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User: rnicey

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  1. Quite the Opposite on Ask Slashdot: Career Advice For an Aging Perl Developer? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Time to move to management. Fluff the resume a bit and put yourself out there as someone who can manage a decent term project and get stuff done. Job interviews, much like everything in life, comes down to 10% what you say, and 90% how you say it. Come across as wise not old, confident not down on yourself, and have an air of "If you don't hire me you're a f'in moron" without actually saying that, and you might be surprised what you get.

  2. Re:Two problems on Ask Slashdot: What's the Future of Desktop Applications? · · Score: 2

    I respectfully disagree. Especially if I'm the sysadmin of the centralized cloud servers.

    Although my original comment was somewhat fatuous, a user on a single machine is much more often a security/failure risk. It's not so much which is better and more reliable these days (it's certainly centralized control and storage, aka 'The Cloud'), but who controls that central point. This all started decades ago with centralized file servers, and processing farms for big data. It's eventually going to be just the browser, or more likely some sort of Chromeish OS that works on a cloud. Again, being able to setup and control that cloud is the real crux of it.

  3. Re:Two problems on Ask Slashdot: What's the Future of Desktop Applications? · · Score: 1

    You talking about the desktop or the cloud? :)

  4. When you can't tell the difference. Looong way to go.

  5. Re:I don't care if he was supporting a bill to imp on Mozilla CEO Firestorm Likely Violated California Law · · Score: 1

    I must respectfully disagree. By simply campaigning against him, he may consider himself harassed. Free speech, to be really free, must have license to offend.

    There is no reasonable definition of harass here, that's the real problem. It's basically what you could probably get a civil jury to agree with, and I think we've all noticed how split right down the middle this whole case is. Is it harassment if 90% of the Mozilla user base stops using the product? Is it harassment to write a letter to the board protesting their choice? Is it harassment to stand outside their offices with a placard chanting? If he feels harassed he has every right to file protective motions in a court of law, I doubt he'll be following that up though.

    As for your uncivil points, a lot of people would argue that 'yes' he was being uncivil when he donated money to that cause. Other people would disagree (maybe me included). People are going to have their say, and California criminal codes don't trump the constitution of the land.

    Nice post though, made me stop and think for a minute. It's a shame we have to tolerate the horrible, nasty, venom filled, bigoted, hurtful, degrading and insulting free speech to allow all the other good stuff. But it's well worth that offence and harassment.

  6. Re:Started something on Ties of the Matrix: An Exercise in Combinatorics · · Score: 2

    Matrix Reloaded was merely a disappointing film. Matrix Revolutions was a shitty, nasty sorry excuse and complete waste of time for a film. Mostly because it wasn't set inside the fucking Matrix. Honestly, if you're going to have a final war between man and machine, set it up to occur inside the matrix, not just the final fight. An army of super humans against machines.... much better than that mech crap we all fell asleep watching.

    Now you've got me started ... Ties pfft ... goddam

  7. Re:And the crucial details.. missing on NSA Foils Much Internet Encryption · · Score: 1

    As it's fairly obvious that the NSA has access to major routers at telecoms, SSL Observatory wouldn't notice a thing. The attack is trivially aimed at specific targets only. i.e. only redirect traffic from the target IP to the fake server with the real looking certificate that's recording everything.

  8. Re: wtf on Supreme Court Decides Your Silence May Be Used Against You · · Score: 2

    He wasn't charged with falling to answer, nor was he beaten until he did. The court and jury were simply informed of his answering pattern and it convinced them to find him guilty.
    We've got the same crap in the UK, they can now tell the jury that you remained silent and doesn't that look guilty?
    The solution is now not to say 'no comment pig', but to say, 'on the advice of my lawyer, no comment pig'! This way you have an excuse in court. You point at your lawyer and claim he told you to.

  9. Welcome to 3 years ago on Why "Verified By Visa" System Is Insecure · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm in the high risk card not present industry and if it wasn't so painful it'd be funny how bad it is.

    3DS solves problems for Visa and nobody else. It transfers the liability from the merchant to the customer. No more 'it wasn't me'.

    Only problem is, it's crap.

    Bit like the chip and pin problem in the UK which is a similar joke. If I can get your card and your pin I can go shopping as you and good luck trying to explain that to the bank.

    If I can fool you into giving me your 3DS password somehow, I can shop online as you with great false trust, and the merchants don't care because they're protected. Kind of.

    Most merchants refuse to deploy it anyhow unless forced. It causes a 5-8% immediate drop in throughput. I wouldn't use a site that used it either.

  10. A Better Reference is on The History of the Federal Reserve · · Score: 2, Funny
  11. Re:thinking about something new? think again on Thinking about Rails? Think Again · · Score: 1

    Here's the Java version (give or take a bit):

    parseFolders(File target)
    {
    for (File item : Collections.sort(target.getFiles()))
      if (item.isDirectory())
        parseFolders(item);
      else
        someAction(item);
    }

    Here's the Perl version (give or take a bit of syntax):
    sub parseFolders()
    {
      my $target = @_[0];
      foreach my $item (sort $target->files)
      {
          if ($item->isDirectory) {
            parseFolders($item);
          } else {
            action($item);
          }
      }

    C++?
    parseFolders(Folder folder)
    {
      folder.sortByName();
      for (int i = 0 ; i folder.getItemCount() ; i++)
      {
          File file = folder.getFileItem(i);
          if (file.isDirectory())
            parseFolders(file);
          else
            action(file);
      }
    }

    My point? Syntax is syntax. Evaluate a language based on it's toolkits, libraries, code maintainability and performance. Almost 90% of the time language choice doesn't matter much for single website projects with less than 25k lines of code (and I mean proper code, not hotwired bodge).

  12. Re:Great! on Google Releases MySQL Enhancements · · Score: 2, Funny

    Because then they'd have to admit that they're a fancy SQL parser, and most of the real meat is contributed by a company called Oracle (ahem Innobase). That said, InnoDB is a real nice data engine.

  13. Re:best Gosling quote ever... on Q&A With James Gosling, Father of Java · · Score: 1

    If I get him right, you'd abstract the interface (which is the point of them anyhow, so maybe inherit is a better term). Eventually you'd have a Mustang class that implements the Car interface which extends the Vehicle interface. It's still abstraction because 'mustang instanceof Vehicle = true'. You'd surely have to be able to specify methods on your interfaces, otherwise as you state you have duplicate code everywhere. By the time you boil all that down you're looking at another weird version of multiple inheritance.

    I'm totally with you however on requiring programming methodology. I'm pro choice there.

  14. Re:Shh on Scientists Say Nerves Use Sound, Not Electricity · · Score: 1

    Muscles react to electricity, but I was thinking along the same lines.

  15. Re:Still no "device"/single file support on MySQL 5 Production in November · · Score: 1

    What are you smoking? You can use files, partitions etc.

    Creating the InnoDB Tablespace:
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-init .html

    Using Per-Table Tablespaces:
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/multiple-ta blespaces.html

  16. Re:MySQL's biggest problem on MySQL 5 Production in November · · Score: 1

    Do they need to? I thought they could sell GPL code as long as they provide the source code to their own linked product, which they already do.

  17. Re:MySQL's biggest problem on MySQL 5 Production in November · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm hoping, because they didn't need to.

    From what I understand there are several developers at MySQL who understand the innodb codebase extremely well. The first smell of trouble from Oracle and they fork the last GPL version and take it from there.

    I personally believe that Oracle bought Innobase to get their hands on the developers hoping to starve development on innodb. I hope that that isn't the case, or even possible.

    Innodb, imho, is a seriously nice transaction engine. It's very very Oracle in it's design. I'm still not entirely sure why they haven't thrown out MyISAM in favour of it. It performs just as well and has no downsides. The old myth of keeping it lean and fast in favour of MyISAM is a bunch of rot. InnoDB is extremely fast.

  18. Re:/. concerned? on Oracle Acquires Innobase · · Score: 1

    Your big problem is that the license that MySQL has to include InnoDB in their product expires soon. If it doesn't get renewed then without question they lose half of their user base.

    I certainly can't do without transactions, foreign keys, table spaces etc. etc.

  19. Re:Consider switching to someone less petulant on Internet Partitioning - Cogent vs Level 3? · · Score: 1

    From what I understand, and I have not checked it myself, Cogent is refusing to advertise its routes through Verio or any of it's remaining peers who may be connected to L3. I don't think L3 would have any problem routing to Cogent via another peer if Cogent was to advertise it.

  20. Napster can be iTunes too. on Business Models: Napster to Go vs. iPod · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's worth mentioning that you can spend 99c / track at Napster too if you really like that model. So at Napster you have more choice. FWIW I think Napster is easier to use too.

  21. Re:Florida bankruptcy laws? on $1 Billion Awarded in Lawsuit Against Spammers · · Score: 1

    According to one of the links the judgements are against the spamming companies. Unless someone pierces the corporate veil here (which is quite possible), the individuals won't even notice.

  22. Re:Google needs to toss its cookies... on Gmail Accounts Vulnerable to XSS Exploit · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's really iffy design.

    The hash or whatever that validates the cookie's authenticity should have the IP address and expiry time (from the servers point of view) embedded in it. Why this isn't part of some standard library for a software house like Google makes me wonder...

  23. Re:conspiracy theories on Kevin Rose Load Tests Gmail · · Score: 4, Informative

    What he thinks is most likely a bunch of rot.

    Decompress a gig on the fly when you login. Please... Do me a lemon.

    The real trick is in the routing for this type of application. When mail is delivered it is switched to a bank of servers which deal with your account (and many others obviously). The messages are indexed and stored.

    When you login there will be a range of load balanced servers routing your read requests back to that same bank of storage from the frontline web servers.

    Limit management is either done in the application logic, or in the database engine. Under load, with simultaneous receipts it's easy to see why you could go over 100% of storage. It's either that or you have to serialize the delivery per user which would suck and be harder.

    It's not a hard concept, but it is tricky to get right in implementation. This is what Google does best though.

  24. Average on InfoWorld 2004 Salary Survey Results · · Score: 2

    Well if they all claim that they're below average we know it's not true.

    In this ever shrinking world people and skills are more a tradable commodity than ever before. How hard you work no longer has much to do with it, how much you can produce is. Hardly a newsflash, been going that way forever. But some still think they _should_ be making more money.

  25. Re:Lawsuit! on DirecTV Extortion Program stopped by EFF · · Score: 1

    You're entitled to your opinion, and I wasn't talking about federal court, of course.

    You're actually agreeing with me, the whole issue is jurisdiction. Unless you own stuff in the state you're being sued in, so what? They still need to get before a local judge to explain themselves in order to ENFORCE that judgement and get the local sheriff involved. Now they're playing on your turf and your attorney's fees are considerably reduced. I'm not saying this is the correct thing to do, a motion to dismiss based on jurisdiction in the foreign state would be my first stop.

    Bottom line, if anyone takes either of our advice without paying for an attorney they deserve anything they get.