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User: MikeRT

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  1. Something's fishy... on London Council Dumping Windows For Chromebooks To Save £400,000 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    1. They're replacing 4,300 Windows machines with 2,300 Chrome machines. Why is the number of boxes cut nearly in half?
    2. Did they factor in the cost of Google Apps?
    3. Did they factor in the issue of retraining and other migration costs?

    Bet they didn't. Bet they just said they can stop buying Windows boxes and that's all there is to the cost.

  2. See no benefit? on Ask Slashdot: Preparing For Windows XP EOL? · · Score: 2

    A lot of companies/users don't want to change because they see no additional benefit to do a costly upgrade, no reason to change a running system, and they may in some cases be right with their assumptions.

    How about this one. All of your software options are better on 7 than XP. Firefox and Chrome are moving away from supporting it. Microsoft is moving away from supporting it too. You know what that means, Mr. Super Conservative Executive/IT guy? It means your threat vectors are now starting to approach "everything installed on this workstation" instead of just the OS.

  3. The first amendment makes more sense... on In the Unverified Digital World, Are Journalists and Bloggers Equal? · · Score: 1

    When you understand that the freedom of the press has almost nothing to do with the rights of journalists/reporters. It is referring to the printing press, not "The Press" or "The Media." It protects the right of reporters and bloggers to publish their free speech.

  4. Correct me if I'm wrong... on Iran Builds Mock-up of Nimitz-Class Aircraft Carrier · · Score: 3, Informative

    But the F35 is more or less combat ready in its basic form, it's mainly extended feature sets like the USMC's VTOL variant that are holding it back from being in use now.

    Moral of the story, though... the people who mocked the F22 as the boondoggle to the F35 should have been fired from the DoD and run out of Congress. The F22 ended up being cheaper and still better (IIRC). There's no excuse for being naive enough to believe "oh yeah, we'll be much cheaper" when building something like the F35.

  5. The only tragedy in all this on Ex-Head of Troubled Health Insurance Site May Sue, Citing 'Cover-Up' · · Score: 1

    Is that if she has a paper trail showing specific government employees kept screwing the pooch that she likely cannot hit them personally such that they lose their shirts in the lawsuit. It shouldn't be primarily the tax payers who foot the bill, it should be the senior government executives who kept messing up. And if their federal counterparts' compensation is any indication, those responsible here have more than enough salary to be expected to foot the bill here for their malfeasance.

  6. Read the TechCrunch FA and... on Prominent GitHub Engineer Julie Ann Horvath Quits Citing Harrassment · · Score: 2

    I could be mistaken, but it sounds an awful lot like this is just a bad attempt to blame the big bad men for what the founder's wife did. She sounds like a bitch on wheels with a jetpack strapped to her for good measure. Sure, the one engineer was a problem, but if the wife wasn't involved and out to get her HR would probably have put him in his place if she asked.

  7. What he's really saying on Eric Schmidt On Why College Is Still Worth It · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you go to the schools we like, major in what we like and are good enough to work for a company like us, it's still worth it. However, if you are John Smith Liberal Arts major at Typical State University, you've just guaranteed that four to five years of partying will result in at least a decade of misery assuming you can even make enough to pay it off.

  8. You want my sympathy? on Sons of Anarchy Creator On Google Copyright Anarchy · · Score: 1

    Make it clear to me that you don't see my property rights as being in contention with your rights. You can start by disavowing any federal legislation that tells me what I can do with my property including tinkering, modifying and resale of the same. Get your DMCA-padded mits off my physical property and stop lobbying for restrictions on my computerized devices.

    Until then all I hear is "blah blah blah I want to violate your rights for profit blah blah blah."

  9. What they're really afraid of, I think... on The Billionaires Privatizing American Science · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Billionaires tend to be far more critical of what their money finances than government granting authorities. Consider all of the scandals involving made up data. A billionaire who funded that might get it checked out before allowing it to be published. A government agency won't. A billionaire who discovers shenanigans certainly won't fund that researcher again, a government agency probably will.

    Now I know a lot of that is driven by "publish or perish" but it's pretty obvious that private donors are more likely to scrutinize than public sector donors. If that weren't the case, the various public funding agencies would be bringing the fraudulent researchers up on criminal charges for defrauding the tax payer.

    But in reality, this should be welcomed. This is how science got funded during its first centuries as a discipline when many of the giants of science did their work. Billionaires have the luxury of blowing their money however they see fit. All a researcher who thinks a field might prove promising has to do is make a case to the man with the money. There's no public interest involved, just his personal interest. That means no red tape, no government oversight, etc.

  10. Now if they wanted to be truly evil on Microsoft Dumping License Fees For Windows Phone? · · Score: 1

    Put together a large team that targets Android phones, particularly lower end phones with no support, and make Windows Phone perpetually free along the same lines as the good custom Android distributions. If they made a serious effort to get Windows Phone working as a solid, stable, fast OS on such phones and made really slick installers, they'd probably see a sharp increase in marketshare within a year. Not even 10%, but enough to cause concern at Google. The best part is that if they were to just stick to Nokia as their "official" handset manufacturer and make it clear that they'll happily support Windows Phone on other companies' platforms it'd probably evade antitrust scrutiny. What would the regulators say? It's illegal for them to make Windows Phone freely available with regular support for phones from vendors that don't even buy Windows Phone licenses? If they were to do that, then they might as well make Windows on Arm illegal, tell Linux vendors to stick to no more than 2 CPU architectures, etc.

  11. One bias frequently overlooked on Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the rush to kumbaya and make it out to be "the sisterhood versus the patriarchy," a lot of women and male feminists don't notice that there is a sizeable contingent of technically qualified women who by and large have little respect for most women. I saw this in college with the women who took CS seriously feeling like they had to work twice as hard because half of the girls were getting by, in their minds by "flipping their skirts and smiling the guys" to get them to do their work for them. A good friend of mine who was a mechanical engineering major observed the same thing in his department at a different university. In fact, our oldest female professor was notorious for being ruthless on the girls because she literally wanted to drive out any girl who had in her mind that women in CS should be allowed to get by in any fashion that even resembled "advancing on their backs."

    So if anything, I would say be careful about letting female engineers interview other potential candidates unless they are known to be genuinely fair-minded. You very well may find that it's actually the women, not the men, who are discriminating.

  12. If you asked most people with a TS clearance if they'd rather this or face a periodic lifestyle polygraph they'd probably call this a no-brainer alternative to the latter.

  13. Looser immigration on Google Chairman on WhatsApp: $19 Bn For 50 People? Good For Them! · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It's well-established by now that one of the most significant factors in destroying the lives of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers across the country has been the influx of similar immigrants from around the world. Legal versus illegal, its immaterial. The invisible hand doesn't give a damn whether they hold a green card or not and giving legal status to the illegals won't suddenly drive wages up because their mere presence in the economy provides at least implicit price competition.

    Here's how you enact a sensible immigration policy. You crack down on the employers of illegals such that no one will hire them. You then offer a contingent amnesty to the illegals that allows them to come forward and face no charges if they leave the country of their own volition, and you even let them keep all of the money and property they've earned if they self-deport. Then, you only allow immigrants with provable skills to immigrate as singles or with their immediate family if they're married with children. None of this "let's bring the whole extended family" over. Grandma, the aunts and uncles and cousins have no business piggybacking on that green card. That's just a recipe for waking up one day and finding a large ethnic enclave in an American city (oh wait, that's precisely what's happened in many areas because of this, silly me).

  14. Probably deceptively worded on One In Ten Americans Thinks HTML Is a Type of Sexually Transmitted Infection · · Score: 4, Funny

    MP3 is a robot from star wars? Even my older relatives know what a MP3 is. My grandmother, who doesn't have a computer, wouldn't even come to the conclusion that it's star wars related unless someone asked her "is MP3 the name of an audio format or a robot from star wars." I'm going to guess that this is similar to what happened when someone recorded himself walking around a campus asking "Is Obama a Keynesian (yes, he is)" and people were smugly saying that no the President was born in Hawaii.

  15. Mass producing lower quality on Do We Really Have a Shortage of STEM Workers? · · Score: 2

    If 500 seniors graduate in CS from a typical state university system in a year, but only 100 can actually function as an intern or junior developer upon graduation then you have 400 people who should probably have never made it past year two of their program. In my alma mater's case, we were weighted heavily toward testing because the alternative was that only about 30% of our CS students would graduate. Our valedictorian, an excellent test taker, couldn't even teach herself Python when she had a whole week or two to learn it and write up a presentation on it. Yet with a 2.5 GPA I managed to do Smalltalk. Go figure...

    A similar thing is happening with managers. A lot of the PMPs I've worked with are no better or in fact worse than the non-PMP managers I've dealt with.

  16. No, big urban environments are bad on 'Google Buses' Are Bad For Cities, Says New York MTA Official · · Score: 1

    The cost of living and working is substantially higher in NYC, Chicago, LA, DC, etc. than in their suburbs. It makes no sense for a company to move into NYC where the costs are so high when it can provide incentives to live and work 1 hour away where the costs are much cheaper. Everything from building costs to payroll costs will be lower and the people just as happy or more so because the lower pay will correspond with lower cost of living and stress.

    Suburbs do have their own public amenities, so his argument is completely fallacious in that respect. I'm sure plenty of residence of Fairfax VA would find it hilarious that businesses that choose to locate there as opposed to downtown DC are "avoiding public amenities like restaurants and transit."

  17. Serious question here... on S. Korea's Cyberwar Against N. Korea's Nukes · · Score: 1

    How do they even know that they'll be able to target North Korea in this way? North Korea's systems are likely crude, home-grown solutions compared to Iran which used Siebel systems and stuff like that. North Korea is by comparison one Chinese power change away from being functionally embargoed by every other country on Earth. This strikes me as something akin to the Independence Day ending in reverse.

  18. Who cares? on Mozilla To Show Sponsored Links To First-Time Firefox Users · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At the end of the day, I still trust Mozilla far more than Google, Microsoft or Apple to respect my privacy.

  19. Corporate sociopaths on Oil Companies Secretly Got Paid Twice For Cleaning Up Toxic Fuel Leaks · · Score: 2

    The main reason why corporate regulation doesn't work is that liberals haven't accepted the fact that if it's true that sociopaths thrive at the upper echelons today, the only cure is strict criminal law enforcement done against the perp not the company. Sociopaths, lacking empathy, don't give two shits about their company unless it affects them. Again, taking Deepwater Horizon as an example, the way to get a corporate sociopath to take it seriously isn't to threaten his company with a $20B fine but with a firing squad if his deliberate machinations result in employees getting killed.

  20. Don't go after the companies on Oil Companies Secretly Got Paid Twice For Cleaning Up Toxic Fuel Leaks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Go after the executives. The executives who do this care more about themselves than the company. The only solution is to focus entirely on the leaders who do this and put them in prison. If Deepwater Horizon had resulted in the Obama Administration filing Felony Murder charges against the executives who directed the safety standards to be ignored (and resulted in 11 oilmen dying), any bets that safety standards wouldn't suddenly become top priority? Same deal here.

  21. Yes, but that's beside the point on Can Commercial Storage Services Handle the NSA's Metadata? · · Score: 0

    Google and Facebook have the talent that, with a several billion dollar (per year) federal contract they could probably be incentivized to put together a team and plan to make it happen. They have the infrastructure already. They just need enough coin to make it sufficiently attractive to work on the problem.

    But the real problem here is uglier than this. The NSA program is the price we pay for living in a globalized, "open society" that prides itself on not doing things like "profiling" and that is unwilling to establish sufficient border and immigration security to reduce the risk of hostile foreigners stepping foot on our soil.

  22. The mammoth in the room on Britain's Eastern Coast Yields Oldest Human Footprints Outside Africa · · Score: 1

    They said well it's possible they were a lot more advanced than we thought. You think? Unless there was a land bridge or glacier linking France and England, that means they were ship builders.

  23. Tyranny on Finnish Police Board Wants Justification For Wikipedia's Fundraising Campaign · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In Finland, it is illegal to plead with audience to raise funds without a special permission issued by the Police Board.

    If that is even half true, that's just tyrannical. Think about it. That means even a church in Finland doing disaster relief cannot call together a congregational meeting and ask for funds without getting a "by your leave, sire" from a bunch of police bureaucrats.

  24. How to break the ice on Reports Say Satya Nadella Is Microsoft's Next CEO · · Score: 2

    Give the users what they want on the desktop. Give them what they loved about Windows 7 back and give it them for free. Maybe go so far as to offer a free copy of the previous version of Office to everyone who suffered through Windows 8.1 or 8.0.

  25. Easiest way to promote passion on The Moderately Enthusiastic Programmer · · Score: 1

    Is to just establish a culture that rewards going the extra mile with more money. If a developer helps develop business, cut them a commission check comparable to the sales guy. If they have a reputation for rapidly solving customer problems, throw them a bonus.