Slashdot Mirror


User: nctritech

nctritech's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
971
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 971

  1. Re:It depends on No, It's Not Always Quicker To Do Things In Memory · · Score: 1

    It's not a programming problem, it's a programmer problem.

  2. Re:Pro-consensual on A Software Project Full of "Male Anatomy" Jokes Causes Controversy · · Score: 1

    No, they're complaining because having a new trumped-up social injustice to screech about every few days is part of their identity and they wouldn't feel like special snowflakes without it. What's most interesting is that the people complaining about DICSS are being a thousand times more rude, offensive, vulgar, and anti-social than the whole DICSS joke ever was. If anything, he's broadcasting to women who are actually level-headed and socially capable that he has a sense of humor and isn't going to live in fear of some bigoted professional victim admonishing him.

  3. Re:I can't wait for the Linus Torvalds rant over t on OEMs Allowed To Lock Secure Boot In Windows 10 Computers · · Score: 1

    Don't forget that OEMs now sell lots of computers with no CSM boot option and only ACPI 5.0 tables which Windows 7 and below can't read and crash on boot claiming that the computer isn't ACPI-compliant. Even if you try to boot Windows 7 via UEFI, the ACPI 5.0 tables will block it completely, so such machines are forcibly Windows 8 or higher with no option to downgrade available.

  4. Re:Bootablt utilities. on OEMs Allowed To Lock Secure Boot In Windows 10 Computers · · Score: 1

    A thousand times this. Tons of diagnostic and repair software runs outside of Windows environments. Windows has also been removing all troubleshooting and repair capabilities from consumer operating systems since Windows 8. No safe mode (unless you can boot into normal mode, how fucking useless) and no boot menu (unless you can boot into normal mode AGAIN, and no, *the shift-F8 thing doesn't actually work*) and not even any boot media included with the computers anymore. Hard drive failure? Fuck you and your data too, plus you don't get any media to install with once you replace the drive. Go buy a new computer!

    There will be corporate heads on a pike when normal people start being bitten hard by this nonsense.

  5. Re:Make it DARKER dammit. on Spock and the Legacy of Star Trek · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I know. I thought about it more AFTER I posted. Bad me. Trusting Ensign Ro to spy on the Maquis might have been a better example. *shrug*

  6. Re:Make it DARKER dammit. on Spock and the Legacy of Star Trek · · Score: 1

    That's part of the point of TNG. They did an excellent job of chipping away at the sanitized image of all those characters with little hammers over the years. Take a semi-Utopian advanced human society and reveal all their flaws, because our flaws are part of what make us human in the first place. Picard might have been a clean looking leader in the beginning but we learned over many seasons that he's reclusive and dislikes kids and barely avoided being kicked out of the Academy and doesn't always make good decisions, like flying into a big ass meteor only to be sealed in by a Romulan ship he knew was out there. TNG and TOS are two sides of a humanity coin: one shows how we are and what's great about it, the other shows how we think we want to become and how that's not as perfect a thing as we envision.

  7. Re:Live on Spock and the Legacy of Star Trek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Surprisingly, you've stated my opinion better than I think I could have. The death of Gene Roddenberry and the slow decline of Star Trek seem to have coincided. It makes a LOT of sense if you watch the various older shows and films and "making of" specials about Star Trek TOS and TNG. Gene had a vision and Gene made Star Trek what it was. After his death, some of the people who worked with him (like Jonathan Frakes) did a decent job of keeping his vision around, but few who watch, say, Voyager (and have seen TOS/TNG) would say that Voyager is generally a better series.

    The newer Trek creators have forgotten that Star Trek is about exploring the nature and folly of humanity. Futuristic space exploration just happens to be an excellent container to ship it in.

  8. Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... on Xfce Getting a New Version Soon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For those of us who prefer to roll our own distros or compile stuff ourselves, XFCE is far easier to build from scratch than any GNOME or KDE4 environment. The dependencies on libraries not shipped in XFCE directly are minimal and there aren't many snags to worry about.

  9. Re:Why don't they get it? on WA Bill Takes Aim at Boys' Dominance In Computer Classes · · Score: 1

    Don't forget about the more recent and glaring example: Big Bang Theory. I've seen it referred to as "nerdsploitation" and "blackface for nerds" in various places. Let's face it: actual nerds are still picked on and outcast even by our "modern and enlightened" society (cough, cough). Being a nerd or geek is now something to loosely emulate in an exaggerated fashion to seek attention, but being an actual nerd or geek is still unacceptable.

    Even worse is the fact that radical feminism is now directly attempting to destroy the "safe spaces" created by the outcast nerds and demonize their existence. Look at Linus Torvalds: actual nerds who understand Linus and Linux, how the ecosystem works, and that see how well Linus' methods have worked for over 20 years straight are happy with his behavior. "Polite society" feminist trolls focus in a myopic way on extremely specific actions he has taken to black-label him and try to get him ousted from the open source community in the name of "being nice." These are the same people that loudly clapped when Sarah Sharp made a politeness stink on the LKML but stopped tuning in immediately before Linus engaged in a courteous two-way conversation with her and they resolved their differences cleanly. Sarah Sharp still contributes heavily to the Linux kernel. Sarah Sharp isn't hiding under a rock playing the victim card while doing nothing of actual value. What do today's nerd-hating oppression olympics P.C. hordes contribute to the world of real nerds and geeks once you exclude their vitriol? Funny how rabid social justice douchebags rarely submit patches to open source projects.

    Nerd outcasting is still very much alive and well. It's just that now they're trying to cast out the outcasts from the island that they founded because they were cast out in the first place. At some point even the most timid victim will lash out against the bullies and re-align their jaws.

  10. Re:That's like ... on WA Bill Takes Aim at Boys' Dominance In Computer Classes · · Score: 1

    Girls do not play the same games as boys, and also tend to pick game categories that have no "main character." It's not that social media changed gaming; it's that social media put the game categories that appeal more to females right in their faces.

  11. Re:Except in the UK! on Data Encryption On the Rise In the Cloud and Mobile · · Score: 1

    7-Zip is by far the easiest way to do this. Select files, right-click, 7-Zip, Add to archive... and if you supply a password and check "encrypt file names" the whole archive is AES-256 encrypted with the password you used. Upload that bad boy and feel more secure. On the other end, download it, right-click, "extract here" and then delete the 7z file. It's just one extra step prior to upload and after download and the shell integration makes it dead simple. If you're on Linux using p7zip at a command prompt, "7za a -mhe archive_name.7z file_and_dir_names_go_here -p" and it'll prompt for a password.

  12. Re:What has happened to Linux? on SystemD Gains New Networking Features · · Score: 2, Interesting

    freedesktop.org is under Red Hat control. All of the biggest douche moves in Linux have come from Red Hat, including all the Poettering-based junk and the lovely musings of Ulrich Drepper. At least Drepper wrote some interesting papers and made some valuable contributions despite his acerbic handling of bug reports; I don't really find anything Poettering does to be of real-world value. Red Hat has beaten Microsoft in the EEE philosophy; I think Microsoft is far less evil than Red Hat at this point in history. It's too bad because Red Hat historically helped to bring Linux into the corporate mainstream and has otherwise done some great things for the community. Why did they start going downhill so hard?

    Red Hat and Ubuntu are the enemies of clean, functional, and elegant open-source solutions. The irony is so thick that you could cut it with a knife.

  13. Re:What's scary is on Firefox 35 Arrives With MP4 Playback On Mac, Android Download Manager Support · · Score: 1

    http://www.floodgap.com/softwa... and you're welcome. ;)

  14. Re:owners of older machines, behold... on Firefox 35 Arrives With MP4 Playback On Mac, Android Download Manager Support · · Score: 1

    Firefox doesn't get slow as molasses after a few hours either. Perhaps you are thinking of a very old version or have a pretty low-spec computer.

  15. Re:Breaks my Adobe Reader plugin on Firefox 35 Arrives With MP4 Playback On Mac, Android Download Manager Support · · Score: 1

    I browse by typing raw HTTP into Telnet sessions on port 80. Text looks fine.

  16. Re:I'm done... on Firefox 35 Arrives With MP4 Playback On Mac, Android Download Manager Support · · Score: 1

    Good, JavaScript is faster. Now where is my in-browser ad blocking engine written in C? Since lots of articles have run that whine about Adblock Plus slowing down browsing due to injecting a massive CSS file into every page, let's see the ad blocking capability put where it really belongs. THAT is a feature that almost every user of Firefox wants: ad blocking in the browser.

  17. Re:As expected... on Box Office 2014: Moviegoing Hits Two-Decade Low · · Score: 1

    I've noticed that a very high number of movies made since Save the Cat! came out follow the three-part formula outlined therein. It was especially apparent having seen Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), then watching the (annoyingly titled) Riddick (2013).

    On top of most films following the same general plot format, the buildup of any kind of suspense is practically nonexistent. Everything has to move so damned fast that you don't even have time to come up with something to anticipate based on what has already happened before the next action-packed mostly-CGI-and-obviously-so thing smacks you in the face. A classic film like Halloween where the first 90% of the film is nothing but suspense build-up could never be made today, even if it was set in the same time period so that modern technology couldn't get in the way of the plot. Suspense is largely a thing of the past.

    While I'm here on my soapbox, does anyone remember when "special effects" were actually special? (Get off my lawn!)

  18. Re:Risk = Reward on Tech's Gender Gap Started At Stanford · · Score: 1

    Women make safer choices. That's better if safety and stability are higher priorities. Men make riskier choices that come with greater potential rewards; some obtain the rewards and some fall flat on their faces. Neither choice is "better" without looking at what matters to the person making that choice.

  19. Re:First they came... on UK Man Arrested Over "Offensive" Tweet · · Score: 1

    Freedom of speech exists to protect the most disgusting, offensive, disturbing, and unpopular speech. It does not exist to protect speech that is not objectionable, as such speech does not need protection in the first place. Production of video constitutes a form of speech; content is irrelevant. The concept of "obscenity" does not exist in the First Amendment and its existence anywhere in the body of statutory and case law as an excuse to penalize people for unpopular speech runs strongly against the entire purpose of the First Amendment.

  20. Re: America, land of the free... on Ask Slashdot: Can a Felon Work In IT? · · Score: 1

    A system administrator can't administrate the system without "that much access." Who controls the access above that sysadmin? Why, it'd have to be another sysadmin...see the problem?

  21. Why couldn't they just pull the plug? on Hackers Used Nasty "SMB Worm" Attack Toolkit Against Sony · · Score: 1

    Why couldn't Sony just yank all the Internet connectivity until the machines were fixed?

  22. Re:you remove stuff you don't know without Googlin on Bank Security Software EULA Allows Spying On Users · · Score: 2

    Oh, I checked. The website made it sound like it was some sort of antivirus program that no one had ever heard of. When asked about it, some customers didn't even know what it was or how it had gotten on their computers. It installed a filter driver for all network adapters and at least two machines weren't getting online at all because of it malfunctioning. All of the customers already had an antivirus solution installed. Rapport started popping up on computers in the era of fake security software.

    You should probably get some detail before jumping to conclusions.

  23. Heh, I wondered what that was on Bank Security Software EULA Allows Spying On Users · · Score: 1

    I've been uninstalling the crap out of that program every single time a customer walks in with it installed because I didn't know what it was and I didn't like how invasive it appeared. It's good to know I was doing them a favor.

  24. Re:C# on How Relevant is C in 2014? · · Score: 1

    It seems that threading isn't nearly so simple in C++ either; at least, not if you want to get it right. From https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com... and http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/s... it would seem that while initiating a thread as you've discussed within a C++ program is easy, the nuances of C++ threading are uglier than C pthreads threading. Quotes like these make C++11 threading seem a lot less trivial than your initially impressive example suggests:

    "If a thread is cancelled no destructors of automatic objects are called; or at least, it is up to the implementation if they are called or not. This would cause too much resource leaks. Therefore, it is not possible to cancel a thread in C++. There is a similar mechanism though: thread interruption. Interruption is coöperative: to-be-cancelled thread must acknowledge the interruption. If interrupted, a special exception is thrown that unwinds child thread’s stack until it reaches the outermost scope. However, interruption mechanism is not available in C++11 either."

    "But all those threads computing fib1 are still running! And as they finish, they will write to all those instances of fib1. Which are no longer there, since the stack has been unwound. In its place will be the stack corresponding to the continuing computation that was initiated when the exception was caught. Thus we now have a large number of threads writing to various locations on the user's stack. By the time the user tries to debug the resulting mess, there is a good chance they will all be gone, leaving him/her with nothing but a stack with mysteriously smashed values. Or those might no longer be visible either because a return address may have been overwritten, causing the main program to take a wild branch."

    As I am not well-versed in C++, I'm interested in knowing about these things. Perhaps it will give me a reason to seriously look at the language.

  25. Re:C# on How Relevant is C in 2014? · · Score: 1

    It's a kernel, not a userland program. It's never going to be as simple as a userland program, so it's a bad example. Kernels can't have the C standard library or pthreads or the STL. Well, technically they could, but that'd make the kernel code massive for marginal benefit and any kind of library bug would become a kernel crash waiting to happen.