Slashdot Mirror


User: Improv

Improv's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,594
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,594

  1. Probably not... on Ask Slashdot: Is There a Web Development Linux Distro? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not everyone configures this stuff the same way, and new versions of software would mean you'd need to change this tuning all the time. Plus, you'd likely need to know all the tuning anyhow in case you need to debug or adjust it. Your best solution probably is not going to hope for a distro so much as baking yourself an image (or install script, or chef/puppet/ansible recipeset, or similar) and using it to build these systems for you. A custom distro wouldn't make sense.

  2. Perhaps the papers are improved after rejection on Does Journal Peer Review Miss Best and Brightest? · · Score: 1

    The process of getting rejected from a journal may lead to improvements in a paper, or lead the paper to be submitted to a journal that's more tier-appropriate than one's first choice. Both can be very healthy.

  3. Re:Forking is good, whiny bitches on Debian Forked Over Systemd · · Score: 1

    In open-source, forking is as healthy as democracy, perhaps moreso.

  4. Re:Summary is misleading, you can work around on Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X · · Score: 1

    That's not what TRIM is for.

  5. Re:Easily done: on 3D-Printed Gun Earns Man Two Years In Japanese Prison · · Score: 1

    Would it bother you if your argument, however much it seems to make sense from a "story" point of view, flies in the face of actual data on levels of gun violence versus levels of gun ownership/legality?

  6. Wrongheaded pandering to statistically marginals on Is It Time To Throw Out the College Application System? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    University efforts are best spent taking those who are ready and capable and stuffing their heads full of new ideas. There are people who are not ready or capable, but trying to find ways to slip them in and hoping they reinvent themselves in time to take advantage of the opportunity (if that's even possible) would be neglecting those who are ready - many of them would end up in remedial classes or just taking the easiest things possible to survive. Maybe they should wait a year and wander Europe, or otherwise take some time to get their life together first.

    I was one of the C-B students who did all the gifted classes in high school but never had the grades. When I went to University, the first two years I loved the freedom and the content of the classes but was as lazy as I had been in high school on the grades. It was only later that I started taking things seriously. The first two years might as well have been wasted, plus I chose a university well below par for my abilities (wasn't even nearly the best one I got into). I think I turned out pretty well looking back 18 years later, but statistically, I was probably bad betting odds. Universities should focus on people who are actually ready to learn, rather than figuring out ways to churn out more people who are likely to drop out. Slashdot, in turn, should stop pandering to people who never learned to focus who drop out of university and console themselves by extolling the virtues of being an autodidact, of not knowing how to dress or clean themselves and paint themselves as "natural" or "different" or "fighting the system", and similar.

  7. Arguing against a strawman on Why Atheists Need Captain Kirk · · Score: 2

    Author is arguing against a strawman (or at least a minority view) form of atheism which claims to be above value judgements. Of course one brings value judgements to the table, with philosophy. People've been doing that for a very, very long time. So what?

    Author also seems to not understand Star Trek that well - while they're a planet of hat, more-or-less, Vulcans were known to live by a philosophy, and presumably like all systems of logic, the Vulcan one sits ultimately on a philosophical foundation, not some bs "a priori" claims that the author wants to warn us against.

  8. Re: Mecial Cannabis companies on California Tells Businesses: Stop Trying To Ban Consumer Reviews · · Score: 1

    The "hidden expectation" is that they had a deal meant for normal consumers, not one company swooping in and buying the whole lot. Seems fine to me.

  9. Re:She probably wants kids on Entire South Korean Space Programme Shuts Down As Sole Astronaut Quits · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not every female wants kids ever. Nor every male. Sometimes personal reasons can mean "I want something different out of life", or "I am tired of the PR", or any other number of things.

  10. Re:Don't ask me on Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy Cast Doubt On the Big Bang? · · Score: 1

    If by physicists you mean to include some fringe folk like Tegmark, then sure.

  11. It's better to hear people you might disagree with on The CIA Does Las Vegas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Closing one's ears to people one might disagree with is a sure way to rot as a community. It's not like the community that attends such conferences is unanimous in their views; it's not *all* technolibertarians. If you look at other presentations by such bodies at past conferences, you see that they're often quite good.

  12. Re:What a crap of title... on Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed · · Score: 1

    Thankless means that few people in broad society adequately respect the need for or the practices of police officers. They're underappreciated.

    Police don't usually have the time, when people pull a gun on them, to carefully consider every possible option. If they can pick the least bad option, great, but if the situation is that someone pulls a gun on an on-duty cop (meaning pulls it out and begins to point it at them), I'd be very reluctant to second-guess them if the policeman shoots that person.

  13. Re:What a crap of title... on Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed · · Score: 1, Informative

    Police do a necessary and often thankless job at high risk to themselves. If a policeman needs to arrest you, it's best not to make them feel unsafe.

  14. Re:PC leftist crowd, ignore not; on Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not all of us on the left have a problem with this.

  15. Re:Flawed reasoning on A Look at Smart Gun Technology · · Score: 1

    Always? If someone did manage to grab your gun and aims it at you, I think you'd prefer your gun to fail at that point.

  16. What does it matter? on Actual Results of Crimean Secession Vote Leaked · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Without consent of the Ukrainian government, such a vote would not mean anything more than, say, if my neighbourhood in Brooklyn voted to secede. The current Russian occupation of Crimea is not valid.

  17. Doesn't always work all that well... on Ask Slashdot: Joining a Startup As an Older Programmer? · · Score: 1

    I'm 35. I recently left a startup where most of the people there were about 10 years earlier. The difference is a bit more than age for me - I spent most of the 10 years I had on them working for a University, but the combination of age and differences in interests were very rough - I didn't feel that I fit in, I didn't hang out with them after work, I didn't want the same things out of life, and so on. It can be rough.

  18. Best solution on Nature Publisher Requires Authors To Waive "Moral Rights" To Works · · Score: 1

    A bit of contract law that would:
    1) Mark these rights as unwaivable
    2) Mark as unenforcable or nonactionable any part of any contract that would bar or establish consequences for asserting these rights

  19. Cue the bad sci-fi movies... on Could Earth's Infrared Emissions Be a New Renewable Energy Source? · · Score: 1

    It'd be amazing if there were a hollywood blockbuster that theorises that doing this will make the Earth run out of rotational energy and fall into the Sun.

  20. Brain damaged project on GNU C Library Alternative Musl Libc Hits 1.0 Milestone · · Score: -1

    I like how they place an emphasis on it being small, but they require you to link the whole damned thing into your app. And of c ourse that doesn't help you write correct software, because you won't figure out if you really need -lm unless you also test your app on a more correct libc.

    Lightweight and correct indeed.

  21. Re:Either gnu libc is hideously slow and bloated.. on GNU C Library Alternative Musl Libc Hits 1.0 Milestone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Steps to a useless comment:
    1) Speculate on the features of something
    2) Note that that speculated feature set doesn't include something you want
    3) Criticise based on your speculation

  22. Re:Native Targets? on Flash Is Dead; Long Live OpenFL! · · Score: 2

    My point is that with modern VMs and JITs and partial nativisation and other systems/PL technologies, you no longer should care whether something "runs native", and that that's a distinction that is so blurred anyhow that it barely makes sense to talk about it. It may have once been important and simple, but nowadays it is neither.

  23. Re:Native Targets? on Flash Is Dead; Long Live OpenFL! · · Score: 2

    (I missed part of a sentence in there ; windows apps can compile "to native" as well using WINE)

  24. Re:Native Targets? on Flash Is Dead; Long Live OpenFL! · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So what? Perl can compile to C too, by bundling the interpreter into your target binary. Windows apps can compile "to native" as well. Neither makes it exactly native, similarly to having your app interpreted by a native HTML5 engine is.

    The most native way something can be for a platform is to be written directly for its platform, bound directly to its APIs. Anything but that gets very conceptually fuzzy. And if you're worried about this for performance reasons, you should look at the Quakelikes that have been ported to HTML5.

  25. Native Targets? on Flash Is Dead; Long Live OpenFL! · · Score: 0

    Flash is no more native than HTML5. At this point it doesn't make sense to "place bets" on Flash at all, unless like the article author you've spent many years on Flash and are not interested in change.