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User: drolli

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  1. As a user you are not supposed to make sensible input to the support hotline. Also the head of the local branch is a user.

    IT departments in banks are behemoths, never changing course. They can't react quickly. A mess of different never integrated systems which were kept over decades, "tailored" solutions by consultants with too little a time budget in the projects, and department heads for whom the internet is a new technology create an impenetratable mess where even the support doen not know whom to turn to.

  2. Re:Relatively high temp... on Physicists May Be One Step Closer To Explaining High-Temp Superconductivity · · Score: 1

    That woudl be pretty unrelated. If you use Helium and not Nitrogen, its not due to the critical temp but due to Type I or II supercondutivity.

    Tcs of Superconductors have been far above liquid Nitrogen for 30 years

  3. Re:The solution on Ask Slashdot: How Does One Verify Hard Drive Firmware? · · Score: 1

    The difference is that if NSA manipulates all hardrives, that would be easier to spot. I know that some organizations actually check the firmaware of devices before they use these.

    By the non-buy list of the

    If they do do what they did up to now (namely patching some high-profile targets) it wil ltake years before it is discovered and analyzed.

  4. The solution on Ask Slashdot: How Does One Verify Hard Drive Firmware? · · Score: 1

    should be that firmware is firmware. Please test rudimentary blocks of computing devices before you produce 100 of millions of a series.

    I expect the manufacturer actually does something like a read/write test for typical conditions.

    I may even accept or wish to get HDs which are one year behind SOTA, if they were not pushed out of the door in whatever shape the SW is due to a marketing deadline.

    For such device i happily would pay more, if the "programmable" fuses are set/burnt.

  5. Re:Climate change phobia on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 0

    Paint a sphere black, and it gets hotter than a white sphere. Emitting CO2 makes the Atmosphere "black" in the infrared, thus you increae the energy input to the system.

    If the local effects have a little bump or not does not matter to the fundamental equation.

    Nowadays we use modeling with great success. The models which were used to procude the processors you type on are complex. The planes you fly in are modelled. The controller in the stabilization system in you car was modelled.

    Should you severly doubt that for something (globally long >100years, not locally) as simple and an energy conservation equation is not reliable, is suggest that you dont use a plane, dont use a car, and move into the forest.

  6. Re:Climate change phobia on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 1

    I am not worried if humanity survives, but if you look into history, provoking wars was never a good idea.

    What happens if, e.g. China falls apart in an uncontrolled fashion, or Russia, or India? Or even the US? limate change is a economic risk on a global scale.

    I hope that this does not happen withing my lifetime.

  7. Re:Climate change phobia on We Stopped At Two Nuclear Bombs; We Can Stop At Two Degrees. · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Only question is the speed.

    If you change something over 10000years, ok people will move and adapt.

    If you change the same thing over 100 or 200 years, you may have a period of an increased numer of wars.

  8. Re:Sony should return to its roots on Why Sony Should Ditch Everything But the PlayStation · · Score: 1

    Yes. I think they should focus at what they are really good: Design of working products (typically for me, the smaller stuff like Headphones, Bluetooth headsets, etc).

    The deisgn of the subnotebook (down to the Vaio P series) was excellent (over 10 years, whenever i wanted to buy a notebook they were always in the last round of competitors due to the excellent design).

    One problem of sony was that it was focused on Japan (i lived there for four years and Sony has many Products which were taergeted at the Jp market)

  9. This name.... on Superfish Security Certificate Password Cracked, Creating New Attack Vector · · Score: 1

    this thing is called really "Superfish"?

    At first i thought its a made up name by the security guys to resemble "Superphish".....

  10. Re:Upper management be like on Torvalds: "People Who Start Writing Kernel Code Get Hired Really Quickly" · · Score: 1

    Somthing true in that. We all have complicated colleagues, and it helps if not everybody starts shouting in a complictaed situation.

  11. As a former scientist: on Mars One: Final 100 Candidates Selected · · Score: 1

    Any scientific organization taking part in this effort, under the prepositions which are assumes now, is, in my opinion, unethical. The life and health of humans involved must be the first priority in any experiment; and this is what it is - its an badly planned, underfunded, and dangerous experiment.

    My wife works in pharmceutical research, and if they did the same thing to mice (namely put them in a badly expected experiment without a clear purpose, but a high change of dying in an uncontrolled and unpleasant way), they would not get the approval.

  12. Your experience? on Ask Slashdot: Are General Engineering Skills Undervalued In Web Development? · · Score: 1

    In my experience, web development is a cocktail of....

    Big project with complex database bindings and backends are usually written in Java. They may not make up most of the web (if counted as pages) or accesses (since facebook etc is highly optimized), but if you need to get a real medium sized project out of hte door in a controllable fashion (and not-perfomance optimized), Java is your friend.

    Forget interpreted loose-typing languages. Forget OO by instance copy shit. Take a decent EE and refactor if something is wrong. Use XML bindings where you see fit (without additional cost). And so much more. I know many programming languages, but Java is my favourite from the vievpoint of controlled delivery and SW Quality tools.

    That being said yes, i believe that general engineering skills are undervalued, but i have the serious feeling that the original poter understands something different than I do, which is the mindset to dissect problems in systems, where each system prevents imperfections of other systems to pass trough.

  13. I am a physicist on Will Submarines Soon Become As Obsolete As the Battleship? · · Score: 1

    And yes, i used some measurement techniques which required a lot of computational power (fitting procedures which ran over days).

    And no: if your signal is too weak, no computation in the world can bring back the lost information. If i know that you will try to detect me optically, i paint the ship using another colour.

    As far as i understand submarines are anyway not meant t o go close to any coastline.

  14. Sounds good to me on Report: Samsung Replacing Its Apps With Microsoft's For Galaxy S6 · · Score: 1

    As somebody who really likes the price/performance point of samsung *Hardware* i have to say that I appreciate if they stop to put their randomly changing (sometime functions vanish when you update) office suite and their completely weird and buggy "communications" crap on the device.

    If they have a long-term thing with MS that wil mean that Office mobile will get better because there is money to make for MS, and that they replace their useless bloatware with thing which i alreaady use.

  15. So strange! on AP Test's Recursion Examples: An Exercise In Awkwardness · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I mean, this guy really seems not to get that the excercise was not meant to demonstrate how to print 123456, but that printing 123456, as opposed to e.g. 654321 is a tool to demonstrate/show the order of the execution of command in a self-recursive function.

    I mean, i have seen bad coding practices in courses (nervous handling of null pointers, and strong binding OOP comes to my mind), but this question has nothing to do with coding, but is purely the shortes way to test is the student understands what happens if the print comes after the call of the self recursive function.

  16. Re:"This is your company, this is your startup" on Building a Good Engineering Team In a Competitive Market · · Score: 1

    may ACT very smart and will create something WHICH WOULD BE truly amazing IF IT WOULD WORK.

  17. Re:Had to check the calendar on Microsoft Announces Windows For Raspberry Pi 2 · · Score: 1

    Yes, me too. I mean: the headline "Microsoft releases next version of windows for hobbyist 35$ computer meant for open source"....

    Whats next?

    -Office for linux - oops Office runs on Andoid.
    -Microsoft hosts Linux - yes, azure runs also linux machines
    -Microsoft sells Linux hardware - seems to be the case - Nokia N1
    -Microsoft contributes to linux kernel - but they are not top 20 any more
    -Linux devices are major income source for MS (~400Million$ for nothing from exFat patents)

    I mean the last thing which is missing is that they actually open source windows. But maybe they do that when they replace the kernel by a linux kernel and forget the rest.....

  18. What is our robot doing? on DARPA-Funded Robots Learning To Cook By Watching YouTube Videos · · Score: 1

    Yea i mistyped "cock" instead of "cook" in the search field from which videos he should learn....

  19. Re:Dangerous overkill on OpenSSH Will Feature Key Discovery and Rotation For Easier Switching To Ed25519 · · Score: 1

    It is dangerous to have partially redundant mechanisms. If you have only explicit redundancy, then errors will show up.

    This tool automates an administrative task. But only one.

  20. Dangerous overkill on OpenSSH Will Feature Key Discovery and Rotation For Easier Switching To Ed25519 · · Score: 1

    Dangerous because automatic key updates should require a great deal of verification of the new keys. I could imagine some scenarios (e.g. cloned virtual machines), which lead to the authenticated key being correctly updated (e.g old instructions/documentation) by the admin, but the EC key not overwritten (since it's not in the standard procedure). If this EC key then is copied automatically to the client, any of the cloned machines would accepted as a verified server after the login.

    Overkill because exposing the public keys in terms of the sftp protocol would be less invasive and give the client full control what to do whith the keys.

  21. Well they are used to facebook. on The NSA Is Viewed Favorably By Most Young People · · Score: 1

    Seems reasonable to me.

    Facebook: If you click here, for playing farmville and getting up-to date advertisements around the world and hearing which of your friends prepares pizza right now, you give us all your data. We will sell it or not, as we see fit, ask you about it or not, as we see fit, change the rules at any time, as we see fit, and if you dont disagree immeduatly, we will make an effort to protect our interest by just giving you enough privacy not to run away.

    NSA: To stop terrorists killing you all, we need to log all data of you which we can get.

    Yes, if you give me the choice if the ratio of loss of privacy to gained comfort/security is better for Facebook or the NSA, i choose the NSA.

  22. Re:Better article on NVIDIA GTX 970 Specifications Corrected, Memory Pools Explained · · Score: 1

    Yes. I think if I do SW development, a price difference of 3 man-hours of less does not justify the trouble...

  23. Re:Better article on NVIDIA GTX 970 Specifications Corrected, Memory Pools Explained · · Score: 1

    I would imagine that it get most troublesome only if you use the card for computing and rely on a homogenous memory access....

  24. Dont fight pedophiles on Anonymous Asks Activists To Fight Pedophiles In 'Operation Deatheaters' · · Score: 1

    but fight pedophile criminals.

    That being said, i doubt that i wnat to put justice in this respect in anonymous hands.

  25. Advantages are gone. on Ask Slashdot: Is Pascal Underrated? · · Score: 1

    IMHO the biggest advantage of pascal was that data structures were well denfined and that strings were not nul terminated.