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User: notsoclever

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  1. please enter a subject on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Have a Pager? Do You Find It Useful? · · Score: 1

    Amazon still uses pages for their oncall, because pagers still have a better SLA than cellphones. However, it comes at a price: their communications are unencrypted, and work on a broadcast basis. Also, they don't do a store-and-forward type thing (their "redundancy" is done by just broadcasting each message a certain number of times spaced apart), so if you're outside of the coverage area when a page goes off you'll never get it (unlike with SMS where most carriers will hold on to it until it's been delivered) so it's still not totally reliable. Personally I would recommend setting up a Twilio app that sends the message to email and SMS, and if not responded to within a certain period of time, starts calling phone numbers and using their text-to-speech API.

  2. Re:This is why on Storing Very Large Files On Amazon's Unlimited Cloud Photo Storage · · Score: 1

    You can also just store the data in a less-efficient way using QR codes or other such encodings that allow you to recover the data from the patterns of the pixels. And you can split large data files up into many many smaller chunks, and even store the index for the chunks in another image file.

  3. Re:Infinite bugs? on The Sad Graph of Software Death (tinyletter.com) · · Score: 1

    Feature requests can grow infinitely, as can the number of duplicates of existing bugs. Unless you're diligently closing/merging duplicates and triaging feature requests, you're never going to plateau.

  4. Re:One connector to rule them all. on Intel Adopts USB-C Connector For 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3, Supports USB 3.1, DP 1.2 · · Score: 2

    yet another person who has never heard of buggy implementations and privilege escalation

  5. Re:One connector to rule them all. on Intel Adopts USB-C Connector For 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3, Supports USB 3.1, DP 1.2 · · Score: 1

    you obviously are bereft of pop culture as a common reference to the rest of society

  6. AT power supplies on Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack? · · Score: 1

    Once upon a time I found that old, obsolete AT power supplies made for a pretty good more-or-less-regulated high-wattage DC power supply for powering all sorts of random circuits which needed more amperage than any typical wallwart that one had lying around.

  7. Re:Every Damn Day on Want 30 Job Offers a Month? It's Not As Great As You Think · · Score: 1

    All of the spammy job postings I get are for things like "DB2 admin in Podunktown, Anywhere" when my resume hasn't even listed DB2 in well over a decade.

  8. Re:Make me an offer on Want 30 Job Offers a Month? It's Not As Great As You Think · · Score: 1

    I love how lately people are trying really hard to look like they're reading my LinkedIn profile before contacting me (and going so far as to contact me via an email address listed on a site linked to from said profile), but they don't even bother to get my first name right or proofread to the extent of even noticing red squiggles underneath obvious tpyos.

  9. All water is recycled on Bill Gates Endorses Water From Human Waste · · Score: 2

    Remember, that delicious tap water was once pooped in by a dinosaur.

  10. Not seeing the downside to this on GNOME Shell Hurts Gaming Performance · · Score: 3, Insightful

    GNOME shell exposes performance issues and driver bugs, which in principle means that those performance issues and driver bugs will (hopefully) be fixed, making the drivers more robust and performant down the road. How's this a problem?

  11. Re:Stroustrup C++ 'interview' on ISO C++ Committee Approves C++0x Final Draft · · Score: 1

    Sadly, for quite some time people actually believed that was real. I had several well-intentioned friends trying to convince me that I should drop C++ and learn [insert fad language here] because Stroustrup was being evil when he designed C++.

  12. This is necessary why? on Google's New Meta-Tags For News Story Authors · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Whatever happened to the already-existing "cite" element and attribute that have been a standard part of HTML for years?

  13. Re:Slashdot: so dense it causes singularities on Adobe Releases Its Own HTML5 Video Player · · Score: 1

    I see it as being beneficial mostly to the vast majority of web designers who don't actually know HTML and just export stuff directly from DreamWeaver or whatever. Also, I haven't looked at this particular player, but I would hope it has a nicer set of controls than the default HTML5 video container's controls.

  14. Slashdot: so dense it causes singularities on Adobe Releases Its Own HTML5 Video Player · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nearly everyone seems to be missing the point to this. It's not something the user installs, it's something that content providers use to provide their video on the server side. This is a GOOD THING - it makes it much easier for websites to transition to HTML5 without alienating users who don't have HTML5-capable browsers.

  15. Re:Been a newegg.com customer for a long time on Some Newegg Customers Received Fake Intel Core i7s · · Score: 1

    And not only will there be no "egg" on their faces but you might expect they would send out "new" stock to deal with this issue.

  16. Re:50 yrs is not that long on Long-Term PC Preservation Project? · · Score: 1

    And even DVI is already starting to go away.

  17. Re:The primary problem with your idea on Long-Term PC Preservation Project? · · Score: 1

    And how do you expect them to store the digital video or watch it? In 50 years, DVD players will be even less common than VHS players are now, and those are ubiquitous - could you really expect any current storage media to be readable?

  18. Re:Warcraft III on A Look At Successful Game Mods · · Score: 2, Informative

    They did at least give Counter-Strike a passing mention, but the lack of Team Fortress, and even moreso the lack of Threewave CTF seem like major ommissions. Also, that site seems to be optimized for getting as many pageviews as possible. There's no reason that article needed to be split up into 12 slow-loading banner-loaded pages.

  19. The point to subaccounts on Playstation Network Gets Revised, More Restrictive ToS · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Subaccounts exist so that you can allow other people to buy games/movies/etc. from your wallet, while limiting the amount of money they spend per month. These TOS restrictions have nothing to do with whether people can use their own (master) accounts on your PS3, or play the games you purchase from your PSN account while logged in to your system, or whatever.

    Further, I'm actually glad for them to make explicit a policy of wanting to remove abusive griefers. Lately I've stopped playing PSN games online with non-friends simply because I keep on running into asshats with Bluetooth headsets and too much time on their hands, which make the whole experience horrible. By giving possible consequences for peoples' actions, it makes it possible that people might actually, you know, not be complete dipshits.

  20. Didn't Jens Alfke already solve this problem? on Quickies — MIT's Intelligent Sticky Notes · · Score: 2, Informative
  21. Re:Misleading title... on IRS Freely Gives Out Employee User Name/Password Info · · Score: 1

    Hey, now, I'm sure IRS employees pay taxes too. It's not like they get a customer discount or anything.

  22. So which was the third-place one here? on 360 vs. PS3 vs. Wii - The Designer's Perspective · · Score: 2, Insightful
    In the optical media era, Sony brought out the Playstation, Sega gave us the Saturn, and Nintendo hung onto cartridges for one more generation with the N64.
    From the context in the article, it sounds like he's saying the Saturn was the second-place one in that race.
  23. Re:And...? on Unbox Too Restricted and Too Expensive? · · Score: 1
    If that theoretical box also supported free video podcasts and HD content, I'd be SO all over it.

    Of course, they already make something that does all that, though it's a bit pricier than $200 (and there's no built-in tuner, though you can get addon tuners for it pretty cheaply now, including a rather nice miniature ATSC/ClearQAM HD tuner for $250ish).

  24. The Secret Life of Honey Bee on Ask Futurama Star Billy West About...? · · Score: 1

    So, does the Honey Nut Cheerios bee have any deep, dark secrets he'd like to get out in the open? Anything to do with the fact that honey bee drones are all female?

  25. Really? OMG on How Battlestar Galactica Killed TV · · Score: 1

    How does setting a VCR show up on the Nielsen ratings? Does that mean all of our VCRs are collecting our viewing data and sending it back to Nielsen Media Research?