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Comment: Re:Given two programmers (Score 1) 609

by galorin (#31608572) Attached to: Math Skills For Programmers &mdash; Necessary Or Not?

I have been programming for one year, sysadminning for the better part of ten years. Not a single programming day goes by where I am not working with mathematics. Sometimes it is low level stuff A + B /c^2 things, this last one though was implementing a timber Engineering equation, which integrates shear forces and bending moments, as well as environmental factors. I not just need to have a good understanding of raw mathematics, but also of a specific sector of Engineering in order to do my job.

Yes, math is important for the really interesting stuff.

Comment: Xerox Phaser 8560 (Score 1) 557

by galorin (#29605957) Attached to: Choosing a Personal Printer For the Long Haul

Get yourself a good business-level machine. We've got the above, using 3rd party ink wax blocks. We just replaced an 8200n with an 8560 after 5 years and 120,000 pages. Our older 8560 is sitting at 80,000 pages and just had a stripped nylon gear replaced. Good machine, it does color, and is fast if you choose the right mode. Just don't laminate anything that comes out of it, unless you can do cold lamination.

Comment: Re:Long term (Score 1) 611

by fgouget (#29259121) Attached to: India's First Stealth Fighter To Fly In 4 Months

Why do you say that? Directional antenna would mean that the drone would only "listen" for communications coming from the positions of other nodes in the mesh network. Unless the enemy can put jammers all around, including in the air and above the drone aircraft, at least some comm would get through.

Right. Maintaining proper antenna orientation during a dogfight is going to be fun... Besides even directional antennas are susceptible to off-axis jamming as long as you jack up the power.

One time pad encryption means the enemy can't hijack the drone.

The size of the one-time pads determines the maximum amount of data you can send. That seriously limits their usefulness, especially in this type of application (network communication). Anyway, encryption is not the weak point of drones (except in movies).

Comment: Re:You don't want it (Score 5, Informative) 209

by galorin (#27727707) Attached to: Cross-Distro Remote Package Administration?

Depending on how uniform your servers are, keep one version of CentOS and one version of Ubuntu running in a VM, and have these notify you when updates are available. When updates are available, test against these VMs, and do the local repository thing suggested by another person here. Do one system at a time to make sure something doesn't kill everything at once.

Web based apps with admin privs are fine as long as they're only accessable via the intranet, strongly passworded, and no one else knows they're there. If you need to do remotely, VPN in to the site, and SSH into each box. You're an Administrtor, start administratorizing. Some things just shouldn't be automated.

Comment: Re:Bloat issue (Score 1) 432

by galorin (#24043849) Attached to: The Microsoft Office Rental Program

What more could I want? Ability to import Access .mdb files, and comparable reporting. I haven't tested the latest iteration of oo.org Base, but what I remember would involve a complete re-write of our code.

We've got a few business critical apps built solely in Access. I am working on moving the backend out of Access and into MySQL, but the frontend has to stay in Access (Not my decision). That in itself is quite a task, as I'm re-writing all our code anyways, but my wishlist includes Access integration into OO.org.

As an aside, I use OO.org at home, on a Debian box, and find it more than sufficient for my needs.


+ - Petition the Prime Minister over iPlayer->

Submitted by gidyn
Link to Original Source

+ - South African band asks for their CD to be Pirated->

Submitted by
adriaan123 writes "While the RIAA is fighting against music pirates, granny's and schoolkids, a South African band is asking people on their website to pirate their CD. They are providing all the music on their website as 192kbit/s downloads, as well as the CD graphics necessary to print the booklet and back inlay. They aptly call this venture the "Please Pirate" campaign."
Link to Original Source

+ - Electricity from the People

Submitted by smitty_one_each
smitty_one_each writes "Some chap named Lucien Gambarota has implemented one of those ideas that likely shall have seemed obvious in retrospect: electricity from thepeople.

As the political and ecological aspects of energy rise in people's consciousness, the search for new and clean ways to generate energy is California Fitness Gym's demonstration how energy is generated from gym users gaining momentum. A fitness center in Hong Kong has joined the movement with a new idea: the energy generated by the members as they exercise is transformed into electricity to help light the facility. Claudia Blume has more.
Improving health through fitness and producing electricity as a result should please both Michael Moore and Al Gore. So we got that goin' for us."

Nobody said computers were going to be polite.