Slashdot Mirror


User: AlanBDee

AlanBDee's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
332
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 332

  1. Re:And this despite lower gasoline prices on Tesla Says Model 3 Had 'Biggest One-Week Launch of Any Product Ever' (theverge.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    I keep fairly detailed records of the maintenance cost of my cars. My 2000 Toyota 4Runner, purchased in 2003, has cost me $13,479 in maintenance. I've put 140,000 miles on it. My 2007 Honda Accord has cost me $5174 with 95,000 miles put on it. This is excluding the purchase price and gas.

    Purchase plus maintenance plus gas on the Accord comes out to about $0.37/mile. The 4Runner is $0.43/mile.

    In theory the EV won't require nearly as much in maintenance cost and would save in gas so even if I had to buy a new battery for $8,000 every 8 years it would probably make sense.

  2. Another reason to make sure you owe taxes on 4/15 on Identity Thieves Obtain 100,000 Electronic Filing PINs From IRS System (csoonline.com) · · Score: 1

    I've been claiming 0 on my taxes so that I get a big refund. The logic is that it's easier for me to put away $3k on day then $115.0684931506849 every two weeks. I'm also quick to file my taxes because I want my money. For years this has worked well but now I think I should rethink my strategy.

  3. Re:Just a thought... on Women Get Pull Requests Accepted More (Except When You Know They're Women) (peerj.com) · · Score: 1
    Women in open-source are more competent than men?

    The women I have worked with have indeed been seriously good. They were also very quick to ask for help which I think we can all agree is a good way to improve your code. This is also supported by the curious case that women tend to change more lines of code yet still produce less bugs.

  4. Re:sunfire / in my stellerator / makes me... happy on Wendelstein 7-X Fusion Reactor Produces Its First Flash of Hydrogen Plasma (gizmag.com) · · Score: 1

    Posts like this are why I love /.

  5. Re:Everybody uses health care on Windows 10 Passes Windows XP In Market Share · · Score: 1

    I do know people who once entering adulthood would rather die then go to a doctor. But they're crazy and I agree with your argument and everybody should have a stake in health care.

  6. Re:Good luck ... on Ask Slashdot: How Do I Reduce Information Leakage From My Personal Devices? · · Score: 2

    CyanogenMod and Microsoft are getting a little too close for comfort. http://www.androidcentral.com/...

    However, the last version I used (6 mo. ago) was very nice if you didn't want to tie your device to Google. At this point for security conscious people, Apple might be the least horrible solution. I've also started to be less critical of Microsoft lately.

  7. Re:Always used to use Newegg on Newegg Sues Patent Troll After Troll Dropped Its Own Lawsuit (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    I agree except that worry about Amazon getting too big and taking out too much of the competition. Then we'll be like, "Amazon used to be so great, but now I have no other choice." I may be a little dramatic but companies like Newegg are worth keeping around.

  8. I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs on Ask Slashdot: What Are Your Experiences With Online IDEs For Web Development? · · Score: 1

    The biggest issue I see is speed. Nothing on the web runs as fast as it would locally. If you're looking at cheap hardware you're thinking about it wrong. Time is money and development time is expensive. Trying to save money on hardware is penny-wise, pound foolish.

    I'm a huge fan of fast machines and multiple large high-resolution monitors. The more code I can see, the quicker I can get confused, then lost, found and finally come up with a work-around that nobody will ever understand, but works.

  9. Re:Not great... on Ask Slashdot: What Are Your Experiences With Online IDEs For Web Development? · · Score: 1

    I think it's important to point out that you tried it and went back.

  10. Instead of click-bat here are some real sources... on The Best Ways To Simplify Your Code? (dice.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    These books provide much better information on the topic and deserve a place on your shelf alongside the GoF's Design Patterns.

  11. Re:Good! on Pirates Finding It Harder To Crack New PC Games (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    Completely agree. For the "real" pirates I know cracking the game is the game.

  12. Re:quickly to be followed by self-driving cars on Are We Reaching the Electric Car Tipping Point? · · Score: 1

    $15k in cash isn't that easy for most people to come up with on the spot

    You'd be surprised how easy it is to save that money when you don't have any car payments and pay cash for everything. You'd also be surprised at how cheap one becomes when paying cash.

  13. Re:Define "success" on An Evidence-Based Approach To Online Dating · · Score: 1

    I did very similar things but with a slightly different outcome. Meeting women online helped give me the experience and confidence that when I met the woman I would marry in real life I was far more confident and better prepared. In the past I had always screwed it up, said the wrong thing, or whatever and the girl would run for the hills. My wife now insists nerds make the best husbands.

  14. Re:Boring on An Evidence-Based Approach To Online Dating · · Score: 1

    I always said I would rather be single and happy then married and unhappy.

  15. It can only work to a point on The "Cool Brick" Can Cool Off an Entire Room Using Nothing But Water · · Score: 1

    As a person who lives in one of these dry areas (Utah) I have an evaporative cooler along side my AC unit. Mold is not a big issue here but can be a problem. The bigger problem is that there are limits to what a cooler can do. If it's 120 degrees outside you won't be able to get it to feel like it's 70 inside. It can definitely make it comfortable but only to a point.

    The other issue is that as your house becomes more humid it becomes less effective. You can't leave them running all the time or else you get a hot humid muggy house that feels like your walking through a swamp. That's why I use both a AC unit and the cooler. When it starts to get too hot or humid I kick on the AC. I save on power usage and get the best of both worlds.

    All this being said, the idea of building a wall out of these with water running through it does not seem like a good idea. I hope they can make it work, but even if it does it won't be able to replace an air conditioner.

  16. 4 Isn't enough but 8 is on AT&T Says 10Mbps Is Too Fast For "Broadband," 4Mbps Is Enough · · Score: 2

    I shake my head when people start to argue over high speeds. My basic Centurylink connection with an 8Mbps connection is enough to stream two movies/shows from Netflix. Service providers have a limited "pipe" to send traffic through and that seems to be the bottleneck, or ISP's filtering come traffic. When I had a 50 Mbps connection the only difference I saw was in downloading an Ubuntu ISO with bittorrent. Either way, they can call it whatever they want, I don't care.

  17. /. works for me on The Rising Power of Developers · · Score: 1

    So does TechSNAP and the Linux Action Show. WebSphere on the other hand.... I hate IBM!

  18. Contribute to Open-Source on Ask Slashdot: Scientific Research Positions For Programmers? · · Score: 2

    If your goal is to contribute to the "betterment of humanity" then I suggest you join the open-source community. You can probably make a bigger difference in that area then to try and find a job in the scientific community. It also sounds like your current placement may not be the best fit. Look for a job in the IT department of a University or at a company that embraces Open-Source. For instance I work at Novell, sister company to Suse Linux and the "corporate culture" is very different from the Insurance company I worked at before. Suse strongly encourages involvement in the open-source community. I think you just need to find a job that fits your personality better. Lucky for you, demand for good software engineers is high.

  19. try buying a server board on Ask Slashdot: Linux-Friendly Motherboard Manufacturers? · · Score: 1

    Actually buy a server board, if your building a server. A quick search on newegg for "UEFI" under server boards came back to 0 results. This is because most servers are *nix based. The manufactures will not build them to require UEFI until you can install Linux on them. On principle, if your building a server build a server. Not a PC that your calling a server.

  20. Romney's Right! on Lunar Base Foe Romney Endorsed By Lunar Base Supporters · · Score: 1

    First, Romney didn't say it was a wacky idea. He said that the idea of doing it in the next 8 years was wacky. And for good reason, cost. Do you think it was popular for him in Florida to say, "sorry folks. I know you'd love to boost your economy with more funding to NASA but it'll just cost too much!"

    I want a president who IS willing to be realistic and NOT tell me what I want to hear!

    Second, it wasn't just Romney said it was a bad idea. All the GOP candidates, except Gingrich, also said similar things. So why single out Romney? I believe they were all asked in the debate.

  21. My experiance on Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Answer to Dreamweaver? · · Score: 1

    Since I've been a professional web developer for around 8 years I'll share what I have been doing. First, do your design in Photoshop or similar program. Once you learn how to use it it'll be much faster. I used Dreamwearer from version 4 to CS3 and rarely used the WUSIWYG editor. It always caused more trouble then it was worth. I've been using Eclipse or Netbeans since I migrated to Linux.

    The reason I don't use a WUSIWUG editor is because I generate most my HTML using PHP factory classes. To the "generate a 7x9 table table in 5 seconds" I do one better and simply throw the data into a datagrid class and it renders everything from sorting to paging. That's how it's done folks. API's such as that are usually part of frameworks like cakePHP, Yii, Zend, Drupal. Once learned are your biggest time saver.

    As for page layout I do that in any editor I'm using and test it in various browsers. After some time and experience you'll learn what CSS works and what doesn't on all browsers. First I try to get my base CSS to work, if it fails on IE6 (which is common) as a last resort I'll edit a specific CSS file that is only used for IE6.

    There are also front-end testing frameworks that are designed to find and detect issues with different browsers, but I haven't used them.

    In the end, if you can't find an open source solution to anything related to development your approaching your problem wrong. I attest that Eclipse and Netbeans are some of the best tools because they were built by developers for developers. If an open source solution seems to be missing, there's a reason.

  22. What could be done? on White House Responds To SOPA, PIPA, and OPEN · · Score: 1

    I agree that piracy is wrong and that the artists should be paid for their work. The best solution I can think of would be to redirect suspected sites through a monitored proxy for closer evaluation. So, if I go to the pirate bay instead of getting redirected to a site saying it has been shut down I get redirected through a proxy server that carefully tracks all my traffic then to the pirate bay. Then, I am still free to pirate if I choose to knowing that my traffic is being monitored. This addresses the concern of censoring the Internet, you can access it all. Of coarse, this can still be circumvented by going to the direct IP address of the pirate bay. It also doesn't address file sharing cloud services or direct peer-to-peer sharing.

    So therein lays the problem, everything I can think of can be circumvented, period. It think it's safe to assume that the RIAA, MPAA, etc are also stumped. As soon as they do one thing, someone else will circumvent it. it's a cat and mouse game.

    I always have and still maintain that NetFlix did more to stop piracy then anything else, ever. And for one simple reason, they made the material accessible for a reasonable price.

    The producers get paid and people are happy. That's your win-win solution!

  23. Re:ASP.NET and C# on Ask Slashdot: Which Web Platform Would You Use? · · Score: 1

    I don't remember where I read this but as I understand it the reason mono is not complete is that it lacks the DRM components of Silverlight. The problem is that the DRM component needs kernel access, which Linux won't allow. Apple and Android may have opened it up for it but the Linux community won't. So I believe mono not being complete is more an architectural problem then lack of cooperation from MS.

    This is an argument I read somewhere and made sense. But since I can't confirm it so I reserve the right to be wrong.

  24. Choose the right tool for the right job on Ask Slashdot: Which Web Platform Would You Use? · · Score: 1

    The biggest benefit to PHP is that it's easy, simple and just works. Most other platforms such as Ruby on Rails, ASP, and JSP derive from other languages such as C#, Visual Basic, Java, and Ruby that were not specifically designed for web development. PHP was designed from the ground up to build web sites.

    Ruby on Rails was designed for rapid development, great if your manufacturing web sites. Java and C# can do anything, including web services but they are best suited for enterprise applications that are likely to integrate with other systems that are far more complex.

    I think Steve McConnell said it best when comparing software solutions and how some projects are simple and can be built with simple tools. But if your designing and building a skyscraper you will use different tools and different expertise. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/09/steve-mcconnell-in-the-doghouse.html

    The disdain you sense in some circles is the contrast from the highly experienced software engineer vs the unfortunately common PHP coder who doesn't realize how ignorant they are. To play off Steve's analogy, it would be like one saying they can design a skyscraper because they did such a great job designing their dog's house.

    I was one of those arrogant PHP coders and thought I could do anything. Then I got a clue and realized that I knew nothing, as said best by Socrates. If any PHP programmers are reading this and are offended then simply ask yourself if you can name five design patterns. If you can then you are not the ignorant PHP developer I'm talking about.

    PHP is a very powerful language, especially when coupled with jQuery, Zend, Yii, Cake, or many of the other frameworks. Therefor if you are not sure what language you should use then you will want to use PHP.

  25. what we did on Ask Slashdot: Writing Hardened Web Applications? · · Score: 2

    I worked at an insurance company, which holds a huge amount of personal information. Monitored and regulated by the Federal Government. To keep our system secure the primary server was locked out of the Internet completely. Internal operations were able to access the server from inside the building only. I was able to VPN in from a remote location and then access it but nonetheless the server itself had no public access. A public web server was setup with it's own database. Every night the system would go offline while the private server pulled/updated necessary information on the public server.

    While I didn't set the whole system up as that wasn't my job there, the only thing I would change would be to add several tripwires with honeypot data. By that I mean placing fake or bad data in specific locations with a tripwire that would notify me if they were accessed.

    I also have loads of experience in locking down PHP applications. First thing I do is filter all incoming parameters with regular expressions. Loop through all get, post, and request parameters. I only pass numeric ids so that's easy. I also specify what parameters I expect. On critical pages if any "unknown" parameters are sent it silently kills the page, return an empty response as if a critical error happened. (Note: Search engine spiders often append special parameters that identify them as spiders. If SEO is important to you then you'll want to account for those.)

    Validate all public methods of your classes very well. It doesn't matter if it is validated multiple times, it's good to confirm it anyway. Finally, use the prepared statements in database queries. Worst thing you can do is, "SELECT * FROM MY_TABLE WHERE ID=".$_GET['id']. That's guaranteed to be injected... quickly. If I don't use a frameworks API, setup a OOP set of classes to handle the operations.

    In the end, remember the two guys in the forest being chased by the bear. The one guy only has to run faster then the other to survive.