Slashdot Mirror


User: Chuck+Chunder

Chuck+Chunder's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,077
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,077

  1. Re:and so meanwhile... on Will Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Stay With MySQL? · · Score: 2

    No way to "use dbname" for switching DBs inside psql - must quit and restart with different dbname

    /c dbname

  2. Re:Ugggh. on US Lawmakers Want Sanctions On Any Country Taking In Snowden · · Score: 2

    These clowns don't have anything more important to work on?

    Of course. No doubt right now someone is drafting directions to rename the "Black Russian" to the "Black Freedom" at all congressional events.

  3. Re:That decides it on Sony's PS4 To Have Less Stringent DRM Than Microsoft's Xbox One · · Score: 1

    Vote with your money

    This is the crux of it, however it raises an issue that I haven't seen mentioned yet, the price of games.

    It has long been argued (largely unconvincingly admittedly) that piracy "costs" developer money. If the MS DRM is shown to "work" then there is an argument to be made that the games released on both platforms should be cheaper on the Xbox (especially if the opportunity for earning more money on resale is there)? If the publishers buy into that theory and the Xbox One is cheaper to run then I think, for a lot of people, the question will become muddier. Similarly if publishers begin to see better rates of legitimate purchases on Xbox they may favour it with more exclusives (or at least release the Xbox version first).

    All theory of course, but as someone who only uses a console to play games and has little time to do anything that would require more freedom than the Xbox allows the practical differences between the Xbox One and PS4 are negligible and other factors are likely to take greater sway.

    I think this will be an interesting test. With the consoles releasing more or less side by side and with similar capabilities it will perhaps help show once and for all whether DRM can be done in a way that makes customers prefer it.

  4. What I would like from the next series on Matt Smith Leaves "Doctor Who" · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Less SHOUTING. Too often they seem to try and create a sense of excitement through the sole mechanism of having the Doctor get excited and shouty. I don't think it Matt Smith's fault, he does do some of the darker, more ponderous moments very well. I think the situation should be exciting in itself and the Doctor then rising above it.

  5. Re:No Shit on Matt Smith Leaves "Doctor Who" · · Score: 2

    It was a 'clue' for the 50th anniversary special.

  6. Re:I don't know *anything* about this on Dell Signs Agreement To Cap Icahn's Share Ownership · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There is a clear difference between a company deciding how it sells shares it currently owns in an IPO and restricting someone from buying shares from other parties.

    The article isn't entirely clear though, at first glance it makes it sound like Icahn is being frozen out from buying the company, however I think his offer as far as that goes is still on the table. This agreement seems to be more about preventing a hostile takeover, ie Ichan gaining enough shares/influence in the meantime to control the process and have his offer approved with less oversight.

    As it's an agreement Ichan is presumably OK with it though if you were a Dell shareholder you might be annoyed that the company has taken someone who might buy your shares out of the market for a while.

  7. It is creepy on SXSW: Al Gore Talks Surveillance Culture, Spider Goats · · Score: 1

    Awesomely creepy!

  8. Does it matter on How Competing Companies Are Jointly Building WebKit · · Score: 1

    Ie is there a practical difference between 30%, 50% and 90% of people's browsers being exploitable with a particular exploit? In any case it a phenomenally large number of people.

  9. Re:Why is there a wi-fi crisis? on Carmakers Oppose Opening Up 5GHZ Spectrum Space For Unlicensed Wi-Fi · · Score: 4, Funny

    And you have never copied files from one device to the other.

    He does, he's just ultra paranoid and routes it all through TOR.

  10. Strange how things turn out on Mozilla To Enable Click-To-Play For All Firefox Plugins By Default · · Score: 2

    Remember back when the EOLAS patent was being waved about and it was suggested that browser makers may have to implement "click to play" to avoid it.

    Strange that a year after EOLAS gets their arse handed to them in a Texas court we get to a similar place for entirely different reasons.

  11. Re:Let's Make a Deal? on Have a Wi-Fi-Enabled Phone? Stores Are Tracking You · · Score: 1, Funny

    Do you operate purely on cash?

    Of course not, he clearly operates purely on sarcasm.

  12. Re:About the defense budget. on This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For · · Score: 1

    What the hell is this? A death star for ants? How can we be expected to deploy storm troopers to destroy planets... if they can't even fit inside the building?

    That's easy, you just build it round one of these.....

  13. Re:This is why you DON"T TALK TO POLICE on Japanese Cops Collar Malware-Carrying Cat · · Score: 0

    It depends. How much do you want to bet on your not finding yourself in this scenario:

    Everything? But feel free to live your life like a scared little pussy if you want.

  14. Re:And Apple's cut... on Apple's App Store Tops 40 Billion Downloads; Generates $7 Billion For Developers · · Score: 0

    Just to be a pendant,

    Slashdot would be so much better without your kind hanging around.

  15. Re:Multisigning on Turkish Registrar Enabled Phishing Attacks Against Google · · Score: 1

    A certificate can (obviously) only have one issuer.
    What he's suggesting is having multiple certificates corresponding to one private key.

    This seems like an eminently sensible idea. Part of the problem is that the Certifying Authorities get "too big to fail" and it takes something pretty massive for a CA to have their authority revoked as doing so impacts a lot of users.

    If sites (at least those interested enough in HA to preemptively guard against the invalidation of a CA) could back their keys with multiple certs that would be very useful.

  16. Re:It's sad.... on Voyager 1, So Close To Interstellar Space That We Can Taste It! · · Score: 3, Funny

    Angry Birds seem to sponsor all sorts of things, why not space exploration?

    An Angry Bird shaped vessel hurtling out of the solar system would be awesome though I guess we'd have to hope that aliens aren't green and porcine lest they get the wrong idea.

  17. Re:Online storage?! on Slashdot Asks: SATA DVD Drives That Don't Suck for CD Ripping? · · Score: 4, Funny

    In any case, there were tracks in the silver like some animal scurrying and eating through the layer.

    That's the problem with WORM media.

  18. Re:A jury who doesn't understand the subject matte on Google Found Guilty of Libel For Search Results In Australia · · Score: 1

    There is caching and there is caching.

    A caching proxy merely serves content that was specifically requested. Google's 'cache' is serving images that Google themselves are associating with a word or phrase. Thus Google is making some sort of editorial decisions in regards to the content that a simple proxy is not. Now that "editorial decision" may be being made by an algorithm and that algorithm may make it's decisions based on other peoples content but at the end of the day Google is in a very real sense curating that content.

    It's a fine line (or perhaps a wide, murky continuum) but in the pursuit of being more useful to people Google has in many senses moved from a 'mere' indexer to an aggregator/publisher. As such it is probably not surprising that simply saying "hey, it's not us, we just link to what's there" doesn't always apply.

  19. Re:Apartheid on Saudi Arabia Implements Electronic Tracking System For Women · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because it goes against Political Correctness.

    I think it's fair to say that this specific situation has bugger all to to with "political correctness" in the sense you mean it.
    It's about oil, "stability in the middle east" (ie oil), an "ally to the west" (ie oil).

    It is not "political correctness". It is diplomacy in the worst sense of the word. The sense that allows countries to "smooth over" inconvenient realities and buddy up to the extent that dependency increases to the point becomes practically impossible to say "no". The "bleeding hearts" didn't get us here, the cold pragmatists did.

    Political expediency is the problem not political correctness. The solution? Frankly I don't see an easy one.

  20. Re:Marketing Speech? 10 writes per day for five ye on Intel DC S3700 SSD Features New Proprietary Controller · · Score: 1

    Doesn't sound like "marketing speech" to me, it sounds like trying to express the life in a fashion more useful to a human being. The term "Marketing speech", at least when used derogatively, suggests obfuscation or hiding reality.

    Here what they are saying is clear. As someone considering the drive I can easily say (without doing any sums) that my use case is nowhere near as "bad" as the pathologically SSD unfriendly situation they describe and quickly conclude (to the extent I trust their information) that I don't need to worry about wear being an issue for the expected service lifetime of the disk.

    If the numbers were more borderline then expressing it as write cycles might be more useful as people would need to do the sums for their individual use case. However because they are so large it makes sense to describe them in a way that obviates the need to do any sums for 99.999% of realistic use cases.

  21. Re:removing the right to fight for your life on Scientists Move Closer To a Universal Flu Vaccine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    vaccinating children against various disease - by giving their immune systems an "easy ride" - their immune systems simply do not develop

    That makes no sense. A vaccination only makes someone's immune system work harder, earlier. It is just like "playing in the dirt", only with particularly useful dirt.

  22. Risky without SSL everywhere on EFF And Others Push For Open Wifi APs Everywhere · · Score: 1

    I can be reasonably sure that my ISP and their upstreams aren't going to be injecting malware into the Slashdot pages I view. I might trust a coffee shop or a hotel. I'm not sure I want to routinely connect to random access points though.

  23. IMEI based locking rather than blacklists on Smartphone Mugging More Popular Than Ever · · Score: 2

    Seems to me that IMEI blackilisting after a theft is one thing, but why not allow people to pre-emptively opt in to locking their IMEI so that it can't be used with another account without some additional authentication (a it like registrar locking for domains)?

    Obviously not everyone would want it (ie people who switch sims etc) but for a lot of people it would make sense as a default.

  24. More importantly on US Presidential Debate #2 Tonight: Discuss Here · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What power does the President have to actually enact any tax related policy they have on their platform? Surely for the most part they a legislative rather than executive issues?

    The American system seems very weird. Well, on paper it seems reasonable but in practice it seems to operate in a way that ensures nothing 'difficult' gets done and that everybody has someone else to blame for the inaction.

    Meanwhile.......

  25. False dichotomy on In Under 10 Hours, Google Patches Chrome To Plug Hole Found At Its Pwnium Event · · Score: 2

    Come on Google, you can afford to pay people properly for such valuable work

    Presumably they _do_ pay people for such valuable work. This isn't a "cheap trick", it simply acknowledges that:
    - No matter what experience you do employ, there will always be vastly more external experience.
    - Not everyone interested in these things would necessarily be motivated by being employed by Google (or even by money).
    - Offering an alternative to the black market for such skills is a good idea.