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User: ralphdaugherty

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Comments · 1,126

  1. Re:America leader on clean energy, not Europe on The World Falls Back In Love With Coal · · Score: 1

    In English, America is a synonym for USA. In other languages however, especially Spanish, "America" is the word you use when talking about South + Central + North America.

    Interesting. USA residents do not have one word for that in English. We can only say North and South America. And the North America includes Central America in usage.

    Oh wait, we have a word. Americas I believe.

  2. Re:America leader on clean energy, not Europe on The World Falls Back In Love With Coal · · Score: 1

    Well, to be fair, after a short google expedition, America does seems to be an accepted name for the United States of America, but it is so ONLY in the United States of America. remember, in the Americas there are about 911 Million persons, including the 315(35%) Million currently in the USA

    Are there citizens of any other country in North or South America that describe themselves as living in America?

  3. Re:Who cares on UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    well, buddy, I'm certainly no troll. Been around almost as long as you have and have a good posting history on technical issues.

    The fact that you know how small Latvia is and didn't correlate what I told you about the incredible range of IP addresses that are used to attack from there, just one frickin example btw, chosen for precisely what you were able to glean from it, tells me I have to spell things out for people at a level that is disturbing.

    Perhaps you can't understand what incredibly wide range of IP adddresses are for such a small place, don't understand that that was just one small example.

    Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I assume someone with similar longevity to me here is not a technical dummy.

  4. Re:Who cares on UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1

    And now some people that don't anyone to see what I have to say about IPV6 are modding me troll. IPV6 people have some serious issues. In my opinion their behavior of modding down opinions against them should raise questions about their agenda. And perhaps my point is striking too close to home.

    This post rated troll. I've been on slashdot for 13 years and have excellent karma. What we have here are IPV6 censors, not moderators.

    My post:

    As always, People who don't want anyone to see what I have to say about IPV6 mod my post down to hell. My wishes are that they go there too.

    Post modded redundant and overrated (and there are no positive mods to be overrated)):

    When IPV6 is what we have to work with, we will be swarmed by those bastard botnets with no way to block that many IP addresses that will be used to attack.

    The IPV6 crowd pooh poohs this and says blocking IP addresses is not the answer. Well not for an established users, but for registration and spam posting it is the answer. Or was.

    I will get off the internet before dealing with innumerable attack vectors from our botnet friends in Russia and China. The loss of my little sites will be no big loss. But everyone remaining will be inundated, and they won't be able to deal with it either.

    Imo the botnet criminals have been trying to force the use of IPV6 by getting all new ranges of IPV4 allocated as soon as possible. Certainly that's what I've seen these last few years from logging spam attack IP addresses.

    Rather than IPV6 globally and IPV4 internally, I think IPV6 should be what the countries that attack us, who just happen to have very large populations, can use for themselves. Do you have any idea how many IP address ranges we are attacked from in places like Latvia? Let them do their attacking with IPV6. Good riddance.

  5. Re:Who cares on UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses · · Score: -1, Troll

    As always, People who don't want anyone to see what I haqve to say about IPV6 mod my post down to hell. My wishes are that they go there too.

    Post modded redundant and overrated (and there is no poisitive mods to be overrated)):

    When IPV6 is what we have to work with, we will be swarmed by those bastard botnets with no way to block that many IP addresses that will be used to attack.

    The IPV6 crowd pooh poohs this and says blocking IP addresses is not the answer. Well not for an established users, but for registration and spam posting it is the answer. Or was.

    I will get off the internet before dealing with innumerable attack vectors from our botnet friends in Russia and China. The loss of my little sites will be no big loss. But everyone remaining will be inundated, and they won't be able to deal with it either.

    Imo the botnet criminals have been trying to force the use of IPV6 by getting all new ranges of IPV4 allocated as soon as possible. Certainly that's what I've seen these last few years from logging spam attack IP addresses.

    Rather than IPV6 globally and IPV4 internally, I think IPV6 should be what the countries that attack us, who just happen to have very large populations, can use for themselves. Do you have any idea how many IP address ranges we are attacked from in places like Latvia? Let them do their attacking with IPV6. Good riddance.

  6. Re:Who cares on UK Government Owns 16.9 Million Unused IPv4 Addresses · · Score: -1

    When IPV6 is what we have to work with, we will be swarmed by those bastard botnets with no way to block that many IP addresses that will be used to attack.

    The IPV6 crowd pooh poohs this and says blocking IP addresses is not the answer. Well not for an established users, but for registration and spam posting it is the answer. Or was.

    I will get off the internet before dealing with innumerable attack vectors from our botnet friends in Russia and China. The loss of my little sites will be no big loss. But everyone remaining will be inundated, and they won't be able to deal with it either.

    Imo the botnet criminals have been trying to force the use of IPV6 by getting all new ranges of IPV4 allocated as soon as possible. Certainly that's what I've seen these last few years from logging spam attack IP addresses.

    Rather than IPV6 globally and IPV4 internally, I think IPV6 should be what the countries that attack us, who just happen to have very large populations, can use for themselves. Do you have any idea how many IP address ranges we are attacked from in places like Latvia? Let them do their attacking with IPV6. Good riddance.

  7. privacy? on The Rapid Rise of License Plate Readers · · Score: 1

    I thought we past thinking we had any privacy left.

  8. Re:Pro Move, Romney on Romney Taps Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan As Running Mate · · Score: 1

    The question is how do we get the media to stop presenting the 2 parties as the only choices?

    When there are more than 2 legitimate choices.

    When there has been a legitimate third party candidate (Ross Perot, John Anderson, etc.) they were fully covered in media.

  9. Re:Hopefully it's an outlier on July Heat Set U.S. Record · · Score: 1

    We'd have to cut it nearly in half to get back to 1850 pre-industrial revolution CO2 levels. btw, all of that CO2 since then is from fossil fuels whose carbon has not been in atmosphere since before dinosaurs. This is what people do not understand, for example your question.

  10. Re:Dark Profiles on Former Facebook Employee Questions the Social Media Life · · Score: 2

    "... a team of Facebook engineers was developing what they called dark profiles - "pages for people who had not signed up for the service but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users. The dark profiles were not to be visible to ordinary users, Losse said, but if the person eventually signed up, Facebook would activate those latent links to other users."

    LinkedIn did a form of this, apparently just storing invites to my email address from members even though I wasn't a member. After some time, I registered with LinkedIn for other reasons and was immediately linked to those who had sent me invites in the past.

  11. Re:Don't touch it on How To Deal With 200k Lines of Spaghetti Code · · Score: 1

    All the advice to rewrite it is misguided. Maybe rewrite small parts that you need to to keep it working on new hardware, or whatever, but if it works, I would think that wholesale rewriting is asking for trouble. The Ars article is full of great advice about what you should do to manage a large codebase going forward, but actually it doesn't really address the question of what to do about a large legacy codebase that wasn't written with best practice. The best software is written by incremental improvement of what went before (no matter how badly written, as long as it meets its specification) - big projects written from scratch usually fail.

    so very true. insightful.

  12. Re:...no on How To Deal With 200k Lines of Spaghetti Code · · Score: 4, Informative

    G2 is being called virtually obsolete. I looked up G2 in Wilipedia comparison of programming languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages and it is listed as:

    Language: G2
    Intended use: Application, inference, expert system
    Paradigms: common graphical development and runtime environment, event-driven, imperative, object-oriented

    Plus the search on G2 shows there is a G2++. So what does obsolete mean to those calling it obsolete?

    btw, I'm an RPG programmer and I've been writing tons of new business software every day for the last 23 years, the whole time the language has been declared obsolete.

    Now get off my lawn.

  13. Re:Don't put up with it. on How To Deal With 200k Lines of Spaghetti Code · · Score: 2

    If that's the case, the stated or implied directive is don't break this. Which means probably no major rewrite.

    This should be +5 Insightful. It's the bottom line for production software.

  14. Re:TRS-80 Model III on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Turns 35 · · Score: 1

    Tempest, that is an awesome story.

  15. Re:respect on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Turns 35 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Cassette tapes unreliable storage? That's one of the kinder ways to describe it. :) But seriously, I taught myself programming with the Z-80 assembler/debugger and would make multiple backups to tape to counter the occasional read glitch that rendered the tape contents lost for all practical purposes. (Although in a pinch attempting to read it in over and over with fingers crossed hoping that one time it would work was occasionally successful, at which point you wrote it out to a new backup tape.)

    Wrote Double Deck Pinochle as my first program, later rewrote for DOS (is freeware out there somewhere), rewrote it in Java a few years ago (seriously proper OO architecture, but an interesting experience to rewrite 8086 to Java), and just so happens am now rewriting from Java to RPG for my IBM i (iseries AS/400) web server. Again an interesting experience. :)

    For those who might wander about RPG looks like these days, I have open sourced a couple of projects:

    http://code.google.com/p/rdwrites/downloads/list

    (the ascii source downloads can be viewed in a text editor.)

    And I have the TRS-80 to thank for it all. So happy 35th, TRS-80.

  16. Re:If you don't have javascript, you're a bot? on Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots · · Score: 1

    oh, ok, thanks for the info.

  17. Re:If you don't have javascript, you're a bot? on Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots · · Score: 1

    yeah, I'm not mixing them, it's cpc, but the gist of what you're saying is right.

  18. Re:If you don't have javascript, you're a bot? on Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots · · Score: 1

    but then if you're getting a 200k legitimate page views maybe 2000 bucks a month is reasonable...

    I did a search today on what Facebook click rates were and the answer I'm seeing was 50 to 60 cents per click. That's $100,000, not $2000.

    I can't believe advertisers were bidding to pay 50 cents per click so I hope I have misunderstood the numbers, but saw today elsewhere an article that mentioned paying $2 per click, so apparently this was thought to be effective. I say I can't believe it because of the high percentage of bot activity on any page.

    Advertisers were apparently hoping it was legitimate potential customers. This is hitting national press today so lots of people will know better now. So will Facebook shareholders.

  19. Re:If you don't have javascript, you're a bot? on Company Claims 80% of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots · · Score: 1

    If it's mostly bots, then the amount advertisers are willing to pay will go down in proportion to how much bot "views" go up...

    And as GP said, Facebook stock tanks. The amount advertisers pay is Facebook's income.

    Advertiser's currently paying about 50 to 60 cents a click from what I'm seeing in a search today. It should go down to about a dime per click, Facebook $1 billion in income drops to $200 million, and Facebook shares tank likewise.

  20. Re:Lost decade? on Microsoft's Lost Decade · · Score: 1

    If you don't know about the jpg execution attack, you don't need to be giving me any advice.

  21. Re:Lost decade? on Microsoft's Lost Decade · · Score: 1

    If by false sense you mean I don't know what a drive by attack ois, you're right.

    I looked it up and it says it requires tricking the user into loading a piece of malicious code. I thought I made it clear but apparently you didn't understand. Nothing gets installed unless I say so (which requires disabling auto stuff, such as executing jpg's, autorunning CD's, autoshowing emails, executing attachments, and on and on. All the dumb things that happen automatically. I disabled that.

    Also, anti virus scans downloads of everything. So no I am not affected by drive by's, trojan authors, or any other malware.

  22. Re:Lost decade? on Microsoft's Lost Decade · · Score: 1

    [XP is] prone to malware, gradually degrading performance for no particular reason (requiring re-installs every 3-6 months), and an ugly, intrusive GUI.

    I'm no Windows expert, but I still use XP on my three Windows PC's. I like the GUI better than Linux which I have installed on a fourth PC (OpenSuse KDE 12).

    I have 7 at work and prefer XP. I haven't reinstalled in all these years using it but have had several PC's crash with fatal hardware errors. I'm not blaming XP for that.

    I've had no malware ever but I run Symantec or Kaspersky anti-virus and I disable auto anything so that nothing happens unless I tell it to. I also install Windows updates.

    I'll keep running XP as long as I can find a PC that'll run it.

  23. Re:Actually It Aint That Bad on 6 IT Projects, $8 Billion Over Budget At Dept. of Defense · · Score: 1

    couldn't agree more. well said.

  24. Re:Actually It Aint That Bad on 6 IT Projects, $8 Billion Over Budget At Dept. of Defense · · Score: 1

    good thinking, but problem is you're just taking the latest happy number lies from these huge defense contractors and doing what they intended you to do with them. There have been very few completed large projects for US Federal government for more than 20 years as far as I can tell. They're all disasters and none working very well. If there are success stories I'd like to hear about them but haven't.

    Mostly true for large projects at all government levels. People blame governments but I blame the software industry who have been unsuccessfully trying to replace what us graybeards were able to do with limited computing power.

  25. Re:Actually It Aint That Bad on 6 IT Projects, $8 Billion Over Budget At Dept. of Defense · · Score: 1

    I was in Air Force supply (enlisted) during Nam. The Air Force's supply system ran locally on a UNIVAC 1050-II with drum barrel storage and card readers, and teletypes for interactive processing.

    We had parts for aircraft and everything to run a base so yes, it's complicated. And our Air Force logistics system handled the workloads of busy Air Force bases.

    We practiced procedures for war exercise which included the computer being down and I would put all the transactions performed during the week long or longer exercide in big stacks of cards in a certain order. We would have them run through at end of exercise and were measured on errors. We won the European Air Force Supply Command award one year that I handled that.

    I've been an ERP programmer in RPG on the AS/400 line (now IBM i) for 23 years now (8 years 8086/Z-80 assembler before that), and yes writing ERP software or customizing ERP package software is hard. I did a couple of years of consulting at SSA for their BPCS package in mid 90's which ran many of the largest manufacturing companies in the world (although many switched to SAP for Y2K because of SSA insistence on rewriting to their CASE tool product for Y2K).

    I've been working on all custom ERP since then for Fortune 500's. It takes good software programming but it's all doable, at least for us graybeards in RPG or COBOL on an IBM large midrange or mainframe.