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Comment Re:A corrupt company stuggling. Boo hoo. (Score 1) 133

What's sad is that UOP really could have done it! If they offered actual counseling guidance, and curricula that didn't just suck, and made sure that their clients passed classes with rigor, they could have *easily* made a profitable college with good reviews and earned trust.

Instead, they violated that trust, and probably deserve to be shut down.

Comment Re:Wifi saturation? (Score 1) 152

What I find fucks with wifi is big thick walls.

I just bought a house. One of the things I was initially pleased to find is that it was built with full-on, 3/4" sheet rock - quality construction!

That is, until I plugged in my wifi router and tried to connect from my bedroom. I don't know what it is about 3/4" sheetrock made in 1978, but it's practically a Faraday cage. I'm contemplating setting up numerous routers with 1-antenna per room so you can get decent access everywhere in the house.

A compromise position in the hall closet gets the bedrooms *almost* OK through the doors...

Comment Re:Good luck ... (Score 2) 107

You make it sound *onerous* but it doesn't need to be. You can buy many home routers with a USB port. Plug in a thumb drive and enable webDAV shares!

We've been using webDAV for many, many years to create a distributed, "cloud based" storage accessible anywhere with good security. (Authenticated webDAV over SSL is approximately as secure as the password)

Comment Re:If there are patent issues (Score 5, Informative) 355

Microsoft has always been fairly smart about courting developers with excellent tools and development platforms, and making it quite easy to build applications for Windows

Maybe you don't remember history the way I do.

Remember VB? An excellent toolkit that gained widespread acceptance in the Enterprise world for it's tight IDE, integration environment and easy forms. But then MS came out with VB.net which was about as related to VB 6 as javascript is to java. It was a horrible mess, everything had to be re-written to be compatible because it was really an entirely new language. Developers were left in the lurch, oh well, perhaps you shouldn'ta Microsoft, you know?

Remember Silverlight? The "Flash Killer", it was an excellent toolkit for writing distributed applications quickly. Performance was excellent. Many big names "bet the farm" on it. Until Microsoft walked away from it, too. Netflix will *never again* bank on a MS technology, I'm sure.

But that's not where it ends. Remember Windows Phone 7? The next big thing (tm) and they ditched it, for WP8, and all the devs were screwed. Again.

But that's not where it ends. Why is the XBox 360 not compatible with the original XBox? Why is the XBox "One" not compatible with the XBox 360? With every console generation, MS has been screwing the developers.

And so it goes. Over and over, the devs get the shaft any time they bet on Microsoft's newest, highly promoted technology.

What's next?

Comment Re:STEM Shortage (Score 1) 336

The so-called "STEM shortage" is pretty much bullshit. If you take a look at the degrees that pay the best you find that standard STEM degrees dominate.

No degree is a guarantee of employment. If you can't be bothered to shower and show up, you're going to have a hard time. Degrees merely improve your odds of success significantly.

Comment Re:Interesting person (Score 0, Offtopic) 284

I like how it's unpopular to point out that some traits of conservatism are undesirable. For example, looking at the map of the laws against interracial marriage and also gay marriage looks pretty similar to the standard red/blue map that seems to dominate politics.

But hey, it's not a "Republican Core Value" or something. Yeah. /s

Comment Re:Yeah, but can you stop the NSA (Score 1) 66

Just to be fair "perfectly secure" is probably overstating things considerably. It would pass "no known exploits" pretty well, certainly "commercially viable".

The only "perfectly secure" computer is off, unplugged from the Internet, and encased in 50 feet of reinforced concrete. And even then, there *are* ways to exploit it using *ahem* brute force...

Comment Re:And what about the infrastructure issues? (Score 1) 294

It's easy to design something that people can do. It's tough to design a system that people can't fail at. And that's where there's a big, soft, squishy line that divides what people can generally keep up with and the things that people have to work at to get wrong.

As a software engineer, I require the first, and aim for the latter. It's tough.

My uncle was an BART engineer. He controlled BART ([San Francisco] Bay Area Rapid Transit) trains in the SF Bay Area for a living. The train had doors on both sides of the train and some stations opened on one side, or the other.

BART trains are frequently "up in the air" as much as 50 feet, where the expectation is that you climb a flight or two of stairs to the BART station and board the train. And, for passengers, the doors automatically opened on the correct side so that nobody got hut.

For passengers. But the engineers were expected to manually open the doors on the appropriate side when leaving their station. Now, it's not particularly difficult to look outside the door and see which side the station is on, and the doors for passengers automatically opened on the correct side.

This is where that big, squishy line starts to rear its ugly head. Because while passengers weren't expected to remember which side to get off, engineers were. And my poor uncle made a mistake one day, and opened the wrong side. It was a fatal mistake.

Answer me this: Why would we expect that passengers would never get it right, but engineers would never get it wrong?

Intelligently designed systems that account for and prevent common human mistakes is a design goal. It's tough to do because you have to predict what the end user will likely get wrong and account for that. Nonetheless, it's a hallmark of engineering advancement that we've designed something so safe and resistant to human error as a car that casually travels 100 MPH with as low a death toll as we see today.

Comment Re:Too bad to see them go this way... (Score 2) 167

Having never left the RedHat fold, (I'm typing this on a Fedora 21 Laptop) I can't say with any honesty that I've missed them. At all.

Red Hat has been very, very good to me! My business is based on RHEL/CentOS and since Red Hat is quite profitable, I have a simple, economic assurance that my technology base won't disappear.

Feel free to use Ubuntu/Mint/Whatever as your hip distro; but Red Hat has carried a solid, economically potent and robust distro for decades.

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