astangl

10 ms·

31.
by astangl 13y ago
The failure stories I have heard convince me these are not fail-safe devices. If the thing shuts down in the winter and doesn't restart correctly, and you are away, you could come back to frozen/burst pipes. (Probably hasn't
32.
by astangl 13y ago
In order for this to work, it would have to have some real teeth, i.e., spell out real jail time penalties for NSA staff if collection occurs beyond the cutoff date. Jail time for top staff, not just low-level scapegoats. Also, eliminate th
33.
by astangl 13y ago
With all the talk of spying and monitoring citizens' whereabouts via license plate scans -- can anybody setup a camera to take snapshots of license plates of cars entering & leaving NSA & other such installations, and cross-ref
34.
by astangl 13y ago
Reminds me of this http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2013/06/30
35.
by astangl 13y ago
I still think Bill Gates' DONKEY.BAS (described by him as "very thrilling") takes the prize as worst game ever.
36.
by astangl 13y ago
They discontinued the program to save just the 3 headers because now they've got other programs that save the entire email message. And phone calls, and text messages and tweets, etc.
37.
by astangl 13y ago
Better idea -- stop acquiring crap in the first place. Where did all this crap come from, and was it crap when you acquired it, or did it morph into crap?
38.
by astangl 13y ago
How well will the "two-person" rule work, once the second person starts to treat it like a rubber-stamp process? How do you prevent that from happening without introducing big inefficiencies?
39.
by astangl 13y ago
Poser.
40.
by astangl 13y ago
Big deal. So we'll start getting the updates from IBM instead. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/dst/jtzu.html
41.
by astangl 13y ago
Is anybody surprised? Even the inventor of the gun seems quite hesitant about how many times it can be fired safely. Anyone setting out to show how dangerous it can be can simply keep firing it until failure occurs. Voila! If article made a
42.
by astangl 13y ago
One place I worked went in a few short years from having free fancy coffees, etc. (for developers in their skunkworks office) to departmental secretary sending out an email complaining about the rate of consumption of cheap ballpoint pens f
43.
by astangl 13y ago
I strongly suspect age discrimination comes into play, either consciously or unconsciously. In some cases, the team lead making hiring decisions is young enough to be my son, and experience on my resume goes back to around his birthdate. Pu
44.
by astangl 13y ago
I put a (semi tongue-in-cheek) comment in some billing system code I wrote 8 years or so ago, pointing out a date overflow problem, something like Y292277026596 (can't remember the exact year now, but the comment was accurate). Comment went
45.
by astangl 13y ago
When I hear somebody say 900,000 milliseconds, it makes me wonder why he didn't quote the number in nanoseconds or worse. On top of all the other problems with this puff piece, I couldn't shake the feeling that Microsoft will probably end u
46.
by astangl 14y ago
It seems the author is not aware of John Tromp's IOCCC maze program. It uses working storage equivalent to one row of the maze. Very clever.
47.
by astangl 14y ago
I don't see how borrowing (stealing?) 500K euro from many institutions is going to do anything other than get himself some publicity and then trial followed by jail time. Capitalism has a lot of problems, but I don't see how anarchists offe
48.
by astangl 14y ago
Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. For all the people running some Unix variant with local mail, the Python script seems pointless, versus just calling mail.
49.
by astangl 14y ago
I've seen a lot of silver bullet fads come & go. I'll be glad to see the TDD fad go. Testing sure is a useful tool in the toolbox, but that's it. It's funny this article quotes the asymptotic sort behavior, because that's almost identic
50.
by astangl 14y ago
Woah, this is actually a thing people are doing?
51.
by astangl 14y ago
Some of us still use FreeBSD on a desktop (well, maybe you don't consider xmonad a desktop...) But your point is valid -- it can be an exercise in frustration. The big advantages Linux has now are mindshare, funding, drivers, and people th
52.
by astangl 14y ago
Am I the only one who finds the requirement ambiguous? Oldest guy who has been at the company the longest time? If I got a requirement like that I would first push back for a clarification, i.e., if employee A is older but employee B has be
53.
by astangl 14y ago
This seems much more serious than the much-ballyhooed Pentium FDIV bug. Hopefully Intel will be on the ball with notifying people and distributing the fix.
54.
by astangl 14y ago
It's lame to write up a post accusing seller of selling device w/ shorted-out pins, but not even take the time to confirm the accusations with an ohmmeter.
55.
by astangl 14y ago
I wish these perennial programming font lists would make clear up-front which fonts are designed with anti-aliasing (or ClearType) in mind. I don't like the fuzzy look of anti-aliased fonts, plus I typically work with two monitors, one in l
56.
by astangl 14y ago
As Bill Gates would say, 23 GB should be enough for anybody.
57.
by astangl 14y ago
One thing I haven't heard discussed about the "save data forever" model is that in some scenarios you WANT to purge old data and not have it recoverable, for legal reasons. I guess Datomic is not suited to these situations?
58.
by astangl 14y ago
Today's democratic state can be tomorrow's authoritarian regime, and "advances" like these help grease the wheels.
59.
by astangl 14y ago
I would love it if this were true. I have been saying (only semi-tongue-in-cheek) for years that getting shot out of a cannon would be a great form of transportation, if only the bugs could get worked out (i.e., eliminate possibility of mid
60.
by astangl 14y ago
I think it's plausible that he's not crazy and everything on that blog is true. The whole situation is crazy enough that people probably approach it with preconceptions and interpret everything they read in that light. There does appear to

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