to use Microsoft name servers to commit a DoS attack against gmail's hackers, erm, users.

    The Federal judges in Nevada are suckers for a good story, I hear, even if it's blatantly false.

  2. Streisand effect on Following EU Ruling, BBC Article Excluded From Google Searches · · Score: 1

    "Right to be forgotten" works great for some already-anonymous person... not so much for CEOs or other 1%ers.

  3. Re:Hijacking Business on Microsoft Takes Down No-IP.com Domains · · Score: 1

    Try finding the damn tech support number at Microsoft... for those who are affected, call this number and ask for "Operator": 800-642-7676

    At least voicing our angry concerns, and failing any resolution (that won't really happen, but perhaps we can overload their ticket system), call their legal and corporate affairs office (425-706-7863, in the parent post).

    I was directed to the "Pro support team" - if they try and sell me Azure services I am going to freak. That's just outright illegal - hijacking and shutting down a competitor to sell business?!?!? I don't care if that is the unintended effect - it is still incredibly unethical and illegal.

  4. Affected me on Microsoft Takes Down No-IP.com Domains · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't serve anything important... but I usually post images through my local server and upload to imgur "through the web" - it took several retries when I tried to do this a short while ago, and now I know why.

    Thanks, Microsoft.... you can't just take over no-ip and then run it through crap servers that can't handle the loads.

  5. Re:Don't forget these on On the Significance of Google's New Cardboard: An Idea Worth Recycling · · Score: 2

    The only thing these really need added is an LED to aid head tracking with a web cam.

  6. Re:Where's my medal? on An Army Medal For Coding In Perl · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I got a couple of those during my time in. I did a few things to improve productivity and spent a lot of time teaching people how to use PCs (The amazing, Tempest-certified Z-248! Running Enable!). I think I had performed over 200 one-on-one classes in the ~3 years I was at that particular unit.

    Tweaked the EDL-based print spooler we ran to get print from Camp Lejeune so we could store more than 65,535 lines of print (hmmmm maybe it was 255 lines)... that made it possible for the "night shift" person to come in @ 5am and still get all the print off and ready by 7am... before, we had to start at 10pm to get the same amount of work done. It seems that both communications and printing were faster if they weren't performed at the same time, by at least an order of magnitude.

  7. Where's my medal? on An Army Medal For Coding In Perl · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wrote a nice database system to track inventory cards and print out cards that were pretty much identical to the forms our S-4 used back in the late 80s in the Marine Corps. It was much better than the system they had used - which relied on removing old cards, and filling out, by hand, all new cards every time a piece of equipment was checked out or checked in. It helped alot with leakage... and worse, with equipment that was supposedly checked out, but had actually been checked in (and the Marine would then have to incur replacement cost).

    There were other things I worked on, but this one had a significant impact on our effectiveness as a logistics unit.

  8. Always thought this was a joke anyway on FAA Bans Delivering Packages With Drones · · Score: 1

    Seriously... who the frack thought this would EVER be practical? It's like that nonsense "beer delivery" drone - except there was no way that drone could deliver a 6-pack, let alone a case of bottled beer to anybody. Range, payload, maintenance, control, and fuel all mean a big "NO" to delivering packages by "drone" for at least the next few decades.

    It's a JOKE. Apparently, a brilliant one, because slashdotters still believe that something useful could be delivered in a practical manner this way.

  9. Should have gone Beta on Freecode Freezeup · · Score: 4, Funny

    They should have tried a new Beta format. Surely that would have saved them.

  10. Re:The author's example doesn't add up. on Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews · · Score: 2

    No, your analogies suck. We have never bought an SSD expecting it to randomly meet the specs. If you buy anything expecting i to randomly meet the expectations advertised, you are a stupid consumer.

    We buy parts like SSD drives based on the specs. We expect them to meet the specs... every single item of that model should meet or exceed the specs. Exceeding the specs is a nice bonus, but not required.

    A better analogy is buying an intel quad-core i7 CPU, rated at 4ghz, but getting a dual-core i3 part (no hyperthreading) that runs at 2.8ghz, but stamped with the exact same i7 part number, the only change being a revision number.

    If I was a reviewer, I'd continue to review Kingston and PNY parts, with a huge caveat notice that this manufacturer is known to degrade performance by more than 50% in regular production models by substituting inferior parts. I'd also offer projected benchmarks of those crappier production parts based on previous incidents. Eventually, the manufacturers would get the message.

  11. Re: Immoral and Naive on Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews · · Score: 1

    I see the Kingston VP of their SSD division is posting as AC on Slashdot today. Maybe they would be more wise to spend the time deleting their e-mails directing them to save costs and use cheaper, under-performing parts.

  12. Re:PNY wasn't caught on Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Thanks for elaborating. It's all clear now... PNY only created a single SSD in production with a completely different controller and firmware. It's like a practical joke played on the customer, and he should laugh instead, since PNY spent all that money to send him the only SSD of that model ever to be made with a Sandforce controller.

    Damn witch hunts!

  13. Exiting the SSD business? on Kingston and PNY Caught Bait-and-Switching Cheaper Components After Good Reviews · · Score: 2

    They must be... because I can't think of a faster way to poison the well and scare customers off than cheating them. The Kingston move is downright shocking... whoever is making the calls for their SSD parts needs to be fired ASAP, and some serious damage control needs to be put into play if they ever want to continue selling SSDs.

  14. Why? on Shawn Raymond's Tandem Bike is Shorter Than Yours (Video) · · Score: 1

    Like EVERYBODY else, I'm not sure why this was posted in Slashdot... but maybe you'll give my three-person unicycle Kickstarter a mention? At the moment it is simply a concept drawing... I'm hoping to raise $5 million and would probably deliver a working production bike after I've exhausted the funds at my design facility in the Caribbean.

  15. Re:No, we don't on Google Engineer: We Need More Web Programming Languages · · Score: 1

    Well, mentally, I was kind of lumping in a lot more, like server-side languages and the many scripting languages used to create binaries for mobile apps and such.

    My point was, why not continue the improvements to something like Javascript?

    As for VBScript, that is an abomination that should have been banned from the web a decade ago. When it comes to "BASIC" Microsoft seems to have an unhealthy, co-dependant relationship with it.

  16. No, we don't on Google Engineer: We Need More Web Programming Languages · · Score: 1, Insightful

    There are far too many choices now. Most of them only differ in minor semantics, but it is enough that it makes porting already well-designed code a pain. It also muddles education and opens opportunities for countless security holes through exploits.

    What we need is a "golden ideal" language - which may not be possible, but if we could whittle it down to three or four special purpose languages, optimized for specific uses, and a solid general-purpose language, we'd have an ecosystem worth contributing to and using.

  17. Dev Version on Google Starts Blocking Extensions Not In the Chrome Web Store · · Score: 1

    Time to get the dev version. They've already had the annoying habit of nagging me everytime I started the browser to "Disable developer mode extensions" and now they pull this crap.

  18. Ultra WQHD? on Is LG's New Ultra Widescreen Display Better Than "Normal" 4K? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OK, so I now have three WQHD displays and the 1440 vertical pixels are nice... while I cannot stand the 21:9 1080p monitors, because they are only useful for watching movies, I can see 3440x1440 being somewhat useful, but realistically, nothing beats multiple monitors for development. There are times when you need to go full-screen with your application while debugging. Having a 7680x1440 (and 3440x1440 still means at least 2 monitors to match what I currently have) display won't help me at all there (which is why I don't use nvidia's "Surround"). The problem with the 2560x1080 monitors is the lack of vertical real estate for "everything else" outside of games and movies. We took a minor step backward with 1080p to synch up with our home theater TVs, and as a developer, it was truly miserable to develop in. Even if I went with two of these monitors, it means I don't have a center monitor - I either have a primary and a secondary off to the side, or I'm staring at a bezel in the center. Maybe a developer on a budget could get one of these, and a WQHD monitor as a secondary... all I know is that I'm no longer miserable debugging full screen and mobile apps with my current setup.

    While I'm ranting...

    For home theater, ultra-wide is fine. Curved, on the other hand, is a crappy gimmick unless you are the sole viewer in your lazyboy at the focal point. In this usage, I can also see curved ultra-wides as a possible ideal gaming monitor.

  19. Anybody who uses the phrase "these gadgets" when referring to desktop computers is a bit out of touch, and probably shouldn't be trusted to provide an unbiased, open-minded opinion about them.

    Secondary reasons to not take this opinion seriously is that it comes from "the teacher's union" which prioritizes member employment over education. It's akin to the UAW saying "these robot gadgets make poor quality products because they don't have the flexibility of a human assembly line worker" - just because they make some idiotic statement without a connection to reality, doesn't make it true. Unions are, by definition, very self-serving of its members, often to the detriment of the employers (the theory being, push them until the start to bleed, to make sure we get the most we can).

  20. Re:Pretty much decided... on EA Ending Online Support For Dozens of Games · · Score: 1

    Sim City got the "offline" treatment (thanks to a huge backlash and insanely poor sales), but you can be sure the servers would have gotten retired within a few months of "Sim City 2015" being released.

    The problem is any time "Revenue Stream" is mentioned in a corporate board room, the immediate reply is "do it and shove it down our customer's throats".

    For EA, that revenue stream is in the form of yearly editions of games with few new, compelling features, other than a new price tag and servers that remain on for another year or two.

  21. Re:Subscriber Value on Comcast Offers To Shed 3.9 Million Subscribers To Ease Cable Deal · · Score: 1

    Except there are associated costs. "Gross income" is a poor metric on subscriber value. Honestly, I think it is a terrible deal for Charter (though I pay Charter close to $200 per month as a customer).

    Charter has to pay a multitude of companies for the programming they carry, on a per-subscriber basis. I'm sure they have a decent profit margin, but after infrastructure costs, access fees to programming, and other costs, how much profit is actually being made per month, per subscriber? I suspect it would take 20 or more years to see a profit on those subscribers at that cost.

  22. Airchat, or as I like to call it, CB Radio on Anonymous' Airchat Aim: Communication Without Need For Phone Or Internet · · Score: 4, Funny

    10-4, good buddy!

    Hmmmm... might have to dig out my 150W linear amplifier I used to use to drown out obnoxious truckers with, when they needed a smackdown.

  23. Should have gone with ruby.... on How Apple's Billion Dollar Sapphire Bet Will Pay Off · · Score: 2

    ...transparent aluminum! Clearly, Apple hates Star Trek.

  24. Thai floods and Sumitomo explosions on SSD-HDD Price Gap Won't Go Away Anytime Soon · · Score: 1

    Platter drives have been artificially held high for the past few years... and it will burn them unless they start budging on capacity and price, as SSDs will continue to drop.

    With 5TB and 6TB drives finally making it out into the consumer space, platter drive pricing may finally start dropping, but will it be too little too late? Will there be enough of a market now in the consumer space to support the larger drives? I suspect the average user has plenty of storage already - perhaps to the point of full porn saturation - but more seriously... how much drive space does Grandma need for her cat pictures and baby videos? 2TB is probably more than enough, and within the year, she'll be able to save all that to a 2TB SSD that boots her e-mail/web browsing machine in an eyeblink.

    Of course, the platter drive makers have brought on this trouble themselves... like the DRAM price gouging back in 1994 (The Sumitomo explosion supposedly endangered epoxy resin supplies, prices of RAM tripled overnight), platter drive makers have taken the same opportunity to create a scarcity to drive prices up and keep them up. They also delayed higher capacity platter drives, giving the SSD makers an opportunity to catch up. They can't keep this up and stay in business.

  25. DLNA?!?? on Amazon's Fire TV: Is It Worth Game Developers' Time? · · Score: 1

    If this supported DLNA as a client (since I have a media server), I'd be all over this. If I owned one, I'd develop for it. Kindle owners BUY APPS. They are about on par with iOS users.