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User: CastrTroy

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  1. Re:Must be Silicon Valley on 13% of CompSci Grads Have Starting Salaries Over $100K · · Score: 1

    Exactly. What's the added value of living 20 minutes from downtown and 20 minutes from work? I live in a similar situation. I bike 15-20 minutes to get to work, and I can walk 5 minutes from my house to pick up groceries. My house was 200K. My life is pretty stress free and I'm glad I don't have to spend 45+ minutes each way commuting to work.

  2. Re:I bet they're not. on Aussie ISP Bakes In Geo-dodging For Netflix, Hulu · · Score: 1

    They're going to ruin the fun for the rest of us. I think that Netflix is not doing much about this because there are proportionately not a lot of users do this, and it requires a bit of setup and technical know-how on the user side. If you start having ISPs bake it into the service so that all their customers use this feature, then you can bet that the content owners are going to start to apply quite a bit of pressure on Netflix to clamp down on this sort of activity.

  3. Re:Who watches this crap? on Watching People Code Is Becoming an (Even Bigger) Thing · · Score: 2

    I kind of agree on this. Watching others code can really help you pick up on things you can't get from a book. For instance, VS.Net has a really nice feature where you can Type Ctrl+?, which focuses on the search field. Then you type ">of" followed by a file name. You can do this to open files and edit them. It also has autocomplete so you can find your files faster. I use this functionality for switching back and forth between files all the time. It's often a lot faster than going to the mouse to switch which file you're working on.

    I even see a lot of new coders who don't know how to do things like use the debugger. Watching actual coding could be boring, but you could probably pick up a lot of useful tips for how to actually use the tools. Over the years, veteran coders pick up a lot of shortcuts that might not be immediately obvious to many programmers, both old and new.

  4. NES vs. DOS on Retro City Rampage Getting a DOS Version · · Score: 1

    That proved to be quite the challenge considering the NES only had 10KB of RAM, 32KB of program ROM, 256KB of background graphics ROM, and 4KB of sprite graphics ROM.

    While the MS-DOS version isn't anywhere near as limited in terms of resources, it remains to be seen just what corners have been cut in order to get the game working.

    Seems funny when I think about games on DOS vs. NES. Most of the time, NES games seemed much better. I guess as time went on, and DOS advanced to games like DOOM and Descent, it left NES behind. But by that time, SNES was already out, and again, the games were much better on SNES for the most part.

    At the time, NES didn't seem very limited. IT had plenty of great games that played quite well.

  5. Re:Linux everywhere. on First Fedora Image For the MIPS Available For Testing · · Score: 1

    Yeah, people just don't know about them because they are embedded products. There's a lot of routers that use MIPS chips. Intel/AMD x86(64) and ARM are so well known because the chip is one of the bullet points on the marketing materials such as desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets. MIPS chips are put into devices where the processor isn't used as a marketing point. That's not to say it's a bad chip, just stating the way it is.

  6. Re:The cat is out of the bag on When a Company Gets Sold, Your Data May Be Sold, Too · · Score: 1

    While you obviously see it as a privacy issue, and I agree it is, many people would probably see what you experienced as great service. The fact that you could close your account and then re-open it and not have to go through the trouble of re-uploading all the data and reconfiguring all your payment information would probably be seen as a great feature by many people.

    My cousin lost her phone, and upon getting a new one was very thankful that all her contacts got restored onto the new phone. She didn't care that somebody else has access to her list of contacts. She only saw the plus side. Before the advent of cloud services, losing a cell phone or PDA (when they were still a thing) mean that you would loose your contact list. Being diligent about backing up the list to your desktop was very important so that you didn't lose data. Now all data is instantly synced, making our lives a lot easier.

  7. Re:Renewable versus fossil - where is nuclear? on Bill Gates Investing $2 Billion In Renewables · · Score: 2

    This deserves an upvote. It's very hard to calculate the total cost of anything. Not only do we need to calculate the number of people who died building the nuclear plant, but we also have to count the number of people who died while mining the uranium including long term indirect health issues like lung cancer from inhaling radon gas.

    We also need to discount any positive things from using either technology. What is the value to increased spending money from whichever technology is cheapest for the end consumer? How does that compare to paying more for something that ultimately increases lifespans? Is it better to live a bit shorter and be richer, or live longer and be poorer?

  8. Re:Instead of building thin bendable phones... on AppleCare+ Now Covers Batteries That Drop To 80% · · Score: 1

    It's really the screen that drains the battery when you're using it as a GPS. Or at least it should be. I've been tracking my bicycle commutes on my phone. And even during my 40 minute ride when I take the long route, the battery doesn't drop more than a couple percent.

      Then again, I have a Windows phone. It's ridiculous how little battery this thing uses if you aren't actively using is. I've finished the day with 80% battery left because I was particularly busy. Even when I use it a lot, I rarely get below 60%.

    My previous phone was Android and it would drain the battery to 20% be the end of the day, even if I didn't use it. I basically had to leave it plugged in at work or it wouldn't make it through the day.

  9. Re:diluting the market on Aiming To Beat Tesla's "3", Chevy Tests and Teases a Cheaper 200-Mile Electric Car · · Score: 2

    I agree with this. People shouldn't discount electric cars based on the fact that they may want to drive far a couple times a year. Especially with so many people owning two cars. Even 100 miles should be plenty for commuting. If you're spending more time than that in a car every day, I wouldn't want to be you. That's way too much time wasting away in a car.

  10. Re:104Mb on Microsoft Brings Office To Android Smartphones For Free · · Score: 1

    My phone has an HDMI port on it and it also support bluetooth keyboards. Why should I not be able to hook it up to a fullsize screen and keyboard to do a little bit of work if my phone has the capabilities? Phones are coming out with 3GB or more of RAM on them now, and Octocore processors. Probably won't be too long before we just plug our phones into docking stations and use them as a full computer for basic tasks like web browsing or word processing. I plug my tablet into my TV to play games, and I'm quite amazed at the graphics you can get out of that thing.

  11. Re:Try it for yourself! on Google, Apple, and Others Remove Content Related To the Confederate Flag · · Score: 1

    Still plenty of results on this search term

  12. Re:$6K a course for a "free video lecture" on New Google and CMU Moonshot: the 'Teacherless Classroom' · · Score: 1

    Also, it's quite often the case that one can pass the classes without having learned or understood anything at all. Going to a university is a great place to learn things. But it doesn't guarantee that you will learn anything (and especially anything useful) even if you get the degree. You have to take some of your own initiative to ensure that you actually need what you want/need to learn to succeed in life.

  13. Re:Google should move on on Microsoft Brings Office To Android Smartphones For Free · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm surprised Windows 8 hasn't already killed Android on tablets. Guess it takes people a while to realize how bad Android is. I have a Surface 2 RT, and the OS itself is so much better than Android. It's a shame developers didn't latch on to the Windows app store more. It's truly a joy to use this device. Android really is quite crippled. No native support for multiple apps. No native support for Google Drive (developer has to write their own code to support it). No native support for network shares. Doesn't come with a command line.

  14. Re:104Mb on Microsoft Brings Office To Android Smartphones For Free · · Score: 1

    Maybe Android should allow apps to be installed on the SD card then. I think they used to. Did they bring back that feature yet? Maybe MS Word functionality doesn't mean a lot to you, but for many people, that's a small amount of space to give up if it actually supports viewing and editing files in a way that's compatible with the desktop versions.

    Also, my copy of OpenOffice is 316 MB installed. Why would Microsoft be expected to use less space just because it runs on a phone? If it really is full featured, it doesn't really matter what platform it's running on, it's still going to take up the same amount of space.

  15. Re:"Other types of electromagnetic radiation" on The Town That Banned Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but I think it's comparable to any other unexplainable phobia. Some people are very much afraid of snakes, and even a picture of a snake will make them feel very uneasy. If somebody has huge phobia of snakes, it would probably be insensitive to put a giant photo of a snake in their field of view at work or throw a rubber snake on their desk. In the same way, these people are afraid of radio devices. There is no reasoning with them to make the bad feelings go away.

    There's a woman in my wife's office who tells my wife that she's not allowed to have her phone out on the table during meetings because she is sensitive to the cellular signals. It doesn't matter that putting it away in your pocket doesn't change the amount of electromagnetic radiation in the room. It's also OK that there's a WiFi router in the room, because it's out of sight. Just because it's an unwarranted fear doesn't mean it's not real.

  16. Re:Why use ISP email? on Ask Slashdot: How Effective Is Your ISP's Spam Filter? · · Score: 1

    It's so I can switch the interface without having to switch my email address. GMail is just the interface I use to read my email. Sure, GMail might be around forever, but they may decide to change their interface in a way I don't like, or somebody else might come out with a new interface that I like using more. I used to use Yahoo Mail, and even though they still exist, I'm glad I'm not stuck with them because I wanted to keep an email address.

    I don't use email very much for personal communication, but many sites use it as your actual user account name, and make it difficult to change. Your email address is basically your online SSN. Technically, it's possible to get a new one, but doing so is a huge time sink and will cause all kinds of unforeseen consequences.

  17. Re:Why use ISP email? on Ask Slashdot: How Effective Is Your ISP's Spam Filter? · · Score: 4, Informative

    THIS

    There's no reason to use the email provided to you by your ISP. It's just another way to keep you locked into their services. Once upon a time, before web mail, and easily available domain names and hosting services, it made more sense to just use whatever your ISP gave you. But there is absolutely no reason to use it now, and it can actually cause a lot of problems as the OP has pointed out. Personally, I wouldn't recommend using a 3rd party Email provider at all. I would just buy my own domain name and figure out my own hosting solution for the email. Even if you just forward the email to GMail (This is what I do), you own the email address, and you don't have to worry about what happens when you want to switch the interfrace, and end up having to change your email address in the process. Many sites use your email address as your login, assuming that nobody would ever want to change their email address. Sure, GMail may be nice now, but they've shut down services in the path. I ended up switching email addresses a couple times when email services decided to close up, or just start offering really bad service. I don't ever want to have to switch email addresses again.

  18. Re:Valve is the lever moving the PC gaming world on CRYENGINE Finally Lands On Linux · · Score: 1

    I don't see why they should be working. Windows can't remove the ability to install 3rd party software without breaking basically every piece of legacy (non-windows-store) software that exists. As long as you can install 3rd party software in Window, which will probably be available for a long time to come, Steam has nothing to worry about the Windows store stealing their market away. I could see why they might have been worried when Windows RT was a thing, and it only allowed store apps to run, but that's pretty much been abandoned now. It's funny that you mention the "30% tax", since it seems like that is what Steam is charging as well. I can't get why this ever became popular on the PC, since that 30% is a huge portion of the price to give up. It's easy to write your own installer and cut out these middle men. If they can do it for Minecraft, surely other games can make it big without going through Steam.

  19. Re:Equality on Are Girl-Focused Engineering Toys Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe something's changed in CS. 30 years ago, it was probably more about research into computers. Now, almost everybody who is going into CS has no interest at all in doing computer research. They are mostly interested in doing software development. The entire field has changed focused. More than likely, if you take CS, you'll end up writing code for some thankless corporation who doesn't understand what code is and just wants to churn out stuff as fast as possible. 30 years ago, you'd be much more likely to end up working for NASA, Xerox PARC, IBM, or some other research focused company.

    Which leads to another problem. People coming out of CS degrees are often very badly equipped to be doing what they actually end up doing in the real world. Personally, I'm happy that I took software engineering. It prepared me much better for real life jobs in software development than my counterparts in CS who spent a lot more time focusing on the internals of how various algorithms worked.

  20. Re:Equality on Are Girl-Focused Engineering Toys Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes? · · Score: 1

    Not only that, but in some offices they probably wouldn't even let you wear shorts. Whereas a woman would have no problem wearing a skirt.

  21. Re:Dear Microsoft. on The Unintended Consequences of Free Windows 10 For Everyone · · Score: 2

    That or make it much cheaper for those doing home builds. It's currently around $100 for a Windows license if you build your own machine. When you can build a computer for $400, then $100 is a lot to ask for the OS. It's probably one of the major reasons companies like Dell and HP are in business.

  22. Re:Examples??? on The Tools Don't Get You the Job · · Score: 1

    My school was like this too. By the time we got to third year, they basically let you write your assignments in whatever language you wanted. The only stipulation was that it had to run on the lab. Which means you could write Java, C#/.Net, C, C++, Delphi, and quite a few others. one guy even tried to write everything in Prolog.

  23. Re:Why? on Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development · · Score: 1

    Oh, but they did reuse the plus (+) operator for string concatenating. What they did with the language was allow a very specific object to reuse an operator because it made sense, but at the same time decided that nobody could possibly come up with another instance where it would make sense to use operator overloading. Some languages use a completely different operator for string concatenation. I wonder why they didn't decide to do that in Java.

  24. Re:Whats wrong with US society on Privately Owned Armored Trucks Raise Eyebrows After Dallas Attack · · Score: 0

    Wouldn't that be extremely damaging to the roads? Also, I think there should probably be other rules for owning them beyond simply disabling the canon. Seeing a tank driving down the road is likely to put quite few people in a state of panic. Not everybody grew up in a nice little suburb. Seeing tanks driving down the street can bring up some scary memories for some people.

  25. Re:Why? on Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development · · Score: 1

    What happens if you need to store a date before 1970? What if you need a date with more resolution than a millisecond?

    Also, perhaps operator overloading can be misused, but it comes in really handy when you have a class that actually represents a number. You probably don't want to start overriding the plus operator for objects that store XML documents or twitter messages, but that doesn't mean the feature shouldn't exist at all.

    And perhaps you should do some reading about the .Net decimal data type. It has 28 significant digits. That means that even if you need 8 decimal places (like for bitcoin) you still have enough digits left over to represent extremely large numbers. Basically it has enough range to cover just about every financial transaction most coders are likely to deal with. Most databases (all) have a decimal data type for storing binary coded decimal information. The programming language you're using should also support them.