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Comment Re:I have a solution - H1B (Score 1) 110

This is also typical:

[T]he survey of 436 global business leaders finds that only 23% are confident their organizations have the knowledge and skills to succeed in the digital aspects of their business.

The organisation as a whole probably has enough knowledge present to adequately cope with digital demands, but this knowledge is never tapped, because most of it isn't formalised in a certificate or diploma, so it doesn't officially exist. Therefore the employees are digital peasants and the company is doomed.

What's tapping, paying someone outside the IT department market rates to administer the highly specialized, complex software different parts of the business need that the IT department typically doesn't want to give up headcount for because they have a broader mission?

The software regular IT people deal with is, as a rule, more complex than it needs to be, and specialized business software that can really make a difference to the bottom line requires knowledge of the respective business function and is LUDICROUSLY more complex than it needs to be.

These digital demands, we're talking about stuff your brightest guys in IT don't even want to touch. So sure, if you think you all can pool your collective PC skills to supplant some overpaid contractors, nobody from your CIO down is stopping you, it just does't work.

Comment Re:Corruption? In Russia? (Score 1) 94

The media in the USA is the most dishonest I've seen. Their entire goal is to generate misinfotainment that is interesting enough to generate more ad revenue.

I went to rt.com to get the other side, and it's really about the same as the CNN one.
http://rt.com/news/261201-rosc...

They also have some enlightening articles right on their front page:
"Internet troll convictions on the rise (VIDEO)"
"Counter attack: MP asks law enforcers to protect Russians from Google page counts"
"Putin signs bill on ‘undesirable foreign groups’ into law"
"Defense Ministry to improve conscripts’ preparedness through military lessons in schools"
"Snowden leaks aided terrorists, damaged spy agencies – neocon think-tank"

Oh, and they have hardly any ads on their site and no subscription plan, so I guess their funded some other way... neat!

Comment Re:Smith v. Maryland (Score 1) 104

According to Smith v. Maryland, Law enforcement doesn't need a warrant for pen registers, because people have no expectation of privacy in the numbers they called. That one decision has led to the entire NSA metadata collection, as well as unrestrained use of Stingrays and similar devices. Remember that next time someone sneers at the slippery slope.

I'm sneering at your "slippery slope"

You're saying case law is a slippery slope, which is asinine because a judge's job is to interpret the law that legislators write. It's not to make you happy, and that's why you don't elect them. In this case, we're talking about Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution - it doesn't do what you want it to.

If you don't like that, then man up and talk to your legislators and get new laws or amendments passed, or at least acknowledge that's what's needed. Laws that aren't interpreted the way you want are not "slippery slopes". There may be unintended consequences, and you will have to deal with those in ANY new law you propose, that's how the system works. You can't just wish all existing laws into covering every situation the way you want them to. Our legal system is not in a vacuum.

Comment Re:PC version (Score 1) 95

Keep in mind that fps still uses hitboxes, while modding the head may not mean 100% headshots, youd have to change the hitbox size.

True, but big heads have other purposes.

Some people used to give Quake Team Fortress player models a long spike on their head and a Pinocchio nose to see them coming from a lower level and through walls in 2fort. Mark up textures with glow-in-the-dark "fullbright" pixels, increase the volume on grenade priming, footsteps, etc...

So... you still really don't want to allow client side mods in multiplayer, because there is a whole more than physics to mess with.

Comment Re:What Fucking Decade Is It? (Score 1) 100

Did I trip into a time warp and come out a decade in the past?
Who the fuck is actually talking about hadoop or map reduce in 2015? The same retards that were creaming their little cunts about it in 2005?

Even when you ignore the joke that is Java, hadoop is unwieldy, unreliable shit if you actually care about storing and retrieving correct, synchronized data.
If you're fine with throwing all of your data in a pot and getting some sort of result that looks mostly correct, then knock yourself out and use hadoop.

If your data needs to be correct, define it and its relationships then use SQL. You will have to pay someone decent money to do this correctly.

None of these complaints seem to keep people from using Splunk.... unstructured data soup isn't going anywhere at any scale, we'll just call it different things.
I can't even fathom a world where all the data we analyze in Splunk could have been fed into Oracle and turned into usable reports. All of our users would have to be Oracle DBAs.

Comment Re:Thumb Drives (Score 1) 184

I looked into this because I once wondered why no one uses thumb drives for backup. Thumb drives are reasonably safe for a couple years but after that many can degrade. I saw many sites indicating that flash is not a safe media. This caused me to wonder what they did different in SSD technology. The only safe media that I know of is tape.

Tape is some of a myth.

The only safe media, is that which you keep copying before it deteriorates. Not HDDs, not SSDs, not CDs, not thumbdrives, and not tape. Any media you leave untouched past its data retention period, will lose data.

What you need is to check every copy of your data for any sign of degradation, and replace it with a fresh copy as soon as, or before, it begins to fail. Tape may give you the most time between checks, but it doesn't change the fact that data you forget about is data you will lose.

You're talking about archives I think, and the previous guy was talking about long term backups.

An archive might be the only copy of your data, and everything you said applies. But backups only have to live as long as your retention period, so once you meet that requirement, you're set.

The biggest myth is that backups or archives are simple :\

Comment Re:Of course the CIA didn't spy on Senate computer (Score 1) 148

CIA: Hey, MI5.... Can you do me a favour? I'll owe you one.
MI5: Sure, what do you need?
CIA: Can you skim through these PCs and look for evidence of this thing I'd like to know about?
MI5: Sure, no problem.

Hate to ruin a joke, but the computers we're talking about were the CIA's. The data on them was provided by the CIA, in a facility run by the CIA.

Couple of things.. the Senate Committee made copies of sensitive documents and removed them from that CIA run facility.
CIA staff erased some documents that they felt they should not have made available to the Committee, and they searched the computers to determine how the information left the facility.

It's easy to argue both sides were doing their jobs, as expected. The dispute is all office politics.

I won't judge either side in this, but I will point out that if you morons are really upset about the CIA searching these computers, you are overlooking the bigger picture that money was wasted on this facility in the first place because they didn't use existing CIA or Senate resources, and it only housed information the CIA spent even more money on sanitizing.

That the committee ever saw any documents that the CIA didn't want them to says everything about this whole situation. This whole thing is just dumb on all sides, including the spectators.

Comment Re:We're so screwed. (Score 1) 237

I don't understand why you think it was to no useful end. The muslim was intercepted and dispatched before he could execute his murderous plan. I consider this a spectacular success.

Because none of that warrantless spying contributed in any way to stopping him.

"Warrantless spying" doesn't make sense, did you mean "unreasonable search"? Spying involves a whole world of things nobody needs a warrant for, and anyone can legally do.

You're right it didn't stop them. Should it have? Is pre-crime the only goal of intelligence?
It does give us a lot of information about them and who they had been communicating with. Is that not useful?

Comment Re:We're so screwed. (Score 1) 237

Someone mod this up.

First time I've seen anyone asking the obvious question: if the guy was being watched by the FBI for the last N years, how did he ever get close enough to the event to start shooting it up? Could have turned out a lot worse.

How many of our taxpayer dollars were wasted watching this guy to no useful end? How many are spent on even more useless activities?

What do you expect, nonstop realtime GPS tracking via secretly ingested pill with fleet of black helicopters ready to scramble if he moves? Get real.

Aren't you interested in finding others they may have conspired with? Now how do you think THAT's going to happen?

Comment Re:Why do companies keep thinking people *want* th (Score 1) 125

Years ago I had a laptop that could be effectively turned into a portable hard disk drive depending on some weird keystrokes at boot-time. I can't remember exactly how it worked now (but I think it was Firewire) but I had considered building a diskless desktop computer that the laptop would dock into, where the desktop was orders of magnitude more powerful, so the desktop would boot from the laptop's disk.

To make this happen I was going to use Linux, as Windows would have thrown a bitch-fit over the differences in architecture and chipset. Never got around to it before the laptop was hopelessly obsolete and newer ones didn't have the feature anymore.

I could see a dock with all of the accessories that someone would want in a desktop that has storage to mirror the phone's contents in the event the phone is broken or gone, but only if it's not tied to a single model of phone.

I think any Mac can do that, boot from external storage and target disk mode, but I don't see the utility outside of testing OS releases or doing repairs.
You could always keep a VM image on a removable drive if you wanted a portable OS and you wouldn't have to shut it down if your systems architectures are all close enough to do suspend/resume. Well... no-go on a phone.

IDK, unless you are carrying a disk array in your pocket, it seems like replacing local storage would be a bad bet.
So what I don't get is why do the processing on the mobile device vs. using it as removeable storage.

Comment Re:Wow ... (Score 1) 263

Interesting. Thanks. But the entire fleet was not down, only several dozen. The ipads "powered down unexpectedly", not the type of behavior you expect from changes to a document data change, but a very common problem when an app or OS has been updated or changed in some manner.

You're right, it was just dozens - I misremembered the article. But they all appeared to be at the same time. You can't do auto update on the OS itself, though an app update could happen automatically. But supposedly they could not get the iPads to work at all without reconnecting to the airport WiFi network. That doesn't make much sense for any kind of update.

The fix mentioned in the article was deleting and reinstalling the app, so that's probably got to do with it. It's a big app?

Comment Re:Wow ... (Score 1) 263

Honestly, the Apple-ness of this is completely irrelevant, and you know damned well it is.

Actually it's entirely relevant.

An application took down the entire OS. This is exactly the thing we derided Microsoft for allowing for so long. I've been working with Android, including some very dodgy hacked versions for my Motorola Milestone and I've never had an application crash the OS. Sure applications have crashed but that would be back to the home screen (androids version of a crash to desktop) but never had it take down the entire OS. Even in modern Windows it's very hard for an application to cause the OS to reboot.

So first off, it demonstrates the application was not properly sandboxed by the OS.

Secondly, I thought this was exactly the kind of thing Apple's "well curated" walled garden is meant to prevent.

So not only is it difficult for the same thing to happen on Windows, Linux or Android, but Apple is supposed to have extra protection against this kind of thing.

Get back on your meds please.

"No flights were canceled, and pilots have been notified how to fix the bug, by deleting the app and re-installing it. Apple said it had confirmed that the iPads’ own hardware and operating system did not crash, and that the issue was with the Jeppesen app."

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