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User: jonabbey

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  1. Old news.. Caterpillar had these in the early 80's on Robot Printer Brings Documents To Your Desk · · Score: 2

    When I was in the fifth grade (1982), I visited the Caterpillar International headquarters' IT center in East Peoria. For some damfool reason, they had a robotic mail carrier that followed a trail of chemicals laid down into the carpeting to wander around the floor, carrying mail and such.

    This was before email, I guess, but no, I don't know why they had it either. It was boss, though.

  2. That explains the Samsung deal on Google Sells Motorola Mobility To Lenovo For $2.91 Billion · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, that nicely explains why Samsung announced that they were willing to work more closely with Google to make Samsung phones cohere to Google's direction with Android.

  3. Re:Only on Windows Apparently on Google Brings AmigaOS to Chrome Via Native Client Emulation · · Score: 1

    No, it loads and runs on Linux with the latest stable release of Chrome as well.

    It doesn't run _well_.. it failed to capture the mouse and it locked up the browser, but it does run. I got to see Workbench and everything.

  4. Re:Android is not always Java on If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy · · Score: 1

    Yes, I have too - IntelliJ itself is written using Swing and it's quite appealing on all the platforms I've used it on. But I guess that they had to develop custom themes for it and be very careful to achieve that.

    JFX8 looks great out of the box

    Agree about the difficulty with Swing. Swing permits different look and feels to differ too much in essentials like ordering of operations, focus, and etc. It makes it very hard to adjust the styling of individual components and expect it to do anything reasonable in different look and feels.

    JavaFX sounds really good, but I've not yet developed against it. Thanks for the link to SceneBuilder, I look forward to playing with it.

  5. Re:Apparently, applets only on Will New Red-Text Warnings Kill Casual Use of Java? · · Score: 1

    Yes, you could do that, but then you'd have to distribute the updated cacerts to all desktops that need to run your app, and keep it updated whenever a new JVM comes out.

    Oracle did implement a runtime configuration file that could be used to whitelist certain hosts, but the distribution problem remains.

  6. Re:Apparently, applets only on Will New Red-Text Warnings Kill Casual Use of Java? · · Score: 4, Informative

    This would not affect Eclipse, no, but it does affect locally produced applications that are distributed from an intranet web server with Java Web Start / Java Network Launch Protocol.

    Previously, we could just self-sign our app and users could choose to accept the app once and for all and not be bothered so long as the signing cert didn't change. Now, all of our users running Java 1.7.0_40 are given the threatening dialog each and every time they run our internal app, and they can't get rid of it.

    We're going to pony up for a code signing cert from a (Java-recognized) certificate authority to make the dialog go away. It's a hassle, but probably still the right thing for Oracle to do at this point.

  7. No, not SHA-256 on Australian Tax Office Stores Passwords In Clear Text · · Score: 1

    You don't want to use SHA-256 by itself, because that's a high speed unsalted hash algorithm.

    Ulrich Drepper created a good password crypt algorithm which incorporates SHA-256 or SHA-512, but the features that make it resistant to dictionary attack are the salt and the massive iterations over SHA to slow down the algorithm.

    BCrypt uses the same techniques to slow down dictionary attacks.

  8. BCrypt or SHACrypt256/SHACrypt512 on Australian Tax Office Stores Passwords In Clear Text · · Score: 1

    The OP is right that there's no point in using a high speed naked hash algorithm, but BCrypt isn't the only good alternative.

    There's also SHACrypt-256 and SHACrypt-512, which have been supported in GNU LibC since October 2007.

    Wikipedia has a pretty thorough discussion of the various password hash routines that are in use on Unix/Linux systems, for that matter.

  9. Re:NOT on Oracle Open Sourcing JavaFX, Including iOS and Android Ports · · Score: 1

    I do know the difference between a Java stack trace and a VM which crashes with a dump of the CPU registers. Platform was Ubuntu 10 LTS and the Oracle JVM.

    I also checked the PDF parser. I does not use any native stuff.

    Well, I took you at your word about crashing the VM. I was just curious how long ago it was, whose VM you were using, etc.

  10. Re:JavaFX replaces Swing? on Oracle Open Sourcing JavaFX, Including iOS and Android Ports · · Score: 1

    Huh, who knew. Last I checked, JavaFX was built on top of Swing. Apparently that may have changed with 2.0.

    Or maybe not. I can't tell.

    But one thing seems pretty clear from screenshots: your JavaFX applications will fit in with the native desktop just about as well as your Swing applications did. Which is to say, "not at all."

    JavaFX is its own thing, but they've made it possible to include JavaFX panels in Swing apps.

  11. Re:NOT on Oracle Open Sourcing JavaFX, Including iOS and Android Ports · · Score: 2

    I've gone 15 years developing on the JVM and never seen it crash. What JVM were you using? Were you using JNI and native libraries alongside it?

  12. Re:JavaFX 2 nice evolution for Swing on Oracle Open Sourcing JavaFX, Including iOS and Android Ports · · Score: 1

    Swing is definitely functional, and Nimbus doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out, but it's legacy as a cancerous outgrowth of AWT hurts it too much. It's amazing what they were able to do with that kind of foundation, but it's past time for something better.

  13. Re:Net Neutrality on Why You'll Pay For Netflix — Even If You Don't Subscribe To Netflix · · Score: 1

    Yep. The submitter is astroturfing for the telcos.

  14. Looks like a nice game, though on Hit Game Makes £52 In First Week On Windows RT · · Score: 1

    I just bought myself a copy for my Android tablet. Thanks, MS!

  15. Congress *must* pass the Rob Enderle act! on Paid Media Must Be Disclosed In Oracle v. Google · · Score: 4, Funny

    Congress should pass the Rob Enderle act immediately to prevent out of control judges from assaulting the good name of IT industry analysts everywhere!

  16. Re:First Problem on Surfacestations: NOAA Has Overestimated Land Surface Temperature Trends · · Score: 1

    Watts is, in fact, claiming that the new Leroy (2012) method invalidates his 2011 paper.

  17. Study brought to you by.. on Online Loneliness At Google+ · · Score: 2

    I wonder who funded this particular study. ;-)

    I switched from Facebook to Google+, and I use it almost exclusively now. The population is smaller, but the discussions are better. On Facebook, I'm linked to personal friends, on Google+, I'm linked to people all over based on common interests. I like G+ better.

  18. BCrypt is great, but so is Drepper's SHA2 Crypt on Ask Slashdot: Writing Hardened Web Applications? · · Score: 1

    These days, you do have a quite reasonable alternative to BCrypt available as well, which is Ulrich Drepper's SHA2 based Crypt scheme. It's functionally the same as BCrypt but with the use of a different basic cryptographic operation. Like BCrypt, Drepper's sha-crypt is designed to be as slow as molasses, with the ability to make the operation even slower if you like by explicitly specifying the number of SHA256 or SHA512 passes to perform.

    Drepper's SHA256 and SHA512 based Crypt routines are now standard in glibc on Linux, as well as on Solaris and HP-UX, and are likely to natively be supported by PHP and the like on those platforms. If you're looking for an implementation in Java, we have one at ftp://ftp.arlut.utexas.edu/java_hashes/.

  19. Check out their price list PDF on Customers Gleefully Mock Best Buy's $1,095.99 HDMI · · Score: 1

    The first page of AudioQuest's North America November 2011 pricelist has a beautiful painting of a bunch of wolves staring right at you. A bit on the nose metaphor for AudioQuest's intent to wear you down and consume every last dollar on your carcass.

    This company has to be a put-on, right? "Air-Tube Dielectric"?

  20. Re:AGW on Michael Mann Vindicated (Again) Over Climategate · · Score: 1

    Squeee, science love!

  21. Re:Change for the sake of change? on Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce · · Score: 1

    Other than by using that menu, I mean.

  22. Re:Change for the sake of change? on Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce · · Score: 2

    Hey, back in the day, we used TWM and liked it!

    Can you guess from that screenshot how you'd go about resizing those windows?

    Bet you can't guess!

  23. Re:I completely agree on Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce · · Score: 1

    You do get used to it, though. I've been using Unix since before there was a Linux and I'm not at the point where the 'slap the left command button' instinct is so ingrained in my fingers I find myself doing it on my Mac systems at home.

    Hah. I *am* at the point where the instinct is heavily ingrained, I mean to say.

  24. Re:I completely agree on Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce · · Score: 2

    You do get used to it, though. I've been using Unix since before there was a Linux and I'm not at the point where the 'slap the left command button' instinct is so ingrained in my fingers I find myself doing it on my Mac systems at home.

    I don't care for the Adwaita theme much, but the hardware accelerated window manager features are very nice indeed, and I'm now pretty happy with Gnome 3.

    Still, it would be nice to have some of the customization features back. Gnome Shell is a .0 release. It will get better.

  25. Re:Java Facts and Figures on Oracle Announces Java SE 7 · · Score: 2

    Hm, or do they? http://www.java.com/en/about/ seems to suggest that they're not counting Android.

    It's hard to believe that "31 times more Java phones ship every year than Apple and Android combined" these days. Maybe a couple of years ago?