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Comment Re:Thanks to (Score -1) 369

people still read slashdot? not even sure why I'm on here right now. hint; I didn't leave because of AC, I left because of the technical inferiority of the platform and the declining relevance of the articles. I liked usenet. I'm even acquaintances with Brian Kantor. I hate web forums. Fuck the web. The web is good for documents. All this ajax web 2.0 shit, fuck it right in the ear. But everybody uses is so I can choose to live under a rock or I can bite the bullet and get on the web. But reddit. kicks. your. ass. up. and. and. down. I am so fucking sick if getting five lousy mod points doled out once in a blue moon which I almost never get the chance to use before they expire because I like to wait until I find an article that I have an informed opinion about. As this became an increasingly infrequent event, I stopped being able to usefully moderate, and I gave up and left. It kicks your ass in pretty much every other way too. To keep slashdot relevant would require a complete platform overhaul and significant revisions to the moderation system. AC trolls are just a symptom of a bigger problem; a shit platform and a shit moderation system.

Comment Re:Meaningless Bullshit (Score 1) 65

Maybe I'm in the minority here but in most of the shops I've worked in over the decades where the IT dept did a lot of programming most of the folks did both dev and ops although nobody called it devops back then. A pure-sysadmin in a large organization is basically a computer janitor. Without some dev skills you're not going to be able to automate anything hence you're going to be reduced to doing the chump work that somebody with dev skills has already automated. Literally "I will replace you with a small shell script" sort of stuff. So I don't know if devops is meaningless bullshit but I certainly don't think it's anything new or buzzworthy.

As a software dev I have no problem whatsoever doing ops as long as I'm never on call.

Comment Re:If you didn't RTFA "Blame Agile"! (Score 2) 618

That's true at a lot of software companies but it is almost certainly completely untrue when it comes to an embedded engine control unit at a major automotive manufacturer. That sort of development is typically slow, methodical, and rigorous, with extensive pre-release testing. And the team is probably pretty small, I doubt there are more than a dozen engineers working on that, and probably a handful of key guys write most of the code. And I can guarandamntee that their code churn is nothing like "millions of lines per minute", more like hundreds of lines per week in bursts, and even that slows down dramatically as release time approaches. Nothing happens without it being fully planned out and documented and signed off on by management and engineers alike in an engineering change request. To do otherwise would be a huge liability. Remember, facebook can't kill you, but a buggy ECU can.

Comment Re:30 cents... (Score 1) 179

I have a Chinese pulse oximeter. It's completely worthless as a pulse oximeter although it has a very nice OLED display. I can hold my breath for a minute and get tunnel vision without it showing any drop in my blood O2 concentration. I know this is crap because I've shared a hospital room overnight with a guy with really bad sleep apnea who was setting off his O2 alarm every 30 minutes as he entered a deep sleep phase, stopped breathing for 20 seconds, and his O2 dropped to 80%. That was a long night.
Robotics

Volkswagen Factory Worker Killed By a Robot 342

m.alessandrini writes: A worker at a Volkswagen factory in Germany has died, after a robot grabbed him and crushed him against a metal plate. This is perhaps the first severe accident of this kind in a western factory, and is sparking debate about who is responsible for the accident, the man who was servicing the robot beyond its protection cage, or the robot's hardware/software developers who didn't put enough safety checks. Will this distinction be more and more important in the future, when robots will be more widespread?
The Military

US Bombs ISIS Command Center After Terrorist Posts Selfie Online 286

HughPickens.com writes: Brian Everstine writes at Air Force Times that U.S. intelligence officers were able to locate and bomb an Islamic State command center based on a photo and comments in social media. "The [airmen are] combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command," said Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command. "And in some social media, open forum, bragging about command and control capabilities for Da'esh, ISIL, And these guys go 'ah, we got an in.' So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three JDAMS take that entire building out. Through social media. It was a post on social media. Bombs on target in 22 hours."

Carlisle was careful to not go into great detail about the how the information was gathered and what additional effort went into targeting those bombs. It's easy to imagine that in addition to the information gleaned from the initial post that the Air Force used satellite and drone reconnaissance data. It's also possible that U.S. intelligence could have actively engaged with the original poster in order to draw out information. Attackers and researchers have shown time and time again that simply asking a target for information—either by posing as a trusted individual or using carefully created phishing attacks—works even better than fancy information-stealing digital attacks.

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