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User: pjt33

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  1. Hit submit a bit too fast... on How Cornell Plans To Purge Campus Computers of Personal Data · · Score: 1

    Of course, if it's a encrypted partition with a freshly generated key each time you boot that's most of the way there - it requires a very competent attacker to extract the key from powered down RAM.

  2. Re:This is easy on How Cornell Plans To Purge Campus Computers of Personal Data · · Score: 1

    Deleting the FAT entries doesn't delete the data. A regex scan through the disk blocks could still pick up candidate SSNs or whatever for closer examination.

  3. Re:If you find that selling people unlimited or hu on Can Apps Really Damage a Cellular Network? · · Score: 1

    I have a PDA and a netbook, both of them without wireless networking. (The PDA doesn't have a card and the netbook doesn't have working drivers for the wifi adapter). They aren't nearly as comparable as you claim. The netbook is less portable but more convenient to use for anything serious. The soft keyboard on the PDA is fine for typing small amounts of English (as in a few sentences), but drives me nuts when I want to type lots or anything in Spanish: the netbook is ideal for catching up on my backlog of translation work while waiting for a tram, or for driving an overhead projector; I even manage to do a bit of programming on it, although the screen size isn't really adequate for an IDE.

  4. Re:read with a fake Scots accent on Bjarne Stroustrup Reflects On 25 Years of C++ · · Score: 1

    Why would you want a fake Scots accent to do a ripoff of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch?

  5. Re:Didn't realise this wasn't widely known on Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist · · Score: 1

    He didn't exactly do much in Parliament - according to a biography I read he spoke precisely once, to ask that a window be closed because there was a draft. His work for the Royal Mint is a lot more impressive.

  6. Re:Science on Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Newton was Master of the Mint for a quarter of a century.

  7. Re:Just thought I would point out... on 10/10/10 — a Nice Day To Celebrate the Meaning of Life · · Score: 1

    Grandparent post.

  8. Re:Parenting skills? on Apple Awarded Anti-Sexting Patent · · Score: 1

    The legal drinking age is 18 in the UK, where most people are native English speakers. You don't have a monopoly on the language over on the other side of the pond.

  9. Re:Just thought I would point out... on 10/10/10 — a Nice Day To Celebrate the Meaning of Life · · Score: 1

    Reason58 used a system which is designed to represent dates to represent a date. You used a system which is designed to represent seconds. It's not appropriate.

  10. Re:It depends how you define complicated on Grad Student Looking To Contribute To Open Source · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's actually uglier than "just trigonometry and vectors". If you're willing to use a spherical approximation to the globe then yes, but WGS84 is an ellipsoid. To get an idea of how complicated it is, check out this paper (and note the references to numerical analysis).

  11. Re:Why not do *BSD or Linux code review and use it on Indian Military Organization To Develop Its Own OS · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But bearing in mind that a number of the participating countries introduced conscription, being a civilian at the start didn't guarantee that you wouldn't be forced to be a soldier and end up dying of chlorine poisoning.

  12. Re:Useless comparison on Largest Genome Ever · · Score: 1

    The summary says "149 billion base pairs". I agree that it's probably 1E9 in a billion in this context, so 1.49E11 base pairs. Each base pair is 2 bits - 2.98E11 bits. 3.725E10 bytes (assuming 8 bits per byte, and stating it to save the other pedants pointing it out).

    So 34.7GB to 3 s.f., which is all we can justify with 3 s.f. in the original figure. Far too small to be worth expressing in Libraries of Congress.

    And of course, that's assuming that most of it isn't just redundant copies. The actual information contained may be far less.

  13. Re:Why all that fuss? on 10/10/10 — a Nice Day To Celebrate the Meaning of Life · · Score: 1

    /. doesn't handle single-byte characters. Basic-Latin, 7 bits. Although escape codes do work for named entities, so if we remember to use them those of us who want to use words in some European languages can.

  14. Re:Wrong date on 10/10/10 — a Nice Day To Celebrate the Meaning of Life · · Score: 1

    Stop counting in unary. And buy slip-on shoes for an extra two bits.

  15. Re:Just thought I would point out... on 10/10/10 — a Nice Day To Celebrate the Meaning of Life · · Score: 1

    No it isn't. In that scheme it's the range from 1286686800 inclusive to 1286773200 exclusive. Which is part of the reason that GPP used the date-only option of ISO 8601. (The full reason includes the reason for using ISO 8601).

  16. Re:/etc/resolv.conf on Take This GUI and Shove It · · Score: 1

    Why not talk her through installing sshd and do the rest yourself? That's what I've done with my sister.

  17. Re:Bad GUI and no CLI: way too common on Take This GUI and Shove It · · Score: 1

    Also consider the situation where you only want to act on a small number out of a large number of files. Then the pipe to xargs will delay execution until you've exhausted the search, while the -exec will perform the job as the files are found. It won't return any quicker, but the load will be spread out, with the first few tasks happening sooner.

    Really? I don't have time to benchmark now, but I would have thought that using xargs -n1 it would start as soon as it received the first input.

  18. Re:Bad GUI and no CLI: way too common on Take This GUI and Shove It · · Score: 2, Informative

    My root has the ability to download and upload the config as xml. I downloaded it, noticed that it's possible to change the admin's username, and did, thinking that it's an extra step towards defence in depth. Of course, the router didn't like it - it accepted the config but now neither the old username nor the new one work. If I ever want to change the config again I'll have to reset to factory defaults first.

  19. Re:Understanding is not the same as prediction on Rube Goldberg and the Electrification of America · · Score: 1

    Cool. Thanks.

  20. They transmit force with photons on Rube Goldberg and the Electrification of America · · Score: 1

    They work with light.

  21. Re:Understanding is not the same as prediction on Rube Goldberg and the Electrification of America · · Score: 1

    To be honest, I find matches easier to understand than flint + steel.

  22. Icecream on Most Readers Don't Like Customized News · · Score: 1

    Sure. How about garlic?

  23. Re:Thank god he's gone from Oracle on Father of Java, James Gosling Unloads · · Score: 1

    Boxing primitives and generics are essentially unrelated. I think it's more to do with C# being more C++ influenced than Java is.

  24. Re:Oh really? on Father of Java, James Gosling Unloads · · Score: 1

    What I've found, certainly up to Java 1.5, is that rewriting sin, cos, and acos to be pure Java rather than using Math's implementations gave an improvement of a few percent (which was relevant in a previous project where they were the bottleneck). The built-in methods used native code and the JNI overhead was a killer.

  25. Re:Reminds me of thek5.org on 1K JavaScript Madness · · Score: 1

    I remember that, and I still have the Mandlebrot applet I wrote for it. I've also had good fun with the Java 4k contest.