Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: tfa says carry-on, one-way (Score 1) 349

Yup. When my last company was a fledgling and we had more time than money, I was flying from Austin to Boston (through Dallas) and it saved several hundred dollars for my coworker to hop a SWA flight from Dallas to Austin and then join me on the AUS-DFW-BOS trip. Really stupid, and yes he simply got off the plane in Dallas on the way back.

Comment Re:Luggage? (Score 2, Interesting) 349

I would like to fly Delta leaving my destination, but Southwest on my return. Can't do that with a round trip purchase, despite the availability of flights! Absolute bullshit!

How is that bullshit? You want to buy two different things from two totally different merchants!

That's like complaining that you want to get a Chipotle burrito for lunch and an In&Out burger for dinner and its bullshit that you can't do that with a single transaction.

Comment Re:MS has been late to every recent tech movement (Score 2) 421

Someone as simple as YouTube could probably handle that, but for any complex interactions I'll be damned if I'm going to take my time statefully rendering HTML pages on the server (about the most expensive and restrictive operations you can do) just for the truly minute fraction of one percent that won't trust their browsers to execute dynamic code in a nice secure sandbox. Sorry, but I'm with those guys now. You're gonna need a lot of rakes.

Comment Re:MS has been late to every recent tech movement (Score 1) 421

Almost everything but for an easy kill let's talk about real clustering that f'n works. MySQL, even with the 3rd party solutions out there (and I've tried many of them) doesn't get close to Oracle for a truly vertical and horizontal multi-datacenter cluster.

If you don't need that, MySQL is decent, although at least recently was still lacking in simple things like online index creation (adding an index to a table with hundreds of millions of rows shouldn't lock the table for hours, mmmkay?). Sure, there are very elaborate workarounds involving machine failovers, but there shouldn't have to be.

Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 4, Informative) 421

Its not the language, its the libraries, the conventions, the external resources. I picked up Ruby and Python, Node and even dusted off my PHP chops to write some modules for a client a few months ago. It wasn't hard, but I spent 20% of my time on the language, 50% figuring out what libraries to use, and another 30% making damn sure that my novice attempts were at least idiomatic and didn't come across as novice (including having them vetted by more seasoned users).

Anyone can write a for() loop in anything. Knowing the massive standard libraries for a language well enough to leverage them (for example, in Java I still see people dragging in external Base64 implementations that haven't been needed in a decade but once were) takes far, far longer.

I want people to write clean code that will be well understood and maintainable by others 5 years from now, not someone who just figures out how to get code to compile.

Comment Re:America, land of the free... (Score 1) 720

In the US, the employer probably has liability insurance that will pay most of the money. I would guess the liability insurance company probably requires the employer not to hire felons -- or charges a much higher premium to employers who hire felons.

Liability insurance gets even worse than that. If you believe that your accuser doesn't have a case but the insurance company is willing to settle, then if you go ahead and defend yourself you will have no protection if you lose. If you choose to settle because of this (most do) then your insurer gets to raise your rates because you've had a settlement against you. I know that's the way it is in the medical field and have seen nothing to indicate anything different anywhere else.

Comment Re:America, land of the free... (Score 1) 720

I'm actually a permanent resident here in the US. It doesn't bug me that much that I don't get to vote for President and other federal offices, but everywhere from there on down just uses that privilege to define their own. It really makes no sense to me that after living ni a city for over a decade I can't have a voice in who's elected to the truly local position of dogcatcher :)

Comment Re: Get the facts first (Score 1) 250

Sorry, of you can't see that when Real advertises that the DRMed music you buy from them will play on an iPod without problem, Apple will have to make sure it does - then you are obviously a fanboy.

So if Apple advertises that apps written for OS X will run on Windows, its suddenly Microsoft's fault if they don't? Or are you saying that once someone's found a bug in your system and written an exploit for it that you should be required to never again patch that bug?

There would be a process in which your scenario would have worked by the way - Real could have chosen to license FairPlay, at which point they would have been able to claim exactly that and be backed up by their contract with Apple. They didn't.

Comment Re:The real conspiracy... (Score 1) 161

Of course, to be able to read that "ecological" ebook, you just need to extract and rape the planet of non-renewable rare metals so you can manufacture the various device display and electronics components...

Its a crying shame that most software developers don't use computers. Then we'd be able to solve that problem "for free" as they say. Oh, well...

Comment Re:... Everything? (Score 2) 528

People blame silly decisions on "PCI" all the time as well. I'm not a QSA but I do a lot of work in payments and took my last small company through PA-DSS level 1, so I've got some background there.

Having said that, anyone who touches a credit card should generally be in a PCI scope - even if you're a small mom-n-pop bookstore that takes Stripe. The worst abuse that I've seen though is trying to convince people that they should go all the way to "level one" compliance. The levels are based on your processing volume, with 4 being the lowest and 1 the highest. There's a self-abasement questionnaire, level 4 takes about 15 minutes, 2 takes all of 30 minutes (each with a truly trivial systems scan if you're doing work on the internet). Level 1, on the other hand, is designed for people staggering amounts of money and requires expensive on-site audits.

Like premium gas, there's no reason to level up beyond where you need to be except for silly marketing purposes - yet more and more people who trust their consultant advisors are doing so, because its a relatively easy way for consultants to make bank.

Comment Re:Make the business case (Score 2) 247

Make the case that your solution is cheaper than the existing solution if it is in fact cheaper.

It may not be. Don't assume that everyone who came before you is an idiot - they may well have ended up where they are now due to a series of compromises to work around issues that you know nothing about. Why not ask someone who's been involved in the security decisions for a few years why things are the way that they are first?

Comment Re:Not surprising at all. (Score 0, Troll) 250

THAT is why many people avoid Apple like the plague. They've lost their lead, had their fun and are now fighting fowl.

Yup. Random mostly-unsubstantiated rumors that totally happened to a friend of your cousin's roommate are indeed why many people avoid Apple products. Others know that things like this - including such goodies as the "if you hold it the wrong way it dies," issue - are totally overblown if not completely fictional.

An awful lot of people put an awful lot of music on their iPods that wasn't bought from Apple. It all basically worked. The plural of anecdote may not really be data, but in a lot of ways its far more trustworthy than random anti-Apple stories coming out of the woodwork.

Comment Re:So... wait until you get home...? (Score 1) 307

If they didn't keep your transaction open, they wouldn't be able to charge you for damage or incidentals. It's why hotels require credit cards for bookings in the first place. Usually they haven't seen your room when you check out.

Unless they saved the credit card number, either directly or through vaulting at their provider. Both of those are easy and common, and the second one is even safe (since it only allows that particular merchant to charge the card at will, it doesn't appeal to thieves like an actual credit card number would).

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Working...