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  1. Re:Sounds like Android ... on New Intel and AMD Chips Will Only Support Windows 10 (pcworld.com) · · Score: 1

    I think my company's IT department would beg to differ, they just finished their Win 7 rollout 2 years ago. Testing every application used by every department for compatibility with all the region specific installs is a big job. While I have my localization settings on my German laptop all set to English (US) and US number format, the initial boot seqeunce is entirely in German because it was installed from a different ISO. I just work in engineering, the logistics programs for a global supply chain, HR utilities etc, all have to be tested too.

    While I am sure, they are probably working on this already, I doubt every compiler, CAD program, debugger, etc... will work out of the box, despite claims to the contrary. Sure the latest version might work, but once a release is validated using a specific toolchain, using a newer version of a tool would require a full retest if the binary is changed due to bug fixes in the tool or for any number of reasons.

    If Microsoft wants to alienate the businesses which are their bread and butter, they could not have picked a better way to do it. I wouldn't consider my company and companies like mine a declining minority. Yes, they can order computers which are Win7 compatible for a while, but forcing the issue isn't going to foster future goodwill.

  2. Tcl = Tool Control Language
    We used it at my old startup as the scripting language for the testing tool we sold. I have fond memories of developing multithreaded scripts from the interpreter command line. I never used it for Tk, but I implemented the Tcl API for interacting with our tool in C. It was the right tool for the job, trying to use it for everything would be a mistake, just like with any other language.

  3. Re:enum values on Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Bad Programming Ideas That Work? (infoworld.com) · · Score: 1

    That's the purpose of an enumeration, to assign a value to a label. If you're doing compares of an integer literal (hard coded magic numbers) to an enumeration, there's room for cleanup without increasing complexity, but variable to enum constant comparisons are a good practice.

  4. Re:6 Million is a Gross Underestimation on 6 Million Americans Exposed To High Levels of Chemicals In Drinking Water, Says Study (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 1

    The contamination areas includes, Southern California, Northern California, Central California, Texas and large swaths of the Eastern United States (from the Great Lakes to Massachusetts) and down the seaboard to Florida. I would say 6 million is a gross underestimation - considering how much produce is shipped outside of California,and the population density in the affected areas.

    Not to mention the Twin Cities, Chicago, Detroit (big surprise), and Seattle to name a few more affected areas.

  5. Re: Hatchet jobs aside on Tor Project Confirms Sexual Misconduct By Developer Jacob Appelbaum (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/h...

    A first hand description of a harassment campaign he initiated.

    https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/07/...

    A first hand account of him ignoring the safe word during sex, which most would consider rape.

  6. Re:Hatchet jobs aside on Tor Project Confirms Sexual Misconduct By Developer Jacob Appelbaum (theverge.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Jacob is that you? Notice I am not posting anonymously.

    I didn't go into specifics because I wasn't there. There was no hearsay in my post. I've known Jacob since ~2007, so I can call him an ass without it being hearsay. I also did not go into specific details of any one story because they are not my stories, but I know several of the people who came forward and I know their only motivation was to stop Jacob from continuing to abuse people.

  7. Re:"Sexual mistreatment"? on Tor Project Confirms Sexual Misconduct By Developer Jacob Appelbaum (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    http://jacobappelbaum.net/

    The website explains their reasoning for not going to a court of law, which was why the TOR foundation hired a private investigator to confirm their veracity.

  8. Re:Really lousy article on Tor Project Confirms Sexual Misconduct By Developer Jacob Appelbaum (theverge.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are a variety of reasons this will never go to court, in part because of Jacob currently residing in Berlin. If you want the full stories, read them here.

    http://jacobappelbaum.net/

  9. Re:Hatchet jobs aside on Tor Project Confirms Sexual Misconduct By Developer Jacob Appelbaum (theverge.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I personally know some of the people that came forward, they had no agenda other than stopping a serial sexual predator / harrasser. I was sad when I heard the story break, but not surprised because Jake's an asshole if you're not somebody. Where somebody is defined as a person whose work he can steal, someone to intoxicate and lure into bed, or someone that can enhance his reputation.

    Shame on you for suggesting otherwise, and shame on the mods who modded you up.

    Whether or not Tor is backdoored or otherwise compromised is a totally different issue. As for something new made by trustable people, Jacob doesn't have the technical ability to do a project like this on his own, he's a charming sociopath that worms his way into the circles of people that can. Good for Tor to give him the boot and cleaning house of the people who turned a blind eye to his misconduct.

  10. Re:With the best will in the world... on Audi Creates "Fuel of the Future" Using Just Carbon Dioxide and Water · · Score: 1
  11. Re:With the best will in the world... on Audi Creates "Fuel of the Future" Using Just Carbon Dioxide and Water · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Regardless of the efficiency of the process, overgeneration of renewable power is still a huge problem. Germany actually pays its neighbors to take it when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining as the price of electricity between utility companies goes negative.

    There are a few things we currently do with excess power, the ideal option is to store it until we need it, such as with compressed air in salt caverns.

    In many cases, they dump it as heat into rivers as the storage infrastructure simply doesn't exist. This new option seems to be a great way to sequester carbon and deal with excess power generated through renewables. It also reduces our dependency on oil without having to sell new vehicles to utilize it, which is a very good thing.

  12. Re:jesus christ, this. on WHO Report Links Weed Killer Ingredient To Cancer Risk · · Score: 1

    Not everyone's homes. Here in Europe there's a GMO ban. Just think of how much less roundup is used when roundup ready crops aren't planted.

    I read another study a while back about the roundup ready crops having high levels of roundup in the actual food produced, one more reason to be glad I'm not living in the States anymore.

  13. Not sure how this helps on Pakistanis Must Provide Fingerprints Or Give Up Cellphone · · Score: 1

    According to the summary, the attackers were all using cellphones registered to someone else. It might help make a case against the woman to whom the cellphones were registered, but I don't see how this would curb future attacks.

    Even that link to the crime is tenuous at best, since it would be easy enough to create reasonable doubt and claim biometric identity theft. Without limits on the number of SIM cards registered to a single user, nothing is stopping them from getting a mule who isn't on a watch list to buy the burners or even using multiple stolen identities for the same purpose.

    If they limit things to 1 SIM card per person, then it might have a chance of working, since a victim of identity theft would know since their service would be shut off.

  14. Re:Chromecast? on VLC Acquiring Lots of New Features · · Score: 4, Informative

    You CAN use VLC with Chromecast already though. It's not supported in the desktop application yet, but the VLC plugin for the Chrome browser already meets this need. It's fairly easy to make work:
    1) Install VLC plugin for Chrome
    2) Enter URL for video on your filesystem file://path/media.file
    3) Hit the cast button on your browser

    I think official support is on hold until Google releases a Chromecast SDK for desktop applications, otherwise it'll be a hack and could break at any time if Google changes stuff. As far as I know, Google has only released an API for web based services.

  15. Re:"Half Baked"? on Could Tizen Be the Next Android? · · Score: 4, Funny

    Let's be clear that Tizen is actually the child of Nokia's and Intel's Linux-based OS that was known as Meego, which owed much of its existence to Nokia's Maemo Linux platform and Intel's Moblin. That's a lot of history, and Samsung has added more and more. Half-baked? What a bizarre term.

    I think it refers to the fact they must have been high to think it's a good idea.

  16. Should have been obvious on Deep-Frying Graphene Microspheres For Energy Storage · · Score: 2

    I mean, look at the energy density of an Arancini.

  17. Re:Does not contradict on Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120' · · Score: 1

    Not aging as a whole, but the effect of the telemeres on aging was reversed in mice with premature aging diseases. Telomerase can reverse the shortening of the telemeres, that's what the enzyme does, just like DNA transcriptase pops off a bit of the telemere each time it copies it. It does not stop or reset aging, but combined with other therapies may be part of a treatment which does.

    The telemeres themselves are only one component, in a very complex system, but it's not an intractible problem like you seem to be suggesting. If it were a real limiting factor, how is it that babies are born bioliogically younger than their parents? I'm not being flippant, seriously think about it. It's obvious people can make a new life, which starts as a bunch of pluripotent stem cells. But how does the clock reset? What if we could "freeze" the clock right around 22 - 26 or better yet, turn it back.

    It's almost certain that telomerase will be a part of the solution. I personally think it will also require us replacing our naturally occuring symbiotic bacteria in our guts and on our skin with synthetic bacteria which is engineered to function as the old, plus feed us a drug cocktail which keeps us young and protects us from foreign bacteria.

    Telling someone they don't understand the material which they linked and to get back to you, is condescending and rude. Yeah, I'm a jerk for pointing it out, but I'm okay with that. But I don't like bullies, especially not nerdy ones that use their perceived intelligence as a bludgeon in discussions, since they scare the women out of STEM, so stop it. If you don't want to sound like a bully or a jerk, don't tell people RTFA and come back when you get a clue, actually write out why you disagree.

  18. Re:Ref:Telomerase on Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120' · · Score: 1

    What about this article in Nature which directly contradicts your snide presumption?
    http://www.nature.com/news/201...

    Given how we don't really understand if coffee and eggs are good or bad for us, and every month it seems to switch, it seems more than a little arrogant to condescend to someone who is basing their opinion on alternate though legitimate scientific theory.

    Also, considering your GP post about telemeres, he was just asserting that the reduction of the telemere by DNA transcriptase can be reversed using mechanisms which already exist in our body. If you meant something different, you should have written it in your post, rather than let people guess the obvious implication.

    So stop posting like an asshole, no one really KNOWS anything for sure about what will or will not stop or reverse aging, so stop acting like you do.
    OR
    Enlighten us and share your knowledge rather than beating us up with it. Since I am not a microbiologist, I can't rip apart the article from Nature I posted, but you surely must know what they got wrong given the confidence with which you derided that same information as being misunderstood when Wikipedia was linked.

  19. Re:Bicycles and Jets on 'Just Let Me Code!' · · Score: 1

    If I had mod points, I'd mod you up some more.

    Any new safety critical code has to be developed with "State of the Art" techniques, which now means using a variety of fancy tools for job & bug tracking, requirements and V&V (the requirements shall be written the same way we decided 20+ years ago), design IDE (UML from the 90's), coding IDE (emacs anyone? probably not at work), static analysis for complexity metrics, coverage tools for decision and structural coverage, source control, etc. These tools then get scripted to cross reference everything. And that's just for the software portion.

    At system level, you have to perform a hazard & risk analysis to determine what the potential for harm is from hazards that may be encountered during operation. If you were writing software for radiation therapy machine like the THERAC 25, you would have to identify risks, like exposure to high dose of radiation and the severity of harm, in this case potentially lethal radiation poisoning. This determines you safety integrity level, and amount of process which must be applied, in avionics it's the difference between DO-178B Levels A - E (A = plane falls from sky, E = no risk to critical systems), in automotive it's the safety integrity level SIL 0 - 3. Then you would have to define safe operation, like maximum plausible therapeutic dosage. Then from a functional perspective you would identify critical signals from sensors, data buses which carry data that feed the algorithms which control the X Ray Beam intensity and activation. It will also mandate various software integrity tasks for each component like cyclic CPU core tests, program flow control monitoring, cyclic RAM and ROM tests, stack monitoring or analysis, and trace-ability of requirements to design to code to tests, and level of independence between coders and testers. For a SIL 3 component like an electronic steering wheel, where a malfunction in steering control at highway speeds can cause multiple fatal accidents, an independent organization would be required to develop and implement the test plan based on the requirements.

    Managing the development of software by teams of individuals requires much more documentation and meetings than working as a lone coder and a process in which only 10% or less of the work is actually coding, that means enough documentation for new team members so they don't have to bug the productive team members and having a work culture that strives towards excellence in ensuring mundane details like a decimal point don't kill someone. If you want to write software that does cool stuff like control the maneuvering thrusters on the SpaceX Falcon 9R for a soft ground landing, then you and maybe dozens of other people have to make sure all those mundane details are right when its the difference between landing softly at the spaceport and crashing into a major metropolitan area and exploding (or so I assume, considering I do not and have never worked for Space X). If you undertake a project like this and fail to do your due diligence and are negligent in carrying out these tasks and people die, you or your manager might easily end up in jail or your company could be fined Billions in damages like what happened to Toyota.

  20. Performance vs Closed source driver? on Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Steps Up Its Game & Runs Much Faster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Kudos to the Nouveau team for reaching this exciting milestone!

    If they tested side by side with the closed source driver from Nvidia, where does this put them in terms of performance?

    How long until an average user will chose the nouveau driver over the closed source driver, if said user doesn't care about licensing or building from source, but is looking for out of the box performance? Where does that put them in comparison with the Nvidia driver on Windows?

    Personally, this project is not very relevant to me since I have no qualms about using the closed source driver which is good enough for my purposes, but I'm not a gamer. I really hope someone like Valve is sponsoring this development because it sounds like a lot of tedious, hard work to be doing pro bono.

  21. Re:A boon for Parallel Construction on Supreme Court OKs Stop and Search Based On Anonymous 911 Tips · · Score: 1

    I think this is exactly what is happening when a criminal "butt dials" 911 or the sheriff who hears them discuss their plans in their entirety. I think that there must be some system in place that flags the phone user to the NSA, who when listening to their activated mic after hacking their phone, connects them to 911 automatically when they determine an active crime is being discussed. Or as in this case, the NSA calls the DEA who execute some parallel construction when they think the package is in transit.

    Pre-Snowden this would be called a conspiracy theory, now it actually sounds fairly reasonable.

  22. Re:Exactly why I stopped buying Apple on Many Mac OS Users Not Getting Security Updates · · Score: 1

    It's more than just that, a lot of the keys are a different shape too. I still get lots of #'s when going for enter even after 9 months here. Gotta train new muscle memory. Fortunately, learning the QWERTZ layout hasn't degraded my ability to type on a QWERTY keyboard in the slightest.

  23. Re:Exactly why I stopped buying Apple on Many Mac OS Users Not Getting Security Updates · · Score: 1

    I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy S which is now running CyanogenMod, no regrets here.

  24. Re:Exactly why I stopped buying Apple on Many Mac OS Users Not Getting Security Updates · · Score: 1

    You're comparing 20+ year old hardware not being able to run the latest software, to 2 year old hardware not being able to run the latest software and I'm the idiot? I was late to buy the iPhone 3G, does that mean it's okay for Apple to stop providing updates less than 18 months later??

  25. Re:Exactly why I stopped buying Apple on Many Mac OS Users Not Getting Security Updates · · Score: 1

    My late 2006 2nd generation intel Macbook Pro cannot be upgraded to Mavericks. I'm not making this up just to spite the Apple fanboys, I got an error message when I was attempting the upgrade. That's hardly leaping to conclusions..
    And the iPhone 3G hardly runs iOS 4, since it causes the phone which worked fine before the update to drop 1 in 5 calls. And it certainly cannot be upgraded beyond that point meaning it does not receive anymore security updates.

    In short, I would have to be a fool to continue using my iPhone 3G for anything important like online banking. And by extension, I would be a fool to buy more Apple products given their propensity to force users to buy newer hardware if they want to be able to receive security patches.