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User: rtaylor

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Comments · 1,172

  1. Re:Still can't believe on Early Bitcoin Adopters Facing Extortion Threats · · Score: 1

    It's still not up to the private company to tell you that. In fact, disclosing those details might be a violation of their contract with their employer.

    Ask the public office that hires and pays the team how often they are deployed and what for.

  2. Re:Shingled encoding performance penalties on Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte 'Archive' Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    It's handy that modern filesystems are mostly copy-on-write anyway.

  3. Re:Shyeah, right. on Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out? · · Score: 1

    That's why 0 was skipped and they went straight from 1BC to 1.

  4. Re:Not sure if it adds up on Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion · · Score: 1

    Damnit! Messed up the tag.

  5. Re:Not sure if it adds up on Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion · · Score: 1

    [b]I think a much better way would be for companies to bid based on the value they bring to the end consumer public, with the company that promises the best value winning.[/b]

    I believe Russia did something like this with their last spectrum auction. Companies received the spectrum for free (20 year lease or something) and made promises of certain quality of service and network capabilities in exchange.

  6. Re:In the words of Linus Torvalds on Windows Kernel Version Bumped To 10.0 · · Score: 2

    Right up until you want a way to define API changes and continue to maintain back branches.

  7. Re:10x Productivity on Do Good Programmers Need Agents? · · Score: 1

    A rockstar programmer doesn't bang out a lot of code.

    They pick the right algorithm which scales well (doesn't need to be rewritten), considers and handles most error cases cleanly (few bug reports), and often leaves easily maintainable code (another person can take over, doesn't require a support team).

  8. Re:No news! on PostgreSQL Outperforms MongoDB In New Round of Tests · · Score: 1

    Actually, they didn't. The benchmarking was done as the JSONB feature in Pg is brand new and they wanted to see how it stood up to the competition (being much much slower is a sign that something could be improved).

    Being faster on a single node was a surprise.

  9. Re:containment on WD Announces 8TB, 10TB Helium Hard Drives · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's almost exactly how it works with our quarter million dollar SANs.

    They get paid to maintain the SAN and regularly visit to swap hardware bits or apply software patches to it.

  10. Re:Why they're really doomed... on Why Mobile Wallets Are Doomed · · Score: 1

    Actually, I also stopped ordering anything from Windows computers years ago, because I couldn't trust them anymore either.

    You just made yourself irrelevant to the conversation by showing just how different you are from the average consumer.

  11. Re:"GM thinks" there's your problem. on GM Sees a Market For $5/Day Dedicated In-Car Internet · · Score: 1

    You don't need to break it up, just increase the tax rate a smidgen on large firms (revenue over $1B?). Call it "bailout insurance" and dump it into a non-profit government managed fund.

    If companies have contributed, then they can make claims at roughly the same scale as they contributed (see government pension plans for a similar setup).

  12. Re:Business class is a misnomer on How Amazon Keeps Cutting AWS Prices: Cheapskate Culture · · Score: 1

    That is the airlines problem.

    The more workarounds a person finds for not travelling (calls, emails, etc.) the less the cost to the ticket buying company; assuming they manage to keep productivity the same.

  13. Re:This happened to my wife on IRS Can Now Seize Your Tax Refund To Pay a Relative's Debt · · Score: 1

    I assume the dues are tied to the estate of the person.

    They're reclaiming it from the inheritance which should not have been passed down.

  14. Re:Power? on Navy Debuts New Railgun That Launches Shells at Mach 7 · · Score: 1

    The largest diesel ship engines can kick out 80MW of power (100,000 hp) which is right in the middle of the marine nuclear range (40MW to 100MW is common).

    The main benefit to nukes, as currently used on surface ships, is the size of the fuel tank.

  15. Re:Use PostgreSQL on Ask Slashdot: Which NoSQL Database For New Project? · · Score: 1

    Right. So 5 years from requiring a NoSQL DB, and hardware/software advancements in that period will likely give another 3 years of easy growth with just a basic Pg installation.

    If it was 10m text/blob records per day, that would be a different animal; but it's probably 1/10th of that.

  16. Re:Not practical as contact lenses on Contact Lenses With Infrared Vision? · · Score: 2

    Close your IR eye and open your normal vision eye.

    Same idea as pirates moving their patch from one eye to the other when going from surface to inside the dark ship.

  17. Re:We don't need more competition on IEEE Predicts 85% of Daily Tasks Will Be Games By 2020 · · Score: 1

    And if they award points for cooperation?

    This is taking KPI (Key Performance Indicator) to a personalized level and giving them scores. Of course, as with current KPIs you get what you measure, and they rarely measure what senior management thinks they do.

    The most effective way to stop getting customer complaints is to stop answering the phone.

  18. Re:Meanwhile, in Toronto... on California Fights Drought With Data and Psychology, Yielding 5% Usage Reduction · · Score: 1

    Right. Save a couple billion on expanded water treatment facilities but you need a little extra per litre to cover the pipe maintenance.

    It's not a net loss.

  19. Re: why not? on Will Microsoft IIS Overtake Apache? · · Score: 1

    Next time your boss pulls out his list of Key Performance Indicators remember that they will get what they measure; game the system for your review.

  20. Re:GPU acceleration for other platforms on LibreOffice 4.2 Busts Out GPU Mantle Support and Corporate IT Integration · · Score: 1

    Perhaps it'll help with conditional aggregates which are painfully slow in Libreoffice with only a few thousand records.

    For example, sum the $D column when the $E column matches year '2013'. Basically anything involving squiggly brackets around a SUM equation:

    {=SUM(($E$1:$E$65518=$A6) * ($D$1:$D$65518))}

  21. Re:It's almost as though cars need winterizing on Tesla's Having Issues Charging In the Cold · · Score: 1

    Merely pointing out that a world exists outside California is enough to blow a fair amount of minds, I'm afraid.

    I see you've met the US Customs agent I had the other day.

  22. Re:I thought they were already charging on Google Charging OEMs Licensing Fees For Play Store · · Score: 2

    It may have been Samsungs idea in the first place.

    Large companies like to poo-poo regulation, fees, etc. but they also realize it increases the barrier to entry which greatly benefits them.

    Samsung has healthy profit margins and can cover the cost. Other manufacturers Samsung competes against will struggle just a bit more as a result. Some new guy on the block is really going to struggle if it's up-front per device manufactured and not done on a per-sale basis.

  23. Re:Too bad on OpenBSD Looking At Funding Shortfall In 2014 · · Score: 1

    A $20k/year electricity bill is rather abnormal and would not qualify for this kind of thing.

  24. Re:Best news I've heard in a while on China: The Next Space Superpower · · Score: 1

    If China builds a moon base with the primary purpose of mining rare-earth metals; it will be defended.

  25. Re:Meh banksters on India Cautions Users On Risks Associated With Virtual Currencies · · Score: 1

    I'd treat it the same as any other currency transaction. It's fairly well defined how to handle gains while playing Forex.