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User: gutnor

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  1. Re:money? on Electric Cars: Drivers Love 'Em, So Why Are Sales Still Low? · · Score: 1

    According to Tesla, their expected production capacity was 20,000 cars per year. 580,258 cars were sold in the US ... in October 2013 alone.

  2. Re:And it isn't like they have to do it on Amazon Gets Blow-Back Over Plan To Sell Kindles At Small Bookshops · · Score: 2

    It is interesting to note that in France it was to other way around. Independent could not compete with Amazon because book price is fixed by law. The "protection" is closing a loophole that allow shop like Amazon and other to offer a discount price and free delivery on top.

    France has done nothing to protect the bookstores from the e-book.

  3. Re:Probably not a big deal? on Third Tesla Fire Means Feds To Begin Review · · Score: 2

    Tesla has a lot more surface with batteries so the risk is likely higher. With only few reports it is difficult to say, but apparently the batteries of the Tesla seem to take fire more easily than a regular tank. On the other hand, gazoline cars, when on fire, behave worse than the Tesla.

    In any case, worth investigating. Tesla is a unique design, it is bound to have various design issues and that's really no big deal at this stage. After all, that's a high end car, and all high end cars have their own quirks. The stock taking a tumble is quite welcome too. Right now Tesla is valued as if it was ready to take over the world in the next 6 months.

  4. Re:Insurance on Atlanta Man Shatters Coast-to-Coast Driving Record, Averaging 98MPH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They don't do that - they wait until you have had a crash to then refuse to cover you. In the meanwhile they are happy to milk you for more.

  5. Re:Answer: No. on Tech Titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google To Help Fix Healthcare.gov · · Score: 1

    d. run it under agile (so THEY control the requirements, not the domain experts).

    It is sad what Agile has become since becoming mainstrean. It used to be a way to give back the requirement BACK to the domain expert instead of either the developer (bad) or some unrelated department (worse).

    It used to give the planning and estimation back to the people actually doing the work, the developer. Now I see job offers for "Project Manager (Scrum Master)" to run an agile team. Sad, very sad.

  6. Re:Apple made the same mistake on Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% · · Score: 1

    The "control everything" (or in a positive light "integration"), is what Apple is selling and what they are good at. Apple cannot compete head to head with Android, history taught them that - they failed until Jobs came back and started to focus on their niche. After a decade of restructuring, Apple is simply not ready to compete on many fronts, like Samsung is for example.

    That is what is amazing with Apple this time. They had the whole smartphone market by the balls, but they let it go to stay focused on a smaller number of products.

    The real big big difference is that this time there are other players competing in Apple's traditional niche instead of being left alone. If Apple eventually fails, it is this time not because of a strategic problem, just because the competition was good. ( and that's a good thing no ? )

  7. Re:Realities on NSA Intercepted French Telephone Calls "On a Massive Scale" · · Score: 1

    And they say the government can do nothing right.

  8. Re:Maths on Ask Slashdot: What Are the Hardest Things Programmers Have To Do? · · Score: 1

    Yeah, well. I work on the sort of application that require lot of customisation on top of a core product. Our sales generally "wow" the client and get them to sign by showing the UI. One of the first client customisation though, is hooking to their system so that they don't have to use our UI.

    In some cases, it is all about checkboxes. With large companies you sell your software to one strategic group but that's a totally separate operational group that get to use the software.

    So sure those companies should go under for such inefficiencies, but apparently they post billion dollar profit every quarter and received government bailouts the one year they failed.

  9. Re:Good. on UK Court Orders Two Sisters Must Receive MMR Vaccine · · Score: 1

    As someone going through the process right now. Most of the talk is balanced in the same way that teaching intelligent design together with evolution is teaching a balanced view on current "evolution theories". In NHS view, everything is good and giving good result, that's purely your choice. At most they will recommend something like "Vitamin K" to the baby at birth, or give you statistic like 90% of women have a peridurale, but otherwise, it is up to you to document yourself or ask precise questions because balanced means all option will have equal talk time focused entirely on the positive aspect of it or mandatory disclaimer of objective nature only (i.e. never "it can hurt", but stuff like "it can affect your bladder in that fashion")

    For example, they will tell you how great Home Birth is and how great the birthcenter at the hospital is, but they will not check if your specific Home is actually superior or not to Hospital Birth. That's up to you to do the assessment yourself. based on what you read on the internet, not what they tell you. They will talk to you about all the mandatory problem that could happen with epidural, they will not tell you to do anything but will conclude with "women with epidural do great, but so do women without epidural". They will also share personal experience of women going through labour with a few paracetamols just in case they thought they pushed you toward epidural too much. Again you need to make up your mind based on the information that is available to you, not on what they tell you.

    BTW, we had a midwife recommending us to take document ourself before chosing for our kid to have the MMR vaccine because there are pro and con and the risk is to get one of MMR is actually very small. She didn't say the risk is small because of all the others that get vaccinated. (disclaimer: that midwife was an all natural as god intended type of person. So most likely her view were different than the NHS view. Still, she was allowed to express this balanced view of things)

  10. Re:idiots on Shuttleworth: Apple Will Merge Mac and iPhone · · Score: 1

    And in any case, they won't merge today's mac with today's iPhone. Who know where technology is going. The increase in performance between generation of tablet/phone is very big. On the computer side, no so much. Graphical work still need fantasy power, and the rest of creative work has not really improved much since the SSD became mainstream.

    If /. reader where 20 years older they would probably claim that making a server OS for those rubbish Personal Computer is stupid when real men run an IBM Mainframe.

  11. Re:Gimmick on Samsung Creates Phone With Curved Display · · Score: 2

    Well it seems that Samsung finally managed to copy Apple Reality Distortion field.

    A screen, curved like my hands, I need one now.

  12. Re:Computer literacy + social skills on US Adults Score Poorly On Worldwide Test · · Score: 1

    It would have helped if many of those people whose homes were foreclosed during the housing crisis had basic math skills. . .

    It would have help in seeing the shitstorm sooner, to some extend, but what were really their options ? It is nice to see that you are in a bubble but you still need to live somewhere and you need to pay market price. The housing bubble has lasted 2 decades - or the time it takes to get out of school, have girlfriend, marry, have kids and see them enter university.

    Even if you are a pacifist, when your country is going to war you can get caught in the crossfire.

  13. Re:Runnin' on Empty... on HP CEO Meg Whitman To Employees: No More Telecommuting For You · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But bean-counters rarely seem to have the capacity to understand that argument.

    Most companies cannot really evaluate people. They don't know the value of the people they employ. Bonus are given based on the success of the project you are working on and external sign of failure of you direct colleague. Deep down, bean counter know that. They know that if they are going to cherry-pick people, at best they will fire random people.

    Also, when you pay executive hundred of times the salary of regular employee, at some point you start to believe they are worth it. With a team of rockstars like that, why would you care about relative performance of cheapo employee ?

  14. Luddites are wrong ? on Digital Revolution Will Kill Jobs, Inflame Social Unrest, Says Gartner · · Score: 1

    For once that will be very easy to check. We are not talking about prediction but daily reality: people are losing their job now, so it won't take long to see who is right and who is wrong.

    That said both the examples in the article "Luddites are wrong" and the "industrial revolution" were successful technological revolution. However, there is a huge difference. In "Luddite are wrong", there is a smooth transition from old job to new job. Not such much with the industrial one. Although it will prove to be a long term good for humanity, it has been a (long) period of intense misery for the majority of the population.

    Considering that is a scenario people look up too, I don't want to imagine the pain society will be in if the luddite are not wrong.

  15. Re:Look past the article's version of the cast ... on New York Subpoenaed AirBnb For All NYC User Data · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the current scheme of regulation which lets *them* profit

    You are spinning it the other way. Regulation are also costing them. I'm sure lot of hotel would be fine just not having those pesky regulation getting in the way (like you know fire protection, hygiene, using legit employees, insurances, ...)

  16. Re:The solution is simple. on Google Cracks Down On Mugshot Blackmail Sites · · Score: 1

    Same advice as always in the US: don't be unlucky.

  17. Re:Sure, to lower paying jobs on The Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong: Why Tech Doesn't Kill Jobs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The article point is that in those specific sector where automation has happened, more jobs of the same skill level in the same sector (in the US) have been created. That is interesting, and that certainly answer some the question like why the unemployment in the US is not worse.

    That said, the author is victim of cherry-picking. Sure there are sectors where it all worked out, but there are many others where it didn't ( like your example, or any job that has been outsourced ) Also salary level are not taken into account as GGP points out.

    The fact that you need training and education in your own time is not a problem per se. The problem is that by the time you realise that you need those you are probably already in a situation where you do not have the freedom to chose. You need to make career prediction years in advance in order to pull that off, the only way Wall Street analyst managed to do that from time to time is by being in bed with the government to influence the economic polities of the country. That does (Not even considering that minimum wage in the US would not allow you any freedom to train even if you are lucky at predicting the market)

  18. Re:Open source browsers? on Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Approve Work On DRM For HTML 5.1 · · Score: 1

    I assume you mean me as "we the internet users". In that case, we want the content of the content provider, they just won't give it to us without DRM. So our choice is either, keep getting the content with DRM like we do now using the content provider chosen technology, or make a DRM standard and beg content provider to be kind enough to support it.

  19. Re:4 years on Ask Slashdot: Suitable Phone For a 4-Year Old? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Amazing how /. technical elite become downright ultra-conservative assholes when traditional subject are concerned. Your post and many others would be the equivalent telling a woman in the 80's that there is no reason she would need a micro-wave if she cannot take the time to cook properly for her family.

    There are plenty of cases where a parent is legitimately separated from his kid:
    1. divorce: my wife is from a different country - if we divorce and she goes back closer to her family, it would take me at the very least several months to sort things out. My case is easy tough, I can consider moving at all. There are cases where it is simply not easy legally (Australia - UK is already a problem and that's an easy one culturaly, what about China / Russia / Japan) What stuff preventing the guy to move like uninteresting resume, lack of skills.
    2. he is deployed, a sailor, or anybody that needs to be months away from home. Maybe he wasn't 4 years ago. Crisis man.
    3. crisis. I have friends (with older child) that have had to take work several hundred miles away from home. People hit by the crisis are not the kind that can afford a personal jet for commuting. Moving a family to a new city to follow an unreliable jobs can be expensive and almost as bad for the kids. Not even considering that the kid could have health issue or other specific needs making it even harder to move.
    4. shit happens. I known/heard of people being separated for tons of shitty issues like health reasons, legal problems, visa problem.

    The reason there used to be no reason for a 4 year old to have a mobile in those situation was because it was socially acceptable to not interact with your kid in those conditions. I have never seen anybody suggesting that we should make a law prohibiting soldier, sailor to have a family for example. There is a possibility this guy is just trying to do better than what society is expecting him to. That is also his fucking right not to expose all the details of his potentially shitty situation.

  20. Re:Redundant keys on Bill Gates Acknowledges Ctrl+Alt+Del Was a Mistake · · Score: 2

    I guess the screen limitation is to blame. Prior to 2007, expectation for touch screen were quite low. (single touch, resistive, only gesture supported is "tap").

  21. Re:Nokia were about to switch to Android on A Timely Revision of Elop's "Burning Platform" Memo · · Score: 1

    More like Nokia was out of steam and looking for a buyer. If Microsoft didn't buy it they could have ended up being bought by somebody less sympathetic to Windows Phone leaving MS in a seriously bad spot on the mobile market.

    No need for rumor. It was either buy Nokia and keep some chance of fighting against Apple, Samsung, Google or quit the mobile market.

  22. Re:Why saphire on Can the iPhone Popularize Fingerprint Readers? · · Score: 1

    Apple used a saphire cover for the lens cover. Why?

    It can also be that sapphire glass is pretty much standard. Quality watches have had those for decades. Also they already use it for the lens of the camera.

  23. Re:Conservative Java teams will find it "interesti on Java 8 Developer Preview Released · · Score: 1

    Good thing is that it will deprecate Guava. Because young developers like their guava (for loops are fashion faux-pas nowadays), but it looks clunky compared to real support in the language.

  24. Re:Jobs must be rolling in his grave... on Apple Unveils iPhone 5C, iPhone 5S · · Score: 1

    Apple has also very often been left alone in the premium market. That is not the case in smartphone. Also, Apple has made cheaper version of their premium line before: macbook vs macbook pro, mac mini vs macpro, a whole range of price in iPod.

    That is a difficult line to walk. Apple need some volume yet not dilute itself. Until now, Apple was solving that issue by discounting older product giving them in effect a low cost range. The problem with that previous approach is that it killed Apple capacity to change across its product range (for example introducing new screen size and connector) and could only compete year to year with its top of the range only.

    The iPhone 5C changes that. Not to say it will succeed, but on paper it does not seem like a revolutionary rush move.

  25. Re:SSH? on NSA Foils Much Internet Encryption · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Certificate authorities never see private keys

    Theoretically, in practice average Joe buy their certificate and private keys from a third party. And obviously if you use any type of hosted environment, you must provide the private key.

    Even big companies do not run their own datacenter nowadays, hell even Banks do not run everything onsite so I wouldn't be surprise me if the NSA did not already have the majority of the SSL private keys.