Slashdot Mirror


User: gbjbaanb

gbjbaanb's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
5,859
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 5,859

  1. Re:Allegedly on Futures Trader Arrested For Causing 2010 'Flash Crash' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    so the crime he was committing was making money for himself instead of for Goldman Sachs.

    I think it tells us everything we need to know about how corrupt our society has become.

  2. Re: The answer has been clear on Why the Journey To IPv6 Is Still the Road Less Traveled · · Score: 1

    not so - all big companies lease their equipment so they can mark it as a taxable expense and claim tax back on it and reduce their capital expenditure budgets, after a few years the manufacturer contacts them and asks if they want shiny new kit to replace the old junk that is now out of warranty and they always say yes.

    Its all about getting someone else to buy your equipment for you.

    Now I can't say if this is true of telecoms companies too, but even they will replace their kit eventually.

  3. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. on Why the Journey To IPv6 Is Still the Road Less Traveled · · Score: 1

    Andrews and Arnold will give you IPv6... but you forgot to say which country you are in, so maybe this information is useless to you! (they're in the UK BTW)

    But we're making progress, a few years ago the routers weren't IPv6 compatible and everyone said why should they bother if there wasn't any ISP support, and the ISPs wouldn't add IPv6 support as the routers weren't compatible.

    Now this chick-and-egg situation is broken, they have no excuses.

  4. Re:No they can't ignore consumer protections on EU To Hit Google With Antitrust Charges · · Score: 1

    lol. "Dear Google, we realise you have decided to pull out of business with the EU member states so we write to you to regretfully inform you that all your companies in Ireland and the Netherlands that you created for some reason or other will also be pulling out of doing business with the EU. We have communicated this information to the US treasury department as we believe the cash held by those companies will be sent back to the USA and we're all wondering whether you'll be paying the tax bill by money transfer or several truck loads"

  5. Re:Useless on Getting Started Developing With OpenStreetMap Data · · Score: 1

    I was referring the OP to it. I have updated OSM data for my local area when I found it was lacking absolutely vital information on the location of the local pubs. I also helped my work colleague fix a road section as it wasn't giving him the correct satnav details for his drive home.

    OSM is awesome because I can do these things. Its not difficult to do either, just enough of an impediment to deter those who might want to deface the data.

  6. Re:Few understand this on Microsoft Starts Working On an LLVM-Based Compiler For .NET · · Score: 1

    but nobody sensible develops .NET without Visual Studio. .NET is becoming true to its Java roots - write once (on a Windows box with Microsoft tools and you might as well use Outlook and Office too) run anywhere.

  7. Re: And it's not even an election year on Ten US Senators Seek Investigation Into the Replacement of US Tech Workers · · Score: 1

    In the UK, the borders were opened back in 1998. You'd think the initial rush would have stopped by now, but it is increasing (hence all the hooha over it today)

  8. Re:And it's not even an election year on Ten US Senators Seek Investigation Into the Replacement of US Tech Workers · · Score: 2

    Because they are trying to destroy your jobs, not their own.

    The day that the H1B programme also applies to MBAs and Managers is the day that corporations stop using H1Bs.

  9. Re:And it's not even an election year on Ten US Senators Seek Investigation Into the Replacement of US Tech Workers · · Score: 1

    That is also naive. The US is still the largest economy in the world, the companies are here because the money is here

    I think you'll find the money is not in the USA, otherwise those companies would have to pay tax on it, hence all the 'not here' companies with the same name.

    So, if they are happily opening offices overseas to save on tax anyway, why not employ workers in those companies and get them to collaborate with the parent company? With today's technology in comms and remote working, its not so much of a problem at all - in fact it can be a better condition to be in if your company places a lot of emphasis on having meetings, your offshore team would simply get on with their work while you wasted yours!

    You could also pay them less in their own country, so I really do wonder why these companies are so hell-bent on increasing immigration.

  10. Re: And it's not even an election year on Ten US Senators Seek Investigation Into the Replacement of US Tech Workers · · Score: 3, Informative

    partly population concerns - while Amwerica is a big, wide, empty country you all want to live in very crowded little communities. Increasing immigration causes more pressure on those communities for things like housing and traffic.

    Then there's the economic issue, while the wild west had no social care benefits, today you have many. So every new immigrant either has no job and gets benefits, or has a job and pays his own way but helps to displace another worker who then ends up on benefits.

    In the UK we see this a lot, while immigration has increased dramatically, the number of jobs has increased relatively slowly, so we have 6 million immigrants but 2 million unemployed. Our health and education systems have not been funded accordingly though, and are showing signs of collapse. Hence, immigration is a good thing, but only to a point - not as an unlimited influx.

    Its probably entirely linked to the rate of immigration overall, in the old days when we had few immigrants being drip-fed into the system things were OK, now we have a flood people are getting concerned.

  11. Re:Or a simple solution. on Microsoft Creates a Docker-Like Container For Windows · · Score: 1

    Actually that was one of the "great new things" for .NET applications - you could deploy your application using the DOS copy command!!! Fantastic...

    except then they added the GAC and the crap in the various .net frameworks folders like installutil etc and now they'vbe come up with a new 'great new thing' to let you deploy your applications using the copy command.. I wait with anticipation for it to get a dependency on hyper-v administration console and various Windows Server features and updates.

  12. Re:Easy grammar on Ask Slashdot: What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English? · · Score: 1

    correct - that's because once your fizzy drink that is designed to be drunk cold warms up you start to taste it....

    real ales should be drunk at room temperature so you can appreciate all their complex flavours

  13. it was just an example.. its been years since Latin was the most common language too.

  14. that, and the fact that the people using it got a kicking from some other group. We don't speak much Latin anymore, we speak a bastardised Germanic-y language called English even if we have kept a few words for specialists.

    And I'd say we only speak English nowadays, not because how the sun never once set on a salmon-pink part of the map, but because the Americans chose to speak it. If the USA had chosen German as their national language years ago, perl would probably be quite different!!

    Now that happened, and we add the previous corpus of English-speaking people, I think its reached a critical mass to make it a de-facto standard (like how Windows and not anything really good is our most common OS, or javascript is the only browser-based language worth knowing :-)

    Maybe one day we'll replace it with Marain, but we'll need either a Utopia or Dictator to arrange that for us!

  15. Re:Easy grammar on Ask Slashdot: What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But that's because people are fucked up - and the language evolves to fill our needs of being weird and wonderful.

    I think what's proposed here is the same ilk as that of Swatch Time. Someone thought its better if we have a dull but efficient system that reflects how computers want to work and not how people do. They forget that we're not (yet) servants of the machines and we like the craziness, the nuances allow us to express our creativity.

    Now, I'm off for a pint, you can go and enjoy your 0.568261 litres of fizzy beverage while you sit in the corner with your po-faced mates and discuss base 10 maths :-)

  16. Re:Stack Overflow? on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 1

    I didn't mean "not use stackoverflow" but "don't surf it as a hobby".

    I happen to have quite a big rep on there, but my 2 work colleagues here who are older than I am both use SO without having a user account on there. (yes, they agree they should have one if only to show their appreciation in upvotes). And besides, it wasn't as heavily advertised as I never noticed it (though I do spend most of my time on Programmers rather than SO).

    I think many older guys just aren't as likely to be filling in surveys on SO as opposed to using it.

  17. Re:Tabs vs Spaces on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 1

    dammit, I'm self-taught!! :-)

  18. Re:Gender balance "problem"? on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure he is - I studied late 80s and there were very few women in my comp.sci classes at my university.,

    Maybe its a regional thing, I was in the UK.

    Mind you, in my first year I had to take maths and another subject - I chose religious studies as it was 2 hours a week and the tutor explained that there were no wrong answers... I was 1 out of 2 males in the entire class of about 40. Best. Course. Ever.

  19. Re:Tabs vs Spaces on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 1

    no, we learned that tabs are designed for indentation - that's their purpose. So you prefer to ignore the right tool and slap spaces in instead shows you simply want to brute-force a poor implementation instead of using the correct tool, tabs in this case.

    If Python had mandated tabs instead of general whitespace, nobody would be complaining and code would be nice.

  20. Re:Tabs vs Spaces on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 1

    tabs are tabs.

    You know how people say "use the right tool for the job", well tabs are designed for indentation. So use them, rather than bodge some artificial implementation using an arbitrary number of spaces.

  21. Re:Stack Overflow? on Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey Reveals Coder Stats · · Score: 1

    or... over 40s don't aimlessly surf the ends of stackoverflow to find the survey, or can be bothered to fill it out such trivia. Probably too busy doing things!

    I know I do use SO but this is the first time I realised they even had a survey!

  22. Re:Useless on Getting Started Developing With OpenStreetMap Data · · Score: 1

    Their bus stops are all out of date for where I live

    its very easy to go in and update them. So you can't blame anyone else but yourself for failing to help yourself with a resource someone else provided to you for free.

  23. Re:And yet, no one understands Git. on 10 Years of Git: An Interview With Linus Torvalds · · Score: 1

    Hehe, strangely enough the company I mentioned also had a sysadmin who thought he knew what he was doing too - one thing I failed to mention was that all the developers work areas was on a single linux server (as he didn't want anyone working on their own linux machines despite everyone having a laptop just to run putty and email). So I guess even if everyone had got a copy of the repositories...

  24. Re:And yet, no one understands Git. on 10 Years of Git: An Interview With Linus Torvalds · · Score: 3, Funny

    Its true, git is complex like Linux is - it suits the needs to Torvalds, but I think its popularity exceeds its ability, and many people use it without using it properly - for example a previous company I worked for used git for their SCM and I asked where the backups were I was told they didn't need backups because it was distributed and everyone had a copy of the repo... of course, that relies on everyone having a copy of each repo, or at least 1 other person having an up-to-date copy of each repo which wasn't the case. This kind of thinking wouldn't happen if there was more of a concept of distributed-but-from-a-central-repo. It needs the concept of a golden root from where everything else is sourced (and I know you can have this, but its more convention due to the distributed nature)

    Still, it ushered in a new style of version control that wasn't catered for before.

    Now we're seeing easier, more accessible systems, such as fossil by that attempts to bridge the gap between DVCS freedoms and centralised repositories and includes other useful features such as bugtracker in the SCM and still geared towards branches that are more collaborative than gits 'private playground' branches. (ie git is designed for people to work on their own and hopefully merge changes back, many other SCMs are designed for branches that are for common code worked on by several people and thus requiring less merging). Git works well because of how the Linux project is structured - a very large hierarchy, but starts to fall down in a small team where people don't have that arms-length working environment, or where they work on multiple branches at the same time (eg at work, I have my big feature and I have bug fixes that come and go regularly - git doesn't help in that environment unless I have multiple repos checked out)

  25. Re:Mono practically useless on Mono 4 Released, First Version To Adopt Microsoft Code · · Score: 1

    I'm not convinced its he best designed, nor is the chap in the first link I posted where he complains that in 9 years of using WPF it hasn't gone anywhere and is pretty complex and bloated to use.

    Now a well designed UI is Qt - where they enhanced the existing model with their QML language, so you could create a new control in QML and drop it onto an existing form. All the power of QML whilst maintaining the existing investment in UIs. Qt got it right, shame Microsoft didn't have those devs working for them! (perhaps MS should buy Qt out and use it for new developments, probably too late now they've released Windows 10, but it would have been cool, wouldn't it!)

    Imagine if Microsoft had done that instead of reinventing the GUI wheel - you'd create a control in WPF and could drop it onto a Winforms dialog. That would have been good.

    As it is, WPF is just now very well designed, and not vey well implemented. As the other link showed, the chart controls only work for small datasets, if you want something that works well - you use the old winforms one! I'd hazard a guess that they are also hardware accelerated purely by being constructed by gdi calls too.

    So what's the benefit in WPF? It mignt be easier to construct new controls than winforms but is more difficult to use as an application developer, it performa much worse, and requires a lot more investment in training. If the end result isn;t acceptable to users too.. then its no wonder people are sticking with Winforms.

    Or HTML GUIs, which is what I meant by ASP.NET.