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User: euri.ca

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Comments · 74

  1. Re:Vibrating Bracelet on Ask Slashdot: Best Tools To Aid When "On Call"? · · Score: 1

    One of our guys tried those with some success but he didn't like it, and he's moved to using his phone on vibrate under the pillow. (At PagerDuty we get a lot of alerts, but most of our wives and girlfriends just learned to deal with it).

  2. Re:4 lines of JS... on New York Times Paywall Goes Live, Loopholes Abound · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, disabling JavaScript stops the paywall, so does disabling cookies or referrer spoofing. The only reason the media cares about my hack is the narrative of "3 lines of code over my lunch break" is more interesting than "the paywall doesn't work with certain browser settings".

  3. Re:Pay Hedge on New York Times Paywall Goes Live, Loopholes Abound · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Agreed, the price comparison the NYT used was "$15, less that the price of a martini in Manhattan," they aren't targeting people who are willing to twiddle with their browsers, they. (I tried to say as much on my 3 minutes on NPR this morning when they asked me about this)

  4. Re:Too bad we don't have rules to deal with this on Midwest Seeing Red Over 'Green' Traffic Lights · · Score: 1

    I semi-agree. I think the worst part is that when I wrote the test "What do you do at a stop sign?" and "How much do speeding fines increase in a construction zone?" counted for *exactly* the same. One of those should be an insta-fail.

  5. Re:It's finally happening... on Test Driving the Wolfram Alpha · · Score: 1

    I remember those ads for HSBC bank (but I forgot the name of the bank as soon as I left the hallway, and I was in that airport twice a week for months).

    And I remember thinking "wow, that bank must make a great deal of profit on every customer... I don't really want to be one"

  6. Re:Don't worry on Forensics Tool Finds Headerless Encrypted Files · · Score: 1

    That's an interesting point. The test files for our software include 100% random files of 1k, 2k...2^n k bytes, which I imagine is exactly what random noise could look like on the hard drive.

  7. Re:Two changes that could've been made on Battlestar Galactica Comes To an End · · Score: 1

    And who knows what they would've been able to trade for food (which is the standard model for an expedition landing in a less technologically advanced area). At an antelope for a metal bar, they could survive quite a while (try building metal bars with Y-150K technology).

  8. Re:Two changes that could've been made on Battlestar Galactica Comes To an End · · Score: 1

    > though easier at the end of the series than the begining

    That bothered me too, my best explanation is that the Marines would normally have police-style bullets (slower, emphasis on not ricocheting) to put down mutinies on an aircraft carrier. As the show progressed (especially after meeting Pegasus) they could be replaced with armour piercing bullets when needed.

  9. rig the controller to play real notes then on Guitar Hero, On a Real Guitar, To Hit Shelves In 2009 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Once upon a time, I rigged my Guitar Hero controller to play 32 different chords: guitar poseur (requires a USB guitar hero controller plugged in, error handling is non-existent).

  10. Re:What about the production? on LED Lighting As Cheap As CFLs Invented · · Score: 1
    I used to live a short walk from downtown in a Chinese town of several million, and one day my walk to work was blocked because a donkey cart spilled and covered the dirt road. One building I worked in had no running water, a bowl in each room was filled with water carried by hand. This was 3 years ago, everyone had cellphones and plastic shopping bags were slowly covering the entire countryside.

    90% of China is so different from the west that comparing city sizes is near-pointless.

  11. Re:Wrong bulbs on LED Lighting As Cheap As CFLs Invented · · Score: 1

    I had a similar problem, the first "daylight" bulb in 2007 (from amazon.com) is far and away the most glorious bulb in the house (and it comes on instantly). The 3 "daylight" bulbs I got in 2008 from different companies were uniformly cruddy.

    I wonder if the me-too vendors of crappy lightbulbs caught on that "daylight" was a word without a clear definition that would confuse people.

  12. Re:LOL on New Law Will Require Camera Phones To "Click" · · Score: 1

    I AM MODERATING YOUR POST.

    Of course here we have the observation changing the experiment: you can't moderate after commenting and you can't take a second candid picture (and many of my best shots are candids) if this works.

  13. Re:LOL on New Law Will Require Camera Phones To "Click" · · Score: 1

    I imagine breaking the speaker is even easier than that. This is even sillier than DRM where you need to build something (or at least get something working) to break it.

    But on the plus side, it ruins candid photos.

  14. Re:Why is this news? on Facebook Nudity Policy Draws Nursing Moms' Ire · · Score: 1

    "unless you limit public urination to pissing in someone's mouth, it really isn't anywhere near as hygenic as breast-feeding is."

    I'm having a hard time deciding where I stand on this. Can someone put it in a car analogy?

  15. Re:Why is this news? on Facebook Nudity Policy Draws Nursing Moms' Ire · · Score: 1

    I think the key (at least in the public example) is how much good is done by the action. Even if you are offended by public nudity, you'd make an exception to allow a paramedic to rip off a woman's shirt to stop bleeding from a gunshot wound.

    And I imagine most people agree that the nutritional needs of babies come above the emotional needs of occasional uber-prudes.

    Not that any of that applies to the facebook example.

  16. Re:How did he get the high impact factor? on Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics · · Score: 1

    I really think that you need to use the length of the longest citation cycles to get a good idea of where the crackpot-clusters are.

    The assumption being that the good journals outnumber the bad journals, so even if crackpots can take over one or two, the longest cycle they can get is 2, whereas over time all good journals will tend to link to most other good journals.

  17. Re:I don't get it on Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics · · Score: 1

    And it's there that the El Naschie papers fail. Most of the sections quoted by that article fail to adhere to basic standards like "explain the appearance of all magic numbers":

    He then suggests quitting at the second stage of this iteration and getting
    "2×2×17=68"
    of something -- but it's not clear what, nor why the number 2×2×17 should show up.
    But never mind! He then notes that 68 is
    "1/2(1371), where again 137 is a rough approximation to the reciprocal of the fine structure constant. "
    Of course, can always find some formula linking any two numbers, and the possible meaning of this formula linking the numbers 137 and 68 is not discussed.

  18. Re:The mouse... on The Age of Touch Computing · · Score: 1

    I think you've zero-ed in on the distinction there.

    I love my keyboard/mouse (occasionally 2 keyboards/mouse/touchpad) setup because I normally do high-bandwidth in environments that I took a long time to get used to.

    But when it comes to ultra-low bandwidth, like saying "give me $100" to an ATM, touchscreens create the best kind simple data + input wizard. I know people who've been using computers for a decade and still occasionally want to preform simple actions by touching the screen.

  19. Re:Ah My Eyes! on Nintendo To Start Publishing Ebooks On the DS · · Score: 1

    I think that this is basically something no-one wants, BUT that parents (and especially grandparents) would love to be able to give.

    Step 1: Little Johnny loves his gameboy, I want him to read
    Step 2: Give him 600 page public domain books from 2 centuries ago
    Step 3: Book learning!

  20. Re:lol on MS Says Windows 7 Will Run DirectX 10 On the CPU · · Score: 1

    I imagine a lot of people will be running exactly that on Windows 7, after Vista kind of failed the whole copying-a-file test.

  21. Re:Did this in China on Landing IT Work Overseas · · Score: 1

    I did a similar thing, the only downside is that you really can't do this with student loans.

    Your food and rent might be peanuts, but your first world debts are still there and in dollars.

  22. Re:Don't ruin the immersion on Google Brings Ads To Games, Game Ads To YouTube · · Score: 1

    If this becomes popular, will it limit the worlds that games appear in?

    I'm a little worried all games be locked into near-present day urban environments where billboards make sense rather than lose the precious in-game billboards (or destroy the realism by having inter-dimensional Space-orcs considering Geico).

    It'd be as bad as if all first person shooters had the same dirty grey-brown environments :)

  23. Re:a/v for linux on Credit Card Security Standard Issued · · Score: 1

    Completely off topic:

    Thank you for posting a joke in code. Seriously, Slashdot is becoming overwhelmed with car analogies and yelling that I want to be able to mod -1 insufficiently nerdy.

  24. Re:Easier to keep on To Purge Or Not To Purge Your Data · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Lets not get snippy here, but I think the consensus is that:

    • $5/GB is reasonable (or low) for hardcore backups like the source tree, accounting records (anything where you have a person verifying that it's there is super expensive by default)
    • 90-100% of what any typical user makes (the 5GB/year figure) doesn't (or at least shouldn't) make its way into the expensive storage. But it might anyway, because your options for backing up email easily are limited.

    Of the 30 gigs of things I've put on this laptop this year, maybe 100 megs have been checked-in to CVS (and the expensive backups), I doubt accounting and HR have generated another 4.9Gigs on me this year.

  25. Re:Email Attachments on To Purge Or Not To Purge Your Data · · Score: 1

    I've been getting stupid emails like that for years and years... you'd think that Outlook would've dealt with that by storing includes by size & hash.

    But no. Actually, I think they still store them inline in the .pst file. (fun Microsoft fact/theory: it's not the devs/PMs' fault, they could fix it easily if enough people weren't buying Outlook because of the way it stores files.)