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User: CastrTroy

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  1. Re:Want to hire the best? on Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Salaries are important, but that's not all that matters, especially when you get up to senior positions, since most senior positions will pay more than enough money to live comfortably off of. To me, working hours are quite important. I know people who make more than me (and less than me for that matter), but they often have to work evenings or come in on weekends. I don't want a job that I'll have to work tons of extra hours. Once you get beyond the the first 5 or 10 years of your career, having an enjoyable working environment is much more important than your actual salary, assuming a reasonable salary.

  2. Re:selfie sticks on Major Museums Start Banning Selfie Sticks · · Score: 1

    A copper pipe wouldn't be much good for assault. Not enough weight to it. You'd probably be better off with a laptop battery, which they have no problem with you carrying onto a plane.

  3. Re: How Much Does it Cost? on Number of Legal 18x18 Go Positions Computed; 19x19 On the Horizon · · Score: 2

    Just knowing the total number of positions doesn't really do much. It's just a huge combinatorics problem. Knowing the number of positions doesn't tell you much about which positions are good or bad, or even which ones are likely to happen in an actual game. I guess it gives you some idea of the problem space for solving the game, but that doesn't get you very far. We already knew the problem space is extremely huge. I don't think that standard methods or computing all the possible moves like we did with checkers or chess are the right way to go about it. On a 19x19 board, there are 361 choices for the first move. and for the second move there are 360 options. That's 129000 possible combinations for the first 2 moves. Mind you, many of those are symmetrical, but it's still a large number of positions. Compare that to checkers where the are 16 possible 2 move openings, and chess, where there are 100 possible 2 move openings, many of which we know are almost never used in competition play. Attacking go using the same strategies as chess seems like it would just lead nowhere.

  4. 26% seems a bit high on CRTC Issues $1.1 Million Penalty To Compu-Finder For Spamming Canadians · · Score: 2

    Considering all the different spammers out there, it's hard to imagine any single entity getting 26% of all complaints. Somebody must have been really out to get them, or there must not have been that many complaints submitted. From the quick glance I did, I couldn't determine how many complaints they got, or how many emails this company sent out. They probably would have not gotten such a big fine if their unsubscribe links worked.

    I'm from Canada, and as much as I don't like spam, I think that this goes a bit too far. Spam filters are so good now that I rarely see spam in my inbox, and anything that isn't caught can easily be blocked by a filter. This may stop a few companies within the country from sending out emails, but the vast majority of spam comes from outside the country, and this law can't protect against that. It really makes it difficult for small companies to verify that they comply with the regulations. When even companies like Microsoft stop sending out important emails, because there's no way to verity that they have consent for the emails they are sending out, then there's not much the small companies can do to cover themselves if somebody was to complain.

  5. Re:Bad French, man on Quebecker Faces Jail For Not Giving Up Phone Password To Canadian Officials · · Score: 1

    I just checked around the Internet, and I couldn't find a single example of this maple leaf apostrophe in the Tim Hortons logo. Every example I saw had no apostrophe, no maple leaf, just plain old Tim Hortons. I'm not sure where you got your information from, but I've never seen this Tim Hortons sign you're referring to.

  6. Re:What is the point? on Quebecker Faces Jail For Not Giving Up Phone Password To Canadian Officials · · Score: 2

    The difference is, that if they want to inspect your luggage, and you don't give them the combination, they can very easily break the lock. This is not so easy with good cryptography. With certain levels of cryptography, they could try to brute force the password until the heat-death of the universe, and still not even come close to breaking it. Should people be forced to give up information that could be used to obtain evidence against them, or should people truly have the right to remain silent? I don't think our current laws cover this very well.

  7. Re:Do pilots still need licenses? on Would You Need a License To Drive a Self-Driving Car? · · Score: 1

    You obviously don't drive where I drive. It's not uncommon for drivers to treat the road like a racecourse, doing seemingly illogical and unpredictable things, all in the name of finishing a 20 minute drive 30 seconds faster. I see so many people race towards red lights that I really have to wonder how they ever got their license.

  8. Re:If "yes," then it's not self-driving on Would You Need a License To Drive a Self-Driving Car? · · Score: 1

    There's a lot of companies working on technologies that will get is closer to self driving cars, but almost none of them are really trying to build a truly self driving car. A true self driving car has no steering wheel, no gas pedal, and no break pedal. That, or I'm allowed to sit on the back seat, and read a book or take a nap while it drives me where I want to go. Why would I need a license for that? Currently, everyone is building more and more advanced forms of cruise control, but they still expect you to be sitting there, paying attention, ready to grab the wheel or slam on the brakes if something goes wrong. I could easily see accidents increasing in the near future as people start to rely on these technologies too much, and really stop paying attention to the road when they really should be.

  9. Re:Where I see Windows phones... on Microsoft Convinced That Windows 10 Will Be Its Smartphone Breakthrough · · Score: 1

    I'm still trying to figure out if House Of Cards does product placements. It seems like they have a lot of clear shots of products, but there doesn't seem to be any brand loyalty. You'll see plenty of Apple hardware. Then you'll see people using Dell computers. Then you'll see some people using iPhones.some people using Blackberry's, and others using Windows Phone. I can't recall if I've ever seen an Android device in House of Cards, but I've seen just about every other OS in that show.

  10. Re:If it can run some win 10 apps on Microsoft Convinced That Windows 10 Will Be Its Smartphone Breakthrough · · Score: 2

    If they were really smart, they would buy out Xamarin, or use similar technology so that apps written for Windows Phone, and Windows App store would also work on Android and iOS. That way you could write the code once, and have it run on everything including Windows Desktops, Windows Tablets, Windows Phones, Android Phones and Tablets, and iOS. You could even share a lot of the code and make an native Windows Desktop interface if you wanted to sell the application through your own channels for the Windows Desktop. Currently it's kind of a mess having to use different code for Windows, Android, and iOS.

  11. Re:It's Not About Saving on Why We Should Stop Hiding File-Name Extensions · · Score: 1

    It's not really that good of a safeguard when you can use the right to left override character to make a file name look like jpg or something similarly safe even when the file extension is shown. Just looking at what appears to be the extension doesn't help you in every case.

  12. Re:5% Gross is a terrible deal on Unreal Engine 4 Is Now Free · · Score: 1

    Minecraft survived despite how terrible the game engine was. I would probably have been a lot better if it had a good engine behind it. The PC version is for some reason ridiculously slow. The Pocket version for some reason has now problem playing on my 3 year old phone, which only has a Dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2, and 512 MB of RAM, but the desktop version won't run well on a machine with much higher specs. I used to chock it up to the PC version having an infinite world, but the Pocket version has since been updated and also now has as infinite world. I'm hoping MS does something to fix this issue. Basically have the same game, but fix all the performance issues.

  13. Re:Is it finally happening? on Intel Announces Atom x3, x5 and x7, First SOCs With Integrated 3G and LTE Modems · · Score: 2

    This is where I see things going in the next 10 years. Instead of everyone buying a $700 cell phone, a $1000 ultrabook, and a $500 desktop, most people will just buy a small computer that they can carry around in their pocket that acts as the computer for any screen that you hook it up to. Your phone would still have a screen, but wouldn't really have much of a processor of it's own. It would just use the computer you carry around in your pocket. Hook up that same computer to a 10 inch or 15 inch portable screen and keyboard, and you have a laptop. Use the same computer with a 24 inch monitor and a full size keyboard and mouse, and you have a desktop computer. You probably won't be able to do high end games or video editing on a device that fits in your pocket for a while, but most people would be able to accomplish all their computing needs on a single device. And nobody would have to worry about cloud storage or syncing between devices, because they would only have a single device they use for everything.

  14. Not just software on The Programmers Who Want To Get Rid of Software Estimates · · Score: 2

    I always here that software projects are often late and over budget, but I don't think it's worse than any other industry. I've seen countless examples of construction projects that ran over budget and took longer than expected. Often the reasons for this are the same. Either the requirements changed halfway through, or the project was made more complicated than it needed to be to accomplish the task. There's a few bridges in my area that have been huge boondoggles in the past decade, and they all try to look impressive, where a much more conservative design would have be easier, cheaper, and faster to build, and still would have solved the transportation problem. But everybody wants a bridge that looks pretty.

    Projects that deal with a small workload and don't have changing requirements are much more likely to stay on budget and on time. This is how things should be broken up. Build small pieces and deliver the pieces as they become complete. Don't set out to build an entire 5 year task as a single project.

  15. Re:1.39B did /not/ "use" Facebook last month... on Facebook's Colonies · · Score: 2

    I really don't get how they can report numbers like this and not be called out on it all the time. Just from a quick Google, it looks like there's around 3 billion internet users. I would probably believe that. What they are saying is that almost half of all internet users used their site last month. Considering that Facebook is blocked in China, and China makes up 0.6 billion internet users, it makes the likelihood of them having that many users to be completely ludicrous. I know that there are ways to get around the great firewall of China, but I still don't see how they get that number. I think it has something to do with a lot of duplicate accounts. I know a lot of people who have multiple facebook accounts. Some do it because they have different groups of "friends" they don't want to co-exist, and some people do it for games, so they can gift things to themselves. There's plenty of people with a lot of accounts. I'm sure there's gold farmers in Farmville if you look for it.

  16. Re:Problem with this scheme on Intel To Rebrand Atom Chips Along Lines of Core Processors · · Score: 3, Informative

    I agree that they currently make it way too hard to determine which CPU is better than the other. Currently they have 2 things called i3/i5/i7. The i7 that's used in desktops is not the same i7 that you will see in a standard desktop chip. And they also sell small form factor desktops that use the laptop version of the i3/i5/i7. Then there's the lower end chips like Celeron/Pentium/Atom, that I can't figure how how they are supposed to compare to eachother. It was a lot easier when they actually changed the marketing name of the chip each time they actually made a change to the processor. 386,486, Pentium, Pentium 2, Pentium 3, Pentium 4 and so on. They've had the i3/i5/i7 names since 2008, and it's gone through Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell all without changing the marketing name of the chip. You have to look at stuff like i7-4770 , or even worse, look up the exact model number (BX80646I74770) to try and figure out exactly what you are getting.

  17. Re:Watches on Pebble Time Smartwatch Receives Overwhelming Support On Kickstarter · · Score: 2

    It really depends on the kind of watch band you have and how tight you wear it. If it's something like leather, cloth, or rubber then you definitely should take it off daily. If you have a metallic band and it isn't completely tight against your wrist, then there should be enough air flow around the watch band to not have any problems. If you have a full metal watch, and wear it to bed, and wear it in the shower, then it should remain relatively sanitary, and you really don't ever have to take it off.

  18. Re:amazing on Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Will Switch Away From Silicon For 7nm · · Score: 1

    Really? You think you could get something with the intelligence of a mouse to control a vehicle moving at 80 mph? Because if you could, why not just put a mouse into the car itself, and let the mouse do the driving? Make a neural interface so the mouse can access the proper controls. Even getting something like a chimpanzee with very human like anatomy and a high level of intelligence (compared to other non-human animals) to drive a car with the same skill as a human would be a pretty impossible task. It doesn't take long watching cat videos to realize that animals deal very poorly when presented with unfamiliar situations such as low friction floors. If it really didn't require so much thinking, then we would have solved the problem of having people drive very long ago. You can't even get actual people to remember to use their turn signals most of the time.

  19. Re: To answer your question on Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Will Switch Away From Silicon For 7nm · · Score: 1

    But as we move to smaller processes that require less electricity to function, perhaps heat dissipation will become a none issue. I don't think that anybody expects that they will be able to carry the equivalent of the fastest desktop around as a laptop, or that server farms will become obsolete because you can replace an entire rack with a single computer the size of a Mac Mini, but we are very quickly approaching the time where you can do everything that people have traditionally done on desktop machines, the things that people have insisted you always needed a desktop machine for (video editing, compiling C code, playing games), and they are able to do them on laptops, without making compromises in battery life or size of the laptop. The Surface Pro is a very good example of this. It's the thinnest laptop on the market today, but you can use it for almost all your computing needs. The problem is that it's quite expensive right now. But give it a few years, maybe 5, and something in a similar form factor will be much more affordable and will still be able to perform the role of a traditional desktop.

  20. Re:Good grief... on Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just about every good programmer I know started doing it on their own in highschool, or earlier. then, many of them took a 4 year degree in computer science or software engineering. I don't think there's a lot of people who could become a good programmer in 2 years. I took software engineering, and by the end of the second year, I don't think I was really that good. Sure there was a bunch of courses that weren't programming related, but you can't just jam everything together into the same semester. There's a reason classes have prerequisites, 2 years does not give you enough time to progress to progress in your knowledge.

  21. Re:The lesson here on Lenovo To Wipe Superfish Off PCs · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If you buy a laptop/computer from the Microsoft Store, I think they all feature Signature Edition, which they state includes the following

    Signature Edition PCs are tuned for fast performance from the second you turn them on. They include free anti-virus software that never expires and have no junkware or trialware, ensuring that your new PC is always clean, fast, and protected.

    It seems that MS realizes there is a problem with junkware included with their OS. They can't force manufacturers to not install junkware on the computers they sell, but it looks like MS is trying to do something to alleviate the problem. It actually looks like the machines sold on the Microsoft Store are actually quite competitively priced.

  22. LG TV on Gadgets That Spy On Us: Way More Than TVs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have an LG TV and it has a stupid voice recognition feature. You have to press a button on the remote for it to start listening to you. The feature is pretty much completely useless. I tried it a few times when I first got the TV, but quickly found that it's pretty much worthless. The rest of the TV works really well though, and I have no complaints. I don't see the purpose of even building this feature into the TV. Nobody will use it, and nobody is going to make a TV buying decision based on rather or not it has voice recognition. Except maybe some people who will specifically be looking for a TV that doesn't have the feature.

  23. Re:Ain't surprised on Jamie Oliver's Website Serving Malware · · Score: 1

    One of the hosting companies I used a decade ago got hacked, causing every page to contain maláfare. I tried contacting them to get it fixed but nothing worked. I ended up having to switch hosting companies because of that problem. But I learned a good lesson. It's not a good idea to go with bargain basement hosting companies. I wonder if this is a similar issue.

  24. Re:Amazing performance ! on Building a Procedural Dungeon Generator In C# · · Score: 1

    From looking at the article, it doesn't actually state how fast it runs. Maybe it's just a comment, that it actually does run very fast. Like it generates a very large and complex dungeon in .1 seconds, whereas on the machine it was originally written on, it would have taken minutes.

  25. Re:Business problem != technology problem on Ask Slashdot: Version Control For Non-Developers? · · Score: 1

    Firstly, I would have to say that part of the problem is user training. When you have people renaming the file "just in case" so it doesn't overwrite the other version, then you have training issues. Any version control system will keep a copy of every single version, so there's no reason to do stuff like this. This needs to be clear to the employees.