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Comment Re:Er...what exodus? (Score 1) 628

Exodus to mobile devices like tablets and smart phones. It's no secret the PC industry is losing customers as your average non-techie is able to do almost everything they want on a tablet instead of some beige box in the corner of a downstairs den.

I get this kind of blank stare from colleagues at the office too. Let's face it, yes there are many things PC's can do that tablets don't, but those things are being done less and less by the average device buyer. Us techno-literates are a minority. It's myopic to think that just because we need PC's, everyone else does too.

Sorry, I know this wasn't the debate your comment was necessarily aimed at, but it's relevant..

Comment Re:Go Arch (Score 3, Interesting) 380

I actually find pacman to be a little better than apt/aptitude. Additionally, dealing with packages not in the standard repos tends to be a better experience in Arch.

On the flip side of the coin though, Arch feels a bit like Gentoo at times in that some tasks can require a bit of manual intervention.

Plusses and minuses to both I suppose.

Comment Re:Go Arch (Score 3, Insightful) 380

I'll admit that systemd has a learning curve as some commands don't have equivalents, but after a couple of days of having to google for the right commands, I don't think its as bad as its made out to be (most likely by those who aren't willing to atleast try to use it for an extended period of time).

IMHO, it seems to be a "simple but limited" vs "complex and powerful" argument. I also find switching distros solely because of the init system to be a little much. Do yourself a favor and at least attempt to learn the regularly used systemd commands with an open mind. You may find its not nearly as bad as you think.

Comment Re:Aquisition of evidence (Score 5, Interesting) 218

I don't disagree that all pertinent evidence should be gathered to prove or disprove a case, but the correct course of action here is for the judge to issue a warrant to the respective carriers/sites for the necessary information. Asking for someones passwords for evidence is like asking for someone's ATM PIN code to get their financial records.

Comment Re:Experience experience experience (Score 1) 630

If you want to get those nice jobs my advice is to pimp yourself out contracting for 2 years. The work is hard and the pay is mediocre at best but your contacts get HUGE afterwards when your non compete agreement ends and you can make bank. After that only hte most beaucratic companies will weed you out on that piece of paper.

+1

I took a consulting job with a medium sized services firm when i first moved into a new town and ended up gaining an insane amount of product experience and got to know hundreds of people. After about 4 years of consulting, the amount of effort got old and i took a server job for a company that was happy to grab me quickly (after taking one look at my resume and having a good interview). That job paid me almost double the job that immediately preceded the consulting experience.

Comment Re:Important note about nvidia/rpmfusion and F16 (Score 1) 125

I didn't get the warning in time and upgraded. Turns out I'm affected and hadn't even nailed down the issue until I saw your post. It not HORRIBLE per se, but it is mildly annoying. It manifests itself as a momentary system lock up, kind of like what happens when you run out of RAM and start swapping to disk. It's not continuous, there are periods of heavy occurrance, and of light occurrance.

Should be fixed soon it sounds like. It's tolerable for that period of time.

Comment Shyeaaa.. when pigs fly... (Score 2) 575

Though I'm against vigilante justice, I certainly agree with their motives.

HOWEVER.... Am I the only one who thinks Anon won't have much success? The worst they could probably do hack some user accounts. If they think DDOS'ing a site with the infrastructure to handle hundreds of millions of users is going to work with a bot net made up of a few hundred thousand machines, then they're probably in for a surprise. Heck didn't they already try and fail with Amazon?

Or was that Lulzsec? I get those two confused all the time.

Comment Re:Why does encryption never work? (Score 2) 208

The encryption itself is solid. What falls most of the time is the specific implementation. Say for example I made the choice to encrypt my hard drive but didn't use an already baked system like Ubuntu's home drive encryption. Instead I decided to do it by hand and code my own pre-boot initramfs to automatically handle decryption by hashing some hardware specific identifier from the bios. Except that since I'm not a security expert, I made some foolish coding error which allowed the hash to be intercepted or easily guessed. Then some hacker comes along, figures it out and now has full access to my encrypted data.

In this case the encryption itself is sound, and wasn't cracked, instead my shotty coding and/or lack of solid security knowledge was exploited. 9 times out of 10 this seems to be the case when encryption is defeated (brute forcing aside of course).

To answer your question though, why should you trust HTTPS? I'd say that you can never be 100% sure, but HTTPS has been around long enough to have been well tested by by people who rely on it being solid (banks, etc) that you're probably pretty safe. Rest assured that if HTTPS's implementation of encryption were cracked, it'd be news, and you'd know (I assume).

Comment Yeaahhh, it was all the tool's fault. Suuure.. (Score 0, Redundant) 264

I like how this is all a robot's fault. As if these dozen robots are all flying around the busted well using an AI from the future to do work autonomously.

How about we tell it like it is. Some dude/dudette piloting an underwater submersible accidentally bumped into the well and did damage, and that damage required uncapping the well to fix.

More incompetence from the folks at BP. Nice spin job though.

Disclaimer: I harbor no hostility towards the pilot. It's BP who continuously makes bad decisions about how to handle a situation (such as putting too many bots in the water, or having them piloted by people not skilled enough to handle the situation) and the covers it up by blaming something else.

Sheesh.

Comment Re:Stop with the "record number of bugs fixed" ple (Score 2, Insightful) 145

This might be a perspective thing, but I read "Company X has patched a record number of security holes" as a negative thing, not as something the OP or company X is reporting to gloat about. I've taken the liberty of reading the links by the OP (shocking, I know), and didn't find any of them to really be coming across as something that anyone is looking for a pat on that back for (and for the record, I didn't see an official comment from Apple on their "record patch job").

Fundamentally, you're right though. It'd be nice if companies could make flawless products, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and when any company addresses a record number of fixes to a product's flaws, I see no reason why it shouldn't make the news. Granted, some fanboys will try and spin it into a positive of some kind, but that's not really shocking and we all know how trustworthy fanboys are.

My $0.02.

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