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User: fwarren

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  1. Re:Wow ... on Microsoft To Cut 7,800 More Jobs, Take $7.6 Billion Writedown On Nokia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in 2011 when Elop wrote the burning memo the handwriting was on the wall. Nokia was going to have trouble in the smart phone market. There is no way of knowing if their Linux offering that Elop canned to go with WinMo would have worked out for them. What was obvious even back then, was that moving to WinMo was a mistake. MS had gone from 12% of the smart phone market to under 4% by that point. No one was clamoring for new Windows 7.5 phone. Every Windows 6 phone user I knew had left for Apple or Google by that point in time, fed up random reboots on their phone that took 2 minutes to complete.

    It did not help that at that point most of his wealth was invested in Microsoft stock and only a small amount in Nokia stock. It was in his best interest to try and save the Widnows phone. Elop had drank to much kool-aid and was convinced that anything Microsoft was the way to go and coupled with that financial interest he took Nokia in the wrong direction.

    The only thing dumber than Elop tanking Nokia was Microsoft purchasing Nokia.

    I take that back. Microsoft purchasing Skype was just as dumb. After spending over 9 billion on Skype and then having to upgrade the hardware infrastructure Skype runs on. I suspect Microsoft has another 10 billion or so it will need to write off.

  2. Re:Standing / smoking / standing on Ask Slashdot: Have You Tried a Standing Desk? · · Score: 2

    I agree. I find many tasks can be done standing up and I don't even think about what I am doing. However, if I have to work on a very complicated task I find I have a hard time concentrating or getting into it standing up and sitting works better for me. I was hoping that would improve over time. but after 9 months if it is complex and I have a problem concentrating, the problem goes away as soon as I am able to sit down.

    I have a mat I use for a softened floor surface.

    I work for a company that does aluminum metal fabrication. So a buddy of mine on his brake took about $10 in scrap aluminum and made me a setup that was custom to my measurements. http://imgur.com/G06kT8S

  3. Re:High fat? on High-Fat, High-Sugar Diet Can Lead To Cognitive Decline · · Score: 1

    I call bullshit on the study. Mice are designed to run on a grain based diet. Adding a bunch of fat or sugar is not really natural for them. This is a study that works as FUD. When the government agrees with the experts that we need remove the limits on fats in foods and that low fat foods are actually harmful, they can point to this study to keep people confused and sell some more low fat yogurt and snackwells.

    Now if we stop talking about mice and start talking about people we can look at what the science has always shown. There are things called diseases of modern culture. As in indigenous people who don't eat like western cultures have low cancer and mental illness rates and no heart attacks. It looks like flour and sugar are the big culprits.

    All grains turn to glucose (sugar) when you eat them, all sugar is already glucose. A 60% carb loaded diet is a lot of sugar for the body to process. And if your ability to handle that load is affected over time, to become prone to all sorts of conditions. Dementia, schizophrenia, heart disease, cancer, etc.

    Fats and proteins don't spike the blood sugar. Even if mice are not designed to eat fat and proteins like humans are.

  4. Re:Well they're getting closer to the truth on Learn-to-Code Program For 10,000 Low-Income Girls · · Score: 2

    My family was on welfare, later on I worked at the welfare department. I have seen a few people use the system to help them get someplace in life...odds are they would have found some way to make it no matter what. I have seen many people milk the system for anything they can get now, with no intention of ever getting out of it. I have also seen people with no motivation pushed by requirements into programs that had no motivation to be there.

    I stand by what I said. Most people and by that 80%+ will not value something that is given to them where they do not have to put any desire into it, any work into it, and have issues cleared out of the way for them. Why care? Opportunity will always be there?

    If you want to be a carpenter and you need tools to get an entry level job, someone helping you to get tools, be it a gift or a loan, can mean a lot. Offering someone free tools for a job, that they can then quit, continue to get aid, and also make a little extra by selling the tools, does nobody a favor.

    There is a proverb: Why is there in the hand of a fool the purchase price of wisdom, Since he has no heart for it?

    Trying to help people to get something they don't want is a waste of time. Girl or boy, rich or poor, young or old.

  5. Re:Well they're getting closer to the truth on Learn-to-Code Program For 10,000 Low-Income Girls · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I just don't understand. Here is my background.

    Mom was a schizophrenic, my dad an alcoholic. We moved every year or so till I was 13. At that point we were stuck in a crummy motel in central California. This is in the early 80s. So when I was 16 I would walk into K-Mart and local appliance stores, and play around on the Commodore VIC 20's and later Commodore 64s. The local community college had a Commodore PET computer.

    I had no money, no one to show me the ropes, not the best nor most stable education, parents that could not take care of themselves, so I had to watch over them and my 3 younger siblings. I taught myself Commodore Basic, then how to program in assembly. This consisted of writing a program on paper, looking up the opcodes, converting them from hex to decimal and then writing a loader that would POKE those values into memory and then do a SYS call to run the machine language program. From there I moved on to learn FORTH.

    I will admit I am a male. But I had SO many disadvantages and yet I had a desire to learn how to program. Lets not forget wanting to learn how to do this classified me as a geek and meant I had to deal with lots of kids and peer pressure telling me there was something wrong with me on a fundamental level for engaging in such activities.

    Exactly what is holding back any boy or girl in any halfway modern country from learning to program? "Boo Hoo, I would have to buck social norms to learn to program." Well it is not much of a dream or desire if that would stop you. "Boo Hoo, no one will teach me." There are thousands of hours of video on youtube, You can google out books on any programming language you want. If you don't like the teaching style of some video or book, try a different one.

    The world in inherently "I don't give a damn". If you are a former heroin addict and you want to work in pharmacology, well you are going to have some hurdles to overcome. I can't tell you why any particular girl in junior high would decide they don't even want to know about computers. I can't tell you why a girl would decide against a career in programming. What I can tell you from pulling myself up in a world filled with welfare recipients who are just wanting a check is this. If you have to coddle and beg to get people into a program, and work hard at removing every barrier to their success, it hurts the drive and motivation for most people. Without it having some personal cost it has little value to them. Why work hard? If they don't do well, someone will step in and help them. If other things seem more important at the moment, walk away, the program will always welcome them back later with open arms.

    TL;DR - If you are not willing to fight to become something because you want it, what outside program is really going to make a difference.

  6. Re:Minimum Wage on Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour · · Score: 1

    I 100% agree with you.

    I worked for a company that was purchased by a larger company that did not want a competent Dilbert as an employee. A smart person who understood what they were doing, why they were doing it and why it was important. They wanted a minimum wage Wally. Someone who clocked in at 8:00 and out at 5:00, and did the bare minimum. They knew what to do to do the task at hand but did not ask questions. If they were told wrong, they would spend all day building parts that would not work, because they did not know how to tell if a part would work or not. All they knew for minimum wage is how to build the part like they were told to build it.

    After that job, I swore I would never work for another company like that. I watch for it when interviewing for a job with a company, I will leave during the interview if I think they will be an employer who will pay bottom dollar for the minimum skilled employee to work for them. Every job I have ever had I have received promotions and raises because I was able to understand why things were going on and was able to make improvements that added enough value the employer recognized I was a good employee and paid me more.

    I want to work for a company that will let me help them do better. That will treat me good and I will do good work for them. Not a company who wants to pay as little as possible and thinks, "who cares if they quit, we can find someone else who will do the lob for less".

  7. Re:Minimum Wage on Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour · · Score: 1

    Corporations are beholden to their shareholders. When asked if I could do A for the company and it will likely be the dominate player in the market in 20 years or do B right now and pay the shareholders a 10% increase in what they were getting and it does not appear to put the company out of business in the next 5 years. The CEO running the company is pretty much required to take option B. He is working for maximum shareholder value in the near to mid term.

    If my goal was to build a company from 1 person to 10 and then to hire managers to do the work and grow the company to 100 people then to 500 and to offer an IPO. then yes, I am short sited in not loving employees.

    But if I like what I do and can make a bit more money by having a few employees and know I am helping some folks out by giving them a job then why not? I only have to do it if I want to. But if government regulation is to much, or dealing with employee problems is to much or if I can't turn a profit at it, why not go back to doing it by myself?

    To be successful, not every business must go from starting in a garage to being Apple or HP.

    For those that like it small, a minimum wage increase like this may very well mean firing everyone and going back to being your only employee.

    Back in 1992 I worked for a lawyer who had about $15,000 a month in expenses but had about $95,000 a month in receivables from passive income streams. That is right he was pocketing $80,000 a month even if he did not lift a finger, or never won a case. That includes employing 5 people full time. The state was looking at instituting mandatory employer paid insurance. He could afford to pay us all 3 times minimum wage and pick up the health care costs. In reality he would have fired all 5 of us and stopped practicing law or move to another state.

    If every business that employed only 5 people shut down in LA, it would put a lot of people out of work. And every business big or small will be looking for a way to dodge this. It would be much cheaper to bake bread in Bakersfield and drive it over the grapevine. Hell, you don't even have to pay the driver LA wages.

  8. Re:Hooray for experiments! on Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour · · Score: 1

    At this point LA by 2020 and Seattle by 2022. Oregon is looking at doing this state wide by 2018. It is an interesting roll of the dice.

    Either this is great news for everyone, other communities on the West coast will join in and it will be a workers paradise.

    OR

    It will be a bad thing on very large geographical area.

    It is a big experiment and all indicators are this will hurt more people than it helps in the long run.

  9. Re: It's simple. Eat less and eat less crap on Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds · · Score: 1

    This is slashdot, home of that kind of behavior.

    If you are interested in what nutritional ketosis is and want a quick way to do it right without buying $100 in books this is an excellent place to start.

    If you see article X and then ask in the group about it, they will point you to article Y or citation Z. As always common sense is left up to the reader. Read both X and Y and make a decision for yourself.

    I can tell you if I eat the typical "heart healthy" diet with plenty of grains, fruits and vegetables and avoid sweets...I am still pre-diabetic.

    However if I eat a diet very low in carbohydrates, my blood sugar is fine. So I have 4 options

    1. Eat all the processed foods and sugar and want and end up diabetic.
    2. Eat what is considered a low fat, low cholesterol, heart healthy diet and end up diabetic.
    3. Eat a low carbohydrate diet of under 50grams of carbs a day to remain healthy and non-diabetic.
    4. Eat a very low carbohydrate diet under 25grams of carbs a day to remain healthy, non-diabetic and reap the benefits of nutritional ketosis

    It really is not a religious issue. For me and my body, the only question I have to ask, "is it worth the extra effort to stay below 25grams of carbs a day to reap whatever benefits nutritional ketosis will give me or is standard low carb going to work better for me?"

    For anyone interested, get a blood glucose meter and some testing strips and test your blood sugar levels, if you ever get above 120, the odds are a low carb diet will reap you some major health benefits. Also the words "keto" and "low carb" when used on pinterest will yield a butt load of delicious recipes that are low carb.

  10. Re:It's simple. Eat less and eat less crap on Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds · · Score: 2

    Dr Atkins died because he slipped on an icy sidewalk outside of his New York City office. He later died while in a coma. While in the coma he suffered from swelling. His autopsy shows he had heart damage. This is the headline most people have heard. The full story is that he had heart damage as a young man and the corner did note there was heart damage, but did not attribute it to his diet.

  11. Re: It's simple. Eat less and eat less crap on Hacking Weight Loss: What I Learned Losing 30 Pounds · · Score: 1

    First of all a nutritional ketogenic diet is high in fat, moderate in protein and low in carbohydrates. If you eat to little protein you start breaking down muscle. If you eat way to much protein then excess protein is converted to sugar. As a generic range, lets say 75% fat, 20% protein and 5% carbohydrates (primarily from vegetables)

    It has been shown that people who already have kidney damage can do more harm on a high protein diet. However this is not the case for people with healthy kidneys. Which is all still academic, sine a well formulated nutritional ketosis style diet is moderate in protein, not high in protein.

    I also would not blame carbohydrates for all evils in the world. However, the combination of your genetics, diet and exercise can lead you to a place where your body does not do well with a carbohydrate rich diet. I am talking about people who are diabetic or pre-diabetic. A very low carb diet for them can be incredibly beneficial.

    A good source for information about a ketogenic/very low carb diet, both how to do it and debunking common myths would be http://reddit.com/r/keto

  12. Re: Be fair on WHO Report Links Weed Killer Ingredient To Cancer Risk · · Score: 5, Informative

    The chances are very good that the last piece of bread, pastry, gravy or soup thickened with flour you have had, would have roundup on it. Thanks to the crops being treated right before harvest.

    Many farmers will use roundup a few days before harvest because it dries the wheat out. http://www.washingtonsblog.com...

  13. Pikers on Parents Investigated For Neglect For Letting Kids Walk Home Alone · · Score: 0

    These folks are pikers.

    Back in 1971 when I was 5 my parents dropped me and my 3 year old brother off at the theater to go watch Dumbo.

    6 months later I went to go visit my grandmother. They loaded me up on the greyhound bus for the 12 hours drive and asked the driver to make sure I did not get off the bus till it got to the Los Angeles station.

    I look back and think WTF? What was WRONG with my parents?

  14. Re:CryptoWall on Writer: How My Mom Got Hacked · · Score: 1

    Or like me, have my fileserver a Linux system with the SMB shares on ZFS and have scripted hourly backups. Took me all of 20 minutes to recover. 16 minutes to figure out how far back to roll each share, 1 minute to look up the ZFS rollback command and 4 more minutes to commit all the rollback on all the affected shares.

  15. Re:Obligatory XKCD reference on Study: Compound Found In Beer Boosts Brain Function · · Score: 1

    Watch out, Balmer will want to squirt back at you with his shit brown Zune.

  16. Obligatory XKCD reference on Study: Compound Found In Beer Boosts Brain Function · · Score: 3, Funny
  17. Re:Several others posting say that risks corruptio on The State of ZFS On Linux · · Score: 1

    To get all the features of data integrity and error correction you need to avoid hardware raid with ZFS.

    If ZFS controls the drives and you have striping or mirroring and one of the drives has corrupt data, ZFS can log an error and fix the data corruption. If hardware RAID controls the drive, it may realize a copy of the data is bad, and pass back the good copy, but RAID won't log an error nor fix the bad block. ZFS won't fix it either because it won't know since RAID handled returning the correct data to ZFS.

    ZFS is self healing if it is NOT on top of hardware RAID. To reap all of the benefits of ZFS you need lots of RAM, that RAM should be ECC and two or more disks without hardware RAID.

  18. Re:Pick a different job. on Ask Slashdot: What Do You Wish You'd Known Starting Out As a Programmer? · · Score: 2

    As a child my dad taught me what to know about unions. He was a union stone mason in his youth.

    Unions do not foster excellence. If you excel, you make everyone else look bad. My dad was a hard worker. He would get up at 4:00am and be laying brick by 5:00am, and some night had his truck lights on working till 8:00 or 9:00pm.

    He said with the union job, you spent 4 hours working and 4 hours doing other things, like dropping your trowel off the top of the building. Then you had to wait for a supervisor to show up, explain you dropped your trowel. The supervisor then had to go down in the elevator, walk by the trowel, find a journeyman hod-carrier tell him to get the trowel and bring it up to you. 30 to 60 minutes wasted doing nothing, And by the time the trowel got back to you, you could stop to go to the bathroom.

    I like doing good work. I don't want a union that protects me from my boss abusing me like it is 1910 again, but makes me a slave to mediocrity and not standing out from the crowd because it makes them look bad.

  19. Re:What a bunch of Wuss on Munich Reverses Course, May Ditch Linux For Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Damn straight!!! They are in my house.

  20. The humans are dead on By 2045 'The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,' and That Could Be a Problem · · Score: 1
  21. Re:Behind the curve on Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage · · Score: 1

    Fully agree.

    I worked for the welfare department in Fresno California in the 80s. A judge forced a "homeless" program on the welfare department. They would pay first month, last month and deposit. With the deposit being tied to the rent amount and all of that being tied somewhat to what welfare paid on a monthly basis. IE if you got a $700 welfare check, they would NOT fork out $1400 a month rent to you.

    This program had two big effects. The first one is it hurt people who lived just above welfare status. If a crap-hole appartment went for $300 a month and a decent place went for $400. The crap-hole manager raised the rent to $400. Well to keep poor people with poor life skills who will trash the place out AND the fact that the crap-hole goes for $400, now the decent place raises their rents to $500. So this hurt a whole bunch of people who did not quality for welfare.

    The second thing is many folks abused the program. You could get homeless assistance onec a year. So you did not pay rent (pocket 1 months rent), then got an eviction notice, welfare department pays 1st months rent (so pocket 2nd month of rent money). Then you dont pay rent on month 12, (pocket more rent money), they call it your last month, plus keep the deposit and you are now homeless again after a year and qualify for more help. There were lots of people who did this 2 and 3 years in a row.

    The same will be true of this minumun wage increase. If you are a crap-hole manager and charge X now and everyones pay almost doubles, you can almost double rent. Now that you raise the rent the non-crap-hole place will raise rent as well. If a carboard box rents for x then a place with a real roof must rent for more than x.

    Now it is not just labor costs that go up, rents will go up too. This will hurt everyone but union employees whos minumun pay is tied to being 150% or 300% of minumun wage.

  22. OwnCloud on Dropbox's New Policy of Scanning Files For DMCA Issues · · Score: 1

    This is what OwnCloud is made for.

    I know not everyone is able to set up their OwnCloud server. There are places that will host it and set it up for you.

    I am truely sorry that DMCA is slowly but surely choking the web, In the end it will go away. Kids that are 15 today, when they are 45 will not convict someone of piracy, they just wont see anything wrong, same thing for the judges and prosecutors. In the shot term it could get alot worse. If you don't have the skills to circumvent it all I can do is quote John Wayne. "Life is hard, it is even harder when you are stupid"

  23. Re:As an enterprise user of oracle based systems on Ex-Head of Troubled Health Insurance Site May Sue, Citing 'Cover-Up' · · Score: 1

    Yes, and Oregon may have even known what scoundrels they are. But they are the only company that completed the bid process. Which was so byzantine that the requirements kept changinig while the bid process advanced. When everything was said and done, Oracle was the only company that submitted a complete bid the state could consider.

    I have a suspision that the process was built around the concept of give the outside contractor 100 million dollars so they can be blamend intead of us state employees. Tpyically things don't Wile E Coyote blow up in thier face so badly that evenyone involved goes down, but this looks like one of those rare instances where that will happen.

  24. Re:Probably a tough choice to make. on Mozilla Scraps Firefox For Windows 8, Citing Low Adoption of Metro · · Score: 4, Informative

    After 18 months, "Metro" is not a roaring success. Firefoxes absense on Metro will only hurt WinRT users. By definition, being a WinRT users they have already decided they are going to have a stripped down experience.

    I don't think Mozilla is losing anything here.

  25. Re:No on Does Relying On an IDE Make You a Bad Programmer? · · Score: 1

    There are plenty of times when I have not been near a computer and writing some code out when I had a thougth was a great thing to do. In addition to the fact it is great to do when learning a new language or construct.

    The point was that everyone brought up on intellesense did not really know the language, they had a very lose understanding of the syntax. During their larval phase in learning to program it was hindering them from learning the language better. When you understand things, then it is eaiser to undertdand the tradeoffs, when to cut corners, how much time you tools are saving you, etc.