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Comment Re:I can believe it... (Score 1) 69

Maybe if you bothered to look at the relay logs in the header, you'd probably know they were sent from a fictional server pretending to be you (or totally legit from an exploit), but since said note was absent in your comment, I'm assuming you didn't know about spoofing email, which any script kiddie could do trivially.

Secondly, I can't say about Yahoo, but google has 2 factor auth to avoid said problems. Third, Google has account access history so that if 'bad people' were logged into the account, you'd at least be able to view a record of who/when. I'd be very surprised if Yahoo didn't offer a similar example.

Businesses

Why Military Personnel Make the Best IT Pros 299

Nerval's Lobster writes Every year, approximately 250,000 military personnel leave the service to return to civilian life. When the home front beckons, many will be looking to become IT professionals, a role that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is among the fastest growing jobs in the country. How their field skills will translate to the back office is something to ponder. With the advent of virtualization, mobile, and the cloud, tech undergoes rapid changes, as do the skill sets needed to succeed. That said, the nature of today's military—always on the go, and heavily reliant on virtual solutions—may actually be the perfect training ground for IT. Consider that many war-fighters already are IT technicians: They need to be skilled in data management, mobile solutions, security, the ability to fix problems as they arise onsite, and more. Military personnel used to working with everything from SATCOM terminals to iPads are ideally suited for handling these issues; many have successfully managed wireless endpoints, networks, and security while in the field. Should programs that focus on placing former military personnel in civilian jobs focus even more on getting them into IT roles?

Comment Re:Why do people still care about C++ for kernel d (Score 1) 365

Considering that most new phones are being released at 2 GB+ configurations, I care less and less about 'small embedded systems that are becoming more and more niche and obscure'. Sure memory optimization is good, but when resources are short GC's work harder and more often. If anything embedded systems are suited for GC language runtimes just fine, but they waste more CPU cyles for the privilage. The advantage with GC runtimes being that you don't get memory leaks (in the C sense of never being able to reclaim the allocated ram except for restarting the app, sure people can hold ram in allocated by forgotten places, but that's nothing specific to GC runtimes).

Comment Re:I'm glad SOMEBODY finally said this (Score 1) 227

The difference being that tech is VERY in demand and introducing anyone with a pulse (including those that aren't fond if it as a career) is a good at filling back-end need. Forgetting the argument that these people are less likely to be what we would call your typical programmers (people have said that for decades, so nothing new there), having targetted enticements for people to enter a given field that is under-served isn't a bad thing.

Comment Re: It's not feminism at this point. (Score 1) 724

From an objective setting, all opinions are equal, though truth (objective truth) may be closer represented by one side or another. But, since we're all subjective beings, all opinions are intrinsically equal. One's opinion of will always be weighted higher than those given by others when considering an anonymous setting like internet chat boards suck as slashdot.

Specifically to my note, saying that candy crush isn't a game is like saying hop scotch or hoola hoop aren't games either. Why not say Call of Duty isn't a game, its a killing simulator. All these terms are subjectivly asserted by people, and the fact that multiple people differ in terms of their meaning is nothing new. Everyone is welcome to their opinion, and in a case like this, probably everyone is right (in their own mind).

Comment Re:Dear Intel (Score 1) 724

As someone who's played games since the NES, blah blah blah and still invests hundreds of dollars every few years on updated gaming rigs, I could give a flying fuck about what someone says about anti-social troglodites who deserve all the bad press that they get. I'm not happy that I've been lumped in with 'all the crap' personalities that go along with it, but fuck it. Its an editorial and maybe not a specifically good one. I ignore them and read meaty articles. If a site doesn't have good meaty articles on things that I care about, I move on. I don't bitch and whine and force boycott ads so that others who may very well enjoy the site are deprived because they financially incentivise it.

I hate fox news, and I think they're a bunch of idiot blow hards. Do I go to their advertisers mass boycott style to have their 'right' to talk about idotic subnects pulled from the airs? No, let them have their platform, because if we start pulling down all the platforms, there won't be any left that you agree with either.

Comment Re:Hardware isn't Progressing (Score 2) 554

Or more relavantly, you're not utilizing any more performance out of your computer to improve your productivity (or enjoyment factor) and you are right now. Much of this is the shifting of complexity into online services. If you take away the internet, your computer becomes significantly worse than it was. Google Maps pretty much killed every desktop mapping software. Desktop mapping software could have been wasting those countless cycles running them, but instead Google does the heavy lifting for the benefit of allowing your PC to sit mostly idle. See countless other examples. Once you stop needing computing cycles locally, why would you upgrade your system (you being anyone/company/institution)?

That said as an avid gamer, I still upgrade my video card every couple years to the best mid-range option I can justify because I do enjoy my toys, but its a luxury and serves little productivity boost. As a company, the only significant justifications for upgrades are TCO, retention, and reducing drag on business process.

- TCO is obvious, cheaper is better.
- Rentention is basically: If I upgrade this PC to "some better configuration", will my workforce be more likely to stay with the company. Its a concept that business planners basically never care about, and only begrudgingly accept when managers come to them crying about lost resources.
- Business process drag is another sore spot which businesses often do care about, but can never justify cost wise (because it generally costs a small fortune to do). Getting better software / hardware services to better serve your changing business is great, but it also costs a lot of dollars. So much, that a VERY well presented business plan has to sell it. This is also why COBOL mainframes walk the earth to this day. Why upgrade when what we have now is 'good enough' and the upgrade costs at the very least several million dollars?

Comment Or the more apt reason (Score 3, Insightful) 554

There's no reason why an OS needs to be any larger than it is. Let the market add value to a cornerstone product. There's no reason that the Linux kernel should ever take up a gig of ram because, hey lets throw more boiler plate into it.

Microsoft has one job with Windows, and that's to make the best application shell possible for almost every possible desktop need. I think they've done a pretty good job at it, though they've fucked their UI core so badly time and time again, it feels like they're just re-arranging chairs to justify the upgrade cost.

Comment Re:Incorrect, and Perfect Example (Score 1) 724

Crap, you mean a news outlet reported on tangentally related gaming news during a period of very low gaming relavant news? Say it isn't so!

Here's a rule of news:
1. Find stories to report on
2. Filter 'best' stories to the top
3. Report on 'best' stories
4. Goto 1

If there's a very low number of stories, it doesn't matter how many crap stories there are, they'll report them if there's nothing better.

I have no context on this whole gamergate thing, and quite frankly my belief as a gamer is that the 'slashot gamer' are about the most ridiculously defensive segment of slashdot there is; They're even more defensive than Apple appologists, which is saying A LOT. Just shut up and play games.

Comment Re:its all about salaries (Score 2) 59

You are half right, but utterly delusional for the rest.

An increase in competent available programmers will surely drive down the salaries of developers. Look at game dev's. They're often payed significantly less and work them dry because game companies know there will always be the next great fool to jump into the deep and and work then next set of recruits dry. With greater supply comes less demand, and ultimately that's the start and end to the discussion. There's no need to over-describe your nefarious shitty code problem. If we had more talented people being channeled into our in-demand industry vs. another program that may already be in over-supply, then its a win for all.

From my personal experience in Canada, I'm seeing soo many kids churning through schools from grad programs that are essentially guaranteed to find no jobs at the end. These kids have been deluded or coerced into thinking that if I wanted to be a -whatever-, then that's the career path they take. Currently, about half of them end up in the service industry or other 'underemployed' positions and many will never leave it. Many, if not most could be perfectly employable in fields that are actually in demand (like IT/programming).

My friend is 30 and has jumped around careers. First he entered a chef's program (mostly because he had lousy high school grades and his family was poor) and was a professional cook for lets say 5 years? Then he decided that being the bottom end of a restaurant was not where he wanted to end his time, so he had an opportinuty to travel with some friends, and ended up being an English language teacher in China and Korea for a couple years. This was lousy money, but at least it allowed him to travel to interesting places. When he came home, he realized that cooking or teaching wasn't cutting it, so knowing a lot of nerds (but not really being one) he took non-university level technology development for hardware engineering and software development. It was something that really challenged him intellectually in a positive way, and he ended up getting top marks, finding a job the day he left, and loving a much more satisfying lifestyle than the had previously. Now imagine if my friend had -found- his drive for technology much earlier. His road to success could've been years shorter and it would be a net gain for the economy as a whole.

Comment Re:Slashdot comments indicative of the problem (Score 3, Insightful) 1262

Blame is a poor choice of words, but there are definitely activities that cause your probability of being the victim of crime to improve dramatically. If I walked down Harlem yelling racial slurs, I'd have a better chance of getting shanked or shot than say the middle of Austria where'd they just think you're nuts and lock you in an assylum.

I'm not saying its right or not, but life choices can and do lead to consequences. Do we want to live in a better society where women don't feel afraid to walk down the street at night? Absolutely. Are we there yet now? Not for most of the world. So to -blame- a woman for doing what she should be entitled to do like any man can do is wrong, but surely she puts herself in greater jeopardy for creepers and assholes, absolutely.

Comment Redhat is Great (Score 1) 232

When I had a choice in Linux desktop, it was always Fedora because I was sued to it, and even with its bleeding edge slant, it rarely fell over with updates even with some third party repos in my mix. That was from Fedora 1 though like 16? They're up to 20 now so I have some catching up to do!

I don't know if anyone's mentioned that Redhat owns JBoss and all the tools and technologies around that which are very popular in the enterprise development markets. When I think of Redhat, I see a company:

1. Does server-side well for everything except for microsoft centric computing needs
2. Struggling to get into cloud computing (not so well)
3. Token support for Linux desktops which is fine for the not-so-large revenue market that it entails

Comment Re:New rapid release cycle? (Score 1) 251

When the latest and greatest OS can dymanically update itself to the latest and greatest while still being 100% compatible with the giant hodge-podge of software and hardware required in a large company, then by all means 'business people' will flock to it. If it makes a company's life easier SURE. The problem is they aren't. No company remains as compatible with the exisitng corporate networks de-jour as Microsoft. Some of that is very very on purpose making their own tech hostile to others. That's not the point. The point is OSX, Linux, BSD, QNX, ChromeOS, etc.. are all LESS suitable for corporate operations, and unless you have an extreemely cavaleer IT VP, you won't be moving any time soon.

Its VERY costly to change processes and software mid-stream unless there's a good value proposition. Windows only dominates today because *NIX and Mainframe price points were just so significantly higher than PC commodity servers (with the benefit of integrating MUCH better with them). Like it or not, unless the TCO of alternatives drops significantly lower than Windows, don't expect the mass exodus.

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