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User: k8to

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  1. Re:Areal density... on HAMR Hard Disk Drives Postponed To 2018 (anandtech.com) · · Score: 2

    In the 1997/1998 timeframe, the difference was that the submissions were pretty good, so rubberstamping worked OK. There were still frequent omissions and inaccuracies, but this was further handled by the commentary being exceedingly high quality. Frequently someone working on the technology, project, or software, would chime in with clarification and because comment counts were low the signal would get through the noise.

    So no, the "editors" really were never that, but the system worked decently when it was a smaller user base of more knowledgable players. Then as the slide towards uselessness and hostile users began, accounts, scoring, moderation, metamoderation, and so on were all instituted, but there's really no overcoming ignorance in volume.

  2. Re:How many gender professors to screw in light bu on Scientists Have Paper On Gender Bias Rejected Because They're Both Women · · Score: -1

    Wow, this apologia is +5 insightful. I guess this shows how the Slashdot mass falls on this issue.

  3. Re:Error in headline on Scientists Have Paper On Gender Bias Rejected Because They're Both Women · · Score: 1

    Now you really sound racist.

    There is cultural shift over time in what terms are considered appropriate. This particular shift occurred about 45 years ago.

  4. Re:How fucking tasteless on Feds Attempt To Censor Parts of a New Book About the Hydrogen Bomb · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Oh, the entire culture was obsessed with torture and killing. Do you realize how racist this sounds?

  5. Re:Consumers win on Lenovo Saying Goodbye To Bloatware · · Score: 1

    However, this is really a barn-door closing operation. They have committed an enormous breach of trust. This is the start of a many year climb to become acceptable to purchase again.

  6. Re:Well, win64 already required nightly on Firefox To Mandate Extension Signing · · Score: 1

    Waterfox has already embedded malware in its downloads by choice. Steer clear.

  7. Re: No JTAG access? on New Encryption Method Fights Reverse Engineering · · Score: 1

    I would countersuggest 1999.

  8. Re:It's a vast field.... on Ask Slashdot: What Portion of Developers Are Bad At What They Do? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    FWIW, I think that's a mistake. Why trust the opaque "encryption" feature of the application like Excel or acrobat when you can use something well-proven?

    Unless you only want to dissuade casual observation, in which case any number of simple methods may work that involve no encryption.

  9. Re:Start of th End on Firefox To Mandate Extension Signing · · Score: 1

    Your point stands, but are you aware of Classic Theme Restorer extension? It undoes most of the australis idiocy.

  10. Well, win64 already required nightly on Firefox To Mandate Extension Signing · · Score: 2

    I guess I'm happy this won't affect me as their failure to ship a win64 binary has me on nightlies already on windows, and on Linux I end up building my own half the time and can turn this shit off.

    That said, I'm starting to tire of firefox's bad decisions of the month.

  11. Re:Agreed on The Great IT Hiring He-Said / She-Said · · Score: 1

    I disagree.

    That's the reasonable, but minority scenario. A lot of times they want you to solve their relatively arbitrary and ridiculous problem in a very short timescale.

    I give very very simple problems and hope the candidate makes small mistakes that I can watch them figure out. Sometimes they just ace them and I don't learn much but I can ask another.

    A coworker asks candidates to implement the 8 queens solution using an actual computer. He doesn't care about the difference between someone who knows the answer and someone who has never considered the problem before, but expects in 90 minutes that a programmer should be able to get it working even if he has to give a few hints.

    Those are what I consider somewhat reasonable questions.

    However, most of my peers ask code golf questions bout C++ minutiae, or baroque algorithms questions for unusual application domains and seems to think candidates who can't rattle of answers don't know how to program. That's been the majority case at other companies I've worked at as well.

  12. Re:The language in the old west on Torvalds: I Made Community-Building Mistakes With Linux · · Score: 1

    Expletives aren't "dirty". Using them doesn't make you "bad". Removing them from your vocabulary is a choice that you're free to make, but the better choice is to do better editing.

  13. Re:One example doesn't make an "always" on Why the Trolls Will Always Win · · Score: 1

    You have to show that the information is intended to cause harm as the intent, and it generally has to be false. This means that a lot of things that get called libel in the UK aren't in the US (typically things that are true!).

    It also means the burden of demonstration in the US is quite high. Demonstrating intent is in some cases quite difficult.

    In this sort of case, the intent is fairly easy to show, and the reckless disregard for the veracity along with the falseness is easy to show. However the cost of prosecution to the individual is prohibitive, and the actors are frequently legion by the time the problem becomes big.

  14. Re:It's a mixed bag on Why Military Personnel Make the Best IT Pros · · Score: 1

    As always, troubleshooting capacity comes, primarily, from personality type, not from training. Training can help, but it can't substitute.

  15. Re:About time on Former FCC Head: "We Should Be Ashamed of Ourselves" For State of Broadband · · Score: 1

    Yes, I wasn't disagreeing, only commenting on how bad the current state of affairs is.

    Oakland is so redlined that my local loop is over 3 miles long. AT&T one day fucked up the loop. They've never fixed it. DSL speeds went from 1MB to 300Kbps.

  16. Re:About time on Former FCC Head: "We Should Be Ashamed of Ourselves" For State of Broadband · · Score: 1

    Only the FCC dismantled any requirement that infrastructure owners be required to sell access to their lines at all, and certainly not at any kind of fair rate back in the mid-2000s, so the other providers over AT&T's fiber or copper will never be real competitors. They only exist at the whim of the wire owners.

  17. Take that overshoot to 11!

  18. Re:Easier on Researchers Find "Achilles Heel" of Drug Resistant Bacteria · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a medical minimalist, but refusing to sterilize cuts is kind of stupid.

    Your immune system doesn't need a significant exposure to antigens to trigger the normal hypothalamus reactions and induce immune-system learning and memory reactions. Meanwhile your immune system isn't guaranteed to win arbitrary scale battles and you don't really know what was on whatever cut you. It's not like really unfortunate bacteria are all that rare.

    You should also realize that you get away with this because you live in a relatively low-bacteria environment, such as an arid or temperate one. By your logic you should move to the tropics because you'll get far more exposure to diseases. Only there refusing to sterelize cuts will lead to some really bad situations.

  19. TwitchTV could use a tech infusion on Report: YouTube Buying Twitch.tv For $1 Billion · · Score: 1

    Maybe google can find a way to make the video streaming less awful. They can hardly make it worse!

  20. Re:F-4 Phantom jet... on U.S. Passenger Jet Nearly Collided With Drone In March · · Score: 1

    If you don't see the usefulnes, I have to challenge your reading or thinking skills.

    This is in a discussion inspired by a plaything endangering many human lives, in a subdiscussion about regulation of those things.

    Obviously a good line like this allows for reasonable regulation of playthings that are frequently used in dangerous ways vs those that are not and thus should not need regulation.

  21. Re:Management cares about the bottom line on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure? · · Score: 1

    You're simply underinformed.

    it's possible to have service level agreements about things like uptime of a service that is wholly managed by a provider that are sane. Things like how much is guaranteed before payment is reduced or no longer expected.

    However that's not what IT departments deal in. No IT department starts losing funding if they fuck up the DNS infastructure for 2 weeks. No IT department loses its funding if they fuck up the spanning tree for the 5th time in a single year.

    SLAs in this context are about "we promise to write a pointless reply email within 1 day" and such, which are the VAST MAJORITY of SLAs in the overall computing and IT industries. And if you had any breadth of experience you would know that.

  22. Re:F-4 Phantom jet... on U.S. Passenger Jet Nearly Collided With Drone In March · · Score: 1

    Toys don't need cameras or autonomous flight features. Seems like a good line to draw.

  23. Re:That's some crazy shenanigians right there. on Court: Oracle Entitled To Copyright Protection Over Some Parts of Java · · Score: 2

    There have already been rulings that decided that headers that define a public api are not under copyright if they represent the only way that that public api can be declared.

    In other words, this judge did not follow precedent, or they're in different jurisdictions (I don't actually know).

  24. Re:Management cares about the bottom line on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure? · · Score: 1

    More briefly: Service Level Agreements are accepting failure and then trying to limit it.

    Service Level Agreements get demanded for communication paths or trust relationships that have already failed, and now someone is demanding a limit to the amount of failure.

  25. Re:Mass exodus or spin doctor on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure? · · Score: 1

    Far from it.

    IT Departments fail from the inside over time, and are replaced by mindless outsourcers, contract buyers, and CIO magazine readers. Productivity decreases drastically as the employees are blocked from effectively doing their jobs by infrastructure problems, and no one at the top even understands the problem enough to be upset about it.

    That's the usual pattern.