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User: Ukab+the+Great

Ukab+the+Great's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:Upstate New York Isn't That Bad... on The Worst US Cities To Work In IT · · Score: 1

    However, the article trashed the climate (rather inaccurately at that) before mentioning the job market (or absence thereof). And for that I would like to disembowel their editors.

    We Buffalonians would like to applaud the editor rectifying the unjust, decades-long misconception that we have the worst snow in the NY State.

  2. Re:Sounds like a lot of trouble. on An Experiment In BlackBerry Development · · Score: 1

    I think it would be really interesting for you to learn development for the iPhone using Apple's SDK and compare and contrast the experiences you had doing development for the BlackBerry.

    I'd suspect that the conclusion you'd reach would be that the iPhone SDK is the most pain-free (relatively speaking) mobile development experience you've ever had and you'll start to understand why Apple is getting so much developer mindshare despite their draconian stances on the App store and background apps.

  3. Mos Eisley Take 2 on Robotic Ferret Used To Fight Smugglers · · Score: 3, Funny

    Greedo: Jabba's through with you. He has no use for smugglers who drop their shipments at the first sign of an electronic ferret.

  4. Menudo on The "Doctor Who" Model of Open Source · · Score: 2, Funny

    Key members of the project being replaced after a certain amount of time would be more aptly named the Menudo Model Of Open Source.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menudo_(band)

  5. Modems on Weather Balloons To Provide Broadband In Africa · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The technology raises hydrogen-filled weather balloons to 80,000 -- 100,000 feet, which individuals contact via modems.

    I would have thought that multiple 100,000 ft lengths of telephone wire would make the balloons too heavy.

  6. Re:Massive lunar explosion splits moon in half on NASA To Trigger Massive Explosion On the Moon In Search of Ice · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/11aug_lcross.htm

    Equivalent to 2000 pounds of TNT. That's less than a bunker buster bomb carried by an F15. The moons been hit by stuff a lot more powerful, like the enormous asteroids that made the 1000-mile craters you can see without a telescope.

  7. War Of The Worlds on Fertility Clinic Bows To Pressure, Nixes Eye- and Hair-Color Screening · · Score: 1

    To sum up, designing a baby to be resistant to over 70 diseases is cool.

    If humans were disease-free, War Of The Worlds would have ended in a very uncool way.

  8. Deadly Alphanumeric on Twitter "Twitpocalypse" Snags Mac, iPhone Apps · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, any seasoned DBA or database application developer will tell you that any numeric designator/ID number issued by someone other than yourself should always be represented and handled as a string value to deal with the situation of a numeric designator suddenly going alphanumeric.

    If Twitter switched to alphanumeric designators for records, all the existing apps would not only not handle the tweets, some less well written apps would probably crash altogether.

  9. Damned Scientists on Earth Could Collide With Other Planets · · Score: 1

    Why can't they come up with a plausible theory of apocalypse by snu-snu?

  10. Re:DONT DO IT SCIENTISTS! on First Acoustic Black Hole Created · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or even worse, the Earth will continue to exist and be entirely populated by mimes.

  11. The current web is too complex on Ray Ozzie Calls Google Wave "Anti-Web" · · Score: 3, Insightful

    An ajax web app that tries to ape a simple desktop app is built with:

    HTTP
    HTML
    CSS
    XML
    SQL
    JavaScript
    PHP/Python/Ruby/other scripting language

    That's 7 different text-based (aka "simple") languages/syntaxes a developer has to learn just to be able just to get the same basic functionality as a simple desktop application. The current system as it is isn't simple.

  12. I'm not scientist on Black Hole Swallows Star · · Score: 1

    But wouldn't a roving black hole produce a tell-tale roving gravitational lensing?

  13. Marketing on One Approach To Open Source Code Contribution and Testing · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A drizzle is a display of rain that is rather unimpressive. Also, it's a prelude to heavy rain and getting soaked and miserable. On the Drizzle website is a picture of a rainy cloud, which at least in western cultures is an image associated with things that are unhappy.

    At this point in their project I think that some smart marketing is more important than nitpicking over code.

  14. Seinfeld on What Do You Do With a Personal Domain? · · Score: 4, Funny

    Be master of your domain.

  15. It's so old on Hydraulic Analog Computer From 1949 · · Score: 1

    That you program it using the Waterfall Model.

  16. Re:Painful to Watch on Open Government Brainstorm Defies Wisdom of Crowds · · Score: 1

    So on the frton page of the site, I counted more than ten "ideas" from one individual reading all the same (with a handful of votes to each!).

    And the "completely ban the Internet for anything" demographic was horribly underrepresented, too.

  17. Re:$50M for an Eye...Really? on Aussie Government Offers $40M To Build a Bionic Eye · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Supposedly there are 50,000 blind people in Australia.

    http://www.bca.org.au/natpol/statistics/2005_Blind_Stats_num_and_perc_by_State_Territory_CERA.htm

    $50,000,000 breaks down to $1000/blind person.

    I'd guess that the cost in social services to help blind people probably exceeds $1000/yr per person (i.e. well over $50,000,000). Therefore it would make economic sense to cure blindness.

  18. Code Bloat? Think twice. on Can "Page's Law" Be Broken? · · Score: 1

    We could also consider the possibility that a twice-as-fast computer on a twice-as-fast network pipe produces twice-as-much data which, in order to keep the same perceived speed, must be processed twice-as-quickly by another computer.

  19. Cyber Security Cadence on Hackers Breached US Army Servers · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't know what I've been told
    But Army server's are quickly pwned
    You don't need some high-tech decryption machine
    Just a string with a semi-colon in between
    I don't know what I will find
    When good Army hacker's have resigned
    We'll have a good laugh when some bored kid in China
    Posts photos of Gen. Petraeus with a vagina

  20. Re:They still don't get it! on Asus Slaps Linux In the Face · · Score: 1

    Spreading "FUD" would imply an attempt to use fear, uncertainty, and doubt to thwart a plan or a movement. If there is no grand Linux plan or movement, as you have stated in your original post, then technically there's nothing for me to thwart and therefore you can't logically consider me to be spreading FUD.

  21. Re:They are not "Comics" they are "Graphic Novels" on How Comic Fans & Shops Are Stereotyped · · Score: 1

    Like "batsuit" is attempt to legitimize men wearing "tights"..

  22. Re:They still don't get it! on Asus Slaps Linux In the Face · · Score: 1

    - When Linux does something well, FOSS advocates declare Linux a master plan to take over the world.

    - When Linux does something badly, the same FOSS advocates declare Linux to be "just a kernel" that "doesn't want to be anything" and therefore is beyond criticism.

    That's the nuance.

  23. Rube Goldberg on Phony TCP Retransmissions Can Hide Secret Messages · · Score: 1

    The receiver could have a website with empty pages pages titled 0.html and 1.html. To send the ascii character 'a', the sender accesses 0.html, 1.html, 0.html five more times, and then 1.html one last time. The receiver would then look in their web server log and see that the letter 'a' was transmitted.

  24. Endless Cycle on Pentagon Seeks a New Generation of Hackers · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And so continues the cycle of Slashdot stories of "$ARMED_FORCE is starting a new elite CyberSecurityDefenderProtectUsFromBadGuysSuperForce" and:

    1. Former IT folks in the $ARMED_FORCE ranting on Slashdot about how $ARMED_FORCE did nearly everything in their power to make competent IT people leave.
    2. $ARMED_FORCE continuing to disqualify those who are over 30 or who have a pasty-faced a complexion unbecoming to G.I. Joe.
    3. $ARMED_FORCE not wanting to stop using Windows for anything secure.
    4. More Chinese hackers putting stupid stuff on $ARMED_FORCE's IIS servers.

  25. Re:And remember folks. on Pentagon Seeks a New Generation of Hackers · · Score: 1

    "If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking"--William Tecumseh Sherman