Slashdot Mirror


User: ICantFindADecentNick

ICantFindADecentNick's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
33
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 33

  1. Volcanos are good at grounding aircraft - so everyone will have to go on ground transport. Heading south all at once could be tricky - especially if someone puts a wall in the way.

  2. Password rules on Ask Slashdot: Share Your Security Review Tales · · Score: 1

    People will tell you that, with rules requiring password to have upper and lower case, digits and a special character are "best practice"

  3. Not actual computation complexity people on We're Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows (cosmosmagazine.com) · · Score: 1

    To assume that their problem (rather than the first solution they've thought of) is exponential is a bad mistake. Somebody used to big multi-dimensional simulations could re-formulate it down to O(n log n). Now it's still never going to be linear and maybe n log n is still bad enough to make simulating a universe quite hard - but like many others here I'm finding it hard to see this as "proof".

  4. Re:4? on A Fourth Gravitational Wave Has Been Detected (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    It turns out that the universe is big. Really big. Even the correct word of astronomically big doesn't convey the full meaning of just how big. 4 is not an astronomically big number.

  5. Re:That's not the City of London on Honolulu Targets 'Smartphone Zombies' With Crosswalk Ban (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Of course, but it's a particularly american form. I suppose we should be grateful that they didn't put London, England. It's just that in this particular case it looks completely wrong to a native speaker because of the fact of the existence of the "City". You'll notice that that's not something that was in the original Independent article.

  6. That's not the City of London on Honolulu Targets 'Smartphone Zombies' With Crosswalk Ban (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    I know it's confusing but the "City of London" is just the square mile around the Bank of England. It's not the big city which is called "London". Brick Lane isn't in "The City" - it's in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. For historical reasons that little borough got the name city first (and properly historical reasons - it's the only place explicitly mentioned in Magna Carta).

  7. Re:Save paper..waste electricity on Top UK Supermarket Laser Prints Labels On Avocados To Reduce Waste (telegraph.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Light Amplification by Zimulated Emission of Radiation - nice over-britishization

  8. TFA conflates Manning and Snowden with the Manchester bomb info leakers which is a big mistake. There is a huge difference between leaking in the public interest like Manning and Snowden and doing it to sell newspapers because you think the public are interested. I can't imagine why the editors of the NYT thought it was a good idea to publish info that harms an active investigation. It's pretty obvious that finding the bomb maker is important. It's also pretty obvious that you shouldn't tell them what the police know. For all they know everything went up with the bomb, showing them the fragments gives them big clues about the lines that the police will be following. How is that OK? Is it because the funny little people in Manchester are a long way away? The NYT really need to answer for their appalling editorial decision.

  9. Macron email hack wan't the main intervention on Le Pen Concedes Defeat To Macron In France's Post-Hack Election (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    The french two round system has come to their aid here. The initial intervention was the destruction of the previous mainstream front runner, the republican, Fillon. The most likely outcome was then a run off between Le Pen and a very weak socialist, Hamon, which she'd have had a good chance of winning. They were too late in trying to get to Macron to cause the kind of destabilization that they want because he did too well in the first round. We'll never find out exactly who "they" are - but we should take note to build some checks into the political system to keep it robust against these kind of influences.

  10. Between greedy marketeers and semi-competent developers trying to get apps to behave is a lost cause. (For example, I had a fruitless exchange with the customer support on an IoT controller app that was demanding access to phone privilege - they simply didn't get that it was an issue). Our best hope is probably spoofing. It's fine if the app can see that I spend most of my time in Ulan Baator hanging out with Mickey Mouse. But since Xprivacy hasn't got active development I'm not sure what the best spoofing option is. Maybe Lineage privacy manager?.

  11. Of course you are right - but how to make it stop on Slashdot Asks: Are Password Rules Bullshit? (codinghorror.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's "cargo cult" requirements. People are so used to the security theatre of the password rules that when they come to specify what their system should do they put in all of this stupidity, They don't actually read NIST guidelines. Maybe we should lobby for some kind of certification mark - and the people who assess it would have some clues.

  12. Yes, remote team can build the wrong thing quickly on Slashdot Asks: Are Remote Software Teams More Productive? (techbeacon.com) · · Score: 2

    The reason you might want to co-locate is to get the developers to talk to the users. The "distraction" is then the interaction about what it's actually meant to do It's quite shocking to see the difference between messaging and video interaction, and face-to-face (sorry remote working advocates), I can remember the moment we turned up at a remote site after working on a project for six months and seeing the a-ha moment when they realized what it was for.

  13. It's already out there on CP/M Creator Gary Kildall's Memoirs Released As Free Download (ieee.org) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As we know, censorship is really hard to do well. A copy has already been sold at auction And they quote some of the good bits: The trigger for writing the book was apparently his pique when the University of Washington asked him, as a distinguished graduate, to attend their computer sciences anniversary in 1992, but gave the keynote speech to dropout Gates. ... "he said of Gates, He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry..."

  14. Unusually +ve but what's in it for refusniks? on Windows 10 Anniversary Update: the Best New Features (theverge.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Automatic timezone, Dark theme. Whoopy do. Sounds like the bottom of the features barrel being scraped to make items for the story. I'm still sticking with Win7. My laptop doesn't need to be confused with a phone - and I don't want all of the telemetry/spyware.

  15. The mighty Knuth on Fixing JavaScript's Broken Random Number Generator (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    Knuth covers this definitively in Volume 2 of "The Art of Computer Programming". I think I first read it in 1979 so it certainly used to be covered in teaching, maybe that's all been lost in the later generations. Now get off my lawn.

  16. Re:Shows how out of touch I am with modern culture on Are Enterprise Architects the "Miltons" of Their Organizations? · · Score: 2

    The analogy still holds. Somebody has to justify the ways of god to men, just that Milton couldn't do it in UML.

  17. Re:You shouldn't have to mandate this on UK Government Mandates the Teaching of Evolution As Scientific Fact · · Score: 1

    -- ..., lest they quickly become little better than a monarchy. I think you've forgotten that this is talking about schools in England. Which is actually a little better than a monarchy as the Queen stays out of stuff like this.

  18. Lego Mindstorms on Ask Slashdot: Best Computer For a 7-Year Old? · · Score: 1

    Look back over some previous slashdot submissions on Lego. While most computerized toys are rubbish, Lego have done a great job in putting a programmable element to something that's already great (and you should already know if your kid is into that kind of thing).

  19. Re:Freedombox on Ask Slashdot: Building a Personal FOSS Cloud? · · Score: 2

    Don't know why it's modded "Informative". The link posted has a lot about vision, and freedom but nothing about what functions the freedom box is meant to provide.

  20. Re:Interesting but... on The History of the CompSci Degree · · Score: 1

    and when TFA says the answer isn't obvious - it kind of is. Cambridge was the home of the first computer lab, staffed with people like Maurice Wilkes and Roger Needham. That's exactly why I'd expect it to be the answer.

  21. Microsoft always gets GMT/BST wrong on Microsoft Wrongly Gives Britain the Day Off · · Score: 1

    Microsoft have never really cared about getting calendar details right. Whenever a colonial (maybe should I say yank to really annoy them - even though I know they're not all yanks) sends a meeting request it arrives saying GMT as the timezone for London instead of BST. You would have thought that they could get the hang of daylight saying as they have it too. You actually have to confirm with the other end and say: you know that meeting that says 1:00 pm GMT is really 1:00pm BST or noon GMT (actually I normally translate to whatever zone they're in) e.g 8:00 am EDT.

  22. Re:It was a big deal to 18th century astronomers on Venus To Transit the Sun In June, Not Again Until 2117 · · Score: 1

    Maybe that explains why NASA put in all of the US state borders on their map as homage to Mason and Dixon. Don't know why they also did it for Australia though. Assuming that that isn't actually the reason, why the hell would you draw a map like that? It looks really weird - unless it's just an American aesthetic?

  23. An Old and Famous (and not very good method) on Gosper's Algorithm Meets Wall Street Formulas · · Score: 1

    The binomial model is common in textbooks because it's intuitively appealing, but if you only apply it to basic European (exercisable at expiry) options then there really are better ways of getting a closed form solution i.e. the Black-Scholes (or Bachelier-Thorp ....) formula. If you want half decent pricing methods for more general cases then you'll end up with Finite difference or Monte-Carlo methods depending on dimensionality, at which point you've already given up on a closed form solution. One of the reasons that TFA is so unintelligible is it's an academic treatment of half of the theory of a non-problem. (and as others have already pointed out - it has nothing to say about how the finance industry operates).

  24. Re:Hmmm... on Phishing Education Test Blocked For Phishing · · Score: 1

    I thought TFA said that it had no whois data - but use seem to know it's run by someone called Viola. Maybe her surname's Walla.

  25. It's not just partitioning on Exploring Advanced Format Hard Drive Technology · · Score: 1

    After the "linux doesn't handle it story" a couple of weeks ago http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/02/14/1541244/Linux-Not-Quite-Ready-For-New-4K-Sector-Drives I wondered if the mis-alignment was what was causing my poor postgres performance on the WD Caviar Green. After quite a lot of effot moving things around I didn't actually see any noticeable difference. Now I'm left wondering whether the mis-alignment effect is dwarfed by the effort of reading 3.5K of a 4K block for every random 0.5K block write. The fact that the disk is lying to the driver is the big deal here. Does anybody know how to force the linux sd driver to use 4k blocks regardless of the what the disk tells it about blocksize?