Slashdot Mirror


User: tomp

tomp's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
21
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 21

  1. They know it already on Ask Slashdot: What Training Helps Older Programmers Most? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Older programmers know the basics and they know how to learn new technologies. Matter of fact, that's precisely what they know. Those who don't move into management before they become "older programmers".

    There's always a need for better learning tools. But tools for "old programmers" doesn't make any more sense than tools for female coders.

  2. Re:Corporate data grab on Microsoft and HackerRank Add a Live Code Editor Into Bing · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have you looked at the service agrement? It says exacly this:

    To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content,

  3. as seen on... on Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' Released · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    As covered on soylent last weekend:
    http://soylentnews.org/article...

  4. Re:Resurrecting Technocrat.net on Slashdot Tries Something New; Audience Responds! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been here a long time and didn't switch the last two times. I'll switch this time and will support in whatever way I can.

    Thank you!

  5. Re:It's easier . . . on Shutdown Illustrates How Fast US Gov't Can Update Its Websites · · Score: 0

    The quick response isn't a reflection of how easy it is to change a page. It's a reflection of the millions of dollars government agencies have spent preparing for every potential shutdown over the past few years.

    Long before the shutdown happened, government agencies stopped doing the people's work and instead started to prepare for a lapse in funding. Government inefficiency caused by the same people who are tasked with oversight to prevent wasteful spending.

    The web sites were able to be turned on quickly, in part, because it started happening *before* the president signed HR 2775. OPM ordered government employees back to work the day before it was signed.

  6. Re:Ah the memories on Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death · · Score: 2

    Yea, but it doesn't work. Google simply isn't able to do text searches anymore. They can return as many fast half-assed results as I can stand, but not one single accurate result.

    Wanna get a list of pages that don't contain the test altavist? Simple just search for -altavista. Yea, doesn't work.

  7. Re:Ah the memories on Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death · · Score: 1

    It's still the best you could hope for. Sure wish Google still had that technology.

    If my search criteria isn't on the page, I don't want to see it. Can't google get some of that cutting edge 90's tech back? They have smart people, right?

  8. Re:leap year on Adobe and Apple Didn't Unit Test For "Forward Date" Bugs. Do You? · · Score: 0

    The same reason everybody else has a rough time with it. It's hard. You wouldn't roll your own cryptography, don't roll your own date calculations.

  9. Good god man on Denial-of-Service Attack Found In Btrfs File-System · · Score: 2

    "Denial-of-Service Attack Found In Btrfs File-System" didn't happen. A vulnerability was found. That's a big deal, no reason to obscure it.

  10. What about a text search feature? on Google Unveils New Search Features, Including iOS Voice Search · · Score: 1

    Can Google invent a text search feature? You know, where you type words into a text box and Google returns a list of pages that contain those words? That would be cool. Can Google work on that next?

  11. Re:So out of curiosity, on Domain Theft-for-Ransom Hits css-tricks.com and Others · · Score: 5, Informative

    Gandi rocks, no doubt about it. However, they cannot protect a domain owner from the US government.

    I have my domain there because they respect the rights of a domain owner far more than other registrars, but there's nothing they can do if the US government wants a domain in a US-hosted top level domain. When it comes .com, .net, or .org, NSI is all that matters. And unfortunately, they don't care about domain owners.

  12. Re:Only one question on Newspaper Plagiarizes Blog, Taunts Real Author · · Score: 2

    Sure, but it's not really a newspaper, it's a glorified blog. This was a big win for everybody involved.
    If the snarkiness was in the print version of NYT, it would be noteworthy. As is, not much more than a cat fight.

  13. Re:Only one question on Newspaper Plagiarizes Blog, Taunts Real Author · · Score: 0

    The author thinks he owns facts. It doesn't work like that. What a baby.

  14. Re:Does it still have the AwfulBar? on Firefox 4 Released! · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure which 'forever' you're thinking of. If the location bar was for searching, there wouldn't be a need for that little search box to the right of it.

    Before the awesome bar, the closest thing to search in the location bar was automatically adding 'www.' and '.com' to bare names. Even that went away for many years due to the whitehouse.com brouhaha.

    I'll let the 'typing in URLs is bad' pass. We all know that's silly.

  15. Re:Does it still have the AwfulBar? on Firefox 4 Released! · · Score: 1

    What's so awful about the Awesome Bar is that it has partially repurposed the location bar, causing the UI to be inconsistent.

    In all cases before the awesome bar, the location bar was used for URL's. After the awesome bar, the location bar is almost always used for URL's, but during text entry it is used to search both URL's and web page titles.

    An inconsistent UI us a bad UI. The awesome bar introduces inconsistency into the firefox UI. It's bad.

  16. Re:Does it still have the AwfulBar? on Firefox 4 Released! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Disabling the awesome bar solves part of the problem. However, it doesn't restore the functionality the location bar had before it was replaced by the awesome bar.

    It's not just the the awesome sucks. It's that mozilla removed something that worked and replaced it with something that doesn't. Turning off the part that doesn't work is insufficient to solve the problem.

  17. Re:Awsome! on Firefox 4 Released! · · Score: 2

    Have they dumped the awesome bar yet? It makes my browsing more difficult nearly every day.

    What are they going to do next? Replace the menubar with a start button? Oh, wait...

  18. Re:No attempts at finding other sources? on Google Wins Injunction Against Agency Using Microsoft Cloud · · Score: 1

    Perhaps. However in this case, I believe they felt burned by Lotus and decided to just buy whatever Microsoft was selling because surely it's what theprivate sector uses. And that must be what's best.

  19. What about keyword searches? on 'Reading Level' Filter Added To Google Search · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's great and all, but what would be *really* cool, is if Google provided some way to search for pages that contain a specific word or phrase. Yeah, that would be cool. Some kind of search engine where I type in words and the search engine returns only pages that contain those words. Can Google work on that next?

  20. reliability != availability on Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability · · Score: 1

    Availability often comes at the cost of reliability.

    If you put 2 drives in a RAID-1 mirror, the odds of a drive failure goes up. After all, you now have twice as many drives that might fail. However, a single drive failure no longer makes the data unavailable.

    RAID-1 lowers reliability with the goal of raising availability. Paying sysadmins to swap drives is way cheaper than paying people to sit around waiting for their critical data to be restored from tape.

    Low reliability is probably just a sign that their systems are highly redundant. Not really surprising.

  21. One hack replaced by another on SpamAssassin 2010 Bug · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the "fix"

    > FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
    > change '/20[1-9][0-9]/' to '/20[2-9][0-9]/'

    That's no fix, it just puts the problem off for another 10 years. Why call the rule FH_DATE_PAST_20XX, shouldn't it be FH_DATE_PAST_201X? At least then the hack would be documented.