Slashdot Mirror


User: pathological+liar

pathological+liar's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
239
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 239

  1. Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard? on Apple Ships OS X 10.7 Lion 'Gold Master' For July Push · · Score: 1

    The rumours sites are claiming the latter, that you'll need to install SL first.

  2. Re:Too early yet to bury Thunderbolt on First Thunderbolt Peripherals Arrive To Market · · Score: 1

    but when you need it you need it

    But do you really need it? 10Gb/s is pretty great and all, but... so's SATA3. 6Gb/s is 750MB/s, Seagate's 2TB SATA3 drives do ~130MB/s sustained in the benchmarks I found, so the R4 array in the article can only max it out for the first second or so while it's still reading from the drive caches. The R6 would be bottlenecked by SATA3, but *barely* (780 vs. 750) Cheaper cables too :P ... sure you could put SSDs in it and get a benefit, but that's a pretty niche market.

    I think what's more likely is that by the time there's enough hardware, and enough desire, for Thunderbolt... there'll be a SATA4 or something.

    Of course, what do I know?

  3. Old(er) guy likes old(er) music, film at 11. on Weird Al Says "Twitter Saved My Album" · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If you don't like Lady Gaga (and neither do I) just say it and move on. You don't need to justify it, if it doesn't float your boat, it doesn't float your boat.

    The music industry is dying, but that has nothing to do with what it puts out. Slashdot was wrong then, and it's still wrong now.

    We haven't run out of classic music, we're making new classic music all the time. "Classic" is about attachments or memories you form with music, and often during formative years. Did you happen to listen to the B-52s or the Talking Heads growing up? It's also about taste, for example I find most stuff that gets labelled "Classic Rock" relentlessly boring. Merzbow has fans. Noise rock has fans. It's rarely about objective quality, and even if it were, who decides what's quality?

    You may not like or feel any attachment to modern music, but let's not pretend nobody does.

  4. Non-answers on Amir Taaki Answers Your Questions About Bitcoin · · Score: 1

    The "why would anyone accept bitcoin given its instability" question was admittedly a bit inflammatory, but it would have been nice if he'd even made an attempt at answering it.

    When the market doesn't have enough volume to smooth out wild gyrations like over the past few weeks it's completely unacceptable for real world use...

  5. Re:This is why you use encryption programs... on Brute-Force Password Cracking With GPUs · · Score: 1

    256^32 == 2^256...

  6. Re:This is why you use encryption programs... on Brute-Force Password Cracking With GPUs · · Score: 2

    Typically bruteforcing refers to exhaustively searching a reduced dictionary... bruteforcing 62^8 (alphanumeric, mixed case, a reasonable metric for a 'decent' password) might be easier with a GPU investment, bruteforcing 256^32 (let's assume a 256bit keyspace) is not.

  7. So what's the story? on Call Interception Demonstrated On New Cisco Phones · · Score: 1

    VoIP systems can be compromised/abused? I intercept calls at work ("... for quality assurance and monitoring purposes ..."); if that system was compromised someone could certainly demonstrate call interception on a two-bit Asterisk/Polycom setup too.

  8. Re:What a bunch of dummies on Workers Will Smash Their PCs To Get an Upgrade · · Score: 2

    Unless you're at a tiny company (single digits) where the "IT guy" is the "CTO", he almost certainly doesn't set the budget, he just makes do with what he has.

    As someone who got saddled with desktop support in addition to real work, please: if your hardware is inadequate and preventing you from doing your job, bitch to your boss, NOT your IT guy. I sympathize, but I can't do anything about it and it's getting more than a little tired.

  9. Re:He forgot something on Freedom Box Foundation Wants Plug Servers For All · · Score: 1

    Are you European by chance? Habitable and inhabited aren't the same thing, there are a great many developed countries with isolated areas, Russia, the USA and Canada spring immediately to mind...

    I mean yeah, Windsor and Detroit will have no problem, but what about Toronto to Alert? New York to Barrow? Moscow to Uelen?

    If you're just talking about absolute routing between a country in general, and another country in general, then sure.... but if you're talking about reasonably complete coverage, not so much.

    The other problem is that any sort of large scale, long-distance mesh network is going to make freenet look zippy. ... maybe if they make the mesh medium-agnostic, IP over shortwave or something, routing shortcuts...

  10. Re:they suck and you will get burned out on Are 10-11 Hour Programming Days Feasible? · · Score: 1

    And you live... where? I agree with most of your comment but in significant chunks of North America and Europe the economy (and by extension the job market) is still in the toilet. While most companies have stopped letting people go, they're sure as shit not hiring en masse again. You personally may not have trouble finding work but there are still huge numbers of people who do.

    That doesn't mean the OP should sit there and take it, just that most people find it prudent to look for a fire escape before jumping out of a burning building...

  11. Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. on After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function? · · Score: 1

    My last ISP would have leases expire every two or three weeks. My current ISP has DHCP leases expire weekly. You could certainly link traffic within the lease, but you would have no way of knowing when the lease expired, or whether I'm the same person who had the lease the last time around.

    That's not perfect, but it's much better privacy than a prefix that *never changes*.

    That's the other thing. I'm making a couple of assumptions here. One is that an ISP will assign each customer a /64 (as per recommendations), and that we've seen the last of NAT. I'm also assuming that the /64 prefix will be statically assigned, since other than privacy you don't gain anything from dynamically assigning them. Finally, I'm assuming that your client makes use of the privacy extensions, I'm completely ignoring the last 64 bits of the address... so the privacy enhancements don't apply. You shouldn't be able to identify individual machines, but you'll definitely be able to identify the network they're on, and that network id won't change.

    So yeah, it would effectively be the same as having a static IPv4 address, except you'd have no choice.

  12. Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. on After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function? · · Score: 1

    You have a loony definition of "privacy"

    Ad hominem attacks don't advance your case (and that's obviously false or I would have posted as AC...), and your analogies don't hold water.

    I don't give out my unlisted number, I forward a voip number to it so I can change providers without the hassle of porting... but there's also nobody other than the telco (and the NSA ;)) aggregating the details of who I call, and they're not reselling it. Clearly they're doing nothing useful with it or they wouldn't have tried to sell me a LD plan to go with those 0 minutes of long distance I use...

    Similarly, while Fedex/UPS/USPS/[your delivery company of choice] could probably build a profile of me based on the size/weight of packages they deliver and where they're delivered from... they don't.

    On the other hand Google* is unbashedly all about profiling people. That's their bread and butter. It's silly to think that they wouldn't take advantage of a situation like I described in the GP post.

    Hey, maybe you're on facebook, linkedin, flickr, or the trillion-and-one other social networking sites. If there's enough of your personal info out there already, then maybe being trackable despite noscript/adblock/taco/betterprivacy is fine with you as well.

    It's not fine with me. I like to choose what information I give out about myself. I know that changing my IP address doesn't give me anonymity in any substantial sense (my ISP probably has proxy logs, certainly DHCP logs, if I was doing something nefarious it wouldn't be hard to connect the dots), but for now they're not who I'm worried about.

    I realize Slashdot is large and diverse, and that it's silly to talk about the views express on it as if they were consistent, but people get up in arms at the idea of an internet-accessible ID for a computer. A static /64 for a residence might as well be the same thing.

    * I don't mean to keep harping on them, they're just a convenient example.

  13. Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. on After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function? · · Score: 1

    With IPv6, your network will have its own 48 to 64-bit prefix. Once you remember that prefix, you can choose your suffixes to be as simple as you'd like.

    Yeah, see this is the other problem that I haven't seen anybody talk about yet. IPv6 is a potential privacy nightmare. From an ISP's perspective, there's no reason to assign addresses automatically anymore, just assign every client a /64 and move on. (End users can of course feel free to run DHCPv6 internally, whatever floats your boat) If that's true you can be trivially tracked by building a database of IP blocks assigned to ISPs and the size of the prefixes they give their clients. No cookies, no flash lsos, no logins, and no risk of you being a pesky consumer and unplugging your modem until you get a new IP.

    Obviously it's not just the sites you visit either, it's anything they might load. I see Slashdot uses doubleclick, hi Google!

    I dunno, it's a worrying thought.

    </tinfoil> ;)

  14. I guess that's how engrained it is on USB Is the Devil's Connection · · Score: 1

    I meant "I've always called it 'scuzzy'..." of course...

  15. Re:Only Apple tried to mispronounce SCSI on USB Is the Devil's Connection · · Score: 4, Informative

    The rest of us? I've always called it SCSI but if you thought "sexy" was a rebranding (or Apple's idea) Larry Boucher would like a word with you...

  16. Re:Yes on Larry Ellison Rips HP Board a New One · · Score: 1

    I don't disagree that he has been an amazing manager at HP, helping to turn things around after the mess that was Carly Fiorina.

    You might not, plenty of people disagree. I realize this is just coming from a blog, but the guy has his name (or someone's anyway) on it, and he spent almost 30 years at HP.

    He raped HP employees (figuratively, without violating the sexual conduct code at HP) by eliminating the sixty-five year concept of profit sharing, preferring to move to obscene bonuses for himself and his five top minions -- a mere $113 million payout for them in a year he chopped everyone else's pay by 5% plus profit-sharing. These were raises for some of the five people by as much as 400% -- a tidy uptick.

    ...

    The Voice of the Workplace, HP's thirty-five year historic 'measure' of employee feelings (done every five years) showed in April an astonishing finding -- more than two-thirds of HP's employees would quit tomorrow if they had an equivalent job offer. Not a raise, not a promotion, simply an alternative.

    He might have turned the economics of the company around, but that doesn't mean he wasn't driving it into the ground. He sounds like a sociopath and a world-class shithead.

  17. Re:It's not as bad as it looks on Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time · · Score: 1

    I didn't expect him to know the terminology. I was just boggled by the writing.

  18. It's not as bad as it looks on Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some of the writing is godawful:

    I'd not played a shooter that looks like Doom. I'd not one that presented each of its figures as a stack of pixels rendered at the fever-dream intersection of real and colorful, relevant abstract. Be it dirt, blood, hair or the barrel of a gun, everything I saw was a block. Each block was a tile of a nightmare mosaic.

    ... the part that immediately follows is interesting though. There are some good bits.

  19. Re:Took long enough _ on Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" Frozen · · Score: 1

    ... and they do. Except the point of the freeze is to focus on fixing problems so they can push out a solid, stable release.

    What's the point of slipping a freeze date? (There's mailing list traffic from a while ago now saying that they were pushing back the freeze, so yeah, they slipped -- even if it's just from an internal date.)

  20. Not affected on OAuth, OpenID Password Crack Could Affect Millions · · Score: 1
  21. Re:Portal on How Game Gimmicks Break Immersion · · Score: 1

    Hah. Spoken like someone who's never played TF2. Maybe their QA department is overworked, maybe regression testing a game just sucks, maybe it's just the number of people playing the game, but there are constant bugs/glitches affecting gameplay. The fixes often introduce new bugs/glitches of their own.

    On the other hand, even on the old stock maps that people have been playing to death for almost 3 years now, I still see people coming up with new ways to do things.

  22. Re:Hey... on Canadian Arrested Over Plans to Test G20 Security · · Score: 1

    I thought it was pretty clear he was correcting individual points, since he wasn't making that particular argument in the first place...

  23. Re:Hey... on Canadian Arrested Over Plans to Test G20 Security · · Score: 1

    Yeah, uh, you might too. The FLQ were implied when he mentioned Pierre Laporte...

  24. Are they employed? on Study Finds That "Extreme Gamers" Play 48 Hours a Week · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The article doesn't look like it says, although I only skimmed. I spent several months unemployed last year and I'd easily hit 40 hours a week playing video games, frequently more. It was shameful, but that's the way it was. When you're living hand-to-mouth for months on end, utterly sapped of any energy or confidence to do anything meaningful, video games are a way to kill time.

    If they hold down a job I don't know whether to be concerned or impressed. If they're "homemakers" then it's no big deal. If they're unemployed I'm disappointed you needed a survey to figure that out.

  25. Must be all that disposable income on Linux Users Donate Twice As Much As Windows Users, On Average · · Score: 0

    ... from not buying Windows, antivirus software, an office suite, ...