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Comment Too much smoothing (Score 3, Interesting) 377

There is a reason why JPEG is blocky. The blocky nature of the encoding preserves details better.

BPG blurs everything heavily. Small details and fine textures literally disappear.(*)

JPEG is definitely outdated and web could gain from a worthy replacement. But BPG IMO doesn't appear to be "it".

(*) I wonder how JPEG would fare on the images, decoded from BPG. Since fine details are removed by BPG, the JPEG would be smaller too.

Comment Re:dynamic sites ? (Score 1) 67

Most of the web might be dynamic.

But most of the interesting content is quite static, changing relatively slowly. Consider Wikipedia or YouTube. Wikipedia updates relatively slowly. YouTube only adds new videos (and after Google's touches the comments and the recommendations are pretty useless anyway).

Search and the comments might need to stay dynamic - and centralized - but hosting costs would drop significantly if the bulk data transfers would be handled by the P2P network.

Comment Re:Google engineers... (Score 2) 239

I have found a very good job near where I live and I have simply "canceled" their hiring "process" in the middle. Imagine: dozens phone calls to organize dozens of "interviews", scattered around the world. I have stopped around 5th or 6th "interview", which was around 9-12 month into the "process". In other words, I wasn't hired by Google on technicality that I got bored waiting (and found good job ~20min walking distance from home!)

All in all, I was pretty surprised to find that the hiring process in Google is so badly organized and is so poor in communication. Just like any other other employer, they let you wait and dangle, but the difference that they need 4-12 times more interviews and 4-12 times more waiting and dangling for weeks and months.

That whole thing doesn't make sense, unless your goal specifically is the magic "Google" badge on your CV.

Comment Google engineers... (Score -1, Flamebait) 239

Google engineers are just bunch of narcissistic douchebags. (Hey, I went through their hiring process - I know the types who would fit perfectly!)

GMail was one of the first indicators.

They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.

But they would go on "reinventing" e-mail forever, with colors, tabs, bars, circles, ovals, shapes, and probably in far future odors. Because sitting down and making a finished product takes a commitment. But the only thing Google has ever apparently committed itself to.... Squirrel!

Submission + - Richard III's remains found under parking lot (nationalgeographic.com) 3

kammermusik writes: A skeleton excavated from a parking lot in Leicester, England,was DNA-tested with a curious result:

The team of genetics detectives reports that DNA from the skeleton shows that the bones were Richard III's, with a likelihood of 99.9994 percent. This is the first genetic identification of a particular individual so long after death—527 years.


Submission + - A Unique World-Wide Collaboration Around an Open Source Offline Password Keeper (indiegogo.com)

swv3752 writes: Introducing the Mooltipass, a physical encrypted password keeper that remembers your credentials so you don't have to. With this device, you can generate and safely store long and complex passwords unique to each website you use. A personal PIN-locked smartcard allows the decryption of your credentials and ensures that only you have access to them. Simply visit a website and the device will ask for your confirmation to enter your credentials when login is required.

Over thirty people from all around the globe contributed to bring this project to where it is now, including software and firmware engineers, designers, mechanical engineers, artists, project managers, students and security engineers. Our project started a year ago with a call for feedback and contributors. It turned out that people were thrilled by the idea of an open source password keeper and didn't hesitate to commit some (if not all!) of their personal time to join this adventure. Now there is three days left to finish funding.

Comment Re:All right, allow me to expose my ignorance (Score 1) 647

"monolithic in architecture" - that means its a single binary with no dependencies [...]

No. Single binary with no dependencies means monolithic design.

For example Linux kernel : single binary with no external dependencies, but internally its architecture is still modular. And the implementation of modules in Linux is still largely "monolithic", since kernel are just pieces of the live kernel, not compatible between different kernel version, which reside on hard drive, not in memory. And when they are loaded into the memory they pretend to be an integral part of the kernel.

[...] which is wrong otherwise every single binary with depending on a library is a monolith. this smart-ass mis-definition of "monolith" is one used by detractors of any system they don't like.

You seem to fail to grasp the difference between design and architecture. Your CS education has failed you. Pick a copy of Booch's OOAD and read it up.

Comment Re:All right, allow me to expose my ignorance (Score 1) 647

Or I forgot to add "beardy" to "*NIX guys"? Who knows.

What people do not understand, do not grasp yet, is that SystemD brings Linux closer to the *BSD. Pretty soon, SystemD would start dictating kernel version and kernel configuration, turning the whole Linux ecosystem upside down, and making it just like the BSD: a system which contains not only the kernel, but also the whole shebang of userspace tools and libraries.

But it does it the Windows way, instead of the traditional *NIX/BSD way, and that is what provokes most of the protests.

Slashdot crowd is special and doesn't see that modern "Linux admin" is not much different from "Windows admin". RHEL and SLES already lock down the system (both with semi-proprietary software and support contracts) to the point where admin can only press the button to accomplish something. If there is no button - then it is impossible. In other words: just like the Windows. (In part, of course, because these days Windows too, similarly to Linux, allows some level of automation from command line or (Visual Basic or PowerShell) scripts.)

Comment Re:All right, allow me to expose my ignorance (Score 5, Informative) 647

I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?

Systemd is a piece of software, modular in design, monolithic in architecture. It is, on top of being a replacement for init and the init.d scripts, replaces basically everything touching kernel and whatnot. It is also a service management and monitoring framework.

It is authored by the same guy who created PulseAudio and Avahi. Think a guy with enourmous ego and the GNOME attitude ("my way, or the highway").

I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.

It takes what worked and everybody knows (mostly written in shell), and replaces it with binary blobs (binary programs, written in C).

The majority of admins (think: ex-Windows white collars) are overjoyed to have a new toy. They never knew how init worked - and now they do not have to care anymore. Because anything written in C is magically better than everything written in shell.

The minority of admins (think: *NIX guys) are royally pissed that something they were taking for granted - the total control over the system *NIX always provided - is now basically locked down and given away to some guys from interwebs about whom they never heard before. All for the sake, wait for it, that GNOME can shutdown or restart computer smoothly.

Comment Re:What killed Ruby (Score 1) 291

It may not be the most popular option, but Ruby is hardly a marginal language. RedMonk has it tied for 6th with C++, PYPL has it at 10th, and TIOBE has it at 14th. It came off from the Rails high, but it remains steadily popular.

The ecosystem has actually got significantly better over the years, especially as Puppet, Chef, MCollective and others have driven popularity as an admin language, rather than a web language. But more importantly, JRuby pulls in the entire Java ecosystem, which actually puts it in a better position than perl or python, in my opinion. There is Jython, but that lags significantly behind C Python (current stable is 2.5 compatible, which was released eight years ago; their 2.7 release has been in beta for about 21 months) while JRuby offers Ruby 2.1 compatibility in their current stable release and will be putting out their release candidate for 2.2 around the same time as the Ruby 2.2 stable release.

Comment Re:If it's losing steam it's because (Score 2) 291

The real win for me is JRuby. The Java ecosystem is at least as broad as perl, and generally better suited to enterprise applications. There are generally perl modules for everything, but they often perform far worse (e.g. Net::LDAP is probably an order of magnitude slower than UnboundID processing LDIF) or are just terrible code (e.g. Net::Sieve::Script which is a regex-based hack, rather than an actual language parser like jSieve).

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