groman - Slashdot User

Comment Re:We need standards, good ones too. For Linux, to (Score 1) 558

by groman on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @12:43PM (#32016996) Attached to: The Mystery of the Mega-Selling Floppy Disk

As much as I like open source, I think that's a pretty bullshit argument. Most applications are not "following of basic standards that have been around forever (like POSIX)", and practically you will have much better luck if you find statically compiled binaries than some obscure source and spend a week just tracking down all the bug-for-bug compatible compiler versions, libraries, etc.

It's much easier to run a DOS 3 binary today then it is even to compile a simple C program something that includes

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 21, 2010 @03:56PM from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

MacBook's "Unremovable" Battery Easy To Remove 476

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @07:17PM from the just-unscrew-16-handy-screws dept.

Slatterz writes "Going just a bit further than your average unboxing, someone has stripped a new 17-inch Apple Macbook Pro to its component parts revealing one or two little surprises. The biggest of which is that the built-in battery is easily accessible, requiring the tinkerer to remove just the 13 Philips screws which hold the bottom cover in place, and the three tri-wing security screws which hold the battery in place."

Comment Re:No Idea what the techspecs are on this but (Score 1) 898

by groman on Sunday December 28, 2008 @02:04PM (#26250565) Attached to: First Look At Windows 7 Beta 1

This is not a reasonable argument. Nobody who has such an old CPU it doesn't support 64-bit has any business running Vista -- it will slower than a legless turtle stuck in a shoe(metric) and while Microsoft might stop selling Windows XP shortly, they certainly won't stop supporting it for quite a while. Microsoft should have not released 32-bit version of Vista.

VMware Promises Multiple OSs On One Cellphone 90

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 10, 2008 @01:28PM from the just-make-sure-i-can-strip-it-off-if-i-want dept.

superglaze writes to tell us that VMware has announced a large effort behind their Mobile Virtualization Platform, promising the possibility of multiple operating systems on mobile devices. "The company described MVP as a 'thin layer of software' that will be embedded in handsets and 'be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones.' Asked whether MVP would offer something different from the abstraction already provided by mobile Java, VMware's European product director Fredrik Sjostedt told ZDNet UK that MVP would require less recoding. 'If you want to have an application run on a Java-specific appliance, you need to code it for Java,' Sjostedt said. 'What we're introducing with MVP is an [embedded] abstraction layer below that, between the physical hardware and the software layer.'"

Comment Re:Population Density (Score 1) 425

by groman on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @09:20PM (#25477241) Attached to: Magnetic Levitating Trains Get Go-Ahead In Japan

Two thoughts on this. First, yeah, why do you guys do that? What is it about Americans that they want their towns to be so mindbogglingly inconvenient? I don't know about you, but I like to be able to, I don't know, pop out for some milk and fresh tomatoes, stroll down to the fountain where the pretty girls walk by, go for a coffee or a beer or an ice cream, perhaps even walk to work! This is supposed to be a democracy—why build such misery for yourselves?

It's not misery and it's not inconvenient. I don't want to live near businesses or other people, but I also don't want to give up the benefits of proximity -- so it becomes a balancing act. I live as far away from others while maintaining the basic required connection to the infrastructure (roads, sewers, electricity, broadband, stores, jobs, etc.) as I can afford.

It's not about being better than somebody, or even knowing that you are better. It's grasping at straws to maintain any semblance of autonomy and individualism (but not necessarily individuality). Why would I choose to deal with random strangers any more than I already have to?

Redesigning the Stop Sign 17

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday August 14, 2008 @12:14PM from the too-many-cooks dept.

Here's what happens when you let the Marketing department have everything they want. The email address for more information about stopping is a nice touch.

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