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Comment: Re:In other words (Score 1) 450

by 4e617474 (#35336718) Attached to: Apple in Talks to Improve Sound Quality of Music Downloads
Vinyl had a problem with static - dust and crap would get attracted to the disk, then stick to the needle. CD's had no issue remotely like that. What they did, however, have was a surface that needed to be clean to the point that the reflective properties of human fingerprints could be an issue, as could any scratch made by a passing strand of lint. They probably re-packaged every "anti-static album wipe" as a "lint-free CD cleaning cloth". Now see how many times you can rub your fingers across the surface of a CD and wipe it off with your shirt before it doesn't sound as good as your friend's what with the laser hitting random parts of the CD and the player getting so confused about it's time index and current audio track that it won't let you advance or rewind. You know, subtle audiophile stuff.

Comment: Re:News Flash: Apple limits app store! (Score 1) 664

by 4e617474 (#31864268) Attached to: Apple Blocks Cartoonist From App Store
It also really matters on a device that doesn't have Flash. Flash is bad enough when it's up and running and serving you obnoxious ads and opening security holes on your system. The worst is that with its near monopoly, when you take it away, then someone says "Will you publish my app?", often times they're asking "Will you permit my content to be seen on the Internet when using your platform?" You can see Fiore's cartoons on Salon.com on your desktop/notebook/netbook. If Salon.com wanted to serve you their Flash content in general on an iWhatever, they'd need to publish an app. And apply to the store. And answer for the fact that Fiore is the least of the ridicule of public figures that they engage in. The devices that a lot of people will adopt as a primary means of "accessing the Internet" will display content that web site operators can publish any damn way they want using text, photos, and Quicktime media formats, and content that Apple's willing to have its name associated with using anything else.

Comment: Wait, what? (Score 1) 131

by 4e617474 (#30679638) Attached to: Is Getting Acquired Good For FOSS Projects?

Novell, who had Microsoft sell their distro on the premise that Microsoft owned hunks of Linux is one of the last bastions of Open Source? Google gives lots of code away and sponsors events to get student developers to cut their teeth writing for Open Source projects, and it's scary that they're big bad proprietary guys getting their "commercial hooks deeper into" their own invention? And somehow the article title is the name of a Rod Stewart song about people judging the town tramp?!?!?!?!?!? Jeesh. Things are murky enough without this guy trying to make it worse in hopes you keep coming back for the part where he sorts it all out for you.

Comment: Re:Just in time for Chrome OS (Score 1) 600

by 4e617474 (#30279542) Attached to: Ethics of Releasing Non-Malicious Linux Malware?

the way it persists itself in autostart is really nasty,

Which simply shows that the lack of Linux malware isn't because Linux is somehow magically superior, but simply because nobody has taken the time to write any...

Um, no. It doesn't show shit. Not unless he explains that "the way it persists itself in autostart" is something harder to rectify than the readily-editable plain text files he listed. I've known IT professionals who couldn't come up with a way to salvage a machine hit by a "ransom note" trojan. Hell, at least once Sophos has decided it was easier to crack the password than provide cleaning instructions. Windows has lots and lots of places to hide files that start when you boot and log in, built in features for disabling everything you might do to fix a problem (so that your office peons don't do anything "dangerous"), and no way to get at the system without loading everything that's configured to load - well, almost no way. You can edit the Windows registry from a Linux CD. I'm sure that's totally easier than vi /etc/crontab

OP, yes, it's unethical to release what you have. No one's going to thank you for choosing a worthy cause to donate their hijacked bandwidth and CPU cycles to. And unless you're the guy behind this, you didn't get there first and that thing you threw together in a week won't be giving qualified "security people" any revelations. If Linux wants to lay claim to Unix's heritage, those guys were decades behind the first people to exploit stupid security blunders. Stop having a chip on your shoulder about people who didn't put two and two together when they saw "Hardening Linux" on the shelf at the bookstore. Those aren't sysadmins who are going to be saved from their ignorance when "security people" - desperate for a way to tangibly illustrate that the worst-configured systems can be pwned - get your toolkit like manna from heaven.

Comment: Re:Has anyone been able to see the report? (Score 1) 314

by 4e617474 (#30278590) Attached to: Dell Defect Turning 2.2GHz CPU Into 100MHz CPU?
It's not necessarily that 60C is a panic value in and of itself. Say you want to shoot for 50 on average, so you start slowing things down a little at 55. Throttle down a conservative 5% and watch for it to level off. If it had just spontaneously hit 56C, you'd be happy to throttle it back by 10% - 90% of max speed - except you just throttled it back and it went up a degree, so throttle it back by 15%. 57C - ok, you've throttled by a "heightened alert" percentage AND the temperature delta is still positive. By the time you're at 59C, throttling is starting to look like a complete failure - either you've been pegging the CPU forever, you're operating at an out of spec environmental temperature/ventilation condition, or the cooling situation isn't what it should be.

Comment: Re:Fucking moronic (Score 1) 212

by 4e617474 (#30179718) Attached to: New York State Testing Emergency Alerts Over Gaming Networks
This is a really well thought-out scenario, but I think choosing nuclear war as an example hurt your argument in places. I know, I know, that was what the system was designed for. But you have to admit, it would still interest the people who didn't personally have to hide in their fridges.

Comment: De Rigeur - Niche, Same as Always (Score 1) 857

by 4e617474 (#29486877) Attached to: Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill &mdash; Does It Matter?
Cursive writing will persist as a specialty skill for those of a historical or artistic bent. My mother did the most beautiful calligraphy when I was growing up, and it was already fading fast with increasingly cheap typewriters. Some people are still learning it, to show off at the Renn Faire. People shoot bows and arrows, but not because it's a way to survive like it used to be.

Comment: Re:Um, I'm doubtful (Score 1) 362

by 4e617474 (#29268005) Attached to: US Call-Center Jobs &mdash; That Pay $100K a Year

...what pisses most people off is that the offshore phone monkeys are completely unintelligible.

That's not quite all there is to it. The phone monkeys are also working off a script. And probably haven't been working at that job long enough to learn anything else about what you'd like somebody to figure out. They might even be fielding calls as an "outsource support vendor" to too many companies at the same time to learn anything more. Your odds of talking to a subject matter expert are approximately zero. Their job is not to be good, their job is to cost less than somebody good. Speaking a mashed up creole version of the language in which they have titular fluency is just adding insult to injury a lot of the time.

Comment: Re:That is your job. (Score 1) 474

by 4e617474 (#28371881) Attached to: Getting Beyond the Helldesk

Um. If you are on the helpdesk - unjamming printers and unfreezing outlook is your job. Your work isn't being interrupted every five minutes, but rather you are being called on to do your job every five minutes.

There are as many different sets of roles for helpdesk employee as there are helpdesks. I work at a helpdesk and it is very much an interruption to my job if someone comes to me with any of the more mundane issues the desk as a whole handles. Analyzing trouble tickets for trend analysis, developing workarounds to new defects, trying to automate those workarounds so that we don't have 800 sites all calling us about the same thing, updating the knowledge base, evaluating new hardware and software releases (yes, it's some other department's job to do that first, but they like to bury things in 50-page release notes where people have to call the helpdesk to accomplish something basic, forgetting that that's the short definition of "defect"), writing database front-ends so that we don't have to have the frontline poking around in places we'd rather they wouldn't, and I can't even begin to describe the variety of conference calls I manage to get roped into. Even in the frontline of a generic helpdesk at a non-technology outfit he could easily have one set of responsibilities that involves someone running up to him and telling him to drop everything, and another that involves having something engaging, stimulating, and remotely resembling why he got into technology in the first place that he's being asked to drop. Oh, and RTF summary again - do you really think that web developers, dba's, and database architects get asked literally every five minutes to handle something stupid and boring without ever getting a few hours to sink their teeth into a task?

IT is a support function

Um, no. The people who design and implement the things that later get supported are also working in IT.

Comment: Re:It's Not Just Any Beaurocracy (Score 2, Insightful) 406

by 4e617474 (#28209907) Attached to: Hospital Turns Away Ambulances When Computers Go Down

If you have an issue that could create serious problems if you were given the wrong drugs, etc., you should get a medic-alert bracelet or similar with the information.

Do you have a blood type other than AB positive, and if so, do you have this information on a medic-alert bracelet? There's information that you expect to have in advance (you're right, it doesn't amount to much), information you gather and have to make note of (I give him drug X, so don't give him drug Y, it won't mix, and by the way, he says he's diabetic), information that has to get to and from other parts of the hospital (uh yeah, his potassium was high when he came in, you might want to take him off that banana bag). We don't know what was happening in that ER, what challenges they worked their way through for a day, how many people they turned away exactly between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M., or how badly they needed to be seen (I've had two ambulance rides and zero life-threatening medical emergencies myself). The same guy who blogged that this was "more about billing than patient care" without backing up that assertion in any way links to his own earlier post where he talks about what "an obvious slam dunk" Electronic Health Records are, because it will result in "tens of thousands of lives saved annually in the US alone". My point is that people (I don't mean people like yourself who make sensible points, swillden) who don't know the story - and you still don't when you RTFA - shouldn't be going "OMG! You turn amboolance away 2 catch up on teh paperwork? Me know wuld hav dun that!" should remember the old adage "Nothing's impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."

You're already carrying the sphere!