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User: pruneau

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Comments · 183

  1. And of course, they had to post the pictures of the actress. Because shaming mens is so old-fashioned

  2. Re:Hobbling the default rm command, etc. +1 on Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code (independent.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    I totally second that: http://docs.ansible.com/ansibl... Moderate parent to top level. rm is a tool, ansible too, badly using them is asking for trouble.

  3. Re:radio in the computer case: the music of... on Old-School Coding Techniques You May Not Miss · · Score: 1
    I did this with my first "programming" love, a Texas Instrument Ti-57.

    Since I was doing "undercover" programming (i.e. programming at night when I was supposed to sleep ;-), I discovered pretty quickly that the beast was making noise, a lot of different ones. I quickly learned the sound of a running program, the noise of an error, and the sound of a few number being displayed as well.

    I then kept this habit since, learning the sound of a properly running computer, and being able to tell when the beast is trashing, and so on.

    Of course, with all those new-fangled virtual hosts, I'm missing a lot of cue about the system I'm working with. This is sad, my friend, really sad.

  4. Skills... on Hackable Microcontroller-Powered Valentine's Card · · Score: 1
    • The programming skill of a grown man...
    • The electronic skill of a teenager...
    • The cardboard-cutting skill of kindergarten

    Hmmmm, I'm wondering: will she find this cute, or plain too much geeky ?!?

  5. You're Fired !!! on Would You Add Easter Eggs To Software Produced At Work? · · Score: 1

    Teh Boss.

  6. ddate on (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks? · · Score: 1
  7. Re:WTF? on Web 2.0 Lessons For Corporate Dev Teams · · Score: 1

    Don't worry, those were mostly managers or HR people...

  8. Re:testing and QA: and dynamic behavior on Dublin Air Traffic Control Brought Down By Faulty NIC · · Score: 1
    It's hard enough designing redundant system, but when you have an intermittent failure, the complexity steps up a bit, because redundant system design generally involves people thinking along the lines: ok, it this fails, how best can the system react ? But when people think "If this fails", they practically always assume "if this fails, _and_stay_that_way_".

    That's why intermittent failures are so bad, because they introduce a dynamic element into an already very complicated equation, and usual testing strategies don't go as far as this.

    For example, just try to see how any routing algorithm reacts to a router that's up and down, up and down, up and down...

  9. Re:Summary: Flamebait? on Linux's Security Through Obscurity · · Score: 1
    Flamebait ? This is a kernel mailing list, for gods sake.

    Have a look at this post, and tell me who wins the flamebait pissing context.

  10. Re:Companies blocking Gmail? on Spammers Choose GMail · · Score: 1
    Yes, having heavily relied on gmail to send school-related messages to a number of parents and other people in the schoolboard organisation, I can tell you that gmail servers IP address are blacklisted by some commercial spam-filtering solutions.

    The oddity is that they go by server IP address, so depending on which server your gmail was sent from, it gets blocked or not.

    This is a kind of very annoying russian sendmail roulette.

  11. Re:How About Just a Dozen? on What To Do With a Hundred Hard Drives? · · Score: 1
    Well, I got one of those cheap Sabrent sata controller, albeit with only two sata Ports. lspci show: 01:0b.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 01) Subsystem: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 SATARaid Controller

    I had no problem booting off it, even with a older promise-based PIII mobo, but I had to change machine anyway because random writes where corrupted, apparently due to some irq managment problems (go figure). So I bought an old DELL optiplex GX 1115 (for ~$70, this is great hardware, by the way), kept just one ide dvd, and got the machine to work/boot without too much ata-related problems. The only "funky" behavior is SMART, which seems to be missing some otherwise common options. Oh well.

  12. Incompetence v.s. Malevolence on Vuze Study Exposes P2P Throttling By Canadian ISP Cogeco · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Never forget one thing though: before ascribing something to malevolence, look into the incompetence direction first.

    And having a mix of the two makes it even easier to hide behind plausible deniability. Because placing the right person at the right place, i.e. the worst net admin on the most loaded network might be just what it takes.

  13. The emperor is nude... on Satellite Spotters Make Government Uneasy · · Score: 0
    ...and he's even floating in the sky for all to see ! But the US governement and other spy PTB do not want you to see it, because it's bad business for them, putting up all those visible objects that _should_ patriotically be _invisible_. So please, be a good US citizen and patriotically look at safe, secure and authorized objects, like your television, your own navel, etc.

    Who the hell is so naive as to believe that if human ca spot objects in the sky with low-tech tools, international agencies with far more long-range detection options would not spot them ?

    I can't take the bush administration arrogance and stupidity anymore, please elect someone else, quick !

  14. Beating a Wang 2200 to reversi. on What Was Your First Gaming Experience? · · Score: 1
    Yeah, that shows how old I was. I'm not sure of the model, but it was definitely the one with a self-containing beige box including the crt, the keyboard, and most certainly a tape deck (see here and here).

    Pong ? yeah I played it when some neighbors bought the Atari version.

    Some time after that, we bought a Apple ][e, and I never really quit gaming since.
  15. Oh, it's like catcam, but for grandpa. on SenseCam Aids Patients with Memory Problems · · Score: 1

    See http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/. It's fun to see a good idea turned into another good idea.

  16. Re:Bring Back Geeks In Space! Slashbaaack. on The History of Slashdot Part 4 - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow · · Score: 1

    Slash_Baaack !
    Slash__BaAaAaAaAaAck !
    Slash___BAAAAAAAAAAAAAck !
    It saved my /news life when I was wery buzzy.

  17. Real questions... on Caltech Creates Electronic Nose · · Score: 1
    To start brazenly: this was the subject of my PhD (e-mail me if you want references) I presented in 96, and this kind of things was already old news at the time, but it's like other subject in science. The press keeps re-"discovering" it now and then.

    Now I do not mean to underestimate what was achieved, but the problems we had when I was studying the matter was principally one of sensor drift over time. You can slap a bunch of gas sensors together, study their various reactions to various "odor" stimulus, and even get to identify those with various processing techniques, including neural nets.

    But the crux of the problem was that the sensor response varied greatly in time, rendering the signal processing useless over time. Unless a re-calibration of the whole system was done all over again.

    Do someone close to the research team (or with enough time to read) knows whether some advances have been made in that direction ?

  18. Nigerian _invented_ scammers, what do you expect ? on Bill Gates Denied Visa To Nigeria · · Score: 1
    Well, you expected that at least nigerians official are trained to recognize a scammer when they see one, do they ?

    "So you tell me that his guys made shitload of money selling a somewhat fake operating system ?" "But chief, he his the richest man in the world, and he wants some help transferring some of it here !" "(Heavy sigh), yeah, yeah they all do. (tiredly grabs for [refusal of entry] red stamp)"
  19. Mind-reading games... on Technology Could Enable Computers To "Read The Minds" Of Users · · Score: 1
    Well, even it's mostly off-topic, I'm still waiting for a kind of mind-mote that connects to a game console/PC and allows to play games designed for it.
    Because right now, this niche still belongs to (and has for a few years) pricey weird new-age relax yourself-out-of-your-worldly-misery games (google biofeedback games for yourself).
    I mean, a combination of classical inputs (for firing-slashing) and biofeedback (you do not heal if you do not relax pal !) could make for some awesome combination, couldn't it.
    It could even teach those pesky ADD child something, who knows ;-)

    So MicroSontendo, anybody is listening ?

  20. Re:Who cares! on Jack Thompson Sets His Sights On Halo 3 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, exactly who cares. Can /. stop the stooping lower trend and go tour some more interesting landscape.
    Leave this frigtard alone: he just leaves on the attention he is getting.

  21. Re:So.. on Mandriva Says No to Microsoft Linux Deal · · Score: 1
    Well, what the Xandros and other Lincrap of this world actully did was the reverse:

    they got up to feed the hand that (threatened to) bite them, so...

  22. Guess who (wa)'s Daddy ? on Ancestry.com To Add DNA Test Results · · Score: 1
    Somehow, I just hope that they though about the kind of nasty surprise that can arise when you are playing a game of "Guess who": becaue you/mommy/daddy/grandpa/grandm/etc could be in for some nasty surprise.

    Nuff said.

  23. Re:The evils of soap and purified water on Are Keyboards Dishwasher Safe? · · Score: 1
    The problem with this kind of experience is that even the slightest impurity or anything soluble will add electrolytic component to the distilled water, which is in fact highly reactive, beeing deprived of any chemicals. Which actually means that they would have to clean the computer repeatedly in order for their experience to work.

    But something else, well know by people using MEMS-like manufacturing process is that when you want highly-purified water to stay well, pure, you _do_not_expose_ it to even simple air, because even that will increase its conductivity by ion dissolution very quickly.

    They probably forgot this other detail: to put the computer/water mix in a sealed box.

    Damned amateurs.

  24. Re:What about our own dogfood? on 40M Vista Licenses in 100 Days · · Score: 1

    Where are my mod points when I need them ???

  25. X was running from desk to desk... on Big Red Button Disasters? · · Score: 3, Interesting
    X was the field-support manager assigned to this brand new american customer (cell provider), using this brand new product of us (big telco badass). X was doing crazy hours, getting all the support calls firsthand (which where numerous and any time in the day/night) before dispatching them to the techies (us).
    On top of the support calls, he was of course getting his daily "yelling at escalation managment party conference call" because not everything was smooth, needless to say. For instance, that brand new customer was brand new to deploying a cell phone infrastructure: bad planning, downtime, crazy schedule were the least of their problems. To add some icing to this merry cake, our switching software was quite new as well, and prone to er, quirks?

    Talk about a recipe for wide-scale disaster ;-)

    But this day, instead of storming to the next support specialist to wearily beg for some random node reboot, X was running to each and everyone desk, doing his grand floor tour, smiling like a madmam, yelling for everyone to hear:
    "They shut off the switch, they shut off the ***** switch, I tell you".
    Turns out some cleaning lady tried to shut the **light** off after a good floor-cleaning session, but when for the BIG SWITCH, the one with the big conspicuous red handle, labelled "MAIN POWER - DO NOT..."
    BLACKOUT
    X did not get his yellint at party this day, and possibly a few days afterward.

    (No real names was used, because all the abovementionned companies are still operating as of today:)