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User: ADRA

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  1. Facebook has officially jumped the shark on Facebook Buying Oculus VR For $2 Billion · · Score: 1

    Expect the way down to be tumultuous occurrence.

  2. Re:Apply to a local university on Ask Slashdot: Fastest, Cheapest Path To a Bachelor's Degree? · · Score: 1

    Funny that you mentioned those information holes. I learned all of those facets from a technical diploma 14 years ago, and I know more than a few CS degree grads that several years into the workforce have confessed that they never 'got' multi-threading. Basically, everyone has holes and most have a ton of them. Being ignorant isn't the end of the world, but being ignorant and incapable of learning is a much larger problem, but I doubt educational background has as crutial in determining the latter.

    Assuming that the 'average' 12 year work experience individual is less capable than the 'average' BSC new grad is rather insulting to the veteran's, full stop. If you want to compare individuals of the same seniority, that's a different matter, but frankly at that point you should be able to talk to a developer for a while in order to know which one is full of it.

  3. Remember on Singapore To Regulate Virtual Currency Exchanges · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is Singapore, the country continually rated as one of the world's greatest countries for economic freedoms... soo

  4. Re:One bias frequently overlooked on Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math · · Score: 1

    That said, there were a few (large percentage of the few ladies in the program) 'skirt flippers' in my classes going through my CS program, so I'd say they aren't totally unjustified in assuming that some ladies are taking advantage of their minority status. It's -possible- that they don't want their tribe looking bad by having a lot of fat skimming loafers ruining the program for the rest of them. You could say that about a lot of tribes all the same.

  5. Re:Sue? on Satoshi Nakamoto Found? Not So Fast · · Score: 1

    It has to be false to sue, and even if it was false, the falsehoods have to be presented as a fact (not a supposition) in order to be a successful law suit. All of which would likely cause more headlines before being resolved. Plus, if it was the real whomever/whatever, it is of complete non-starter unless there was actual continual harassment, which doesn't seem to be the case.

  6. Re:Replace "GOLD" with diamonds, or say, smoke on Bitcoin Exchange Flexcoin Wiped Out By Theft · · Score: 1

    Diamonds like Oil are essentially 'unlimited' in the grand scheme of things, but its very expensive to make Oil (well in a crude oil form anyways) and Diamonds (by crushing various other carbon). But both have a rest value which is the raw cost of just producing them synthetically one's self. At the moment, its cheaper to just dig them out of the ground, so people still do, but that may not be the case always (especially as scarcity increases).

  7. Re:Unregulated currency on Bitcoin Exchange Flexcoin Wiped Out By Theft · · Score: 1

    Not if your wallet just got stolen! ... .. . Boorah!

  8. Re:surprised!!!! on Bitcoin Exchange Flexcoin Wiped Out By Theft · · Score: 1

    Bears are always looked down on regardless of the situation. Nobody wants you to rain on their parade and afterwards, nobody wants a told-ya-so.

    I was in the same position in my beliefs of BitCoin, so you weren't totally alone. Don't fear, there will be at least one more major peak and major bust before this roller coaster is over for sure. Lock in for it!

  9. Re:Bitcoin is Nuts. on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 2

    Yes, society is a contract of cooperation and when you fight against general social norms, expect to be punished for it. What now, not fair? Who the hell said life was fair for everyone. I could cry for unborn babies aborted because their potential mothers didn't want them or for the thousands of cattle slaughtered every day, but I don't, and neither do I care about your disestablishmental libertarian views. Society as a whole could care less as well it seems.

  10. Job Function on Ask Slashdot: When Is a Better Career Opportunity Worth a Pay Cut? · · Score: 1

    Putting all the finances, benefits aside for a moment (since they've been covered to death earlier), you have to realize that modernizing an existing established piece of software is a huge mine field. Trust this from soneone who's had to deal with several large projects varying from small refactoring of existing architectures to complete software rewrites. There aren't many happy problems, as you'll often face problems with integration, performance, ops support, stakeholder buy-in's, resistence from users (for every even trivially minor change to the existing platform), etc..

    So much of this problem is out of your hands that you'll always need to keep a lengthy detachment from the process or go insane frustrated that nothing works the way you like, and in the end its a system that you'd wish was never born. It could take years of maintenance and bug fixes before the software gets to the point where you'd consider it 'good enough'.

    Be very sure you want to load yourself up with this responsibility, because I assure you, that there's no easy solution for this problem domain, which is why large software consultencies charge obcene amounts of money at companies wishing to update/rewrite their legacy systems.

  11. Re:Interesting on Ask Slashdot: When Is a Better Career Opportunity Worth a Pay Cut? · · Score: 1

    Define the difference between visionary and forward thinker exactly? Ah, thats a minor quibble. Architects are supposed to be developers with more wisdom, and hopefully though not always more bredth of knowledge. I'm still technically a developer but I worked in IT between development jobs years ago, and I have significantly more broad knowledge than most of the Arch's that typcially come from strictly Dev/Ops/DBA backgrounds. That doesn't mean they're bad at their jobs, but everyone on the team has something to bring to the table, and if you assume the hierarical development roles as the pinacle of perfection, then you certainly will end up being doomed from one mistake or another down the road.

    Even the most junior straight out of university kid can have great ideas, and its up to development leads and managers to decide the merits of such thrrough their years of development experience. Maybe they're wrong, maybe they're not. Its not the junior guy's fault if a major screw up in design jeopardizes the project / company (assuming it wasn't done without permission).

  12. Re:The usual consulting snake oil on Can Reactive Programming Handle Complexity? · · Score: 2

    Rule Engines are one very tenuous issue. Here are some thoughts on them as I see them:
    1. It requires businesses significant overhead to bring in expertise to allow developers / architects / solutions providers for new products, but
    2. most products are legacy, so when moving into a business rules eninge model, you need to essentially re-implement everything you've ever done, because
    3. Integration with a system of this sort becomes very difficult, and somewhat unmanagable, especially when these outside systems share much of the same behaviour

    I have a customer who's debating 'replacing the crown jewels' with a rules engine, and every time I hear them talk about it, it makes me cringe. This mind you is replacing the implementation of 10's of millions of lines of code and hundreds or even thousands of inter-dependent data elements with multiple workflow stages increasing the complexity factor. The higher ups just don't realize how complicated their system really is and someone was like 'fuck it, its the new buzz word!'.

  13. Re:Tell em how you feel on Ask Slashdot: How Do You To Tell Your Client That His "Expert" Is an Idiot? · · Score: 1

    Nah, but some people can be royal jack asses, just like everyone else.

    I generally go for the self-deprecating developer style. If I earn people's respect without being a braggert, then I know they're not tools and we get along just fine. if my current compensation is any indication, it seems to be working.

  14. Re:Restaurant on Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards · · Score: 1

    Who the fuck cares? Even if you were bravado enough to punch the number in front of everyone in the restaurant in broad dayight, they can't do anything about it unless they steal the card along with it. Chip-in=pin requires both the physical card (or at least a chip clone which to my knowledge doesn't exist -- maybe with destroying the original card to get it) and the PIN number. If my waiter wanted to steal from me, they'd also require the card itself, which is why the 'new norm' for credit cards is to never let the credit card leave your sight/possession. Most sales associates won't even take the card offered. They just direct you to put it int the POS device.

  15. Re:Restaurant on Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards · · Score: 1

    They have cordless terminals which are wireless (and encrypted) which send the challenge all the way to the credit card merchant providers for verification.

  16. Re:Sorry, it's horribly insecure, on Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards · · Score: 1

    If someone could eavesdrop your PIN, why couldn't they do the same with your signature? Your comparison sounds a little weak to me.

  17. Re:It's about time. on Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards · · Score: 1

    I can't say about 'the rest of the world', but here in Canada, Debit and credit cards are still quite separate for major banks, though I imagine you could find one-off's galore.

    As for the rest, I don't know wtf you're talking about. When a credit card is stolen, you reverse your card charges like any other transaction. If someone steals your 'combo' card, they have to guess your pin in a live transaction before being authorized to remove funds (at least for your debit card, and 'officially blessed' chip-in-pin transactions). These are live-authorized transactions, and if you fail the PIN too often, the card will be frozen and the POS operator is required the cut up the cards.

    If you have a credit card and don't have chip-in-pin, you're almost guaranteed to reverse the charges without the bank putting up a fuss. The ONLY way you can run into trouble is if you wrote down your pin number and had your card and PIN stolen. In that case, the bank may give you a hard time because one should NEVER write down a pin. If you can't remember 4 a DIGIT numeric password, then you have other issues. There have been cases where fraudulant POS terminals steal PIN pad info, but then again, that doesn't work for PIN-in-Chip cards, unless they then steal the card AFTER you entered your PIN into the number stealing terminal.

  18. Re:It's incredibly frustrating... on US Democrats Introduce Bill To Restore Net Neutrality · · Score: 4, Insightful

    None of what you say matters. Basically all providers besides very few number of high density area ISP's are huge and effectively Oligopolies, which means 'some small company coming in and selling bwelow cost' doesn't happen. Additionally, the idea of Net Neutrality means that in this limited marketplace, we as conbsumers have no information of what kind of extortion that their companies are putting on the internet services that we use. Would you support an ISP that charged excessively high rates on a site you frequent regularly (like slashdot)? Would you ever know? How much do you want to bet that fees will be doubled+ if its publically disclosed?

    I say screw it. Have the gov take pack the lines they laid and introduce a non-profit entity who's only job is to maintain the architecture and push costs on the content / service backbone carriers.

  19. For the haters on Eclipse Foundation Celebrates 10 Years · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been using Eclipse on for pretty much 10years now and by and large, the tool has been pretty darn soliod. its a memory pig so get over it. I throw 1.5G at the heap and though it rarely if ever gets close to it, the amout of speed it performs mosdt operations is amazing.

    There are warts which I find personally lousy (like Mylyn of the built-in profiler, and much of the built-in text validators), but thankfully most of those can be trivially turned off and tweaked to speed up usage even more. With a few choice plug-ins, you can do a lot of the hard lifting without effort.

    I've only had cursory usage of Netbeans/Idea, but Kepler is really a dream to use. Note, almost every first few months of a new release are generally ass, and Juno was entirely ass so be warned. Just because one version of Eclipse may be a flake, don't discount the platform.

  20. "which can be quite common even on high-end machine"

    Sure, when the games are coded to use 100% of 1 thread while ignoring (most likely) 3-7 threads just screaming to be utilized, then CPU's are surely a contentious bottleneck.

  21. Re:Wait, WTF? on FBI Has Tor Mail's Entire Email Database · · Score: 1

    Yes, and every internet enabled user in the US is legally required to take down illegal material if its been detected (I assume through the confiscation of another users' account information).

    If you don't follow the laws of the land, don't expect to be protected from its freedoms.

  22. No fraud recourse for the recipients on Marc Andreessen On Why Bitcoin Matters (And A Critique) · · Score: 1

    But if you're the sender, you're fucked.

  23. Google: buy back to black

    Seems that search engines somehow work without out already... who woulda thunk it.

  24. Re:I'm dumbfounded on Network Solutions Opts Customer Into $1,850 Security Service · · Score: 1

    Not sure about your experience, but someone frauded my card for an airline ticket, I challenged it, and the Visa/bank? operator said the purchase was made online without a CVV number and I never heard back about it. Probably if there's insufficient information for proper verification (like CVV/PIN/password entry for web purchases as an example) VISA/MC will side with consumer and business will eat the charge.

  25. Re: Okay, but... on Hacker Says He Could Access 70,000 Healthcare.Gov Records In 4 Minutes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Its a false dichotomy because you can never know the inherent security of a company you do business with really. Often these companies are veiled behind the companies you do perform business with anyways, so who's to say that although 'Walmat' may be secure, but maybe their downstream credit merchant bureau has huge leaks, or maybe their third party BI / sales data processing service has some inherent flaw, or ... Security isn't as simple as putting the onus on a very complicated problem and just saying 'sure, I trust Walmat with my credit, address, phone', etc..

    Ideally all this 'information' will become a lot less valuable (like making the ability to attain credit a lot more difficult than some data entered into a web page) but that'll happen sooner or later, be assured. The Internet's rather new in this respect, and although safeguards help, they are by no means perfect. You could increase the security (which is always a good idea for items of value), but ideally, we just make a credit card number useless. Who cares. Its a 16 digit number. Its the hundreds / thousands of sites accepting that as 'sufficient' for merchant exchanges that make the number important.