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Comment Not a great idea, so maybe spend less? (Score 1) 365

There's a great summary about similar project with people who wanted to live off their cars/vans/RVs to cut costs.
The problem is, it's not cheaper and the quality of life isn't superior in terms of daily amenities like Internet, hot water and stone baked pizza.
I think there's a reason a majority of people only go for vacation once a year for a relatively short period of time.

I really fancy travel and I do travel a lot, but some types of work, do not mix with travel that well and by comparison, software related work, having a good and reliable connection to the Internet is one a few concessions I chose to make - by comparison to other jobs it's still great - I can work when I want, choose what I work on etc...
I finally settled down and built myself a small but nice office. It's in the middle of nowhere but it has stable Internet and it's quiet, so I get the job done, with no external distractions.

Still, if I chose to travel, and it was for a fixed amount of time (say a year or two), I'd probably look into the numbers and get a relatively small car rather than RV and stay in cheap motels/hotels such as Super 8 etc. or camp in a tent, when it's warm enough. Small car is much more nimble, will surely fit a laptop and you can go places where an RV won't fit.

If after half a year, you're tired of the idea, it means, financially, you're much better off and you don't have to worry about selling or parking the RV etc...

Comment Decent set of general coding practices (Score 0) 66

It seems they provide a decent set of good practices that should result in more manageable code overall, not just from security point of view, but one that is easier to maintain and better suitet to modern, multi-threaded, shared, virtualised environments where code is usually run...

Comment Re:It seems like bcache could do the same thing (Score 1) 201

Or ln-s on linux /Unix or mklink on windows.
Basically if you can afford to micromanage the caching and designate only specific files/folders to SSD, you will get the best performance characteristics.
No need to have your mp3 on SSD even if you listen to them often, likewise, even if something evicts your kernel files from the SSD cache, you will need it again soon enough...
That's why I have SSD and HDD separately and manage caching myslef to an extent.

Comment Re:Financial Industry (Score 1) 133

Not true in UK. An average is to charge between 200-240 days per year due to weekends and public holidays (heard of Bank Holiday in UK?) and ilness etc - that's why the rate is higher than equivalent salary - where you're paid even when on vacation.
Finally you still have to pay the tax which at this levels is not insignificant and with the most efficient methods (your own Ltd + dividends) is probably 60% take home. So really we are talking ca £150 000 in your personal account and most of that you'll be spending just to cover the rent and food anywhere near London city.

Comment Secure the perimeter (Score 0) 119

I would leave exposed SCADA interface in the open, after Stuxnet it should be clear that securing SCADA interfaces should be done on a higher level - by putting it in a different VPN etc.
Whether the vulnerabilites are public or not doesn't change the fact that a given setup is secure or insecure by design...

Comment Things are looking good for the PC (Score 4, Interesting) 94

Given the recent fiasco of Sony, lack of hardware updates for PS3 / X360 in the near future, the fact that you can get better hardware for similar prices (and play with more eye candy on the PC), you have the choice of the controller, or the kb+mouse, with Steam and it's low, low prices, the fact that you can do other things on your PC as well, possibly at the same time, there's no reason why the PC should not be on the rise now and console market share declining...
The only problem is the huge diversity and lack of big players marketing PC as the ultimate gaming accessory, If HP/Dell got their heads around, they have enough selling power to market the idea, and maybe even promote some baseline performance standards (like high performance, medium, low/mobile) as opposed to 20+ SKU that each generation of GPUs have...

Comment Re:plain-text OS? (Score 1) 433

I think I agree to an extent, reversible encryption in only a notch better than plain text, and some dumb policymaking politician doesn't understand technology and it doesn't mean we have to bow to such idiots at the helm.
A very strong message would be for google to withdraw from France and stop indexing .fr pages, I don't think they will do it unless they really have to.

Comment Sloow (Score 2) 20

You can play games being hosted on Mozilla Labs or author's own server.
The games usually execute Javascript so run on your local machine, but the servers are still being hammered heavily on bandwidth.

I guess that's what you get for giving to community - a massive bandwitdth bill :)

Microsoft

Microsoft Research Takes On Go 175

mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has used F# and AI to implement a consumer-quality game of Go — arguably the most difficult two-person game to implement. They have used an interesting approach to the problem of playing the game, which is a pragmatic cross between tree search with pruning and machine learning to spot moves with a 'good shape.' The whole lot has been packaged into an XNA-based game with a story."

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