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User: eric2hill

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  1. Re:That's great, now what about the police? on Gamers Involved In Fatal Wichita 'Swatting' Indicted On Federal Charges (kansas.com) · · Score: 1
  2. That's great, now what about the police? on Gamers Involved In Fatal Wichita 'Swatting' Indicted On Federal Charges (kansas.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Shouldn't they ALSO be held accountable for showing up at a house and killing someone who WASN'T ARMED? Isn't that manslaughter? I hate the double-standard.

  3. I still use it on Netflix's DVD Rental Business Is Still Profitable (fortune.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The DVD/BD catalog is vastly superior to the streaming catalog. About once a year, I get onto a chat with Netflix and we go through my queue (of around 15 to 20 movies) to see what is available in the streaming catalog, and typically there's only 1 or 2 titles available on streaming out of my queue. Until Netflix can offer up a statistically significant number (is 80% too much to ask for?) of movies in my queue via streaming, I'll stick with the DVD/BD subscription thanks.

  4. Additionally, police (including SWAT) go through quite a bit of training. The cop who shot Andrew Finch should go to jail. Period. I don't care if it's a "heightened situation" or not. The police need to learn to de-escalate, and should only be allowed to shoot when there's clearly a gun pointed at them or they've been shot at. Just thinking a possible perp MIGHT be going for a weapon is no excuse to shoot. Period.

  5. Re:Don't just get a mail provider. Get an address. on Ask Slashdot: Advice For a Yahoo Mail Refugee · · Score: 2

    To add on to this great advice, PAY for G Suite. It's $50/year for the mailbox, completely ad-free, and comes with business support. It doesn't support complete integration like the free gmail account (Play family sharing is a particular pain point), but it's the best anti-spam solution available today and that's worth the money alone. Add to it the benefits of Drive, Photos, Hangouts, etc and it's a fantastic value for the money.

  6. Re:High value items, use registered mail on $10K Package Of Super Nintendo Games Finally Found By Post Office (eurogamer.net) · · Score: 1

    I used registered mail to ship something to Canada and it just evaporated after it was picked up by USPS. No scans, no tracking information, nothing. USPS said the registration was invalid and sorry about your bad luck. I lost over $100 on that shipment with no recourse since USPS blamed me for the issue.

  7. Re:I'm okay with it being rented on Microsoft Announces Surface as a Service, Windows 10 Enterprise E3 for $7 Per User Per Month (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2

    * The inability to prevent Windows 10 from phoning home for reasons I'm prevented from knowing.

    If you care, there's a great PowerShell script available that turns off everything that's known so far. We're going to include it in our deployment script on principle.

  8. Indeed.

  9. Re:I might get crucified but.. on Lenovo Could Remake the ThinkPad X300 With Current Technologies · · Score: 1

    I was right there with you until I got my MacBook Air. Apple has really nailed the touchpad. It's far better than any other touchpad I've ever used. The trackpoint is good, but the touchpad done right is great. I haven't had a chance to use the force touch thing yet, but it seems to be an incremental improvement by the clear leader.

    That said, the Mac keyboard is a distinct step down from the ThinkPad keyboard. If Lenovo could license the Mac touchpad, or Mac would license the ThinkPad keyboard, they would have my credit card on day 1.

  10. It Came From The Desert on Researchers Nearly Double the Size of Worker Ants · · Score: 2

    Anyone remember this classic? It Came from the Desert

  11. A hearty meh on FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors' Chips. · · Score: 2

    I've used FTDI products for *years* and with just a very few exceptions have had zero issues with compatibility and performance. They are my number one supplier of USB to serial chips, and I still don't have any issues recommending them. Their drivers are very stable, and they work hard to make them for every platform. If they want to go after the counterfeiters, more power to them. Filing a lawsuit against a small shell company selling back-room chips pretending to be FTDI chips won't do any good. Brick a thousand shitty chips and things might change.

  12. That's not the story you should be telling on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure? · · Score: 1

    Like the electric company, yes, you should strive for 100% uptime. But that should be a footnote in your report. The main report should show how you have leveraged IT to lower costs in other areas, make the company more efficient, and you've improved the customer experience in a meaningful way. Stop thinking your job is to keep the computers running. Start thinking your job is to help the company run better.

    What have you done outside IT today?

  13. Re:Amazon costs are relatively fixed on Ask Slashdot: Do Any Development Shops Build-Test-Deploy On A Cloud Service? · · Score: 1

    For this particular use case scenario, it would be better to skip the EBS disks and use ephemeral disks with instances that are spawned purely for the build and test, check their results back into the build system, and self-destruct. You could even request spot instances since the workload isn't particularly time dependent.

    You're right, if Amazon goes down, you're down without much recourse. But if you've designed your system to use instances that are launched on demand, you just launch them in a different availability zone and/or region. The odds that *every* Amazon datacenter goes down at the same time are extremely low.

  14. LOGO on the Apple II on How Did You Learn How To Program? · · Score: 1
  15. Re:give me the ability to reverse system time on Taking the Pain Out of Debugging With Live Programming · · Score: 2
  16. Re:Having visited it as well on Swimming With Spacemen In NASA's Giant NBL Pool · · Score: 2

    I would have just taken my shoes off and thrown them in one direction.

  17. Re:They should have gone with Python on Gnome Goes JavaScript · · Score: 1

    Just because you've seen a porn, doesn't mean you know how to be a parent.

    That's brilliant.

    The whole debate over who's language is better is really a moot issue. Javascript can be coded faster than C in many cases because of its' relaxed syntax and foundation primitives. C winds up running faster (all things being equal) in most cases, with a few exceptions where the Javascript RT can optimize better. In the end, you just have to use the best tool for the job.

  18. Hotel Safes Problematic Too on Maker of Hackable Hotel Locks Finally Agrees To Pay For Bug Fix · · Score: 2

    I was just in a hotel last week and had put my laptop in the room safe. I entered my 6 digit code and locked the safe. Two days later, I tried to open it and it wouldn't take my pin. I called the hotel staff and a maintenance guy came to my room with a small 10-key pad that had an LCD display. He plugged an RJ45 cable into a port on the bottom of the locking device, entered 2468#, then 1357#, and the safe opened. After it was open, it flashed LO-BAT, so that explains why it lost my combination.

    If it's as easy as having one of those pin pads, why even have the safe in the room?

  19. Re:Wacom Inkling on Ask Slashdot: Digital Pens On Linux? · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxwacom/forums/forum/236871/topic/4686734

    The Wacom Inkling shows up as a drive with WPI files on it. It should work just fine in Linux since the heavy lifting is all done on the pen. And I didn't spend very long looking either.

  20. Re:Screw Oracle on Oracle's Sparc T5 Chip Evidently Pushed Back to 2013 · · Score: 1

    The firmware thing was what caused me to start recommending other server manufacturers. The Sun hardware was actually really nice, well designed, and very stable. The ILOM was great since it was so tightly integrated with the hardware and yet completely out of band, and was included with the server at no real additional cost.

    Then Oracle bought Sun and turned off firmware support unless you had an active support contract. That was a big *fuck you* to everyone who bought a bunch of Sun hardware and only kept support on a few critial units. I know firmware updates aren't free to make, but that's the price of good customer service.

    Oracle, you've lost my business.

  21. Re:Much Better Video Available on World's First Color Moving Pictures Discovered · · Score: 2

    I thought the same thing. I would imagine they already had equipment to deal with 35mm film, and it was easier to transfer it to 35mm to feed that equipment rather than retrofitting the equipment to take a larger source.

    I'm surprised they MANUALLY advanced each frame through the little shutter contraption. Don't any of these guys have a bag of Legos they could automate that process with???

  22. Much Better Video Available on World's First Color Moving Pictures Discovered · · Score: 5, Informative

    YouTube has a much better video than the one linked in the article that contains the process they went through and talks about the capture and projection intended by the inventor.

  23. Re:I have long been annoyed by Cisco business poli on Cisco Accused of Orchestrating Engineer's Arrest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You don't buy Cisco because of the features, you buy Cisco because of TAC. At 2:30 AM when you have 96 phone lines down, the call center opens in 3 hours, and you're getting call supervision with no voice traffic, you call TAC. I got an engineer out of their Sydney office on the phone in 14 minutes, and we had the problem resolved within an hour. (It was a telco provisioning problem.) Having someone on hand to support a problem 24 hours a day, and a supply chain that can send a part out in 4 hours is a safety net worth paying for.

  24. Re:Dear Amazon on Amazon Stymies Lendle E-book Lending Service · · Score: 1

    Just to be clear, the Harry Potter series isn't available in eBook format. JK won't allow it for some reason.