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Comment LOL (Score 1) 257

THEY WILL NOT SWITCH. Got to use what you like good for you.

Folks who live on the festering edge of technology will forever be in reactive mode.

They most likely live there because they don't know any better and have become "accustomed" to wearing their hair shirt.

There are a lot of customers of mine that love windows XP and there [sic] blackberrys.

Sure, and when Blackberry goes belly-up, they can suffer through a protracted outage while they scramble for a replacement. Nothing says success like a decision made in fear in panic. Or, they could start their planning and migration now and move as soon as they're ready.

Comment Re:This is why I'm keeping my truck for forever (Score 1) 658

Finally a use for tinfoil other than on my head: a GPS that cannot see the sky won't work. Or I could give it a nice coat of paint that has some aluminum powder mixed in. Or the wire powering the system could "wear out" by "rubbing" against another "moving part". ---- If they want to raise enough funds, all they have to do is eliminate all free curbside parking in the city. They don't even have to charge that much: $.25/hour will do it.

Comment Re:Red state (Score 1) 470

All freedom for me and none for thee. Some choice quotes from our idiot governor, Rick Perry:

Our view is that individuals and families can govern their lives better than bureaucrats.

Except when it comes to buying a car?

Conservatives are winning offices, and champions of big government are cleaning out their desks right now.

Since "convervatives" ARE "champions of big government", please clean out your desks and hit the road.

Americans want government that is leaner, more efficient, and less intrusive into their personal lives.

Yes, and that includes being able to test drive a car, you cretin.

In America, the people are not subjects of government, the government is subject to the people.

...but only Super People like PACs and Corps, right? Tiny Meat People don't count.

Patents

A Patent Tree Grows In Seattle 37

theodp writes "Among the featured attractions for the kids at the just-opened $10 million Bezos Center for Innovation in the $60 million Museum of History & Industry in Seattle is a 'Patent Tree'. The museum opening marks the end of a week for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that saw his personal and managerial life put on display with the release of an excerpt from The Everything Store, a new book by Brad Stone, who reveals how he found Bezos's long-lost biological father."

Comment Re:I just do not understand the market for this (Score 1) 53

Whereas with a PC, Android or iOS system you have plenty of RAM, storage and graphics capability so you can be pretty sloppy in your code and get away with it.

Man, I don't have fond memories of memory/resource management in the old PC and C64 day. Not having to deal 64k blocks for expanded memory is a good thing.

In this day and age, multi-threaded programming is more important than managing memory IMHO. I've done my share of sloppy code, mostly because I had more important things to deal with. Sometimes a nested loop does the job quickly and you can move on to other parts. I have yet gotten a bonus,programming style points and won accolades from my peers by coding beautifully or super-efficiently. It's usually scorn and jealousy. 80% of the code I've worked on, no other soul looks at.

I say use what you have at hand and get the job done. If you got 2 Megs of RAM, use them. If you save the a Meg, you're not going to have some sort of cyber consciousness thank you for using less electricity or cycles. Hell, you may have limited your application by not using all the resources available to you.

If you have the luxury of time, enhance it and make it more bug-free.

Comment Re:RIP Bell Labs (Score 1) 75

While many good people lost their job in Nortel, there was a LOT of deadwood at Nortel. Kanata has never been the same since.

We had one upgrade with Nortel telecom equipment, where I had one engineer and five (or six) project managers. You need one or sometimes even two good project managers, but never FIVE, especially when the engineer is doing all the heavy lifting (figuratively and literally). So by charging us $300/hr, we knew we were subsidizing several crappy layers of ineffeciency.

A-L may in a similar boat. There are probably people who did not keep fresh or add very little value, because they were brought in when a VP went on an empire-building spree.

Comment Re:So users still stuck in *two* walled gardens? (Score 2) 196

Good point.

Apple is setting a terrible precedent. I think I know their motivation (e.g. money, Chinese market, etc).

Let's say Saudi Arabia makes looking at dirty pictures illegal (not just immoral). Are they scrapping browsers?

No, the government needs to ensure that while using their network infrastructure the "dangerous" services and applications are blocked. Don't impose your morality and legality on citizens of other countries.

Apple is weak. They considered the cost/benefit analysis, and figured that the few hundred people who get irate about this won't matter. Chinese citizen will not stop buying an iPhone even with this app gone; they buy it for the "cool" factor not because it allows civil disobedience. Most Chinese are terrified of getting in the sights of their government. Those who have an iPhone will gladly use in the government-approved manner.

Comment That's nothing (Score 3, Funny) 93

I once experienced an DoS MitM LTE XSS attack that lasted 42 hours and had a steady stream of 105TB/ms using NetBIOS Saturation over AppleTalk techniques that spread over a redundant cluster of MBR using HPFS. Of course the victim wishes to remain in the shadows as sharing the company's identity would either harm their reputation or allow you to verify the plausibility of the incident.

Comment Re:Episode 3 (Score 0) 150

I really liked the series, but them dropping the ball on Episode 3 and forfeiting on their promise to release, really soured the experience for me.

I will certainly not buy when it comes out, whatever they call it. Actually, I haven't bought anything off Steam and certainly from Valve for that reason (I always associated both together, since the only reason I installed Steam was for HL2).

Comment Re:OH NO. Two whole weeks?!?!!11ONE!! (Score 1) 61

Agreed. Chances are there are a bunch of PMPs and ITIL processes in place. Could be internal politics.

Coding a few minutes is a one thing. Testing it, getting someone to approve to move something to prod, and herding people to actually do work is a bunch of other things. Legal and PR may get involved too.

In some corps I worked, the finger-pointing usually takes days and involves a bunch of crappy meetings. It can be days before someone engages InfoSec or the developers to confirm a problem.

Two weeks is not terrible; better than most large corporations.

Comment OH NO. Two whole weeks?!?!!11ONE!! (Score 2) 61

That's not too bad all things considering. Maybe they have a proper structured development shop (not too structured, since it obviously doesn't include code reviews or vuln scanning)? Maybe they had maintenance windows which they are contractually bound to (and more expensive to make an exception then to do deal with a flaw)? Maybe once they were made aware of the problem they were scanning the database system for odd entries or suspicious activity? Maybe they needed to get an independent audtor to review so they can appease their various stakeholders?

Hopefully they learned from this, and will at least run an automated vulnerability tool against the app for future releases.

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