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User: phoebe

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  1. Re:NAT? on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Solve a Unique Networking Issue? · · Score: 1

    This sounds the most practical method, configure a set of Raspberry Pi devices each in a self contained case with one USB for Ethernet to the pump and the second USB for WiFi. Each Pi device should be configured with plain NAT or HAProxy across each interface for the required access ports. Then bring your laptop and an access point in and update away.

  2. Re:No validation on Qualcomm Takes Down 100+ GitHub Repositories With DMCA Notice · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A lot of the reference repositories include a Qualcomm proprietary license header. Many are from the Vuforia SDK which has a clear license agreement that prevents such redistribution.

  3. Re:Corruption on Former Second Largest Linux Distributor Red Flag Software Has Shut Down · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd like a technical post mortem and a list of contributions that Red Flag Linux has made to the community. There is surprise that a company running so long with state sponsorship has relatively few staff compared with Red Hat in a country of lower wages, and similarly has produced less original content than its neighbour Sun Wah Linux.

  4. Re:I think $3.2B is too much on Google Buys Home Automation Company Nest · · Score: 1

    Nest responded to this on their blog: "Your Nest Protect questions. Our answers." There is no requirement for a hard-wire, there is a requirement for a connection and that can be wireless. All vendors are incompatible and do not support hard-wire connection to other vendors.

    For an eye opener on market pricing look at the KIDDE Silhouette, pricing over U$S110 (list price) by some vendors and that's only a hard wired carbon-monoxide detector. Amazon stocks it for a more reasonable US$60.

  5. Re: Interesting on Epic: A Privacy-Focused Web Browser · · Score: 2

    One wonders what is the excuse this time that the patches have not been submitted upstream to Chromium?

  6. Re:Based on Chromium, not Chrome on Epic: A Privacy-Focused Web Browser · · Score: 1

    Firefox isn't truly open source either, you are probably after IceWeasel if you want the Mozilla route.

  7. Contract vs. Vendor on Samsung Unveils the Galaxy S4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The real question with Samsung's new phone is how the sales will perform. Samsung obviously think they're hot but that is ignoring the fact that the majority of purchasers of the S3 were iPhone 4 owners who finished their contract and the iPhone 5 was delayed. Now we are in a situation that the S3 purchasers are still in contract and not open to free choice and might not want another Samsung device.

  8. Remember remember the fifth of November on Anonymous Vows To Destroy Facebook · · Score: 1

    So Facebook are actually the good guys and on the 5th Anonymous are going to be all rounded up and hung, drawn and quartered?

    Remember remember the fifth of November
    Gunpowder, treason and plot.
    I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
    Should ever be forgot...

  9. aka Differential GPS on Ground-Based GPS Mimic Is Inch Perfect · · Score: 0

    Which has been developed and used for the last 20 years. What is new here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS

  10. Aside of the price on No Set-Top TV Device Market Domination For Google · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The more significant concern should be how complicated the device is. The Logitech Revue has the hallmarks of being rushed to market by a furiously masterbating manager in the corner of an office somewhere, refusing to listen to anything anyone is saying.

    Just look at the Revue website and find anywhere mentioning how simple or easy the device is to use, no just a very daunting picture of a gargantuan remote that is some nerd's wet dream.

    A lot of effort has been put into the product launch, the Logitech website is larger than any other product they ship and it also extends onto the support side. It is nice to see that they have a series of support videos until you actually view one. Oh dear. I'm wincing at these poor actors having to drive through an overly technical and obtuse script which spends far too much time discussing "HDMI capable AV systems" and optional components which only serve to make it look more complicated than it needs to be.

  11. Re:Oh, cool! on Real-Time Text Over Jabber/XMPP/Google Talk · · Score: 2

    Wrapped in a large XML turd and not even following XML philosophy at that, randomly introducing one character tags.  How is this protocol really helping anything?

      <t p='#'>text</t>     Insert specified text at position p in message.
      <e p='#' n='#'/>      Deletes n characters of text to the left of position p in message.
      <d p='#' n='#'/>      Deletes n characters of text to the right of position p in message.
      <c p='#'/>            Move cursor to position p in message.
      <w n='#'/>            Execute a pause of n hundredths of a second.
      <g/>                  Executes a flash/beep/buzz.

  12. Obsolete is the new stable? on Ex-Google Engineer Blasts Google's Technology · · Score: 2

    I think many other companies would be happy to have remotely 'ancient, creaking dinosaur' technology. I ponder to think what the authors opinion of infrastructure technology in the rest of the world that would be lucky to be only 15-20 years old.

    Citing MessagePack is certainly surprising as that particular technology is significantly worse than Google Protocol Buffers, the website is littered with bad test procedures and many errors. Google's serialization doesn't have the speed of say TIBCO's QForms or the compactness of Reuters RForms but it is pretty clear from their documentation that flexibility and easy management were preferred goals over utmost highest performing technology.

  13. Re:Déjà Vu on Texas Student Attends School As a Robot · · Score: 2

    A similar story is covered by the 2005 Japanese film Hinokio, after an accident a house-bound student attends college via a robotic avatar.

  14. Re:A solution in need of a problem? on Free Clock Democratizes Atomic Accuracy · · Score: 4, Informative

    The next generation protocol has already been invented too, the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) recorded as IEEE 1588, with open source implementations already available.

  15. Re:0.5 on The Tuesday Birthday Problem · · Score: 1

    Both the linked article and the article that links to are overly verbose answers that skim the purported issue of whether two boys born on a Tuesday should be counted as two equal probabilities or one.

    sciencenews.org:

    If he’s a boy, he could have been born any day except Tuesday. (Otherwise this case would already have been counted in the first scenario: the older child a boy born on Tuesday). This second scenario generates just six, rather than seven, more possibilities.

    maa.org:

    When I tell you that one of my children is a boy born on a Tuesday, I eliminate a number of possible combinations, leaving the following: First child B-Tu, second child: B-Mo, B-Tu, B-We, B-Th, B-Fr, B-Sa, B-Su, G-Mo, G-Tu, G-We, G-Th, G-Fr, G-Sa, G-Su. Second child B-Tu, first child: B-Mo, B-We, B-Th, B-Fr, B-Sa, B-Su, G-Mo, G-Tu, G-We, G-Th, G-Fr, G-Sa, G-Su. Notice that the second row has one fewer members than the first, since the combination B-Tu + B-Tu already appears in the first row.

    It would appear a fallacy to eliminate both B-Tu/B-Tu pairings, it is briefly discarded. However the difference of 7/378 to the answer (1/2 to 13/27) which is negligible.

  16. Re:Maths don't matter to reality! on Foxconn May Close Factories In China · · Score: 1

    In China the workers work and live together in the same complex it is a fallacy to equate the suicides in an entire day of a China worker to only the working hours of a Western corporation.

  17. Re:Poor Planning on Foxconn May Close Factories In China · · Score: 1

    See "Charge of the Light Brigade" and "Battle of the Somme", charges were incredibly fast and successful tool of war before the automatic rifle. It's usage from WW1 and after is only due to old knowledge of poor generals.

  18. Re:A Monument to "Software Engineering" on ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10 · · Score: 1

    Really. So the fact that a software developer plans to take "the next couple of years" (again, re: the submitter) to complete a software project is symptomatic of the total failure of an entire industry. Interesting perspective. Thanks for that.

    Are you really defending the current development shortcomings of BIND 10 with the article author's inability to elucidate software engineering? Not at all continuing another symptomatic issue of the software industry.

  19. A Monument to "Software Engineering" on ISC Releases the First Look At BIND 10 · · Score: 1

    BIND is thirty years old and a core piece of Internet infrastructure. That a completely new design and re-write of such a fundamentally important piece of software is "inefficient, difficult to work with, and riddled with bugs" highlights the continuing immaturity of the computer software industry.

    This should be an embarrassment to every software designer, Google, IBM, and Microsoft should be screaming out how this is making the entire industry look bad.

    Wouldn't this be an ideal target for test driven development, or are we to praise that at least they aware of defects?

  20. Re:Why people don't update on Wordpress.org Warns of Active Worm Hacking Blogs · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is also a interesting point regarding software repository support. I have a server running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server which is supposed to be supported till April 2011, however Wordpress is in the Universe repository and not updated since November 2008 and is vulnerable to a few attacks that delete content.

    If these packages are not going to be updated should there not be at least a warning, or method to bar such packages from being installed after security issues have been raised?

    Wordpress 2.3.3 in 8.04 LTS Universe repository.

  21. Re:SLA on Hosting Data-Transfer Quotas Are Fading Out · · Score: 3, Informative

    It should be apparent that quotas have been scrapped as they cannot actually guarantee you can use the bandwidth speed they sold. So when they could have previously sold 1/5/10/50GB/day tiers, they spin that into a flat up to 50GB/day, let's call it unlimited, p.s. you'll be lucky to see 1GB.

  22. Re:let me take a guess on Most Expensive JavaScript Ever? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm going to take a stab in the dark and guess it was IBM.

    The IBM Blade Chassis management software works perfectly fine in Opera with no popups or warnings at all. It's actually nicer to use in Opera than Firefox.

  23. ALSA is rouge and OSS is violet? on State of Sound Development On Linux Not So Sorry After All · · Score: 1

    If the user really needs to have a program output sound right until Linux goes into suspend mode, and then continues where it left off when resuming, then ALSA is (currently) the only option. I personally don't find this to be a problem, and furthermore I doubt it's a large percentage of users that even use suspend in Linux. Suspend in general in Linux isn't great, due to some rouge piece of hardware like a network or video card which screws it up.

    So we should be using OSS because the author doesn't use suspend on his computer?

    The article is just a big rant about how difficult he finds ALSA to develop for, how he doesn't understand the benefits of a user-space audio stack as found in Windows Vista and with PulseAudio empowering Ubuntu and other distributions.

  24. Re:You don't ... on How Do IT Guys Get Respect and Not Become BOFHs? · · Score: 1

    I don't know what software I'm going to need for the lifetime of my PC when it's supplied, and I can't afford to wait 3 weeks to get each piece of software I want to install approved because it's not on your list.

    This is why we have the Internet, please use and develop new and interesting applications, but they should be webapps. This completely avoids the issue of modifying the desktop and allows immediate availability to everyone in the company.

  25. Re:You don't ... on How Do IT Guys Get Respect and Not Become BOFHs? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Essentially they're treating you like the janitor. They think everything's as simple as unclogging the toilet or getting more toilet paper. And your attitude seems to reinforce their perception of this.

    You seem to show them that your time is worthless and that your job could be done by a trained monkey - why would you expect them to treat you differently?

    Being an IT person is being a computer janitor. If you are doing the job properly you are simply unclogging the tubes or restocking printer paper. Every machine should be imaged and locked down with something like Microsoft SteadyState, when a user has a problem it's either a reboot, re-image, or a hardware replacement.

    The problem might stem from merging IS and IT jobs into the same position with no distinction being made. IS projects should be handled in a more formal manner than re-stocking a printer but because defining such an interaction is widely open to interpretation it has been taken to the users advantage. You need to take ownership of that interaction and make it clear the difference between such projects and cleaning the tubes.