Slashdot Mirror


User: Just+Some+Guy

Just+Some+Guy's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
11,329
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 11,329

  1. Re:Logical names fail eventually on Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do? · · Score: 1

    Over time, systems get refactored for uses that they were not originally intended, so that box named web1 is now an ftp server and nobody bothered to rename it.

    Consequences of virtualization: our servers are named "jail1", "jail2", etc. Our intranet server, "web3", is a FreeBSD jail that happens to reside on "jail3" today (but I could move it to "jail2" in about 5 minutes.

  2. Re:Wines, cheeses, trees on Why Do We Name Servers the Way We Do? · · Score: 1

    On the other hand, if I told you 'mx2' and 'nas1' are down, you have a better idea of what you're dealing with... Forget that there's a CNAME from mail to daffy and a CNAME from p0rnserver to nas1.

    Conveniently, you can still "ssh mail" and get into daffy.

  3. Re:Is there anything the RIAA can do? on Will the New RIAA Tactic Boost P2P File Sharing? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the RIAA had perfect aim and only took out pirates that it could prove were pirates, they'd have a lot more sympathy.

    Not really. I don't care if a given 16-year-old kid is guilty - I don't want him sued out of his college fund. If the RIAA had sued for reasonable amounts (say, $5-$10 per proven upload) and gone about it fairly, I might have a little sympathy. As it is, they're on the short list of people I'm going looking for if we ever have another civil war.

  4. Re:Is there anything the RIAA can do? on Will the New RIAA Tactic Boost P2P File Sharing? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If the fact that we live in a society that values toilet paper more than theater offends you, then you need to make the decisions in your life that reflect this.

    Most engineers understand the concept of "supply and demand". Basically, there are more people capable and willing to do children's theater than business analysis. How would you "correct" this?

  5. Re:Ruby vs Python on Ruby 1.9.1 Released · · Score: 1

    Consider the Ruby iterator pattern:

    a = [3,4,5]
    a.each do |x|
    puts x
    end

    Having not used Ruby, I've never quite gotten why this is so special. The Python equivalent would be:

    for x in a: print x

    It's not creating an anonymous function, but it's doing the same work otherwise. Can you give an example of why the Ruby way is better? I'm asking genuinely; I'd really like to see what makes this cool.

    The neat thing here is that it's easy and natural to implement your own custom version of each for your classes. By defining this one method, and including the mixin module Enumerable on your class, you get definitions for a bunch of other useful standard collection methods such as map, find, select/reject and so on.

    What does that buy you over Python's list comprehensions or generator expressions?

  6. Re:!gonvidia on The "Bloody Mess" That Is Intel's Poulsbo Driver · · Score: 1

    Not to be too picky, but if you were using a agp2x card (using free bsd) and had that old of a system you were hardly playing games on it anyway, were you?

    I liked an occasional game of Tux Racer and some Second Life. Oh, and I forgot a little detail earlier: I got it backwards, and the security vulnerability was in the NVidia driver itself! They didn't backport the fix to the version of the driver that supported my card. With FOSS, at least I could try to port it myself.

    And you could probably stick without the graphics acceleration, right?

    Sure, but why? Although old, the card itself worked fine. The rest of the system was in great shape, too. There's no reason in the world why I should have had to upgrade everything to replace a working system as long as I'm OK with its performance.

  7. Re:!gonvidia on The "Bloody Mess" That Is Intel's Poulsbo Driver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You do realize that you never ever absolutely have to upgrade your kernel if everything is working hunky-dory, right?

    Spare some love for non-Linux OSes. I had a choice with an Nvidia card in my FreeBSD system a while back: upgrade the kernel to fix security vulnerabilities or keep using my graphics card. Nvidia had deprecated my card, so the driver that was compatible with the new kernel didn't support it. Since it was an AGP 2x motherboard that couldn't accept newer cards, the choice really came down to upgrading the kernel, graphics card, motherboard, CPU, and RAM, or sticking with an insecure system. Yay, binary blob drivers!

  8. Re:Linux deserves its reputation on If Windows 7 Fails, Citrix (Not Linux) Wins · · Score: 1

    Makes sense. And I really do use a Linux desktop to develop web apps that will run on FreeBSD, so I can look friends in the eye and say "Windows? Nope, don't use it."

  9. Re:Linux deserves its reputation on If Windows 7 Fails, Citrix (Not Linux) Wins · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I am tall, in good shape, and have a deep voice, so when I do make myself stand up straight, look people in the eye, and be assertive and direct, they tend to respond how I'd like them to.

    Same here. The difference is that after I tell them "I'd like to help but that's not my specialty", they walk away happy.

  10. Re:Linux deserves its reputation on If Windows 7 Fails, Citrix (Not Linux) Wins · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What you seem to miss is that the exact same thing also happens with Windows, as my experience as the 'free Windows tech support for everybody that gets to know me' shows.

    Correct way to manage your conversations:

    Acquaintance: Oh, you do computers? Can you fix my Windows?
    You: I'm sorry, but I don't really use Windows. I work on the big ones that run websites and stuff.

    You can always admit more knowledge later as circumstances require, but there's no putting the cat back in the bag so don't start with it.

  11. Re:Not DRM on DRM Shuts Down PC Version of Gears of War · · Score: 1

    It's not DRM. It's cheat prevention. Big difference.

    OK, go ahead and explain the difference. Both are programs that monitor the internal state of your system to decide whether you're allowed to use your property. No, really, I'm waiting. What distinguishes them?

  12. Re:What needs to happen... on DRM Shuts Down PC Version of Gears of War · · Score: 1

    Perhaps if everyone did this, we'd see DRM take on a more practical appearance like a USB dongle

    I'm sorry, but it appears as though the low-grade crack you're smoking has interfered with your reasoning. Dongles suck. Universally. Always. The most common form these days is usually removed with a NoCD hack a few days later because people hate having to swap in hardware every time they want to use property that they purchased.

  13. Re:This is not a problem with the Thai people on More Websites Offending Thai Monarchy Blocked · · Score: 1

    Something tells me that if I marched into LAX with my Australian passport and shouted "George Washington was a Fag" someone would object.

    You might get convicted of hatethink for using the F-bomb, but no one would really care that it was directed at Washington.

  14. Re:Should be pulled off the market.. on Lie Detector Company Threatens Critical Scientists With Suit · · Score: 1

    How would the world be different if we gave elementary school kids the same questioning for lies tools that are usually taught to police detectives?

    Very little. When a teacher explains that passing out copies of Ubuntu is piracy, he's not lying; he's a misinformed jackass. I think that honest jackasses outnumber liars by a wide margin, and that we're far better off teaching critical thinking (of which lie detection is just a subset).

  15. Re:Whoopie for cold light! on LED Lighting As Cheap As CFLs Invented · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But I have yet to find truly warm non-tungsten/halogen/mercury/fire/quartz/evil light for home use.

    I thought the same for the first week after we started migrating our home to CFLs. I've since come to understand that "warm" is a synonym for "ugly yellow".

  16. Re:My first experience with LED lighting... on LED Lighting As Cheap As CFLs Invented · · Score: 1

    A 40 watt CFL would be damned bright, I don't know if I've ever seen one.

    I've got a pair of 150W CFLs in my garage. You can't bear looking at them when they've warmed up.

  17. Re:A couple of questions on KDE 4.2 Is Released · · Score: 1

    (that oxygen titlebar blending comes to mind)

    Amen to that! Note that the replacement fork, Ozone, doesn't have that problem.

  18. Re:Woah on KDE 4.2 Is Released · · Score: 1

    Anyone who's used a computer for more than a week knows that "point release means it's the new stable release", or at least reasonably close to one.

    When has X.0 meant "stable" for any X>1, for any major application or OS?

  19. Re:backups on WD's Monster 2TB Caviar Green Drive, Preview Test · · Score: 1

    Depends on the level of RAID.

    Nope. "RAID" has absolutely zero relationship to "backup".

  20. Re:Powers of 2 on WD's Monster 2TB Caviar Green Drive, Preview Test · · Score: 5, Funny

    You mean 1800 Gibibytes?

    I will never, ever, in my entire life, even once mean "gibibytes".

  21. Re:What Benefit Does C Have Over Assembly? on CoreBoot (LinuxBIOS) Can Boot Windows 7 Beta · · Score: 5, Informative

    Doesn't handwritten assembly have the potential to be much faster than assembly compiled from C?

    Short answer: no.

    Long answer: rarely. Optimizing compilers are so good these days that very few humans would be capable of writing better assembler, and I contend that no humans are capable of maintaining and updating such highly-tuned code.

    Embedded assembler makes a lot of sense when you're embedding small snippets inside inner loops of computationally expensive function. Outside that one specific case (and disregarding embedded development on tiny systems), there's not much need to mess with it. Note that need is not the same as reason. Learning assembler is good and valuable on its own, even if there are few practical applications for it. If nothing else, it'll cause you to write better C.

  22. Re:This is good. on Senate Approves 4-Month Delay In Digital TV Switch · · Score: 1

    The cable companies have been using the February switchover as subterfuge for their own plans.

    People still use cable? Seriously, I went to satellite about 7 years ago and it's been a dream. I'm paying much less for more channels, including rental on the dual-tuner DVR. At this point I can't imagine ever going back to cable.

  23. Re:Sshfs is your friend. on Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non-Linux Geeks · · Score: 1

    Or get the old ones with 'history | grep sshfs' and tun it by typing in the number in front of the command after an exclamation mark, like so: '!679'

    You have one of those new-fangled keyboards without ^R, I see.

  24. Re:Good old days on What, Me Worry? MAD Magazine Going Quarterly · · Score: 1

    But hey, at age 9, it makes you feel very grown up and rebellious to be reading such critical literature.

    I developed a taste for critical thinking from Mad. To this day, I can't see things like "the best movie ever!" on movie posters without imagining the whole sentence to be "No one will mistake this junk for the best movie ever!" Seriously, Mad was great for instilling a sense of skepticism in kids. What is there now that doesn't encourage either blind faith or pseudorebellion?

  25. Re:Magazines are dying as a format. on What, Me Worry? MAD Magazine Going Quarterly · · Score: 1

    The problem is Mad Magazine used to be good. It used to push the edge a bit and have good writing. Now it's just a bit bland and tiresome.

    It's not just you. I bought a copy a couple of months ago to see if my kids might like it the way I enjoyed it when I was their age. It was awful! I mean, you can't replace Don Martin, but they could have at least tried to keep the same spirit.