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User: pavera

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  1. I love sailing on Verizon Changes FiOS AUP, -1, Offtopic · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Sailing is a really great sport and you guys should all try it! Speaking of which, anyone have a 1990 or newer Hobie Cat 16 for sale? Preferably in the western US?

  2. Re:If I lived in Cali... on Car Glass Rules Could Impair Cell, GPS and Radio Signals In CA · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem is, this is how California effectively legislates for the entire nation. The auto industry won't sell 2 different versions of their cars (that would cost too much money, having to have different assembly lines to satisfy the laws of a single state), they will just change the assembly line and install this glass on all new cars regardless of where they are destined. So in effect California is going to create a nationwide mandate and degrade wireless signals inside of cars nationwide. Also, they will raise the cost of cars nationwide, for something they admit has a 12 year ROI. The fact that it costs $250 but takes 12 years to save $250 in gas is pretty insane.

  3. Re:If handled properly.. on Comcast's War On Infected PCs (Or All Customers) · · Score: 1

    Well, we did it because the problem is just too massive. By "the problem" I mean the number of idiots. It was way more cost effective for us to send out a tech for 20-30 minutes fix their pc, and have the customer be happy.

    The alternative of having 2-3 hour tech support calls into our customer service center, where the staff is very entry level and not paid very well (read, not really able to walk a customer through finding, downloading, installing, and running a virus scan. Much less able to walk someone through a nasty spyware removal...) Its simply untenable.

    We had all the tools on USB keychains, and we passed the house call responsibility around between 4 or 5 techs.

    The sad truth is most people aren't idiots in general, but easily 90% of computer users are idiots when it comes to security, best practices, and everything else. Of course 95% of people running windows doesn't help either :)

    Now, comcast as they don't really care what the customer thinks, they are happy to have people call in to their $10/hr customer support people who say "reboot your modem" and if that doesn't fix it they say "it must be your internal network" and that is all they know/can see in their script. They don't care if their customers are frustrated and annoyed. The only reason they can get away with that is cause the only option most people have is DSL from the phone company, which depending on where you are is the same level of service or much worse.

  4. If handled properly.. on Comcast's War On Infected PCs (Or All Customers) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ok.. so its Comcast and we can all assume they will handle it poorly, but I worked at a small local ISP and was responsible for implementing just such a system on our network. The system would notify our NOC engineers about suspected infections, they would investigate more fully, and if the traffic was really suspect, we would log a ticket with customer support who would then call the customer. If we were unable to contact the customer for 48 hours and they didn't call us back we would disable their service.

    Now, it was a little different as we are small and local, and we would send a tech out to their house to help clean the virus off their machine. When customer service called that was part of the call.. It went something like this: "We have detected suspicious traffic coming from your connection. To protect our network and your neighbors who also use our service, if the traffic does not stop within 48 hours we will disconnect your service. If you need any information about the traffic in question we can have an engineer contact you. Also, if you need help installing, updating, or using virus and or spyware removal software, we will be happy to send a tech support engineer to your house to help you remedy this situation."

    We didn't charge for that tech support house call, it was just part of providing excellent service. In short, if it were to be handled appropriately, I don't see any problem with this sort of system. That being said, I feel comcast will probably really botch this, just as any large telecom company would.

    Our system never detected a false positive on for example bittorrent traffic. We did have some on the IRC ports, but less than 5% (not that many people actually use IRC anymore, on a residential ISP network, probably 95%+ of IRC traffic is botnet control). We never turned off someone's connection who was validly using IRC. The customer service tech would ask "do you use IRC?" almost everyone would say "uh.. what is that?" The few people who use it would say "Yes I do" and we would say "Oh ok, that explains it" and that would be that.

    We only ever turned off 1 person's connection, they had left their machine on and left on vacation and it was on a botnet. We disabled their connection as we didn't get a response from them, when they got back they called in, we sent out a tech and cleaned up their machine and that was that.

  5. Re:Out of context theator on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 1

    Well... no we probably haven't spent MILLIONS setting up a replica of the LSE trading network and benchmarked these systems... BUT THE LSE HAS!!
    The article states quite clearly that the accenture/.net system could only achieve 2.7ms/transaction. It also states the system they bought achieves .4ms/transaction. So sure the LSE CTO could just be lying to make himself look good for spending $30 million to buy the company that built this platform... But whatever, its not fanaticism, the system they are buying is better (ACCORDING TO LSE) than the Accenture system.

  6. Re:OK. Let's be a bit careful about "cost" - "qual on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As if Accenture can't "outsource" and hire Sri Lankan developers?

    They are buying the whole company in Sri Lanka, not just hiring them to build a project for them. The software in question already exists, the company in Sri Lanka already built it and is selling it today to other exchanges.

    Further, your statement that its about "going with a cheaper vendor and a software platform that GIVES THEM MORE CONTROL" is very much a damning of Microsoft and its technology. With Microsoft you don't have control THEY DO. And they charge you an arm and a leg to take that control away from you...

  7. Re:Cheaper labor in Sir Lankan? on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 1

    The software is already built. The article states that LSE had a selection process, started with 20 vendors/platforms, shortlisted 4 of those, and brought those platforms in and ran them in a test environment for a period of time and then selected MilleniumIT as the winner. Yes, they have to transition their production systems to the new system, but the software is already written, and is already being used on other exchanges. There is mention made in the article of other exchanges that are running this software and how they are worried now that a competing exchange owns the technology that they are using.

    So while the project could still fail in the transition period, there is a much smaller risk of failure since the software is already built.

  8. Re:LSE Acquired the Dev Shop on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 4, Informative

    You are not accurate. The LSE bought a dev shop that ALREADY BUILT A TRADING PLATFORM, that is being used today in other exchanges. The platform in question ALREADY achieves 6 times the performance of their existing platform (built by accenture), and has MORE FEATURES.

    And they are moving from an outsourced dev model to an in house model, as they now own the devs and the software. Sure they devs are still in Sri Lanka, but Accenture could just as easily hire people in India or Sri Lanka to get the same cost savings.

  9. Re:It's not a win, it's a better fight. on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 4, Informative

    Uhh... I've never seen this level of RTFA and.. man this is slashdot where that is the norm.

    the LSE ALREADY ENTERED A PURCHASE AGREEMENT TO BUY THE COMPANY that ALREADY BUILT A TRADING PLATFORM THAT IS BEING USED TODAY IN OTHER EXCHANGES! The deal closes in the next week or 2. The article says 95% of the "Non-Refundable" parts of the deal have already been transacted. Neither the LSE nor Millenium IT (the Sri Lankan company that is being purchased) is walking away from this deal.

    You don't spend $30 million dollars and purchase a company if you aren't moving your software to that platform. The article states they already had a trial phase and brought in originally 20 platforms, shortlisted 4, ran those for a period, and MilleniumIT won. They then decided to purchase the entire company. This process is much further along the road than you seem to think.

  10. Re:Out of context theator on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You are incorrect, they are trading a $65 million dollar piece of software for a $30 million COMPANY. They bought the MilleniumIT company that had ALREADY IMPLEMENTED a trading platform. They bought the company for the platform, and now they control the development of the platform going forward in house. They are not trading one IT consultancy for another, as they now OWN the software and the company that built it.

    However, they state the platform they bought ALREADY achieves 6 times the performance of the piece of software built by accenture (.4ms vs 2.7ms transaction times).

    While I agree that this is more of an indictment of Accenture's apparently shoddy work than of .NET itself, the fact that they've had 6 years (the article states the TradElect software/project was started in 2003) and $65 million dollars thrown at the problem and haven't been able to make the software perform better does raise some eyebrows about the underlying technology as well.

  11. Re:Cheaper labor in Sir Lankan? on London Stock Exchange Rejects .NET For Open Source · · Score: 4, Informative

    You didn't read the article did you?

    It was cheaper for them to buy the WHOLE COMPANY that had built this technology, than it was to continue running/maintaining a .NET application. The .NET application was built and maintained by accenture, who can just as easily hire cheap devs in india or sri lanka as any other outsourced IT consultancy.

    Also, they specifically state multiple times that the .NET solution would not scale to meet their needs, the quoted stats are 2.7ms/transaction in .NET and the linux app performs the same transaction in .4ms... So the linux system can handle 6-7 times the transactions on the same hardware...

    They are talking about scaling up from 100 million transactions a day to 5-6 billion, so, yeah having to buy 6 times less hardware will probably save them some cash.

  12. Re:Disclaimer "this article sponsored by VMware" on The Perils of Ramming Products Down IT's Throat · · Score: 1

    Thats all fine and dandy today... what about 5 years from now when the free solution has successfully put vmware out of business or they are now a shell of their former self... And Microsoft gets to pull their regular monopolistic pricing on you. Now you have 5k virtual machines running on 2k CPUs and now, MS says, well windows 2014 will only run in hyper-v 2014, and hyper-v 2014 is now 2500/CPU/year + 100/VM/year. Your free solution just got a whole lot more expensive.

    Microsoft has years and years of experience pulling this stunt. They've done it over and over again in multiple markets (OS, and office suites are the two obvious ones. I remember when Windows cost $99 and office cost $99, and you could use that copy of windows and office on your work computer and as many "home" computers as you wanted. They were never free, but those products have far exceeded even health care in inflation over the last 15 years. In 1995 I spent a total of $200 and had legal licenses of the latest OS and office suite for 3 computers. Today that same licensing would cost me more than $3000, luckily I moved to linux in 2002.) To not expect the same inflation in the virtualization market after VMware is killed off is the definition of insanity.

  13. Re:This is a surprise how? on iPhone 3.1 Update Disables Tethering · · Score: 1

    Any idea on when this might actually come to pass? I know I shouldn't be using tethering, but when the only other option is to pay $60/mo for a separate USB key and I use it very rarely. I maybe use tethering 2-3 times/mo for maybe 10-15 minutes at a time. Obviously $60/mo isn't worth that tiny amount of usage.

    (I only use tethering when I'm on call and not at home, and a support request comes in... the intersection of those 3 events is pretty small). Anyway, if it is only an additional $25 that would be great, but when it isn't even an option at any price it is pretty annoying that they turned it off early. I could perfectly understand releasing this software the day AT&T releases a supported tethering plan, or a week or 2 before even. But when the at&t tethering plan is still only rumored, and, probably won't be available for many months (My guess is next summer after they complete all the 3G upgrades they've announced), well... that is really unacceptable. The only reason I broke down and bought an iphone was because it offered tethering, otherwise I would have gone with another blackberry and verizon.

  14. Re:This is a surprise how? on iPhone 3.1 Update Disables Tethering · · Score: 1

    AT&T hasn't announced pricing for the iphone tethering plan, where are you getting $25/mo? Further, you can't add tethering as there is NO IPHONE TETHERING PLAN. So until AT&T gets their crap together, US users are once again without any options or recourse. I can see launching this update once AT&T has an option to compensate, until then this is just plain EVIL. I have heard rumors that the tethering alone could be as much as $60/mo (on top of the $30/mo data plan for the phone).

    Anyway, I agree though that this isn't surprising, just more apple + at&t being evil, which is something anyone who has dealt with either company for more than a week should totally expect. Just bend over and take it.

  15. Business Model? on Clojure and Heroku Predict Flight Delays · · Score: 1

    How are they going to keep this cluster of servers running (they use EC2, so they don't have THAT much overhead), crunching all that data? I don't see why anyone would pay anything for this, after all its just an educated guess...

  16. Re:Hey anyone remember the Network Computer? on Microsoft vs. Google — Mutually Assured Destruction · · Score: 1

    Difference between then and now is anyone who cares about computing and uses computers on a regular basis has high speed internet, so using the internet as a storage device is much more practical and usable than it was even 5 years ago. 5 years ago the best internet I could get at my house was 512kbps down and 128kbps up, I now have 10mbps down and 5mbps up and if I wanted to pay another $30/mo I could get 30mbps both ways...

    This makes all the difference, being able to download a 10MB file in 10 seconds is usable, vs 5 years ago that same file took 2 minutes. Granted high speed internet in the US isn't anywhere near ubiquitous, but it is much better and much faster than it was 5 years ago in most metropolitan areas.

    The time of the "Network Computer" is coming, and faster than I think most people think.

  17. Re:A teachers take on A Mathematician's Lament — an Indictment of US Math Education · · Score: 1

    recognizing effort is ok, I suppose... But as a talented and rather bright student I always found that completely insidious and hurtful to my education.

    IE, I don't know how many advanced and AP classes I took where the other kids in the class were there because they "tried really hard" and so the teachers let them in... Well guess what? That just slowed down my education, cause now the advanced teacher is having to babysit, review, and in general spend all of the time in the class helping these remedial math students understand basic algebra before we can actually get into calculus.

    Or the AP Chemistry class I had where a total of 2 (and yes I was one of them) (OUT OF 35) passed the AP test, because 33 of the 35 kids could barely handle algebra and they didn't have even a basic understanding of molecules, atoms, or anything else.

    This is what rewarding effort gets you, it gets you a bunch of idiots who are good at hard work, not people that are actually smart, or able to learn.

  18. Re:Read the Freaking patent on IBM Wants Patent For Regex SSN Validation · · Score: 1

    how about just about every single web 2.0 app I've ever used? You seriously haven't filled out a form that real time validated username availability? or that an email address actually looks like an email address? or that the zip code you entered is a valid zip code? I've seen at least those 3, and I've implemented 2 of them (zip code validator and email address validator) in javascript just like they talk about. 8 years ago.

  19. Re:Is this just USA? on Why Is It So Difficult To Fire Bad Teachers? · · Score: 1

    Its worse now, and it was bad when I was in high school 12-16 years ago. In my entire school career (k-12 and 2 years of college) I had 2 teachers that I considered good teachers. The rest of them were all there to simply collect a paycheck until they hit 20 years and get to then draw a 75% pension for the rest of their lives. so... my experience would be the exact opposite. 95% of teachers are just there to babysit the kids and take advantage of a flawed compensation system. Only 5% have a desire to actually help kids and try to help them improve their lives.

    I know 3 or 4 teachers who are currently teaching in middle or high schools... I hear no end of complaints from them about how horrible their kids are, how bad their jobs are, and how poorly they are paid. Personally I don't know I've never tried to live on a teachers salary, but I do know the 2 teachers I had that I liked both felt that the pay was extremely high for what they did. At the time, the teachers were required to be at school from 7:10am until 1:45pm, with 30 minutes for lunch and a 50 minute prep period, so.. a 6.5 hour workday. And the work year is from the first week of sept until the first week of june... When I was in high school the teachers all had student aids that did most of the grading, and they could use the 50 minute prep period to develop the next day's class. So there was basically 0 work outside of school hours. Anyway, my point being at most it is a 3/4's time job, for about 3/4's of the year, so how are they expecting to be paid as if its a full time job? This is from my 2 favorite teachers, who taught well, loved their jobs, but also had interests outside of school. One had a business that they ran afternoons and during the summer that contributed to their earnings, another loved the teaching schedule because it allowed them to travel extensively during the summer.

    Anyway, 2 classes in 14 years of class taking operated as you describe, with the teacher working with the students, and actually having a collaborative experience.

  20. Re:That's what you get... on Options For a Laptop With a Broken Screen? · · Score: 2, Funny

    its not all white, its got a red stripe too...

  21. This has to be... on Think-Tank Warns of Internet "Brownouts" Starting Next Year · · Score: 1

    The most poorly written article ever.

    I don't own a single computer that will "jitter" or "freeze" if my internet connection is down. Who on earth does?
    Individual applications may be effected, however it will not "freeze" the computer. I hate idiots that write about things they don't understand.
    And, who are these people that are using their home pc's as mainframes? How do the kids getting home from school and playing games making the home computer slow? Who is noticing? unless they are somehow using that pc as a terminal server no one. Is it making the rest of the computers in the house internet access slower? That is a completely different thing than making the computer slow.

  22. Kids? How about Americans period... on Narcissistic College Graduates In the Workplace? · · Score: 1

    Seriously, I am an American, but I really think in general, as a society, we have become so completely "entitled" in the last 20-30 years it is insane.
    Back in the day (IE 70s early 80s) it was EXPECTED that you work 70-80 hours a week for at least 5-10 years if you wanted to be a millionaire.

    If you wanted to be able to send your kids to college that MEANT BY DEFINITION that you worked 80 hour weeks to try to make the money it took. I remember growing up the 8 years my dad spent building his business up from nothing, he never took a single day off family vacations were at most 2 days long (aka a weekend non of this pansy 3 or 4 day work week crap), he worked mon-sat and most sundays for 8 STRAIGHT YEARS. This was 100% NORMAL back then. Everyone I meet these days thinks that they are going to start the next google and just have a billion dollars dropped in their laps.

    And even people who aren't "starting" something think they automatically DESERVE a college education, a 6 figure income, and a couple vacation homes. That is absolutely bizarre! Used to be that you had to have good grades, a proven track record of work, and at least a minimal ability to reason to get accepted to college... My college experience in the late 90's was so seriously lacking in any sort of actual intellectual stimulation that it was a complete waste of time and money. Being relatively ambitious, a quick learner, and motivated I was extremely disappointed to start 4 more years of high school. It was just as bad, stupid kids making lame excuses for why they couldn't spend 20 minutes doing some lame assignment.

    Worse still are the welfare jerk offs like the octomom that just expect society to take care of them regardless of their complete lack of contribution. America in general is suffering because as a society we have become entirely too "entitled". If we don't wake up soon, the chinese and indians who are willing to work 80-100 hour weeks to make their lives better will steal the world out of our lazy hands. Everyone just better step up and start working your butts off and quit whining about not getting paid enough, if you make enough for a) housing b) food c) clothes (and not a penthouse in manhattan, filet mignon, and gucci, but a 2 bedroom apt, top ramen, and levis) then you make enough to live and work. So get to FREAKING WORK! LAZY PUNKS!

  23. Re:Woahh... on Red Hat Hit With Patent Suit Over JBoss · · Score: 1

    Only half a dozen?

    I'm not proud of this... but when I was in high school (14 years ago) I wrote an MS Access application, it stored things through ODBC to a real DB server (I forget which one... I didn't maintain the DB, just pointed my ODBC connection to it...). Anyway, VBA was/is object oriented... would that count? And how many millions of VBA/Access apps were developed before 1997?

    Anyway, since that time I've grown up (C/C++, Java, Python) but I've violated this patent at least 500 times in the last 10 years...

  24. Re:No ORM? In 1998? Yeah, right. on Red Hat Hit With Patent Suit Over JBoss · · Score: 1

    read the patent? There ain't no coding around it, and every single ORM on the planet violates it rails, django, sqlalchemy, hibernate, it doesn't matter, if it has an ORM it violates this patent. Were ORMs really invented in 1997? No one had thought about this before then? I dunno... every reference I can find just points to object databases...

    So, I guess we can all license this patent from these guys, or get rid of OO all together (or get rid of RDBMS all together and just move to data stores like couchDB)... This patent covers any method of taking data from a relational database and putting that data into an object as a property of that object.... if you have ever written this:

    cursor.execute("select * from users")
    users = cursor.fetchall()
    for user in users:
    user_objs.append(User(username=user['username'], first_name=user['first_name'])
    user_objs[0].username

    you've violated this patent cause it pretty broadly covers any method of taking data out of a database and putting it on an object. I've written code like that.. oh I dunno every single project I've worked on in the last 10 years... unfortunately I didn't begin my programming life until after this patent had been filed.

  25. Re:Great! on Smart Immigrants Going Home · · Score: 1

    Its also the brilliant strategy that has brought us al queda and most of the leaders of terrorist sponsoring countries.... so you go right ahead with your bad self