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User: hab136

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  1. Re:contractor position? on How To Handle Corporate Blackmail? · · Score: 1

    Secondly
    Companies no longer give references in many cases. All they do is record years of service and pay. They have enormous legal exposure for doing otherwise.

    "This person (is/is not) eligible for re-hire" is often communicated. There are innocuous reasons for not being eligible for re-hire (anti-nepotism rules for example), but mainly it's because they were fired.

  2. Re:1 TB of tape costs more then 1 TB of portable H on Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good · · Score: 1

    Tapes are comparable in cost/GB to hard drives. Within the same order of magnitude, anyway.

    Hey boss, I spent $3,000 instead of $1000 on our backups. Same order of magnitude, quit bitching.

    Tapes are about $0.30/GB (raw space, since you can also compress data to drives). Hard drives are around $0.09/GB. 10TB = $3,000 for tape vs $900 for disk. Not including tape drive.

    So you're paying about 3x for tape.

    No moving parts means you pretty much don't have to worry about them breaking.

    Tape drives have moving parts. Oh the tapes themselves - here's a fun scenario: Write your backup out to tape, then verify it was written correctly. It was, so ship it offsite. The tape warps in the back of a hot delivery van, then sits in storage a while. Your database fails, so you get the tape back from storage. While restoring you get data errors (from the warping), then the tape snaps, gets chewed up in the tape drive, which then jams.

    Tape has failure scenarios too.

    Of course, I am making a big assumption here: that you're going to want to take your backups out of the server room. In that case, do you really want to send off hard drives every day? Tapes are built with this specific use-case in mind, while hard drives aren't -- I can't imagine what you'd be doing to the MBTF for a drive by sending it on a road trip once a week.

    Here is the the one argument tape has in its favor. There are rugged enclosures and connectors for hard drives, though.

    Of course, as networking gets cheaper, it may become more attractive to have a local disk backup, and a remote disk backup that is copied over the network. Depends on how much data you produce every day vs your network speed/costs.

  3. Re:Donate to At Home Projects on How Do I Put Unused Servers To Work? · · Score: 4, Funny

    You mean ::1

    Not even jokes are IPv6 compliant.

  4. Re:Do zombies even use ISP mail servers? on Verizon.net Finally Moving Email To Port 587 · · Score: 1

    The first scenario that comes to mind is that the next generation of bot-ware will listen to your outgoing email traffic and learn your password then configure itself to send email based on that information.

    That's why you also use encrypted connections. It would be stupid to pass login information over unencrypted connections.

    Without access to the SMTP port and the login information, the next route is to tell the default mail programs (Outlook express, Mail.app, etc) to send a mail and let those programs handle it. This is already used by malware, and has been for some time. The reason they've been using straight SMTP is that it's harder for the user to notice, and marginally harder to trace to the sender.

    (This is the reason Mac OS X is mostly immune to attacks and infection... it isn't yet a big enough target!)

    Well, that and the lack of "run any code any idiot puts on a web page" (ActiveX, VBScript) and the whole non-root privileges by default thing.

  5. Re:An echo chamber... on Facebook Scrambles To Contain ToS Fallout · · Score: 1

    In your scenario someone posts excerpts of a book they are writing online, say as a series of notes on Facebook, then after this book is published Facebook Lawyers® are going to 1. hunt down a user and then 2. sue them in open court for a share of the profits?

    Other way around.

    1. Write your content on Facebook.
    2. Make book of (supposedly your) content.
    3. Facebook sues

  6. Re:Multiple redundancy on Major Cache of Fossils Unearthed In Los Angeles · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Just in case anybody cares, "La Brea" is Spanish for "the Tar," so "The La Brea Tar Pits" translates into "The The Tar Tar Pits."

    Is there somewhere in The La Brea Tar Pits where I can put my PIN number into an ATM machine?

  7. Re:Lunix sucks! on Post-Beta Windows 7 Build Leaked With New IE8 · · Score: 1

    But if you have someone who has used Linux on someone else's computer or a school computer or something so that they are not scared of the command line and are have become pretty sure this is something that they'll actually be using rather than just installing because they want to try it and think they might like it, and they are willing to put in a little bit of effort, Gentoo is a really good choice. (That's a lot of 'if's, but Gentoo isn't exactly your typical newbie distro.)

    Gentoo has great documentation and is wonderful for learning Linux internals and such. It sucks for users who simply don't care how the computer works, only that it does. Ubuntu is a better choice for them.

  8. Re:Universal Remote on Euro Parliament Wants "Red Button" For Shutting Down Games · · Score: 3, Funny

    If they want a quick "OMG boobs!" button then they just need a universal remote. Program it to the XBox's IR "Off" command and bam! Problem solved.

    How does turning off the machine get me instant boobs? I think you have that backwards!

  9. Re:Oh joy on Massive EVE Online Alliance Disbanded · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To put in perspective how seriously the people involved (not me) take this stuff, the leaders of the disbanded alliance got on flights at 3am to meet in Washington DC (I believe) so they could pick up the pieces and start getting to work on putting together the alliance.

    Why? Have they never heard of webcams and videoconferencing? Or just plain telephones?

  10. Re:DRM? on Windows 7 Gaming Performance Tested · · Score: 1

    I agree totally; GGP is off topic and uninformative. It is, however, a valid question, and one which would be pivotal in my decision to buy this new OS.

    And your post - with something more to offer than "zomg m$ winblows DRM suxxors" ranting - is notably moderated Insightful instead of Troll.

  11. Re:DRM? on Windows 7 Gaming Performance Tested · · Score: 1

    hab136, you are being extremely unfair. How will the OP get his views affirmed by everyone else?

    Demanding that people use logic and reasoning is extremely elitist.

    *chuckle* The first time I was called elitist in real life was by a US history teacher who was arguing that everyone should vote. I was with her until she argued that we should pressure people to vote who were not informed and did not feel competent making a decision - by their own assessment. Now I'm all for removing any obstacles to participation in government, and encouraging that participation, but I don't want to pressure people who have *no rational basis for decision making* to make a decision that affects everyone's lives.

    In her mind, someone who said "I don't really know the issues, don't know the candidates, and therefore won't vote because I'd just be guessing" should be pressured to vote (or even forced through mandatory voting laws!). I pointed out that they'd be making terrible, spur of the moment decisions, probably based on the candidate's charisma or a simple party ideology, and it would be better for everyone involved if that person stayed home. She called me elitist and continued with the lesson.

    So yeah, I'm apparently an elitist.

  12. Re:DRM? on Windows 7 Gaming Performance Tested · · Score: 1

    Isn't a Troll a post which is designed to annoy people or cause arguments? Posting uninformed emotional opinions isn't trolling.

    I don't think intent comes in to it. If only thing the post offers is angry emotion, the likely response is more angry emotion, which leads to one giant shouting match. That's the very definition of trolling.

  13. Re:DRM? on Windows 7 Gaming Performance Tested · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is this modded troll? It's the *ONLY* statistic I care about.

    Was it informative? No.
    Was it interesting? No.
    Was it funny? No.
    Was it an emotional remark, offering no information or reasoning? Yes. --> Troll

    Now, a reasonable discussion of why you won't purchase anything with DRM might be informative, but that veers into off-topic - since the article is about performance of Windows 7, not whether or not you will buy it, or how you feel about DRM.

  14. Re:We had pure water once... on Lots of Pure Water Ice At Mars North Pole · · Score: 1

    ...then the industrial revolution happened.

    If by "pure", you mean swimming with parasites, fungi, and bacteria, sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_diseases

    There's a reason we chlorinate water.

  15. Re:Engineering nerds, this is an example! on The ASP.NET Code Behind Whitehouse.gov · · Score: 1

    stroke their butter soaked neck beards

    I hate you for providing that mental image.

  16. Re:US Only? on Gaming Netflix Ratings? · · Score: 5, Funny

    I had thought Netflix was a US only service. 400+ reviews for a film that's only been released overseas seems quite a lot - I guess Governor Palin has reignited the legendary American love of travel and curiosity about foreign countries.

    Russia put up a big, big movie screen so Alaskans can watch from their house.

  17. Re:Finally on Valve Takes Optimistic View of Piracy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Steam is pants. Don't buy pants.

    I tried this strategy, but it's been a chilly winter..

  18. Re:No, haven't RTFA, thank you very much on Ubuntu Download Speeds Beat Windows XP's · · Score: 1

    A colleague of my wife (a linguist) studies these sorts of phrases.

    She should do a duo with Marina! http://www.hotforwords.com/bio/ (mostly SFW)

  19. Re:More to the point on Can We Create Fun Games Automatically? · · Score: 1

    That PDFs more or less print the same any time is more due to luck than because it's such a good spec.

    Yeah, it's totally not because they set out to make a document description language (based off Postscript which was also a document description language). Nope, complete accident. :)

    There are still elements in PDF (look at the recent GIMP review at Arstechnica for example), which are rendered differently in different viewers.

    I think you're referring to http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/gimp-2-6-review.ars/10

    This one wasn't flawless though--you can see the image gets knocked out at the top right of the image below the drop shadow. But Pantone spot plates and drop shadows are still death for modern RIPs. Kodak's own production-level RIP software can't even get it right most of the time, so I can't complain much about GIMP's slightly imperfect rendering.

    A bug where it's "slightly imperfect" (and treated as a bug) is a far cry from printing the same document across multiple versions of Word and getting completely different results - which is what we were originally discussing: why use PDF instead of DOC for distributing a static (not meant to be edited) document.

    I have written a tool which modified existing PDFs. Let me tell you that PDF is a worthless specification.

    So worthless that you wrote a tool for it? :)

    If you're used to the simplicity of SGML, you'll find the PDF spec about as friendly as the jungle by night

    I've been to the jungle (South America) but not at night, so I don't know how scary that's actually supposed to be. :) Hot and sweaty for sure.

    However..

    If you're used to the simplicity of *thing you know well*, you'll find the *thing you don't know well* spec about as friendly as the jungle by night.

    Did you have previous Postscript knowledge? If not, of course PDF was confusing. Postscript/PDF is indeed crazy, but saying "it took me a few weeks to go from zero to a working product" is not exactly a serious condemnation of something.

  20. Re:More to the point on Can We Create Fun Games Automatically? · · Score: 1

    So presumably those patents on the splash screen are now null and void ? Including the one for the implementation of the LZW algorithm, that they don't even own ?

    If they licensed or owned a patent for their software, they would list it in the splash screen. That doesn't mean the patent is require to read/write PDFs. A number of the patents are for the extra crazy features that nobody actually uses (DRM, live web updates, etc) or for their specific way of doing something.

    As mentioned in other comments, LZW is no longer patented (since 2003): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZW#Patents_and_accreditation

    Finally, Open is not a synonym for free of cost.

    I fail to see how anything "open" can also be patented ... I mean what would be the point ?

    Patents could arguably be an early embodiment of open source ideals, since you have to disclose your "source code" to get one. The system has degraded in a number of ways, notably granting patents to non-novel ideas and granting patents when the full steps for reproducibility have not be disclosed, but the original idea of "share with the world how you did it, and you can have a short monopoly on that invention" is still the idea of the patent office.

    Documents that need to be read in 50 or 100 years (for example government archives) need to be in an open document format. Adopting PDF now may cost some money while certain patents are in effect, but over the long term, the ability to fully understand the document without the help of a (possibly since-defunct) private business is the reason to choose an open format.

    Many government records are available to anyone, but come with a per-page copying fee (10 cents or so) or a flat fee (like $30). Think property deeds, marriage licenses, death certificates, etc. Open, but not free. Same idea.

  21. Re:More to the point on Can We Create Fun Games Automatically? · · Score: 3, Informative

    PDF is documented and can be read and written by open tools. Also it prints the same way every time.

  22. Re:more paper == more trees on How Long Should Companies Make E-Bills Available? · · Score: 1

    That's basically what I was trying to say. Good summary.

  23. Re:Going into the air is it? Why can't it be found on Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer? · · Score: 1

    From the ORNL report:
    For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively.

    Sounds to me like they actively measured it, in 1984.

  24. Re:This again! on Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer? · · Score: 1

    Toxic yes, however nobody can find the radioactive waste. That is an assumption of pollution controls as a simple black box from a paper in the 1970s among other flaws.

    Thorium and uranium aren't radioactive?

    ORNL report (ORNL = government funded nuclear research lab)

    Trace quantities of uranium in coal range from less than 1 part per million (ppm) in some samples to around 10 ppm in others. Generally, the amount of thorium contained in coal is about 2.5 times greater than the amount of uranium. For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively.

    The concentration of fissionable uranium-235 (the current fuel for nuclear power plants) has been established to be 0.71% of uranium content.

    Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium.

    Feel free to argue specific numbers, but here are the facts:
    1. Coal contains thorium and uranium
    2. Burning coal releases coal ash into the air
    3. Coal ash contains (surprise!) thorium and uranium
    4. Thorium and uranium are radioactive
    5. Therefore, burning coal releases radioactive waste into the environment.

    We've had more than thirty years to try to find the stuff. So much for "definitely".

    We found it in 1978. And 1982. And 1984. And in the 1990s. Yes, coal definitely contains thorium and uranium.

    We've had more than thirty years to find radioactive elements in coal, and every time we look, we find them!

    A lot of these studies are old mostly because there's no real reason to do them again. Coal emits both toxic and radioactive waste into the environment. We know this. We (mostly) don't care.

    As I keep saying in different ways, people die from the use of coal by various real events so we don't have to make new ones up. This bullshit was just a "why worry about nuclear waste, coal is nuclear waste too" stunt by a PR firm that should have known better (it didn't help the nuclear lobby either) and unfortunately it stuck in people's heads

    PR stunt or not, it is correct.

    Here's some more reading:
    "Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste" from Scientific American.

    I can find tons of screaming eco-freak sites about coal radioactivity, but I've tried to stick to rational, scientific sources.

    Coal ash is (very slightly) radioactive due to it containing trace amounts of thorium and uranium. It's not actually a big deal overall, unless you happen to live near a coal plant - which some people do. Oops. Sucks to be those people!

  25. Re:Do they need more servers !?! on Unemployment Claims Crash State Web Sites · · Score: 1

    And of course, MS SQL Server 6 is running as the primary database, on the same machine.

    MS SQL Server 6 is installed, running, and consuming resources, but the real backend is an Access database.