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User: k8to

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  1. Congrats at noticing code words on The Moderately Enthusiastic Programmer · · Score: 2

    Corporate speak is full of nonsense code words use to mean things other than what they mean. Job postings are nearly the thickest.

    "Need Passionate Self-Starter who is a rock-star team-player who wants to change the world!"

    This stuff has been nonsense since before I was born.

  2. Re:Whalewatching on Google Co-Opts Whale-Watching Boat To Ferry Employees · · Score: 1

    Or, looking at it from another perspective:

    You can get a full workday with less time wasted. If you stand up for yourself this means you can live in a city you want to live in, and have a rewarding job, and not have many hours a day spent driving a car.

    Seriously, no one likes driving hours a day in commute-traffic. Avoiding that is something any sane person wants.

  3. Re:Whalewatching on Google Co-Opts Whale-Watching Boat To Ferry Employees · · Score: 1

    People who work for Google is not a race.

    It's a class thing.

  4. Re:Why put this guy in Solitary at all? on Pirate Bay Founder's Custody Extended to February 5th · · Score: 1

    Also you used the incorrect "your", it should have been "you're".

    TO SOLITARY WITH YOU!

  5. Re:30 years? on Ask Slashdot: Are We Older Experts Being Retired Too Early? · · Score: 1

    Well, to be fair, in the broad view, we have more than enough people.

    I'm not sure the current situation is great, but some incentive against reproducing isn't all bad.

  6. Re:FTFY on Ask Slashdot: Are We Older Experts Being Retired Too Early? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd expect a systems admin to be able to diagnose a problem like that -- not that ours can. But most programmers I meet can't. They'll be trying to fix their code all day long when their system has bad ram.

    Our customers have the same problem. They'll be asking why our software is slow on "just this one node". Telling us to "fix the bug".

    I have to look through system call timings, application logs, kernel messages, kernel dev tools blah blah to give them evidence of what I already know. "it's a hardware problem. It seems this is a known failure pattern in the linux kernel for cache coherency errors betwen SMP cpus".. or whatever. We're an application vendor. I guess these companies spend enough money with us that it's worth it to my employer for me to play tinker-toy remote systems admin for them via proxy of systems debugging.

    I get roped into these problems because no one else on my team can figure them out.

    It pays.

  7. Re:Presenteeism on Ask Slashdot: Are We Older Experts Being Retired Too Early? · · Score: 1

    Those things are true, but IMO the real issue is:

      Can they find the same talent offshore?

    I'm sure there are developers in eastern europe, china, India, and other popular offshoring locations with all the talent of a 50 year old american or western european engineer who is looking to work remotely. Good luck finding them through typical offshoring channels.

    The real issue, IMO, is that modern management has NO idea how to measure competence and turn it into a number, and therefore doesn't believe it's important.

  8. Re:Lie a little on Ask Slashdot: Are We Older Experts Being Retired Too Early? · · Score: 1

    Some open plans are awful.
    Some are fine.

    If you hate open plans, then skip them.
    But don't write them off if you don't know that you hate it already.

  9. Tools that dont' do what's promised on Ask Slashdot: What Makes You Uninstall Apps? · · Score: 1

    I do a lot of evaluation of special purpose tools.

    Performance analyzers
    Flowchart editors
    Outline editors
    Callgraph generators

    I don't do this until I actually need a thing. Then I want it within a week or less. I often try out several multi-hundred dollar packages. Inevitably almost all of them fail.

    The last thing I needed to do was generate a callgraph to document a subsystem I'd spent around 30 hours understanding. I didn't want to ever do that again. I went through a few ~1000 dollar packages that sucked. I ended up writing the callgraph myself in DOT.

    Most commercial programs are too full of features, dialog boxes and other crap to really work for anyone except someone who uses them all day long. And there is a very short list of sotftware categories that deserve this type of complexity and learning curve.

    Most apps are just NOT the center of attention, and the important thing is to remove everything obscuring the core utility.

  10. Re:what is "Box" on Box CEO Talks European Plans, Warns About Meeting BlackBerry's Fate · · Score: 1

    Too bad the usability is worse than both combined.

    Really Box is just a way for lazy corporate IT departments to spend money instead of do their jobs providing secure, functional file access services. The only people who like it are CIO type morons who don't know what their users need but are sure everything has to be outsourced.

  11. Re:and it begs the question on Feds Confiscate Investigative Reporter's Confidential Files During Raid · · Score: 1

    No, you're not alone. It's disgusting and enshrines our cultural perception of criminals as sub-human.

  12. Re:Constitution free zone on Feds Confiscate Investigative Reporter's Confidential Files During Raid · · Score: 1

    Convicted of Resisting Arrest, so they couldn't make the real charge stick, and went for some BS.

  13. Re:As a Linux user I want to support them, but... on Myst Creators Announce Obduction · · Score: 2

    This is quite typical for kickstarter. "Maybe we'll do Linux, you know, if the Windows users give us a lot of money." It's awkward.

  14. Re:some definitions for the non-native on Oakland Is Building a Big Data Center For Police Surveillance · · Score: 2

    Or more simply:

    Oakland is pretty crime-encoouraging territory.

    The best (most effective, and most efficient) ways to reduce crime are:

      * Improve neighborhoods to the point where they feel well kept, and try to ensure there's a feeling that most public spaces have people watching them by having housing facing those spaces.
      * Walk beats, be present in neighborhoods in a slow, ongoing way. Crime-in-progress tends to require police to be present for around 30-50 minutes for the actors to give up and wander off. Crime tends to be strongly discouraged though by regularly present officers who know the territory.

    The problem here is that Oakland like most post-1930s cities is largely built in a semi-suburban pattern, with bones that work against neighborhood centers (which leads to blight) and don't have a strong sense of observation, which means crime feels free to happen.

    In addition, it's not high density, so there's far too much territory to realistically fund a police force who actually walk beats. In addition, in a lot of neighborhoods the police would be afraid to do so.

    So the obvious place to invest is in neighborhood center revitalization, encouragement of high quality urban development, and slowly getting rid of the semi-tenements that exist here and there. But that's long slow hard work. Gadgets are more fun.

  15. Re:What a farce on New High Tech $100 Bills Start To Circulate Today · · Score: 1

    The only way to make currency impossible to counterfeit is to not have fiat currency in the first place, which means the people would choose something real to be money, I am talking about gold, and you can't really counterfeit that.

    Crazy gold bug,

    Gold-backed currency does not mean that everyone carries around gold in their pocket. It's actually quite a bit harder to accurately value and validate than paper currency with various anti-counterfeiting properties. Let me repeat that, physical gold is easier to counterfeit for typical casual excahanges than modern cash.

    So in the realm of reality where cash has not been physical gold in living memory, nor will it be, gold-backed currency could only exist in a similar form as our current currency. And it would be subject to exactly the same forms of counterfeiting.

    Just because the value of the valid currency would be, in your mind, ideologically pure, doesn't mean people can't fake it.

    So now we see that your reasoning is entirely nonsense, which is always the case when gold bugs speak.

  16. Re:I believe that . . . on Sick of Your Local Police Force? Crowdfund Your Own · · Score: 1

    The problem is that Oakland doesn't have much of a tax base, but Rockridge is one of the few relatively monied regions.

    Oakland has other problems that lead to fairly high crime rates (most violent crimes are actually down, but robberies are way up). So overall the costs of policing vs the funding are quite high.

    Rockridge would rather split from Oakland and have their own police department and not have to finance policing the city at large. Since attempts to head that way haven't really gone anywhere, this is the next closest thing.

    I think there's some space for a neighborhood watch plus to do some serious good. I'm not sure what this will turn out to be.

  17. Original poster claimed a trend, you think you countered with an anecdote.

    That's not a contradiction.

    Original poster might be wrong, but you've really provided nothing either way.

  18. Re:Mountain out of a molehill on Social Networks Force Barilla Chairman To Apologize For His Anti-gay Remarks · · Score: 1

    Correction, he supports *some* gay rights.

  19. Re:Mountain out of a molehill on Social Networks Force Barilla Chairman To Apologize For His Anti-gay Remarks · · Score: 1

    Your position is ridiculous. You think everyone needs to be the same "for the children". That will never happen.

    In practice the adopted kids in my school were never singled out. Typically the fact they were adopted was simply not known to most people, and even when it was known it was just another fact.

    In practice the children of gay couples I know from 3-12 do not have problems in school because they have two moms or dads.

    You can't justify preventing people from having kids because of some vague peer pressure idea.

  20. Not particularly new on NYC Is Tracking RFID Toll Collection Tags All Over the City · · Score: 1

    It's common knowledge here in the San Francisco bay area, that the google maps traffic progress data is largely based on pickups of people's ezpass information along the highway at various points. This allows them to estimate flow by seeing how long it takes for cars to go from given points along the highway, which lets them determine if the highway is operating at reduced speeds.

    Many people do not keep their ezpass available. Some do. Generally people seem happy that some tracking occurs to provide the public with a useful service.

    Maybe that's the key difference. If NYC was providing realtime data to the public as a result, the public opinion would probably be different.

  21. Re:How your car thief will will steal your cars. on Your Brain Waves Are a Password: How Your Next Car Will Check You're Not a Thief · · Score: 5, Funny

    I believe brain patterns typically alter when the head is separated from the body.

    Your milage may vary.

  22. Re:Stay away from OCZ and SandForce on SSD Annual Failure Rates Around 1.5%, HDDs About 5% · · Score: 1

    *slightly* bigger datapoint. Work bought around 10 ocz drives for shared build machines. 3 failed within the first 6 months. This was around early 2012.

    I wasn't really paying attention to the choices being made around then or would have warned away from that choice. I only found out after I started doing my own research into card-based flash storage that I asked about what we used (the second pass was violin cards) and found out we'd used ocz drives for the first failed experiement.

  23. Re:Do the math on SSD Annual Failure Rates Around 1.5%, HDDs About 5% · · Score: 1

    Sure, you can compile in RAM, (my commercial work project with a ~4GB build tree does this whithout a ramdisk just fine) but linking in ram is right out.

    And since in C++ linking is the slowest part by FAR on rotating disks, SSD offers an immense benefit.

    If in some other language like pure C or ocaml, then this may be less true.

    But then again just building the dependency graph for make wins so hard on SSD, there's still no reason to forgo it. And if you have to build ANYTHING with visual studio, the whole-project link-time optimizations make linking so expensive that you really desperately want the SSD.

  24. Re:Source code on Writing Documentation: Teach, Don't Tell · · Score: -1, Troll

    Using msdos since 1990, /slash switches are overall less common on msdos and its children than -minus switches were.

    Nevermind that / is a poor choice due to its meaning as a directory separator. (Yes, windows supports / as dir separator for the last ten years or more).

    But please, parade your lack of familiarity with your platform more.

  25. Re:Clean their own act first on SF Airport Officials Make Citizen Arrests of Internet Rideshare Drivers · · Score: 1

    It's quite likely there were two.