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User: Bazman

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  1. Knobs and switches on Touch Interfaces In Cars Difficult To Use · · Score: 2

    My 1983 Series 3 Land Rover has big chunky knobs and large switches for everything. Engineers have been happy with those things for the user interface for a hundred years, why change now?

    Reliability? Not judging by the 'my car UI failed after 3 months and spent two weeks getting a replacement' post.

    Probably marketing (look at the gee-whiz dashboard! See its shiny goodness!) and maybe even insurance (so they can tell if you did indicate or were fiddling with the radio before crashing) and also built-in obsolescence (oh, you need an upgrade, $$$ plz kthx, no, nobody else can fix it) unlike on a car with knobs and switches where anyone can replace a switch.

    I hope these touch screens work with gloves on...

    My Land Rover does have two switches on the centre of the dashboard that I have no idea what they do...

  2. Re:You can't get rid of automated / off-site backu on Ask Slashdot: How To Clean Up My Work Computer Before I Leave? · · Score: 1

    Backups should only be available to admins, who will have probably had full access to your data all the time you've been working there.

    Wiping the disk will stop the next dumb user who is assigned your PC from seeing anything, even if they take the drive out and remount it somewhere.

    But you can't stop the BOFH. What stops the BOFH is supposedly the possibility of being found out and then becoming unemployable.

  3. Re:Believe it or not... on City Council Ordered To Stop CCTV In Taxi Cabs · · Score: 1

    Central Services are looking for you, Mr Tuttle. I mean Buttle. Tuttle.

  4. iMilk on Apple Gets the Importance of Packaging; Why Doesn't Google? · · Score: 1

    Maybe Apple can design a milk carton that doesn't spoo milk all over your lap when you open it...

  5. Re:no woman on Man Tries To Live an Open Source Life For a Year · · Score: 1

    Or maybe she can fork him? Although 'git clone' will just make another git [UK defn: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/git] but then most girls I know go from one git of a boyfriend to another...

  6. Re:Step 0 on Ask Slashdot: How To Add New Tech To Old Van? · · Score: 1

    Just make sure all the tech is too big to go out of the window (BIG screens) and that the doors auto-lock when the windows are smashed.

    Or hook up a garage to the towbar so you can keep the car indoors all the time.

  7. Step 0 on Ask Slashdot: How To Add New Tech To Old Van? · · Score: 2

    Security. 1977? You could open car locks with a bent pin. Central locking and immobilisers were probably a decade away in luxury models. Okay, maybe a van has better security in case it had a valuable cargo. But anyway, don't put 10k of tech in a vehicle that can be stolen with a bent wire coat hanger.

  8. google for "open basque" on Basque Country Gov't Decrees State-Produced Software Should Be Open Sourced · · Score: 5, Informative

    Everyone do a google image search for "Open Basque"...

    That's what I call open sauce.

  9. Yawn on HP Shows Off Power Over Ethernet Thin Client · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wake me up when it can do power over wireless ethernet.

  10. One thing missing on Dell Designing Developer Oriented Laptop · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, every web developer runs Ubuntu up until that moment when they realise they have to make sure the site works with Internet Explorer. So the first thing you'll have to do with this is install Virtual Box and do a Windows Install. You do have a Windows license, right?

  11. Cultural/Media Studies? on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With University Firewalls? · · Score: 1

    Make friends with someone in your Cultural/Media Studies faculty. Preferably someone doing research into social media, emerging cultural phenomena, self-organising cliques, something like that. Then get them to repeatedly hassle IT to give them access to blocked sites, claiming its for their research. I reckon after the fifth time IT will give up and just open up the whole network (their router access control lists will get unmanageable for their competence level).

  12. You expose your DB server? on Serious Oracle Flaw Revealed; Patch Coming · · Score: 1

    Who exposes their Oracle DB server to the outside world anyway? Surely its just accessible from the servers that need it. Anyone know any public Oracle DB servers? Lemme just scan the interwebs...

    Of course if your front-end gets pwned then you don't want your DB server getting rooted, but hey, they got your front end server... Hopefully that will only have restricted access to the databases it needs, so an Oracle remote exploit here could let an attacker get to anything on the server...

    Either way up, not a good thing... Has Larry sold his MiG yet?

  13. google for 'itil' on Ask Slashdot: Documenting Scattered Sites and Systems? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you know what ITIL is? Find out. Then get yourself a CMDB. There's open source ones so you're not going to break the budget.

    http://www.cmdbuild.org/en/index_html?set_language=en&cl=en

      Then get yourself a document management system. Alfresco? It's a monster.

    If you can tame those systems, then you can look for a massively well-paid job with a bigger company that wants to leverage enhanced ITIL capabilities in an enterprise solution situation scenario. F**k yeah.

  14. Google sketchup on North Korean Nuclear Facilities, From 30,000 Feet · · Score: 1

    Anyone want to tell those guys that SketchUp isn't open source? This is slashdot after all, and we care about these things don't we?

  15. Slashdotted on One Million Web Pages Attacked By Lilupophilupop · · Score: 1

    Getting '503 Service Unavailable' when I try and wget the relevant URL. The slashdot effect for good!

  16. How does this work? on Groupon Not Doing So Well On Wall Street · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How does groupon work?

    Company A has a product that normally sells for X. They get a deal with groupon to sell it for Y, such that Y < X.

    Groupon take some cut, so the retailer is getting A, such that A<Y<X.

    So I call the retailer and go 'hey, let me buy your thing at price B', such that: A<B<Y<X.

    The retailer gets more than they would from groupon. I pay less than I would if I'd gone through groupon. Groupon get zilch. I win, the retailer wins. My only issue is how I pitch the price B. But for me, anything below Y is a win for both of us, I just don't know what A is (if I go below that, the retailer is better off with groupon).

    Or I've missed something, apart from the fact that if groupon didnt exist I wouldn't have heard about the retailer in the first place...

  17. More oddities on Giant Chinese Desert Mystery Structure Solved · · Score: 2

    So can anyone tell me what the circled numbers 1 to 5 are:

    here

    40ft across, irregularly spaced, close to something the size of a soccer/football field.

  18. Re:Virgin to sell 1.5 gigabit Internet to cocks on Brits Rejecting Superfast Broadband · · Score: 1

    Actually its the complete opposite. The telephone companies are desperate to fibre-up the working class estates in order to cut into Sky's satellite TV revenues. In my town I hear you can get fast fibre internet north of the river, but not on the more middle-class south side. There's no money to be made in infrastructure unless you can sell 260 channels of endless crap to unemployed chavs sitting on their butts all day. Slight caricature.

  19. That would be a Steiner/Waldorf School? on A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Use Computers · · Score: 5, Informative

    Described as "Mystical Barmpottery" (a lovely english expression we should all use more):

    http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3528

    and some wonderful racism in there too:

    http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3853

      The only Waldorf I'd want my kids taught by is the one who sits next to Statdler on The Muppet Show.

  20. 2500 users? Not really on Newb-Friendly Linux Flavor For LAMP Server? · · Score: 1

    I thought you meant you wanted 2500 users on the Linux system itself. That's a fairly big /etc/passwd file, and if they all log in at once then I suspect even a high-end system will crawl a bit.

    What you really want is a system that can run a forum that can support 2500 users, but you don't say how many simultaneously, or anything else useful. For 2500 simultaneous users, all posting and reading, you might need more than one box...

    So, proper requirements spec plzkthx.

  21. I know what it is... on Will Capped Data Plans Kill the Cloud? · · Score: 1

    ..these game-changing big forces that will alter our lives forever? ISPs will start only taking bitcoins for payment. Heck, this is another bitcoin slashvertisement isnt it?

  22. Icons on EG8 Publishes Report In Noninteractive, Nonquotable Format · · Score: 1

    I laughed at the "download" icon. All the greatest tech minds and what do they use for the download icon? A floppy disk.

  23. Re:Don't Disrespect the Backups on Ask Slashdot: Uses For a Small Office Server? · · Score: 1

    "Can things like 5 months of "no backups" happen with an rsync-based backup to external hard drives? (see my comment above regarding same). I'm honestly asking."

    Of course. Suppose the server gets rebooted, but there's an issue with the backup drive, and the server spits a warning and carries on without mounting it. Now the clients are dumping to server:/backups as usual, but oh dear, that's on the little 10G root file system and not the 6TB backup. Which soon fills up. And there's insufficient monitoring and logging for anyone to notice. I mean, why bother checking the disk space, we're never going to fill 6TB, right?

    Just one scenario out of plenty. New or expired ssh keys? Someone changed the network card? Lots of things can trip up a system, the epic fail is not having a human check it (which would take two minutes) frequently.

  24. Python? on Ask Slashdot: Moving From *nix To Windows Automation? · · Score: 1

    With the win32api module, can do Windowsy stuff, and you can transfer all your python skills from your Unix days. You do have Python skills don't you? Well, get some.

    There's a native port of Python so no need for cygwin.

  25. Understanding on Is Science Just a Matter of Faith? · · Score: 1

    To "understand" something means to figure out what "stands under" it. Like Newton figured out that the moon and the apple were both subject to the same force, he understood gravity on that level. It was still a mysterious action-at-a-distance, and Newton never got any further in his understanding. Then Einstein comes along and understands it as space-time curved by mass. But he didn't understand where mass came from (that's still up for grabs, and our best bit is the Higgs boson coupling mechanism).

    So it's always the case that a physicist is going to say they don't understand something - otherwise their job is done or they are an arrogant idiot. So what Feynman was saying is that "yup, its a quantum world at very small scales, but we don't really know why below that. Maybe someone else will figure it out". Maybe it will be multiple universes interacting with ours via some unknown force, or multi-dimensional branes colliding. But there might always be something in science we dont "understand".