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Comment: Hosting Matters (Score 1) 456

by Emnar (#31224962) Attached to: Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company?

...so I use Hosting Matters. Been using them for years, they're cheap, provide MySQL and cpanel access, sftp, and ssh (if you ask). Their rates are reasonable, and -- bonus -- every time I've filed a help ticket, I've gotten a response in hours*, and it's always been knowledgeable.

*Once it took 12 hours (essentially overnight) and the support rep apologized for taking so long.

Comment: Re:Speaking of tags... (Score 1) 4

by plover (#31018726) Attached to: The first rule of Slashdot...

I think there's an actual Slashdot preference setting that hides tags.

I honestly don't know any more, I have so many ad blockers, script blockers, greasemonkey scripts, firefox extensions, CSS modifiers, and other stuff filtering down every site I really couldn't tell you which particular one shut off the damn tags.

Comment: Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 353

by pydev (#31018612) Attached to: Rumor — AT&T Losing iPhone Exclusivity Next Week

Android has limited multitasking that isn't terribly intuitive to use

You don't "use" multitasking on Android at all; it's completely transparent to the user, since all activities can be fully stopped and resumed.

Yet all I hear on /. is "iPhone, Android, iPhone, Android" ALL FRACKING DAY LONG. It's like WebOS isn't even on your radar,

I tried WebOS and I like neither the hardware, nor the software, nor the programming model. In addition, it looks to me like the company is going to die. Why would I care about WebOS?

Education

Indian CEO Says Most US Tech Grads "Unemployable" 1144

Posted by kdawson
from the you-stereotype-i-draw-distinctions dept.
theodp writes "When questioned about his firm's US hiring, Information Week reports that Vineet Nayar, the CEO of the Indian outsourcing giant HCL Technologies, showed he can stereotype with the best of them, telling an audience in NYC that most American tech grads are 'unemployable.' Explaining that Americans are far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology, the HCL chief added that most Americans are just too expensive to train. HCL, which was reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft last April, gets a personal thumbs-up from Steve Ballmer for 'walking the extra mile.' Ballmer was busy last week pitching more H-1B visas as the cure for America's job ills at The National Summit."

Comment: Re:1. Upload to Wikileaks with Xerobank 2. Link to (Score 4, Informative) 471

by Emnar (#27974691) Attached to: Hosting a Highly Inflammatory Document?

Depending on how important/inflammable this document is, I might look into buying a cheap 20GB laptop hard drive, installing ubuntu, going to a star bucks, doing the above and then "disposing" of the drive and all media so that there are no questions.

For this to work you would also have to change your wireless interface's Ethernet MAC (hardware) address. By default this is a vendor-specific code that is probably unique enough that it could be used to link you to the upload. This would require that (a) the coffee shop kept some kind of long-term logging on their wireless device, (b) the authorities were able to trace the upload to the coffee shop, and (c) the police had some kind of suspicion of you already. All are improbable, but none are impossible.

Most wireless cards will let you change the hardware address. I'll leave instructions for how to do that to the enterprising googler.

The alternative is to use a cheap throwaway laptop with wireless, or a disposable wireless ethernet card.

(Yes, it's paranoid, but so is the original question.)

Comment: Re:3 to 3000 percent? (Score 2, Informative) 292

by Emnar (#27508575) Attached to: MS Researchers Call Moving Server Storage To SSDs a Bad Idea

Enterprise tape has a proven 20-year shelf life, no HDD does.

That may be, but I've lost track of the number of times (as a storage engineer) that I've seen tape backups go bad. Even "enterprise-quality" tapes. I think the claims don't match the reality.

Hard drives die too, but in the case of drive storage (1) it's a lot easier to verify your backups on a periodic basis, like every month; and (2) you can suffer a failure or two (depending on your RAID setup -- most people wouldn't run anything more than RAID-5 for backups) and react accordingly to preserve the data in full.

Of course, if you're really serious about your backups, you back up to disk and THEN offload to tapes and keep those offsite.

The Internet

South Korea Joins the "Three Strikes" Ranks 278

Posted by kdawson
from the judge-and-jury dept.
Glyn Moody writes "For years, the content industries having been trying to get laws passed that would stop people sharing files. For years they failed. Then they came up with the 'three strikes and you're out' idea — and it is starting to be put into law around the world. First we had France, followed by countries like Italy, Ireland — and now South Korea: 'On March 3, 2009, the National Assembly's Committee on Culture, Sports, Tourism, Broadcasting & Communications (CCSTB&C) passed a bill to revise the Copyright Law. The bill includes the so called, "three strikes out" or "graduated response" provision.' Why has the 'three strikes' idea caught on where others have failed? And what is the best way to stop it spreading further?"

Comment: Re:without any humans ever having been involved (Score 5, Informative) 898

by Emnar (#26193027) Attached to: Using Speed Cameras To Send Tickets To Your Enemies

The legislators have thought of that. It's an infraction, rather than a misdemeanor, so it's an administrative fine -- it goes on your driving record, but not your criminal record.

Because it's a criminal charge, you aren't given the right to face your accuser.

It's a perversion of justice for the profit of the state, but right now the judges let it pass constitutional muster.

Comment: The console will evolve the RTS (Score 2, Interesting) 45

by Emnar (#25801949) Attached to: New Details On <em>Halo Wars</em>

Or at least, I hope it will.

I've been playing RTS's off and on since C&C and Warcraft (the original), and I've always had a love/hate relationship with them. I love the strategy and tactics of the genre, but the whole concept of "micro" and continuously abysmal unit AI just infuriates me.

For instance, in the dominant RTS paradigm, if I have a group of units standing in a group in my base, I get two choices: leave them in "free acting" mode, where if they're attacked by some plinker my opponent sends, they'll rush headlong into whatever danger lurks outside the base, outside the range of my fortifications; or they can stand there in "hold" mode, and get picked off impassively by ranged enemy units as their mates stand around watching them bleed.

Why can't I tell them to automatically scatter and get behind fortifications to fight back? Or maybe retreat to draw the enemy into range of my big, immobile guns/cannons/wizards/what have you?

Since micro is so much harder on a console than a PC, my hope is that console RTS developers will address some of these issues, to reduce the frustration of unit management.

Optimism is the content of small men in high places. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack Up"

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