Slashdot Mirror


User: saynt

saynt's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
23
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 23

  1. Re:Today's phrase that pays is "politically correc on Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return · · Score: 1

    Not a thing, just very early to to the party.

  2. Re:Today's phrase that pays is "politically correc on Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return · · Score: 1

    Never seen a UID that close to mine, we must have joined the same week.

  3. Re:Today's phrase that pays is "politically correc on Ellen Pao Leaves Reddit; Site Founder Steve Huffman Makes a Triumphant Return · · Score: 1

    Ahem.

  4. Re:Space programs as a crowbar? on Russia Bans US Use of Its Rocket Engines For Military Launches · · Score: 1

    During the cold war, the Soyuz capsules were equipped with a special pistol that could fire in a vacuum. I don't think it was for defending against the random alien that might wander by.

  5. Safety? on Duo Sneak an Oculus Rift Onto Roller Coaster For a Wild Ride · · Score: 1

    I'd be a bit nervous putting that much extra load on my neck and then getting on an inertia ride. Seems like there would be a very literal breaking point.

  6. Thanks for the disclosure on A Data Scientist Visits The Magic Kingdom, Sans Privacy · · Score: 2

    MailChimp sounds like a company that I'll go out of my way to avoid. Seems that their chief data scientist should have run this by their chief privacy officer before he slapped his companies name on it.

  7. Car Analogy on 'Smart Gun' Firm Wants You To Fund Its Prototype · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If your car doesn't start immediately on the first turn of the key, you die of multiple gunshot wounds.

  8. History repeats on Steve Jobs Health Worries Escalate · · Score: 1

    The history of the Walt Disney company following Walt's death in 1966 appears to be a strong analog for this situation. The company was driven by the vision of one man leading a team of highly talented individuals. When Walt died, the company went into a kind of auto-pilot paralysis, with everyone asking themselves 'what would Walt do?'. This was all well and good, except for the single critical fact that Walt was considered a genius because nobody could predict what he would do next, or how he would accomplish it. The focus on quality stayed, but the unpredictable spark of creativity wasn't something that you could capture by trying to put yourself into someone else's head. The company went into a stagnating decline that would last nearly two decades.

    TL;DR - You can't innovate by trying to guess what a creative genius would have done, you have to find a new one.

  9. Re:Are you evil enough? on Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen? · · Score: 2, Informative

    True, but there are ways to get a reasonably high level of confidence that something will happen. Most flash utils that I've dealt with either do no checking on the image, which is awful, or simply check it for size, extension, or a basic checksum. I'm guessing that this is because the developers believe that only an insane person would try to flash a .jpg or whatever to their BIOS. Since this is one of a very few things that can actually make your computer unusable, you would think that they would take more care, but they don't. As for testing, most of the flash utilities that I've used give you at least two chances to confirm that you really want to perform the flash, usually the last one is after the new BIOS has been read in and, presumably, passed any checks being done. If you were very familiar with the flash program and had the fortitude, you could run the process right up to the point of no return and then say 'no', and I would be pretty confident that something bad would have happened should you have gone ahead...

  10. Are you evil enough? on Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First, get truecrypt, that takes care of your data.

      Now then, If you have the spark of evil in you, here's the plan.

        1. Set up multi-boot config.
        2. Create a bootable partition that has enough OS on it to run the drive and network, name it something interesting like 'Confidential'.
        3. Get the BIOS flash utils for your netbook, create a corrupt bios image that will still pass muster enough to install.
        4. Set up a boot time process on the netbook that does a 'wget' from a web site that you control. If it gets a file, quietly flash the BIOS with what it downloads.

        If you ever get ripped off, move the nasty BIOS image to the file location on your web site and bask in the glow of pure wickedness...

        You can test this with a valid BIOS image, but don't look at me if something terrible happens, you're playing with fire here.

  11. Re:I just call them Web Designers on What Do You Call People Who "Do HTML"? · · Score: 1

    markup artists?

  12. Re:When is backing up *not* an option? on Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution · · Score: 1

    Good points, all. I use a 500GB drive at home to do back up. I have an DLT8000, but it's just not worth the trouble to dig it out and get it hooked up anymore. It doesn't really protect me against physical hardship, since the backup drive is kept in the same house as the primary, but it's a nice insurance policy against drive failure and human error. For a small web company that I'm working with, we're using Amazon S3 and JungleDisk for their Windows based app server. I'm not sold on it yet, but it's another option and seems to be a reasonable way to make sure critical data is off site.
        The move to commodity pricing on tapes has been a nice development for us, I remember paying upwards of $200 for DTF2 tapes...

  13. Re:When is backing up *not* an option? on Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution · · Score: 1

    I think that you aren't really considering the power of scale in this issue. As of last Friday, I had nearly 6000 LTO-3 tapes in rotation. Granted, about 2500 of those are long term archives, and only get pulled in to do a restore, or when we re-tension or migrate media (2yrs. & 6yrs), but this kind of scale makes the cost of drives (14), and even tape robots level out greatly. My concerns are media stability, transportability, and tracking. Snapshots to drive surely have a place, and help us keep our service level for quick restores high, but for any large (or medium, like us) storage installation, tape is the only real option.

  14. Re:Do we really need this? on Fly-by-Wireless Plane Takes to the Sky · · Score: 1

    Power generation happens much closer to the control surfaces than the command inputs. It's that big bundle of cables coming from all the way up in the front of the plane that they want to deal with. That being said, I'm not going to get on a plane that uses this system for love nor money. On the other hand, this would make a light aircraft system like the predator drone really flexable. Want Thermal IR + Chaff + Package drop (Think SAR in a hostile area), just bolt the modules on, connect the power feed and take off.

  15. Re:Slashdotted? on How The NSA Secures Computers · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh crap, I wasn't here, you never saw me.

  16. Re:Alternative slogans... on Microsoft's New Mantra - It Just Works · · Score: 1

    It just worked. As in, 'I don't understand, it just worked a minute ago...'

  17. Re:They have cracked strong hashes, huh? on Finnish Firm Claims Fake P2P Hash Technology · · Score: 1

    I hope they are doing this, since the fix seems trivially easy. Once the packet is downloaded, rehash it and compare to the published hash. If it doesn't match, requeue from a different host. Start logging the mismatches and you get a nice little blacklist for future reference.

  18. Re:Finally! on Maya now Free for Personal Use · · Score: 1

    Any company that thinks that they can steal maya (or lightwave, or houdini, or renderman, or whatever) and display the rendered images publicly needs to have their heads examined. Each of the tools have their own personality and an experienced artist can identify what tool was used to create a piece of CG without much trouble at all. I've worked with a few that can look at a single frame at video resolution and tell you what packaged rendered it. I'm certain that Alias and company keep tabs on who is producing what imagary, and how many licenses they own.

  19. Re:Nothing new here on Maya now Free for Personal Use · · Score: 2, Informative

    It doesn't include the maya unlimited features, particle based hair, cloth, or the live action tracking software. It does include subdivision surface modelling now, which is nice.

  20. Re:Bull Hooey on Filing a Domain Name Dispute? · · Score: 1

    Hmmm. Impressive, I haven't met many people that have read all of the UDRP decisions.

    Article 34 of the Final Report of the WIPO domain name process clearly states that, and I'll quote here, 'Rather the goal it to give proper and adequate expression to the existing, multilaterally agreed standards of intellectual propery protection in the context of [the internet]'.

    Seems fairly clear. Case law clearly supports the return of intellectual property rights to owners that have lost them through some inadvertent error. Loss of IP rights through deliberate neglect or lack of diligence is much less defensable. Since the search function of the UDRP database is fairly pitiful, I haven't reviewed every one of their decisions, but if you are willing to cover my time, I'll be glad to determine which one of us is correct.

  21. You used to own it? on Filing a Domain Name Dispute? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you owned the domain name and then let your ownership drop, especially if it wasn't simply a failure to pay in time, you might have some real trouble getting it back. You need to be able to show that you meant to keep the domain name and that it was lost through some error.

  22. Re:Hm ... 6 days, took longer than I t hought... on Stallman: Thousands Dead, Millions Deprived of Liberties · · Score: 1

    If you aren't worried about your privacy, why are you posting as an AC? What do you have to hide?

  23. Re:Applications? on DIY Railgun Projects · · Score: 1

    William Gibson used one mounted on an airship in 'Count Zero', to destroy an encampment of mercenaries. In the story the impact blast was mistaken for a small nuclear weapon.