Slashdot Mirror


User: putaro

putaro's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,099
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,099

  1. Re:Does Australia tax losses? on Amazon's Luxembourg Tax Deals · · Score: 1

    How much does Amazon Australia spend on R&D? I'm betting they do make a profit and remit it back to the US parent which then spends on R&D. Quite fair for Australia to ask for a cut of the profit made in Australia.

  2. Re:Uncool on PC Cooling Specialist Zalman Goes Bankrupt Due To Fraud · · Score: 2

    Part of the bankruptcy will be to get as much cash back as possible. That's typically done by selling the assets and technologies of the company, along with things like brand names. The buyer does not assume any of the original company's financial responsibilities.

  3. Re:are you sure? on World War II Tech eLoran Deployed As GPS Backup In the UK · · Score: 1

    The common failure mode would be "electronics" and any type of electronic navigation would fall under that. Furthermore, if all a ship's electronics are offline their engines are probably not functioning either.

  4. Re:Netflix, in the parlor, with the fireplace poke on First Detailed Data Analysis Shows Exactly How Comcast Jammed Netflix · · Score: 2

    The traffic isn't transiting Comcast going to another network. It's going to a Comcast subscriber who wants to watch a movie. So, yes, the subscriber is requesting a movie and the data is being delivered to them. There's no other route to the subscriber than through their ISP.

  5. Re:How about we hackers? on Debate Over Systemd Exposes the Two Factions Tugging At Modern-day Linux · · Score: 2

    Exactly - keep it in Fedora and Ubuntu for a while before migrating it to the systems that need stability.

    Who knows what annoyance are lurking in there.

  6. Re:"general market" computers on Xerox Alto Source Code Released To Public · · Score: 1

    Well, when I was referring to the original comment, that was the one written by rioki, not you.

    I got interested in computers at about the same age as you, but for me that was around 1978 in the US. At that time things like tabulators were ancient history.

    We did have a test scoring machine that was semi-standalone when I was in high school but I think it had a microprocessor in it. You could program it with an answer key and then it would mark the Scantron (fill-in-the-bubble) forms based on the answer key. It had an RS-232 interface that it would output data from as well and I spent some time writing software to capture test results on an Apple II.

  7. Re:"general market" computers on Xerox Alto Source Code Released To Public · · Score: 1

    I agree that the comment that sparked this was talking about special purpose machines (tabulators, etc.) vs computers. I suspect that he went googling for computer history, though, and found the rather specialized definition of "general purpose computer" that the mainframe people created.

    For those of us with a computer science, rather than an IT background, general purpose computer means Turing complete. And while doing scientific computing on a BCD machine may be like going to LeMans with your turnip truck, it's still doable and in an era when computers were rare for the average person, many would have been interested in doing it.

  8. Re:Huh, what? on Xerox Alto Source Code Released To Public · · Score: 1

    You're off by at least a decade, maybe two.

    IBM mainframes were never really used that much in scientific applications. They cost too much. That's why minicomputers were so popular. Big business used IBM mainframes starting from the early 50's. COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) was introduced in '59.

    Computing follows the money. The money was initially in the military market, then the business market.

  9. Re:Huh, what? on Xerox Alto Source Code Released To Public · · Score: 2

    The space age rocked.

    The Apollo program and the military (Minuteman missile) pushed integrated circuit technology. Remember that 1969 was the culmination of Apollo, not the start. PARC was founded in 1970, the Alto started in 1972 and they had a working system by '76.

    There were a lot of things pushing computing in the 60's and 70's. The space program was a big part but business was using computers as well. The national laboratories were pushing for faster and faster computers. The Cray I supercomputer was available in '76.

  10. A lot of to-do about $700 on Help ESR Stamp Out CVS and SVN In Our Lifetime · · Score: 1

    I read through half the comments here before twigging to what's really going on. He's got all of $700 for this project. And we're paying attention to this because???

  11. Re:Ho-lee-crap on The Largest Ship In the World Is Being Built In Korea · · Score: 2

    Part of the long build time may simply be to keep the shipyard in business over a longer term. After all, it's not like you can pop out a ship and send everyone home for a couple of years while waiting for the next contract. Building to the pace of the contract acquisition lets you keep your skilled workers on the job.

  12. Re:Some Sense Restored? on Debian Talks About Systemd Once Again · · Score: 1

    Postgres seems to do it OK.

  13. Re:Some Sense Restored? on Debian Talks About Systemd Once Again · · Score: 1

    The daemon should stop and start itself safely. The shell script is just there to tell it to do so.

  14. Re:Some Sense Restored? on Debian Talks About Systemd Once Again · · Score: 1

    But you have to support multiple init systems anyway unless you're going to make your package dependent on the latest distro release.

    We have stuff that runs on RHEL, Debian and Ubuntu. We can't ditch RHEL 6 , Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu Trusty Tahr support for quite a few years.

  15. Re:What happens with no ID? on Federal Government Removes 7 Americans From No-Fly List · · Score: 1

    There are no Republican DA's, Secretaries of State, etc. looking for in-person voter fraud? Give it up, doesn't happen.

    It used to be that conservatives were opposed to identity cards and they were right. They do not solve problems they simply allow for control of the populace.

  16. Re:Ob on The Subtle Developer Exodus From the Mac App Store · · Score: 1

    The sandbox is a stupid idea.

    The reason given for it is to prevent exploitable code. This makes sense on a system that is running in multi-user mode where a non-admin user is trying to escalate to admin and will try any exploits available to do so. This doesn't make sense on a single-user system where the user is running the apps and any exploit that is being targeted would be automated. It doesn't make sense to automate exploits for apps that have a small user base so sandboxing is silly for the majority of App Store apps. It tries to close a door that no one would exploit. It makes sense to sandbox apps like Safari (the web browser) or iTunes or TextEdit or any of the other apps that are installed on every system.

    What sandboxing is really for is to allow Apple to sell software and vouch for it without doing any work in terms of vetting either the vendors or the code. To date this has been successful because no one has really tried to break out of the sandbox. However, given the number of exploits that tend to exist in any code base, the odds that there is an exploit somewhere in the sandbox system is pretty high. Sooner or later someone will distribute malware via the App Store and the sandbox is going to be shown to simply be crap.

  17. Re:What happens with no ID? on Federal Government Removes 7 Americans From No-Fly List · · Score: 2

    Voter fraud is a worse problem.

    It is? Give examples. In-person voter fraud is almost non-existent. Ballot box stuffing, payola and other forms of voter fraud are not affected by requiring ID.

  18. Still a dumb idea on CSS Proposed 20 Years Ago Today · · Score: 0

    Yeah, all the CSS lovers will pile on. Have a party. I still think CSS is a stupid idea.

    1) Cascading. What the F? In order to figure out what is going on I have to work back through all the cascaded sheets to figure out what's going on
    2) "Separation of content and presentation" Yeah, that's a great idea, but not in HTML. HTML *is* a presentation layer. Who writes content in plain jane HTML? Idiots, that's who. Everyone else writes in something else (Markdown, XML) and compiles to HTML.. CSS is a negative there.
    3) CSS syntax is completely unrelated to HTML syntax. Thanks a lot

    It still sucks.

  19. Re:Not just any ethernet on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Build a Home Network To Fully Utilize Google Fiber? · · Score: 1

    I hear Zuckerberg wired his whole house with those.

  20. Re:Doesn't matter on Ask Slashdot: How Would You Build a Home Network To Fully Utilize Google Fiber? · · Score: 1

    The problem is usually routers. Build up one on a PC and use PFSense or another software router package.

  21. Re:it solves some unicode issues on Systemd Adding Its Own Console To Linux Systems · · Score: 1

    Let's try this again...

    that can be combined or interchanged with others like it

    That's the key part of modular. If you can't use something different it's just spaghetti code in multiple processes.

  22. Re:it solves some unicode issues on Systemd Adding Its Own Console To Linux Systems · · Score: 1

    That's the key part of modular. If you can't use something different it's just spaghetti code in multiple processes.

  23. Re:What about overseas servers of US companies? on US Says It Can Hack Foreign Servers Without Warrants · · Score: 1

    What I find most annoying is the government, which is supposed to enforce and obey the law, spends so much time figuring out ways to get around the law.

  24. Re:Why do people still care about C++ for kernel d on Object Oriented Linux Kernel With C++ Driver Support · · Score: 1

    When I said "If you were doing the same thing in C/C++" I meant hanging onto a pointer after freeing the memory. Which you can do in both languages and which will cause you no end of problems later on.

  25. Re:Why do people still care about C++ for kernel d on Object Oriented Linux Kernel With C++ Driver Support · · Score: 1

    Whoosh - he was talking about how you could allocate objects on the stack and have them be released automatically as you exit the scope. Java always allocates objects from the heap, but the reference can be on the stack and when you exit the scope the reference disappears and the object is now eligible for garbage collection.

    Greyfox doesn't understand how garbage collection works in Java is what it comes down to.