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User: Dewin

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  1. Re:WTB Cisco Switch on Cisco Exits the Consumer Market, Sells Linksys To Belkin · · Score: 1

    I remember having a Linksys WRT54G with a legitimate hardware issue years ago

    Okay, I bought the story at Linksys but lost it at WRT54G. Though I suppose Cisco could have botched the newer hardware revisions ;)

    Our WRT54G is about... 9 years old. Still runs as our primary router with nary a hiccup. I managed to get a hold of 3 WRT600Ns as well -- the one that I've actually put dd-wrt on and put into service (with the intent of expanding our wifi coverage to the basement) can't actually hold a decent connection speed (speed from wireless device to router is fine, speed from router to WAN is fine as evidenced by an Ethernet-connected PC, speed from wireless router to WAN is abysmal...)

  2. Re:I'll stick with mechanical on OCZ Launches Vector Indilinx Barefoot 3 SSD, First All In-House Design · · Score: 1

    Personally, I run a hybrid approach: I have 2x1TB spinny disk drives mirrored, and an 80GB SSD (soon to be 240GB SSD, hurray for Black Friday deals from newegg) for anything that needs to be fast.

  3. Re:POS on Ask Slashdot: Should Hosting Companies Have Change Freezes? · · Score: 4, Funny

    In my experience, they are one and the same.

  4. Re:Babylon 5 on Aircraft Carriers In Space · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's part of EVE's lore, actually, from the few months I tried it.

  5. Re:Propose addition to the dictionary on More Evidence That Multitasking Reduces Productivity · · Score: 1

    Were you two saying something? I was suffering from some, umm, what's the word? Let's make one up. Distractions. Yeah, that's it. Oooh shiny!

  6. Re:battery life on Motorola's First Intel-Based Handset Launches In UK · · Score: 1

    My phone (a Samsung Vibrant, or Galaxy S1 if you will) charges from empty to full on 2 hours.

    Doubling the charge time for double the capacity doesn't seem like a problem to me, since it usually charges overnight -- and it still leaves the option of a half charge in the same amount of time for the same amount of battery life I have now.

    Of course, I sometimes carry one of these around, but that's mainly because tethering is a huge battery drain. Oh, and that+the phone easily fit in one pocket, with the Nexus 7 that is using the phone-provided wifi in the other.

  7. Re:Cool and all, but when will it stop? on Injured Bald Eagle Gets New 3-D Printed Beak · · Score: 1

    Clearly someone just needs to install FreeBSD on their 3D-printed toaster.

  8. Re:Range data types on PostgreSQL 9.2 Out with Greatly Improved Scalability · · Score: 1

    Before 9.2, I did this (for timestamp ranges only) using Jeff Davis's Temporal Extensions for PostgreSQL, which I've submitted a few patches to.

    Which really is the direct predecessor of 9.2's Range Type support (from the same developer, too.)

    Heh, I should have guessed.

    It was a few years ago, but we actually tossed around some ideas on a standard format for applying the range concepts to types besides timestamps. One of the issues then was that a small handful of built-in types have a notion of infinity/-infinity, but some (e.g. ints) do not -- yet ranges really need to support the notion, even a range of ints. It looks like the 9.2 implementation uses its own definition for -infinity/+infinity unrelated to the type in question, which thinking about it now might not have been the best decision (at least, without the ability to define that [,y] and [-infinity,y] are synonymous) since -infinity (as defined by range types) is less than all other values including -infinity (as defined by the contained type).

  9. Re:Range data types on PostgreSQL 9.2 Out with Greatly Improved Scalability · · Score: 1

    Optimization of a constraint involving date ranges is a bit more difficult than you might think, and having it as one unified type makes queries a lot cleaner and indexes a lot more efficient (if done as GiST indexes anyways)

    Old: WHERE (a.starttime BETWEEN b.starttime AND b.endtime OR b.starttime BETWEEN a.starttime AND a.endtime)
    New: WHERE a.timerange @@ b.timerange

    The speedup when you're doing things like trying to find overlaps between two lists of tens of thousands of ranges each is phenomenal.

    Before 9.2, I did this (for timestamp ranges only) using Jeff Davis's Temporal Extensions for PostgreSQL, which I've submitted a few patches to.

  10. Re:Simple solution on Secret Security Questions Are a Joke · · Score: 1

    The better designed systems use a one-way hash of the answer. The support guy types the answer in and it's hashed and compared. Other systems use a mix of reversible and hashed answers. It can be done securely.

    Until your security answer is something that can be spelled and/or punctuated a multitude of different ways and you're answering it verbally (i.e. to authenticate yourself over the phone). "Grey" and "Gray" are going to hash differently, and to say nothing about the multitude of ways of spelling various names. ("Is it O'mally or O'malley or o'Malley or...")

    You can't count on the support type spelling it the exact way you do.

    And you definitely can't count on the back end to be storing it with any sort of security at all, so my original point still stands.

  11. Re:Simple solution on Secret Security Questions Are a Joke · · Score: 2

    Yup. I had an embarassing phone conversation with my state's tax department because a year earlier I set the secret question to "What is the password?" and a year later I had naturally forgotten the answer.

    This is a bad idea, since security questions are probably stored unencrypted or at least using a reversible cipher -- the people on the other end of support need to be able to compare your answer, and there needs to be some leeway especially with spoken answers and spelling variations.

    Unless, of course, your answer is an entirely different password...

  12. Re:Once the market matures on Microsoft Lays Out Money-Making Options For Windows Store Developers · · Score: 2

    The lucrative in-app purchases in my metro app will involve throwing chairs.

    It could be a parody of angry birds, where you throw chairs at Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and others.

    The first expansion pack would be "Angry Ballmer: Developers Developers Developers".

  13. Re:Could someone please explain to me on Order Limit On Raspberry Pi Lifted · · Score: 1

    I imagine the Pi is cheaper than the PIII after you factor in electricity costs...

  14. Re:Is this just a brilliant step in the plan.. on Apple Tells Retailers To Stop Selling Certain Samsung Devices · · Score: 1

    I'm fairly certain these are hardware patents, but it's still just as ludicrous.

  15. Re:Article title on Interviews: Ask Physicist Giovanni Organtini About the Possible Higgs Boson Disc · · Score: 3, Funny

    No, what he meant was that Organtini is going to put a bunch of Higgs Bosons on a DVD and sell them to people who want them.

    I don't think Higgs Bosons will catch the interest of the mass market.

  16. There's only 4 confirmed reports of banning... on Linux Users Banned From Diablo III Servers · · Score: 3, Informative

    A feral druid blog I follow had this to say about the banning:

    TLDR:

    • There are tens of thousands of Linux/Wine Diablo 3 players.
    • Only 4 of them were banned.
    • Whatever they were banned for is completely unrelated to Linux or Wine
    • They were either cheaters or ran something else that turned up false positive by Warden.
    • If they were innocent, then they are pretty much screwed without possible help.

    (Full source here)

    Blizzard doesn't make a point of banning Linux users. The same source claims that there was an incident a few years ago where they inadvertently banned everyone using Cedega to play WoW, but when Cedega contacted them they determined the bans were false positives and not only lifted them but credited them with 20 days of game time.

  17. Re:Yay. on The Long Death of Fat Clients · · Score: 1

    I've read that Maptools (an open-source virtual tabletop for RPGs/etc.) currently is non-functional under Java 7, presumably due to an incompatible library.

  18. Re:Offer a SKU that does not have an optical drive on Next Generation Xbox and Playstation Consoles Will Have Optical Drives · · Score: 2

    However, the way some things are headed, why have any hardware at all? The only hardware you need is a screen to display the content/produce the sound which has been generated in the cloud...

    And perhaps a controller or other input device.

    It's been done before...

  19. Re:Worse? on Human Water Use Accounts For 42% of Recent Sea Level Rise · · Score: 5, Funny

    (Which obviously proves satellites cause sea level rise. )

    Well, there is one particular satellite that has been well known to cause sea levels to rise quite significantly, so I think you might be on to something here...

  20. Re:Why not just wait? on Brain Scan Can Predict Math Mistakes · · Score: 2

    At least some of the MCSE-related exams do as well, though they're adaptive in a different manner -- if you miss a question on one subject area, it asks more (harder) questions on that subject to determine if it was just a tiny mistake or if your knowledge on that subject is actually lacking. The drawback to the format is you can't go back and revise your answers before time is up since, if you could, you could pay close attention to the questions being asked and go "Oh, I must have picked the wrong answer to this one, let's try this other answer."

    The net result is a much shorter test than when I took the NT Server 4.0 exam (70-067) way back when (a few months before they changed to the adaptive format.)

    (Disclaimer: I never actually did anything with my (now defunct) certification, I just had a high-school level class (as a pilot program) that actually taught it and included a trip to take the actual test.)

  21. Re:In other news... on Operators: Nokia Would Sell Better With Android · · Score: 1
  22. Re:Disincentive? on An Easy Way To Curb Smart-Phone Thieves, In Australia · · Score: 1

    ...kind of the same reasoning they use to justify high ETF's that still cost over $100 one month before the contract ends.

    T-Mobile pro-rates ETFs. My wife and I are changing plans with them in a couple of weeks to save $50/mo, but it'll be costing us $50 per line in ETFs on the current plan (presumably because the new plan is unsubsidized and the existing one isn't). The reason we're waiting two weeks is because we're right on the cut from when their ETF goes from $100/line to $50/line.

    I believe there was a class-action lawsuit against some other carriers (Verizon I think?) about ETFs that basically forced them to pro-rate ETFs as well, so I don't think this is exclusive to our carrier.

  23. Re:It Can Tell by the Pixels on How Photoshopped Is That Picture? · · Score: 3, Funny

    like you don't xerox on a Cannon.

    I tried to xerox on a cannon, but every time I fire up the machinery there's a loud bang.

  24. Re:What kind of data? on Ask Slashdot: Post-Quantum Asymmetric Key Exchange? · · Score: 1

    I'd really like to know what kind of information you have that still needs to be a secret in the year 2111 when we'll all be driving fusion powered flying time traveling cars and vacationing in hotels on the Moon and Mars and carrying petabyes of data on our iMicrosoftPods with end-to-end DRM that terminates in chip implanted in our brains.

    The keys to the DRM, of course.

  25. Re:Ok, so it holds paper ... on Ballistic Clipboard Holds Papers, Stops Bullets · · Score: 4, Funny

    Knowing people's fanatical devotion to their model M keyboards, I think they'd rather take the bullet than let the keyboard do it :-p