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User: MarcAuslander

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Comments · 33

  1. Re: Not surprising on Millions of Android Devices Are Vulnerable Right Out of the Box (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    So name the half decent device that isn't loaded with crapware they should have bought instead?

    Too often voting with your wallet is like voting in the old Soviet Union, you can choose any member of the Communist party you want.

    Google phone from Google FI

  2. You mean there was no deep fat, no steaks or ... on Large-Scale Dietary Study: Fats Good, Carbs Bad (cbsnews.com) · · Score: 1

    In the 1973 file Sleeper by Woody Allen two of his caretakers in the future discuss his breakfast request and then start a riff on "deep fat". You mean there was no deep fat etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  3. The specs say 2G. ATT has shut down it's 2G GSM network and I assume others will follow. So this phone appears useless out of the box, at least in the US.

  4. that's why VPN or equivalent is needed in public on RSA Conference Attendees Get Hacked (esecurityplanet.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use a homebrew equivalent of VPN whenever I'm in public. Started when I realized a hotel was messing with my HTTP traffic! Crucial of course is reliable access to DNS - if that's broken then even connecting HTTPS can get you in trouble if someone has gotten hold of a signing certificate and does man in the middle.

    This stuff is just to hard for the average user.

  5. Send it an email? on Deleting Your Yahoo Email Account? Yeah, Good Luck With That (zdnet.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder if checking by seeing if an email to it bounces would "reset" the timer. Because if so, spam will keep it open forever!

  6. Don't fix it if it ain't broke on Windows 10 Informs Chrome and Firefox Users That Edge is 'Safer' (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 1

    It's amazing how often Microsoft reminds be to be thankful I turned down their generous offer and stayed with Windows 7.

  7. Re:Auto (vacation) Reply? on Yahoo Disables Automatic Email Forwarding Feature, Making It Difficult For Users To Leave (reuters.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Make a gmail account and tell it to pull the yahoo mail - then do whatever you like with it.

  8. Get the facts right please on Amazon's New Kindle Is Only $80, Comes In White, and With More Storage · · Score: 5, Informative

    It has 4G if storage just like the paperwhite.
    It does NOT have a screen light so it's not just like a paperwhite at all.

    https://www.amazon.com/All-New...

  9. Doesn't everyone who is asked for a birthday they don't want to enter use 1/1/1970 :-)

  10. They've forgotten the Microsoft Diode on Microsoft Convinced That Windows 10 Will Be Its Smartphone Breakthrough · · Score: 1

    Microsoft long ago took over areas dominated by others with the Microsoft "diode".

    Step one was the run the leader's stuff - for example their document format.

    Step two was to "enhance" the support in a way that made new work incompatible with the former leader.

    If they ever want people to buy their smartphones, they will have to start by running Android apps until they get to the point where Windows phone is a necessary app target, just as Apple and Android are today.

  11. Net metering is unstustainable on The Groups Behind Making Distributed Solar Power Harder To Adopt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The current system lets the home owner use the power grid as a battery, storing excess energy for later use. And this battery is free. But it's not free - someone has to pay for the power lines, meters, and generation or storage capacity that makes it work.

    Electric bills have two components, the supply cost and the delivery cost. The supply cost is what the electric company should be paying for electricity it buys from the home owner. But the electricity the home owner buys back should include the delivery cost.

    In effect, the utilities are subsidizing home generation, which may make sense for now, but is not a plausible end game.

  12. Ignores how disks often fail on Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance · · Score: 2

    My understanding is that disks often fail when a head touches the surface, or a piece of dirt gets between the head and the surface. Once that happens, more dirt is produced, increasing the probability of more head crashes, leading to a failure cascade. As a consequence, once one of my drives starts to show unrecoverable errors, corresponding to damaged surface areas, I replace it while it can still be read.

    The spare platter strategy does nothing to reduce this failure mode. In fact, all modern disks already have spare space for bad block relocation.

  13. Squarer is better. on Eizo Debuts Monitor With 1:1 Aspect Ratio · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The move from 4x3 to 16x9 was already a big loss - more scrolling for no advantage except using the PC as a TV. Don't know about 1x1 but the old 5x4 worked just fine for me.

  14. the windows interrupt handler on Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Often-Run Piece of Code -- Ever? · · Score: 1

    I agree this is impossible to measure but..

    I'd guess the first level interrupt handler in windows (most of which is in C by the way) would be high on the list.

    (Most processors go to sleep rather than running an idle loop, which sort of rules that out).

  15. Adblock is your friend on When Opting Out of Ad Tracking Doesn't Opt You Out · · Score: 1

    The cynic in me says that any request you make about your email address just makes that a more valuable address!

    Ablock, on the other hand, seems to do the trick pretty well for many people. Adblock plus actually right now - but there is a growing controversy about it.

  16. How do you know? on Condensation On Your Beer != Good · · Score: 1

    People always claim that bad beer tastes like piss. And I always wonder how they know! Which reminds me of a childhood memory. We were in the Catskills in what was then called a bungalow colony. One day, for some reasons, the owner had to siphon some gas, which he started by sucking on the hose. My dad asked what it tasted like - it tastes like manure he said. Once we were away, my dad wondered aloud how he knew.

  17. I only drink coffee on Oracle Fixes 42 Security Vulnerabilities In Java · · Score: 0

    Removed java a while ago. I haven't found a site a cared about that needed it. We should all pressure any sites that still use it to get off it.

  18. T530 Keyboard on Are Lenovo's ThinkPads Getting Worse? · · Score: 1

    This was the beginning - the "new" keyboard on the T530 and brothers. It's OK - but not the wonder that my ancient T40 had. I simply make more typing errors, for a bunch of subtle reasons.

  19. Marketing to cover weakness on Google Loses Santa To Bing · · Score: 1

    The story prompted me to look at bing maps. Very first direction request produced a poor route. When dragging the route to change it gives less time and distance, you know it's not the source to use! There is no way to reset a drag! etc. etc. I'll stick with google.

    But one wonders how this government agency was co-opted.

  20. ext4 unless there's a good reason not to. on Ask Slashdot: Best File System For Web Hosting? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The obvious argument for ext4, the current ext version, is that it's been around a long time and is very solid. I'd only use something else if I knew the performance of ext4 would be an issue.

  21. Security Questions deemed dangerous on WHMCS Data Compromised By Good Old Social Engineering · · Score: 1

    It has been pointed out many times that the security question system is dangerous if the user does what he's told. It is in general easier to find out what someone's high school mascot was than to guess his password! My approach it to provide nonsense answers I can retrieve for all such question. No one's going to guess that my mother's maiden name was bottleofbitsofstuff for example. You can use the same answer for all questions if they let you, or use obvious variants otherwise.

  22. Assigning new values to constants can be useful! on Stroustrup Reveals What's New In C++ 11 · · Score: 2

    I was amused by the comment "If that incr(0) were allowed either some temporary that nobody ever saw would be incremented or - far worse - the value of 0 would become 1. The latter sounds silly, but there was actually a bug like that in early Fortran compilers that set aside a memory location to hold the value 0. "

    Back then, I wrote Fortran subroutines which took computed dimension arrays by declaring the arrays with crazy bounds, numbers I hoped would never be used as constants, and then "assigning" the real bounds to the "constants".

    Those were the good old days.

  23. Chase Letter a perfect phishing template! on Epsilon Breach Affects JPMorgan Chase, Capital One · · Score: 1

    Got my Chase letter. It warns about not sending information by email. Nothing about not clicking on links. In fact, it contains the lines:

    The security of your information is a critical priority to us and we strive to handle it carefully at all times. Please visit our Security Center at chase.com and click on "Fraud Information" under the "How to Report Fraud." It provides additional information on exercising caution when reading e-mails that appear to be sent by us.

    chase.com is a link!

    All a phisher needs to do is send this exact email, pointing to a dummy Chase page, and encourage the victim to log in when he reaches it.

    Clearly they are either very stupid or really just don't care. I'll go for the latter.

  24. WIndows 7 Only on Microsoft Makes Chrome Play H.264 Video · · Score: 1

    As with the firefox extension, this only works on Windows 7. So it in no way makes H.264 universally available.

  25. William Feller taught this almost 50 years ago. on Scientifically, You Are Likely In the Slowest Line · · Score: 1

    In An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications by William Feller, published before 1968, Feller describes this effect, pointing out that we mentally average over time, not occurrences, and spend most of our time in the slow line.