Slashdot Mirror


User: vidnet

vidnet's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
519
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 519

  1. Re:All or nothing approach is silly on 1.2% of Apps On Google Play Are Repackaged To Deliver Ads, Collect Info · · Score: 4, Funny

    pop up a request to access the other permissions at the time when they are needed

    Because that worked so well for Vista?

  2. Re:Dear Slashdot... on Google Is Testing a Program That Tracks Your Purchases In the Real World · · Score: 1

    You're either confused or trolling.

    This is not some fine print hidden in the bowels of the EULA, that you accept just by using a cell phone.

    You have to explicitly enable the feature. When you do, there's a popup that says, and I blockquote:

    Allow Google's location service to collect anonymous location data. Some data may be stored on your device. Collection may occur even when no apps are running.
    Agree | Disagree

    If you Agree, this feature is one of the things your anonymous data is used for.
    If you Disagree, you can still use positioning, it just doesn't use Google's server side assisted positioning and anonymous user data.

  3. Re:Dear Slashdot... on Google Is Testing a Program That Tracks Your Purchases In the Real World · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You:

    they are gathering the exact same information, and unlike the NSA, don't have any rules restricting their use

    The article:

    Google gets permission to do this kind of tracking when Android users opt in

    Do you really not see a difference between an experimental, opt-in location system and an international, clandestine spy program?

  4. Re:Am I imagining it? on Stolen Adobe Passwords Were Encrypted, Not Hashed · · Score: 1

    I believe that users should have some responsibility in not divulging their passwords to third parties, yes.

    Users gave away their gmail and facebook credentials to Adobe, without Adobe even requesting them. What kind of stewardship is that from the user?

    Do you honestly believe it's fair for both users and services that any breach or malevolent admin in any service the user ever visits will compromise the entirety of the user's online identity on all services?

    We should not be allowing and especially not encouraging this. Browser level, two-factor oauth everywhere.

  5. Re:Google Answers reimagined on Google Relying On People Power For 'Helpouts' · · Score: 1

    Let's try to sell this from a slashdotter's angle:

    Imagine having a rash from sitting on a filthy chair in your basement, showing it on camera to a certified physician, and then have two bag of cheetos and some fungal cream delivered hours later.

    Normal people, meanwhile, sometimes do pay money for various services that don't necessarily require physical presence. It's arguable whether they should or not, but they do.

    These include personal trainers and dietitians, IT support, psychologists, life coaching, pet trainers, travel agents, and (sadly) alternative medicine, feng shui advisors and psychics.

    With some guarantee of legitimacy, also psychiatrists, some medical services, law and real estate.

    I can actually see this being useful.

  6. Re:Am I imagining it? on Stolen Adobe Passwords Were Encrypted, Not Hashed · · Score: 0, Troll

    It wouldn't matter if users just followed best practices for password selection.

  7. Re:So... no separation between system and userspac on New Operating System Seeks To Replace Linux In the Cloud · · Score: 2

    Maybe you want to be able to control whatever is running in the VM. How do you propose to do that [...]?

    The deployment system should be responsible for the configuration. The hypervisor should be responsible for starting and stopping VMs when the monitoring system determines that they're misbehaving.

    SSHing in and changing config files, killing process and deleting unused logfiles or whatever is not a scalable solution.

    If you're just going to spawn a new VM for every single program you might as well just run all those programs on the physical machine.

    "The" physical machine? You mean the ten thousand machines across half a dozen data centers where jobs from a thousand different entities are constantly being spun up and shut down in response to load and hardware changes?

    Yes, you could do that. This is just an easier way of doing it quickly, transparently and securely.

  8. Re:So... no separation between system and userspac on New Operating System Seeks To Replace Linux In the Cloud · · Score: 1

    Just because you've only got "one app", it doesn't mean that you've only got one process.

    If you have multiple, semi-related tools, you currently wouldn't run them as different threads in the same process. Why put all your eggs in one basket, having to restart them all at once, letting one rewrite the memory of another, when starting a new process is so cheap?

    Now, if you have multiple, semi-related tools, you wouldn't run them as different processes in the same VM. Why put all your eggs in one basket, having to schedule them all on the same hardware, letting one misbehaving VM affect all of them at once, when starting a new VM is so cheap?

    We don't use separate processes because it's the best imaginable model of systems design. We use it because it's been the best compromise between separation and efficiency.

  9. Re:Huh? What? on The Greatest Keyboard Shortcut Ever · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The quality of this article did make me suspect that, yes.

  10. Re:Huh? What? on The Greatest Keyboard Shortcut Ever · · Score: 5, Funny

    Somehow it claims it's "a sort of Ctrl-Z for the entire Internet".

    Come back when it lets me undo posting Slashdot comments with mipselled words.

  11. Re:Huh? What? on The Greatest Keyboard Shortcut Ever · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The summary should read "Several browsers let you press Ctrl-Shift-T to reopen a closed tab. That is all."

    Why this is deserving of an article I don't know.

  12. Re:Take it public on Security Researcher Makes His Point By Hacking Into Zuckerberg's Facebook Page · · Score: 1

    If you'd read TFA, you'd have seen the bug reports.

    The first was a proof of concept that just didn't work.

    The second was one was an explanation that was very difficult to understand, and was interpretted as a feature working as intended.

    The reason why they won't pay now is obviously that they don't want all future exploit reports to come in the form of posts on Zuckerberg's timeline. People would love to do that with impunity, and it would not look good for Facebook.

  13. Re:Who is getting ripped off here? on Instagram "Likes" Worth More Than Stolen Credit Cards · · Score: 1

    Seriously, does the fact that some random web surfer took the time and effort to click a button really have any real-world value?

    The "Like" button is actually just a marketing term for "Subscribe and recommend". The counter is just a tiny side aspect.

    "Liking" something subscribes you to the news feed of whatever you "like", so that you will see show's promotions later. It actually allows you to advertise directly to people who have explicitly expressed an interest in your product. This is incredibly valuable.

    If several "friends" in your network "like" something, Facebook will recommend it to them. A recommendation from several friends has a much greater impact on people than that of strangers.

    So yes, it has a very high real-world value. Fake likes, though, much less so.

  14. Re:So much for... on Teenage League of Legends Player Jailed For Months For Facebook Joke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In a Twilight Zone revelation, the authorities do exactly what the people want them to do.

    They're showing a "tough and uncompromising stance on terror" which gets you public support. What if? Think of the children! (except the ones you jail, obviously). If he did happen to have something they could pin on him, they've "stopped a terrorist", gaining more public support.

    If they had done nothing and nothing happened, no one would have cared either way. If they had done nothing and something happened, there would be public outrage, mass firing and countless inquisitions.

    Arresting him was the logical thing.

  15. Re:Whoopee? on Next SurfaceRT To Come With Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, LTE · · Score: 2

    Have you tried Windows 8 on a tablet?

    While Surface Pro is bulky and has a terrible battery life, the Windows 8 tablet experience is actually really good. It's powerful enough to run Visual Studio when docked, lighter than many laptops for carrying around, and has a good touch interface and stylus for using it on the subway or in meetings.

    And there is no separation. If you want to fix a bug on the subway or navigate Youtube left-handed by touch while eating lunch at your desk, you can.

    I used to be a .NET consultant, and I would have loved a Surface Pro.

    Of course, I'm one of those freaks who thought Maemo phones were awesome because you could write a shell script in vim if you wanted to. YMMV.

  16. Re:Well, we are fucked... on Will Users Get a Slice of the "Big Data" Pie? · · Score: 1

    Basically, it's like Bitcoin where instead of cryptographic keys, the public ledger and proof-of-work you have the honor system.

    What could possibly go wrong?

  17. Re:You're all gonna hate me on First Looks At Windows 8.1, Complete With 'Start' Button · · Score: 1

    Sharing to Facebook.

  18. Re:Ti-82 Pre-Cal math class on How Did You Learn How To Program? · · Score: 1

    It definitely is. The most easily accessible scripting language on Windows 3.11 was DOS batch files, so that's what I started with. If you think C64 and BBC BASIC are slow and inexpressive...!

    Sometimes I wonder where I'd be today if I could have started with a proper language.

  19. Re:No? on Has Supercomputing Hit a Brick Wall? · · Score: 1

    When they do a mapreduce, each node might take minutes or hours to do work.

    I'm sure they have processes that require fine grained, millisecond parallelization, but mapreduce is not one of them.

  20. Re:thnx sony on Sony Launches Internet Service Offering Twice the Speed of Google Fiber · · Score: 1

    To prevent piracy, there is a 25 MB/day cap. A company spokesperson assured us that this does not affect the average person, as it's equivalent to over eight copies of the entire Lord of the Rings series -- much more than any mortal being could possibly plow through in 24 hours.

  21. Re:This is how you end up bankrupt on Crazy Eric Schmidt, His Yacht Prices Are Insaaane! · · Score: 1

    You'll never in your life get $14 million worth of enjoyment out of a boat.

    There are probably half a billion people in this world that would claim that you could never in your life get $25,000 worth of enjoyment out of a new car.

    Millions would say that never in your life would you get $400 worth of enjoyment out of a PC or smart phone.

  22. Re:A runtime system is an OS on A Glimpse of a Truly Elastic Cloud · · Score: 1

    Are we going to allow application programmers to start making direct calls to the hardware?

    But that's the thing: there is no hardware. In a virtual system, the hardware is implemented in software.

    On a physical platform, the lowest level operations are things like sending disk requests or pushing Ethernet frames, because it would be madness to implement a CPU instruction that reads a file by name from the filesystem.

    On a virtual platform, that's not madness, but actually rather convenient. When the lowest level platform operations are basically on the level of syscalls, you don't need an OS anymore.

  23. Re:Yes. on Do Nations Have the Right To Kill Enemy Hackers? · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let's do it. This would solve the growing cost of pensions, and open up lawns for kids everywhere.

  24. Re:Scaling is the Key! on New Process Takes Energy From Coal Without Burning It · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The part that worried me was more the fact that CO2 was still produced, it was just contained within the chamber (the benefit of their technique seemed to just be less/no air space required in the chamber).

    Sequestering CO2 is not simple, and is currently done mostly by pumping it into used oil fields. It's not certain whether these costs were factored in.

  25. Re:The standards are published in English on Ask Slashdot: Do Most Programmers Understand the English Language? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You're assuming that the majority of web programmer reads RFCs and the HTML5 spec.

    It's not unreasonable to think some people in less anglocentric parts just know tag names as character sequences rather than words (and science backs up the fact that arbitrary character strings works as commands when you're used to them).

    Even if they do know the meanings of every word used in HTML/CSS markup, they still might have no idea how to conjugate "to be", much less read english prose.