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User: Flwyd

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  1. Does it matter who runs the data center? on Microsoft Putting Servers In Germany To Keep User Data Away From US Intelligence (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    A German company will be operating the data center, but Microsoft will still be writing and presumably operating the software.
    Or are they making an Office 365 install like running Apache and any ol' ISP can run a copy?

    In a world where any computer can talk to any other computer, the physical location of the small bits of wire and magnets holding your data isn't the most important thing to worry about.

  2. From the '40s on What's the Oldest Technology You've Used In a Production Environment? · · Score: 1

    I routinely launch computing jobs on thousands of Von Neumann machines.

  3. Would You Rent Space on Someone Else's Hard Drive? on Would You Rent Out Your Unused Drive Space? · · Score: 1

    A primary goal of any sort of cloud storage is high availability: when your own system is unavailable, you want to be pretty certain that you can get the cloud copy.

    How many copies of your file would you need to store on random people's hard drives to feel confident that in three years (when you spill beer on your computer) all of those hard drives are still functional, haven't erased your data, and are connected to a computer which is connected to the Internet?

    With enough copies of your data floating around, you can probably recover it. But would the cost of renting that many people's disks be reasonable, compared to backing it up to two or three cloud providers?

  4. Emperor Norton on California Legalizes Bitcoin · · Score: 0

    Excellent!
    Anyone know when Fry's will accept these Emperor Norton bills I have?

  5. Emperor Norton on California Legalizes Bitcoin · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Excellent!
    Anyone know when Fry's will start accept these Emperor Norton bills I have?

  6. Re:But there's nothing wrong with Bitcoin! on Cryptocurrency Exchange Vircurex To Freeze Customer Accounts · · Score: 1

    Bitcoin by itself has no intrinsic value. It only has value because people decide it should.
    Money is just shorthand for people doing stuff.
    Without people, there's no economy. Money is just a useful fiction.

  7. Practice. Listen. Think out loud. on Ask Slashdot: Re-Learning How To Interview As a Developer? · · Score: 1

    Step 0: Have a friend do a mock interview with you.
    Tell your friend to pick a question like the ones you've been getting.
    Solve it on a whiteboard.
    In addition to getting some scenario practice, your friend can point out if you're coming across in an awkward way.

    Step 1: Listen
    Listening is more important than talking in good communication.
    I interview a lot of software engineers. Sometimes candidates get so excited about an idea they have that I can't get a word in edge ways to point out they missed a requirement or to suggest there's an easier solution. They may leave the interview saying "I cranked out some great sorting code," but in my notes is written "Implemented bubble sort."
    Before diving in to code, verify that the interviewer wants you to implement something. If they say "How would you sort the data," you might not need to implement a sort algorithm.

    Step 2: Think Out Loud
    If a solution to a problem occurs to you, say it so the interviewer knows where you are.
    If they ask questions about your thought, follow their line.
    If they just acknowledge what you said, analyze it for a minute and see if it's a good solution, or if there are interesting caveats.

  8. All Mozart's Works are Open Source on Remember the Computer Science Past Or Be Condemned To Repeat It? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You can learn a lot from Mozart because you can read all the notes he published.
    You can listen to many interpretations of his works by different people.
    We don't have the chance to read through 25-year-old Mac symphonies^W programs.
    We aren't even writing for the same instruments.

  9. Diversify on GMO Oranges? Altering a Fruit's DNA To Save It · · Score: 1

    Or they could, y'know, plant several varieties of orange trees to hedge against a narrow epidemic. Like, say, a parasite that his spinach really hard...

  10. Starving to death on Things That Scare the Bejeezus Out of Programmers · · Score: 1

    Because I'm trapped in an output monad. Or stuck in an infinite loop.

  11. Re:James martin lost at sea as well, what is going on Unix Guru Evi Nemeth Missing, Feared Lost At Sea · · Score: 1

    Gah! One of my other favorite professors from the University of Colorado is named Jim Martin. You had me very worried for a moment.

  12. A Professor of Integrity on Unix Guru Evi Nemeth Missing, Feared Lost At Sea · · Score: 1

    [previous post was accidentally anonymous]

    I started CU at the tail end of Evi's career when she was, as she put it, "on sabbatical buying a boat." In five years in the classroom, I only got to hear one guest lecture from her. Yet through the passing interactions and from the smiles of respect every student gave her, I could tell Evi was a great person.

    I remember an open meeting about improving things in the CS department. At one point, we decided to have a students-only brainstorming session for a while. "All the professors leave and come back in fifteen minutes. Except Evi, she can stay." That's the sign of someone with a lot of social capital.

    Here's hoping a decade of sailing has taught Evi enough to get out of this jam. She's certainly taught many of us how to keep afloat in the cyber seas.

  13. Ideagrams on Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore · · Score: 1

    At a company where no one seemed to have any graphic design skills and our toolbars were a random collection of misappropriated icons from various open source projects, I suggested we just use Chinese characters for everything. Our users are gonna have to attend training to figure out what the button's for anyway

  14. Competition on Fox News Brings Video Game Violence Debate To a New Low · · Score: 1

    Shootings and rapes? Sounds like the news on my local Fox channel, followed by COPS. They're probably worried that people will spend time shooting imaginary people instead of listening to reporters tell them about shootings of real people.

  15. Re:How Absurd on Does Typing Speed Really Matter For Programmers? · · Score: 1

    When was the last time you ran a program where the WPM of the developer affected the quality of the code?

    I type way fewer WPM on a smartphone or tablet than I do on a keyboard. I think if I tried to program on a phone, a general sense of oppression and hatred of my situation would express itself in an inferior software product that threw NullPointerExceptions at random.

    What's important is not how fast you can type words, but how effectively you can connect the problem-solving part of your brain to your code input method.

  16. Single Repository? on Putin Orders Russian Move To GNU/Linux · · Score: 1

    a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power

    Part of the point of free software is that there are lots of repositories, and anyone who wants to create their own can do so. That phrase certainly sounds like a Soviet-style approach to a good idea about sharing.

  17. Out of Resources? on Don't Talk To Aliens, Warns Stephen Hawking · · Score: 1

    If they're looking for resources, they could do a lot better than trying to take over Earth. Humans have depletion quite in hand, thankyouverymuch.

  18. Re:What did you expect ? on Facebook Retroactively Makes More User Data Public · · Score: 1

    once something hits the internet its out there, no privacy promise by a huge corporation is going to protect it.

    BS. People send millions upon millions of email messages a day and have a reasonable expectation that their email providers and any SMTP hops along the way are going to keep them private. If a webmail provider suddenly decided that everyone's email address and all the addresses of all their contacts were to be public (unless you opt out), that would rightly be perceived as bad behavior and a violation of users' sensible assumptions. The path of least resistance opt-in flow for Google Buzz had the end result of publicly listing the names of some of folks frequent contacts (who'd also opted in). It created a big uproar and Google quickly changed the wording to make it clearer what would be public and how to keep it private.

    I access my banking records through the Internet on a regular basis. I use this convenient system instead of paper and phone calls precisely because I trust the privacy promise provided by my bank. A bank that suddenly decided to make everyone's financial information available to the world on the web by default would quickly lose a lot of customers and get a big fine from the regulators. I don't think we need a Federal Department of Regulating Facebook, but I do think we have a right to expect companies to stick to their privacy promises and suffer customer-based consequences if they fail to live up to them.

    One thing The Cloud can do better is give users control of their data. Google's Data Liberation Front is a good model: If a user decides they don't want to use a cloud provider's services for whatever reason, it should be easy to get all their data out of that company's control and import it in to a different cloud provider (if desired). Take it a step further: As a user of service A, I should be able to select certain information to share privately with my friend who uses service B. Like telephone companies and the post office, the service providers should transmit and present that information, but they should have no option to change the parties who can see it.

    Caveat: Court orders and other legal actions can force a provider to reveal private information without the approval of that information's owner. This is true of banks, cloud providers, and internal IT departments. So yes, if you're planning an elaborate murder scheme on the Internet, don't assume it will only be seen by your co-conspirators. But if you're closeted at work and out to your friends, you have a right to expect your social network won't suddenly decide to make "Orientation: Gay" the first thing people see when they Google your name.

  19. GPS Replacement? Hardly. on Here Come the Linux iPad Clones · · Score: 1

    Kindle killer? Fine. But a tablet computer is an astoundingly poor replacement for a GPS device.

    My Garmin device fits in my camera bag, takes 2 AA batteries, and is sturdy enough to drop off the side of a mountain into a brook. Tablets won't do that very well.

  20. Re:Ah, and is it Useful? on 1Gbps Optical Wireless Network Might Replace Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    Also conferences with a could hundred livebloggers in an auditorium.

  21. Bad Math on The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook · · Score: 1

    ... assuming CPU cycles are the key bottleneck and not, say, network communication and data access. I'd assume they look at performance pinch points and optimize those. So if the 10% most computationally-intensive code is written in C++ or Java, the savings in rewriting the rest in C++ might be 15%.

  22. Cost Effective? on Tag Images With Your Mind · · Score: 1

    Are brain scans really so cheap that it's cheaper to set up an EEG than to pay someone in a third-world country to do it?

  23. Re:Much more specific than the summary suggests on Microsoft Patents Sudo's Behavior · · Score: 1

    Does the patent also cover being ridiculously annoying and not actually secure since it doesn't prompt for a password? If so, I say we grant it to Microsoft so nobody copies that design.

    It would be great if they added sudo.exe so you didn't have to run the whole command shell as an administrator.

    (I'm basing this on my experience with Vista; things may have gotten markedly better in Win7.)

  24. Re:incorrect deduction on C# and Java Weekday Languages, Python and Ruby For Weekends? · · Score: 1

    automatically equating weekend work with fun is just poor science

    People do all sorts of unfun things on the weekends: cleaning the gutters, upgrading Windows, scrambling to meet a work deadline because you picked the wrong language or environment for your project...

  25. Property Tax on Mississippi Bill Would Tax Software Sales · · Score: 1

    In many states, property tax is the primary source of income for local (county, city, fire district...) governments. Conveniently, those governments provide services to people using that property (social services, road maintenance, putting out fires...).

    The economist-minded folks might also point out that if someone has a lot of land and not much income, the land isn't being used very effectively, so having to sell because taxes are too high will increase the efficiency of used. (I have some philosophical issues with this line of reasoning, but it's got a point.)

    On the plus side, it means that if you live in a rural area but work and shop in the city, your house in the country gets a paved road, a sheriff's department, and fire protection. It also means school districts in areas with high house prices are better funded that districts in poor areas where parents are less able to compensate for a school's shortcomings. It's not a perfect system, but it works fairly well.