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User: Reziac

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Comments · 15,747

  1. Re:Unchanging UIs? Not just for old people on How Bad User Interfaces Can Ruin Lives · · Score: 1

    Going from WinXP to Win7 pretty much made my mom give up using the computer too. She is 85 but not at all dim. She just doesn't live on the computer like some of us do, and if anything doesn't work as expected, she's like "whatever" and stops using it.

  2. Re:Unchanging UIs? Not just for old people on How Bad User Interfaces Can Ruin Lives · · Score: 1

    Geez yes. If it ain't broke, don't go fixing it. If it ain't broke, a whole LOT of people already depend on it, and whatever you change WILL break it for too many of 'em.

    This kind of breakage is a major reason why I use so many old software versions, across the board.

  3. Re:A long time coming... on China's Stock Crash: $3.5 Trillion Wiped Out, $2.6 Trillion Frozen · · Score: 1

    Considering the radically poor quality I've observed in Chinese steel (speaking of construction materials here) -- I'm not at all surprised.

    The first that I noticed was concrete bracing, which I formerly used for something it wasn't really meant to do, but worked well for anyway. And it held up great for many years of hard use under severe conditions -- no broken welds, no destructive rust. The current stuff coming from China starts popping apart in a matter of months, and is rusting away within a year.

    You gotta wonder what that's doing to our infrastructure that's being built using Chinese materials.

    Or maybe you need not wonder, just look at the example of that new bridge... where was it, San Francisco? that per what I've heard is already falling apart thanks to the foibles of Chinese steel.

  4. Re:The reason is more simple on Why Electric Vehicles Aren't More Popular · · Score: 1

    Consider also your climate-related road conditions:

    Recently I talked to someone here in Montana who drives a late-model hybird... and they plan to trade the damn thing in ASAP, because in ice/snow conditions, it has no torque. Get it the least bit stuck, either in snow or an ice rut (a common situation under icy winter conditions) and it won't climb out, and it can't be rocked out. It is STUCK until someone with a non-electric vehicle comes along and pushes or pulls them out.

  5. Re:Drone It on Test Pilot: the F-35 Can't Dogfight · · Score: 1

    How about we stop trying to make one plane do everything? Build something small, fast, and minimal for dogfights. Build something with more range and capacity for when that's needed. Don't cripple the pilot's ability to use the tool, either.

  6. Re:And if they see a NEW surge, it's because... on DuckDuckGo Sees Massive Growth In Post-Snowden World · · Score: 1

    And I always use a link on my menu bar, never a toolbar -- interesting how user method changes perception like that.

  7. Re:And if they see a NEW surge, it's because... on DuckDuckGo Sees Massive Growth In Post-Snowden World · · Score: 1

    [goes to check]

    Looks like IXQuick/Startpage has reverted to the old layout (that was quick) which would explain why today it again works fine without javascript. The 'upgraded' page quite definitely did not. Plus it was hard on aging eyes. Fucking pastels everyone has suddenly gotten into...

    DDG used to require JS to work, but doesn't now.

  8. From the POV of a former middle-class landlord on The Vicious Circle That Is Sending Rents Spiraling Higher · · Score: 1

    ...the biggest reason middle-class rentals are disappearing is because there's no money in it. At best, you might cover your costs, but more likely costs will exceed income, by as much as 50%. Who in their right mind would own middle-class rentals when they're so likely to be a financial loss??

    It is far, far cheaper to rent. Yeah, you don't build equity, but you also just pay rent. You don't pay tax, insurance, and maintenance that exceeds the value of a middle-class home, and which can bring your total outlay to half again more than the mortgage payment.

    Home buying benefits realtors and mortgage lenders a whole lot more than it does home buyers.

  9. Re:Wrong question. on When Will Your Hard Drive Fail? · · Score: 1

    That's actually why I decided not to use Dropbox, Backblaze, etc -- because more often than not, the file I want back is on some HD not presently connected, and would therefore look "deleted" to the backup software... so it would be deleted from the remote backup as well. This is probably fine for a business box that doesn't have removeables come and go. Not so fine for my use.

  10. Re:This policy is ridiculous on Facebook's Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory · · Score: 1

    That's a problem, yeah. I think it would depend on whether "intent to defraud" could be demonstrated, and whether it gets prosecuted as "theft of services"... there's a fine can of worms, considering that Facebook users are the product being sold by Facebook. Are they thereby defrauding their advertisers??

    (In the U.S., generally you can call yourself whatever you like so long as there's no intent to defraud.)

  11. Re:just die already on SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring · · Score: 1

    This was 2001. At the time there weren't all that many options in free FTP hosts, let alone with decent bandwidth. Walnut Creek's FTP.CDROM.COM had been THE main archive host for the whole world for a decade, and a lot of scenes depended on it. Mirrors that could handle its level of traffic were rare to nonexistent, and often limited to university use. Bandwidth/hosting was still expensive and even our puny 4GB archive was still a LOT of data (IIRC total data was about 300GB). So yeah, single point of failure wasn't a good thing, but you can't entirely blame facepalmworthy users here. We used what we had. And it failed us. Mirrors have since proliferated and hosting/bandwidth have become cheap, so today's self-appointed experts think the world was always that way and anyone who did different was too stupid to live.

  12. Re:This policy is ridiculous on Facebook's Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory · · Score: 1

    And they fail to consider that anyone with a good printer and an editing program can whip up a convincing driver's license, certainly good enough to pass muster as a photocopy.

    And yet there are over 500 Facebook users right now with the same rather unconvincing 'real name' as my own account.

  13. Re:Phones are all the same... on Planned Sequel To Fairphone Promises an Ethical, Repairable Phone · · Score: 1

    The only blocker I use is NoScript, with javascript entirely disabled for the whole site, and as a result -- for me, Slashdot's look has changed very little since its earliest days.

  14. Re:Let it rot on SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring · · Score: 1

    Everything needs to be more broadly mirrored, so there's not a single point of failure for the source community. One or two big hubs may be convenient but if that one or two go bad, then what?

  15. Re:just die already on SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring · · Score: 1

    And remember when the old Walnut Creek FTP was acquired by Digital River, who shortly thereafter nuked all the non-paying archives with absolutely no notice??

    The DOOM archive was saved because I'd found some financial statements that Digital River had accidentally left accessible, and judging by the state of their profits, I smelled trouble and predicted that the free FTP would very soon go away. Fortunately the DOOM archive maintainer believed me, and mirrored our stuff elsewhere.

    Other archives were not so lucky; some were lost.

  16. Re:Kickstarter campaign to fix the overlord proble on SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring · · Score: 1

    The logic sometimes isn't profit. Sometimes the logic is being able to show a loss for tax purposes. See also "Hollywood accounting".

  17. Re:Meh on SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring · · Score: 1

    No, no, no. This is their new program to vet developers so that we users can easily tell which projects will sell us out.

  18. And if they see a NEW surge, it's because... on DuckDuckGo Sees Massive Growth In Post-Snowden World · · Score: 1

    ...StartPage/IXQuick just "upgraded" and thereby royally fucked up their interface (now requires javascript AND the search box no longer accepts paste, at least for me). I'd preferred StartPage, but have now switched to DuckDuckGo in sheer desperation for a search engine that doesn't argue with me, never mind tracking me... that's almost a secondary issue in the face of usability, or lack thereof.

  19. I foresee a thriving business... on European Court: Websites Are Responsible For Users' Comments · · Score: 1

    ...in forums hosted in small island nations and obscure African anarchies.

  20. Re:Routing around it. on Reddit Removes Communities To Address Harassment, Users Respond · · Score: 1

    I agree. It's not about tolerance or civility; it's about pandering to SJW beliefs.

    Relevant:

    http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

    http://www.breitbart.com/londo...

    Boogie makes good points:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  21. Re:the danger isn't immediately afterwards on Ask Slashdot: Should We Expect Attacks When Windows 2003 Support Ends? · · Score: 1

    It's been pointed out (I think correctly) that *the* major source of information for blackhats is the patches themselves. The patch info tells you what it fixes, and then it's relatively easy to reverse-engineer that patch -- and then you go looking for systems that haven't applied that patch, with full knowledge of exactly what to exploit. Patches function as signposts for vulnerabilities.

    Funny how after Win2K support ended, there wasn't a rash of new Win2K exploits. Same for Win98. Win95. Win3.x. And not just because "no one is using them anymore" -- as you say, why wait to attack systems *after* they've lost major marketshare?? that would be just plain stupid, since there'd be fewer targets, and the left-behind users are those LEAST likely to have anything worth stealing.

  22. Re:This can't end well on Sex-Switched Mosquitoes May Help In Fight Against Diseases · · Score: 1

    We just started our mosquito season here... so far they're just little gliders, but the dive-bombers will be along in a bit.

  23. Re:Solid horse on American Pharoah Overcomes Biology To Win Triple Crown · · Score: 1

    Well, I just watched the Belmont on YouTube. That horse has two advantages: he's got more stamina (didn't look at all tired at the end) and he's got more length of shoulder, so he has more reach than average and wastes less motion. Compare his gait to the #2 horse -- not quite the reach, and looked to me like was coming up on out of gas.

  24. Re:Actually it has some medical effects. on Placenta Eating Offers No Benefit To Mom · · Score: 1

    My background is biochemistry/microbiology. I do grok this stuff. I read a lot of material from JCEM and other professional sources. If this isn't relevant, explain why oral hormones work across species. How much is absorbed varies somewhat, but that's a dosage detail (frex, the oral thyroid dose for a dog is 10x that for a human by weight because dogs don't absorb it as efficiently; however once absorbed by either human or dog it still does the same job, and it doesn't matter if it started life in a pig or a rat, and barring deiodinase deficiency, doesn't even matter if it was synthesized in a laboratory, as is most prescribed today).

    Do you know where oral progesterone for human use comes from?? Hint: not from human sources.

    JCEM: Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism

  25. Re:Solid horse on American Pharoah Overcomes Biology To Win Triple Crown · · Score: 1

    I don't watch very often anymore since I saw a Derby that was clearly rigged some years back (the horse that looked like he had the most speed was held back hard all the way to the wire -- if his jockey had let him out he'd have won by several lengths) but I happened to see this year's Preakness. And yeah, American Pharaoh looked to me like he had a lot left, in fact I remarked on that after the race.