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Comment Re: In unrelated news: Average IQ up 5 points in U (Score 5, Insightful) 275

I must admit, I wasn't really on the band wagon of making the comments. I came here looking to read the humor.

I personally don't depend on any of the networks because I have had the displeasure of having the opportunity of learning how broadcast journalism actually works. As a result, I have absolutely no use for their media. I certainly don't wish to be a target for what passes as journalism today.

The government operations (like the Senate, House, etc...) are broadcast an televised. We're choosing candidates as members of a team. We pick a team like Fox or CNN and they broadcast play by play or blow by blow reports of how they interpreted events in the government. We don't choose politicians to represent our best interests. We choose politicians to be a member of one team or another. We want our teams to win and we don't care what they have to do in order to do it. We love the technicalities too. Like, "My team doesn't like what the president did. Look here, there's a little rule in the rule book which says we can throw a card and sue the president for doing his job the best he can".

I must admit, I put little faith in the silliness you seemed to come here to attack. I have far less use for a drone like yourself who seems to think that just because someone won a popularity contest and was voted CEO (which actually doesn't mean what you think it does) he/she or they are special by some means.

Comments here are a waste of time and effort, but for many of us provide an outlet for our frustrations with the system. It's probably no more productive than talking sports at a bar, but it at least keeps us from being drunk all the time. If you're not interested in the Slashdot method of communicating, why would you bother coming here? Of course, I guess maybe you're just using the comments as a place to be a dick and unload a bit. More power to you. Enjoy, Slashdot is here to offend and we are its little helpers :)

Comment Re:My sockets are made of high quality steel (Score 5, Interesting) 152

There almost certainly was a socket wrench available. The point is that a socket wrench is a highly complex tool that depends on precision and rigidity to produce. The fact that the multiple components of a socket wrench could in fact be printed is a major accomplishment. A hammer or screwdriver would not have been an appropriate test. This was.

The question is, after printing it, was the produced wrench a suitable alternative and could it accomplish the task it was needed for. ABS, even in the resolution and density they're printing isn't very rigid. I have seen a great deal of information regarding the fact that the tool was printing and more so, how excited everyone was that Autodesk Inventor was used. What I haven't seen is whether ABS used :
  1) had a negative impact to the air quality and scrubbers on the ISS. The ABS I use (even stuff I specially looked for) produces a great deal of noxious fumes. I tend to print with the windows open.
  2) The printout was rigid enough to be useful as a tool. I have absolutely no doubt that making extra parts for the station is entirely possible and smarter than keeping spare parts for everything. But did they manage to produce a wrench worth using?

As a bonus... can they release the design they printed as a benchmark for the hobbyist community to use for making their own improved printers. The high resolution photos of the wrench looked great.

Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 2, Insightful) 421

In my city, PHP completely dominates... that is of course unless I look at things asking for skills other than PHP.

I did a few searches on Monster.com and found that Java and .NET are about the same. There is however a single employer posting way more java jobs in Minneapolis.

This is actually not meant to be a troll or rude, but having traveled 42 states and 60+ countries, Minneapolis, while being an amazing place and a diamond in the rough was strangely, from an employment perspective, one of the most unusual places I encountered in my travels. I've been an instructor (ever since I found out that it pays much more to talk about working than actually working) and have met people everywhere. I felt like engineers in Minneapolis were much more likely to be happy with less overall ambition. It's an odd generalization, possibly more poorly researched than your own, but it struck me as if engineers were just another cog in the machine and many of the engineers I encountered adopted an almost Scandinavian lifestyle of working to live instead of living to work.

While here in Oslo, Noway I consider that the norm or the average, in the U.S., I consider it highly unusual and somehow a little scary.

My point is, that I feel that Minneapolis from my perspective probably should never be used as an example of "normal". There are some special things which make Minneapolis a wonderful place to live. In fact, if it weren't for the impressively awful weather (which makes Norway look warm), I would love to live there... as long as I didn't need to work there.

Comment Re:This reads like a hit piece (Score 1) 222

Exactly!!!

I agree completely. I don't think she belongs where she is... it has nothing to do with gender or her past. I honestly believe they are assets to her job. I just never got the sense that she understands her audience. For example, how would she attract the people like Slashdot readers to her services so that we'll feel comfortable putting them on millions or billions of phones and desktops? She has done nothing to attract and endear Yahoo! to the people who will get her exposure. Yahoo's investments in Alibaba also instills a great deal of mistrust. She's made her money there, it might be a good time to look elsewhere. I think she has to choose, either Yahoo is Yahoo or Yahoo is Alibaba. I don't think she can gain trust from Slashdot people when her company is basically one of the biggest shareholders in a company best known for fraud.

Without the trust and support from the "Advisors" in the IT world, I don't see how she'll get more users.

Comment Re:Chickens return, roost (Score 2) 222

I would love to hear more about your point. There is merit to it... though it lacks a bit of depth in the writing.

I think the big problem is that many of the more technical users of the internet simply wrote off Yahoo and even teased people for using it. As a result, Marissa would probably have been better off re-branding it. Somehow, it's hard to take Yahoo seriously. I think the biggest problem I have with it at this time is that for every serious news article written by a journalist who actually performs research, there is three Kardashion or Hilton type articles which makes them unreadable. This of course might be their desired effect in the long term, but it makes it really hard for people like Slashdot readers to say to someone "You should really use Yahoo!" since we wouldn't use it ourselves. In fact, we're more likely to distrust it and steer people away from it.

Comment Re:No, it isn't. (Score 4, Funny) 222

Hmm... She's managed to gain the trust and support of enough people to get into the position she's in. She's managed to build one of the most prolific, wide spread news sources (though painfully littered with tabloid nonsense) on the Internet. She has also managed to get to the point which more traditional media channels are genuinely being replaced by her company.

What she hasn't figured out how to do yet is to capitalize on all of it. There is a lot of potential... which is based on what she has done... but I for example had no idea there were Yahoo mobile apps before this article. Of course, I don't know why I would install one, but it means that a core component of their network isn't functioning (marketing) and needs to be fixed.

So, you seem to think that everything she's done is based on her dick sucking skills. As such, I'm sure you've accomplished more than she has. After all, you wouldn't make such a comment unless you felt that her actual achievements in life were minimal compared to yours. So what have you done?

Comment International document standard? (Score 0, Troll) 40

Great.. I heard of this. I can't really say I've ever seen it.

Apple iWork doesn't have it. The only office format which seems to be standard appears to me Microsoft's and PDF and PDF isn't really a great editing format.

I recently used LibreOffice and OpenOffice and I was just absolutely amazed at how bad they were. Don't get me wrong, they had gobs of features, they just didn't work well with Windows or Mac and had truly horrible cut and paste support.

Example, open a PDF file in Acrobat Reader. Copy a section of text (no images) and paste it into LibreOffice. Then select an image and try to paste it in. I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert the image where I want it instead of automatically creating an extra column and having to press enter a bunch of times and manually flow my text past the image.

It's just absolute shit. Even WordPerfect gets that one right.

Comment Re:practical-based certs hold their value (Score 1) 317

CCIE is definitely a great cert. It's been a quest of mine for a while. I basically took off January to develop some software and to study and get my CCIE SP. I have more hours in studying than most CCIEs because I feed myself as a Cisco instructor. As an example, I'm teaching MPLS this week, so I get a lot of practice and am hardening those little corner topics like label filtering which generally don't play a big role in most networks since leaking is typically done through BGP as opposed to LDP.

I have been using my somewhat visible position to start altering universities in Norway to require that Information Technology education looks more like Computer Science. I feel that the standard for IT guys is WAY TOO LOW!!! Even a CCIE who might be the ultimate troubleshooter probably is a half ass scripter. I refuse to have anyone on my team which actually performs changes without making change scripts and verification scripts and uses revision control and scrum. I tell all my adult students that they better learn to program because in the future, IT guys out of the university will have those skills and banging on keyboards like lower primates is not interesting in the new world.

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