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User: afgam28

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Comments · 396

  1. Re:Great, when will I use it? on Wayland 1.7.0 Marks an Important Release · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can use Wayland in Fedora today: http://fedoramagazine.org/gnom...

  2. Re: Pope Francis - fuck your mother on Pope Francis: There Are Limits To Freedom of Expression · · Score: 1

    Even if there was a choice, there's nothing wrong with choosing to be black or Asian or gay. But there is something wrong with choosing to believe a fairytale, and we should be able to make fun of that.

  3. Recent but obsolete software on Ask Slashdot: Sounds We Don't Hear Any More? · · Score: 2

    For example:

    The Windows 95 startup sound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    The ICQ uh-oh sound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    RIngtones, notification sounds and alarms from old phones that we no longer use. I've found that I can still instantly recognize sounds from handsets that I haven't used in years, even old versions of Android (e.g. the default alarm clock from my Nexus S running Gingerbread).

  4. Re:Never been better on Tumblr Co-Founder: Apple's Software Is In a Nosedive · · Score: 1

    I agree. Anyone who thinks that Apple's current software is bad clearly doesn't remember what Mac OS was like before X.

  5. Re:Aren't they all? on Why We're Not Going To See Sub-orbital Airliners · · Score: 1

    You're technically correct - the best kind of correct :)

  6. Then why is my over-50-year-old dad always asking me to fix his computer?

  7. Re:The main issue is on Box Office 2014: Moviegoing Hits Two-Decade Low · · Score: 1

    Hollywood does take risks, the problem is that the movie-going public doesn't! There were plenty of good movies last year but 11 of the 15 top movies in 2014 were remakes or sequels or superhero movies. Sadly the previous list has no correlation to the movies that audiences and critics actually enjoyed.

    The problem is that people choose movies to go and see by optimizing for the size of its marketing campaign, or opening weekend gross. So they go and participate in a feedback loop that encourages Hollywood to make more and more low-risk superhero sequels. A much better way to avoid disappointment is to choose a movie that other people who have seen the movie (i.e. reviewers) actually liked, and avoid the ones that reviewers have told you are going to be shit. It sounds obvious but people don't do this.

    Even here on Slashdot where we were warned that The Hobbit would be shit. But I see other posts where Slashdotters still went and watched it and are posting here that it was shit. As if that was a surprise, and it's all Hollywood's fault!

    A few people here have already mentioned Rotten Tomatoes. If you're not already using it or something similar, you should. Otherwise you're probably part of the problem.

  8. Re:Hooray Cyberpunk! on FBI Monitoring Hacking Targets For Retaliation · · Score: 1

    Most DDoS attacks are launched from zombie botnets, so there's a lot of collateral damage when someone does a "retaliatory" or "self-defensive" attack. It usually misses the true perpetrator's computer.

    Anyway I'm not saying that DDoS is "not really that bad". My point was more that bad analogies lead to bad conclusions. It looks to me like a disgruntled employee hacked into SPE and hurt the feelings of a few celebrities who made some shitty movie, and somehow this has resulted in two nation-states getting involved. All because our leaders, the media and society don't really understand what's happening, so they've shoehorned this into a flawed mental model that they do understand: war.

  9. Re:Hooray Cyberpunk! on FBI Monitoring Hacking Targets For Retaliation · · Score: 2

    Does anyone else feel that using the term "cyberwar" to describe this is an insult to anyone who has ever been through a real war? Insofar as there is a conflict between two or more parties, it is like a war. But that's the furthest that the analogy can be taken without it falling apart. Let's get some things straight: computers aren't people, DDoS attacks cause orders of magnitude less suffering than real war, and using a hyperbolic analogy leads to massive escalations of a conflict (e.g. Obama getting involved and taking an entire country offline).

    I propose we replace this with a car analogy :). A bunch of people, possibly North Korean, possibly not, have gone and stolen a lot of cars and parked them in JP Morgan's car park. Now all the bankers, and their customers, can't find parking and can't get into the office. Banking and financial services have been denied. Then some guy at JP Morgan realizes that those cars all have New Jersey plates - that's where the attacks are coming from! So they go steal a bunch of other cars, drive them across the Hudson River, and use them to gridlock all the streets in Jersey City. Problem solved - there's now ample parking for Jamie Dimon's Maserati!

    Except that because cars were stolen and transported interstate, the FBI now has to get involved.

  10. Re: My sockets are made of high quality steel on NASA 'Emails' a Socket Wrench To the ISS · · Score: 2

    It was printed with ABS plastic: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

    Not sure why people here are so hung up on plastic though. It's better than nothing at all, and doesn't stop you from getting a metal one in the future.

  11. Re: Bewitched? on Marissa Mayer's Reinvention of Yahoo! Stumbles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If they're comparing her to Steve Jobs and expecting her to create Yahoo's iPod, then it may be worth pointing out that Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and the iPod wasn't released until 2001. Two years is a long time but sometimes great products take even longer than that.

  12. Re:"Chinese"?! on Want To Influence the World? Map Reveals the Best Languages To Speak · · Score: 2

    Mandarin and Cantonese differ a lot when spoken, but have similar written forms (especially for more formal writing). Since the study looks at written languages (books and websites) it makes sense to lump the many written forms of Chinese together.

  13. Another on LA Mayor Proposes Earthquake Retrofits On Thousands of Buildings · · Score: 1

    There seems to be this idea that rather than regulate something, you just need to inform consumers of the risks, and then the free market will sort everything out. It sounds great in theory but doesn't seem to work well in practice. How many times have you seen a sign saying that something "contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm"? Most Californians ignore it and most people would probably ignore this list of "unsafe" buildings too.

  14. Re:I disagree on The Driverless Future: Buses, Not Taxis · · Score: 1

    The only time this matters is during peak times - who cares how much space a vehicle takes up when you've got plenty of extra road capacity?

  15. Re:Why Chrome when you can use Chromium? on Google Chrome Will Block All NPAPI Plugins By Default In January · · Score: 1

    I suspect they do some, but either way you're still "the product". Or is it more about privacy (which is a totally different thing from being exploited)?

  16. Re:Huh on Firefox Will Soon Offer One-Click Buttons For Your Search Engines · · Score: 1

    I bet it has something to do with the $5 billion they pull in every year in revenue.

  17. Re:Why Chrome when you can use Chromium? on Google Chrome Will Block All NPAPI Plugins By Default In January · · Score: 1

    An honest question: if you don't want to be "the product" then what are you doing here? How do you think Slashdot makes its money?

  18. Re:I'm not clear on Australian Post Office Opens Mail Forwarding Warehouse In the USA · · Score: 1

    Yep, sellers charge Australians more literally "just because they can". They sometimes make up excuses like shipping or localization, and sometimes buyers even believe them! But the reality is that Australians are willing to pay more than Americans for the same thing, so sellers take advantage of this.

    A similar situation of price discrimination exists for university textbooks. US edition textbooks can cost about double the price of the "international edition" of the exact same book. This is because Americans are willng to pay more than the rest of the world for the same book.

  19. Re:Cloud on Ballmer Says Amazon Isn't a "Real Business" · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. It's interesting that Ballmer would say this, given that Microsoft made a big effort to carbon copy AWS during his leadership.

  20. Re:More changes I don't want ... on Google Announces Inbox, a New Take On Email Organization · · Score: 3, Insightful

    1. UI innovations are still innovative, even if the underlying technology has been around for a while.

    2. There are no existing email clients that bundle semantically similar emails and extract relevant highlights. Even if you're not impressed with the ui there is still a lot of interesting machine learning behind this.

  21. Re:Apple's take on Windows 8 on Apple Doesn't Design For Yesterday · · Score: 1

    I don't think this is like Windows 8. It's a safe bet that once technology improves and prices are low enough, everyone will have a hi-dpi screen, so it's easy to argue that retina displays are the future. Whereas this idea of desktop-tablet convergence thing that Windows 8 tried to push was controversial at best, and is an example of Microsoft designing for a future that probably won't happen.

    The right font choice depends on the screen that the font is being displayed on. And during the period where we're transitioning away from low resolution screens to "retina" screens, there is no perfect choice for everyone - Lucida Grande is going to be better for low-resolution screens but Helvetica will look better on retina displays. They're not "ignoring good user interface design", they're just making a design tradeoff that favors new hardware over old, and optimizes for their highest-paying customers.

  22. Re:Chimps have rights, babies don't on Chimpanzee "Personhood" Is Back In Court · · Score: 1

    You're putting words in their mouth - no one is arguing that we should just coldly kill babies. This isn't about lowering babies, it's about improving the treatment of animals that are believed to have self-consciousness and the capacity to suffer from what we do to them.

  23. Re:People on Is an Octopus Too Smart For Us To Eat? · · Score: 1

    So do dogs, cats and chimpanzees end up on the "OK to eat" side of that line?

  24. Re:Drawing the line on Is an Octopus Too Smart For Us To Eat? · · Score: 1

    No, we're not all one big organism, or at least it's not useful to think that way.

    When it comes to the ethics of eating meat, the issue is not really the eating but the killing. If you could eat octopus meat without killing it or harming it or otherwise causing it to suffer, you'd be able to side-step this ethical problem easily. That's why even PETA is interested in lab-grown burger meat.

  25. Re:Not strong in Oakland on Magnitude 6.0 Quake Hits Northern California, Causing Injuries and Outages · · Score: 1

    Maybe he wasn't talking about Mercalli, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about intensity and not magnitude.