Farlan - Slashdot User

Comment: Think of it as breaking it (Score 1) 396

by Farlan on Monday August 16 2010, @10:27PM (#33271500) Attached to: How Can I Make Testing Software More Stimulating?

As a software analyst and a QA engineer, if you think of the software you write as if it were someone else's (preferably someone you know is a poor coder), test the software with the objective of breaking it, and finding those loopholes which will allow you to use the software in ways it wasn't designed to be used. It makes a very monotonous task so much more enjoyable.

Comment: SpiderOak (Score 1) 467

by Farlan on Friday August 06 2010, @03:43PM (#33167036) Attached to: Web-Based Private File Storage?

I can recommend SpiderOak. It is a fully encrypted web storage service, and the first 2GB are free! then its $10 a month for the first 100GB. I don't think you can beat that.

Comment: Derby (Score 2, Insightful) 215

by Farlan on Friday December 18 2009, @05:05PM (#30493140) Attached to: $25,000 of Communications Gear In a $500 Car

But can it crush cars?

Comment: tmnt (Score 1) 309

by Farlan on Wednesday September 02 2009, @03:52PM (#29290313) Attached to: All Humans Are Mutants, Say Scientists

I guess we'll have to wait a few million years for teenage mutant ninja turtles to walk the streets of NYC... Splinter may come earlier, have you seen the size of those rats in NYC?

Comment: Hacking (Score 4, Funny) 244

by Farlan on Sunday August 30 2009, @01:13PM (#29252563) Attached to: Personalized In-Game Advertising In Upcoming Titles

This may lead to a new generation of hackers: people who use their spare time to patch the games to remove those insidious ads. Should we call them adkers?

Comment: Customer Service (Score 1) 493

by Farlan on Tuesday August 18 2009, @12:50PM (#29107509) Attached to: Verizon Sued After Tech Punches Customer In Face

It appears that the verizon tech has got a case of the BOFH. -- on a side note, customer service these days leaves a lot to be desired...

Comment: Add it to coffee and.... (Score 1) 272

by Farlan on Friday August 14 2009, @03:34PM (#29069753) Attached to: Genetic Mutation Enables Less Sleep

I'll have a large with an extra dose of non-sleepy genes!

Comment: Took a PHD to figure this out? (Score 2) 137

by Farlan on Friday August 14 2009, @11:13AM (#29066005) Attached to: Facial Expressions Are "Not Global"

Anyone in the MMORPG world could've summarized this!

Comment: not really useful? (Score 1) 264

by Farlan on Monday August 10 2009, @02:42PM (#29014339) Attached to: New Company Seeks to Bring Semantic Context To Numbers

To me this doesnt look like theres a real need to do this. A lot of research has gone into getting a bunch of 0s and 1s organized in a way that can represent text. It appears counter-intuitive to go back to numbers... why dont they just do a wiki?

Software Glitch Leads To $23,148,855,308,184,500 Visa Charges 544

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 15 2009, @05:06PM
from the what's-the-grace-period-again dept.

Hmmm2000 writes "Recently several Visa card holders were, um, overcharged for certain purchases, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on a single charge. The company says it was due to a programming error, and that the problem has been corrected. What is interesting is that the amount charged actually reveals the type of programming error that caused the problem. 23,148,855,308,184,500.00 * 100 (I'm guessing this is how the number is actually stored) is 2314885530818450000. Convert 2314885530818450000 to hexadecimal, and you end up with 20 20 20 20 20 20 12 50. Most C/C++ programmers see the error now ... hex 20 is a space. So spaces were stuffed into a field where binary zero should have been."