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Comment Far from the best customer service (Score 1) 748

I had my phone stolen from a table at a resturant and a bus boy made hundreds of long distance calls to Mexico placed AFTER I had reported it stolen and asked for it to be de-activated. It took almost 1 year and getting the FCC involved to get T-Mobile off our backs and credit us back the money. And they still turned it over to collections and it took another 6 months to get the collections agencies to quit calling us on something that we didn't even owe. We switched to Cingular ( now AT&T ) and never looked back. Of course in Atlanta, we don't have the apparent problems AT&T have in other major cities.

Comment Re:Cloud - Microsoft did it . . . twice already (Score 2) 244

You are really mis-informed, Microsoft bought Danger, who owns the Sidekicks, they never had local storage, guess where your pictures and information went? Yep to "the cloud" before that was a term. And the sidekick defined "locked down". And guess who lost every sidekick owners data all at once? Yep Microsoft! Guess how much local storage the Microsoft Kin had, yep ZERO, it got uploaded to "the cloud", for the very brief time it was on sale, guess why? The bat shit insane prices they were charging for data rates on the Kin, so it made it useless without a data plan! For them to own your data in a locked down server storage as well.

Comment Its not the password that gets cracked ... (Score 1) 343

its the way the password is encrypted. Hashing is not encryption, because you can just brute force it using a dictionary attack and find the hash that matches. A long random string of characters is hard to "crack" if you are repeatedly trying to login with every combonation, but when you have a list of hashes, you can spend as many cycles as you can throw at it in a multiprocessor environment and discover, the password that matches the hash. Hashing is a terrible way to "protect" a password for discovery, especially a hash without a secret salt combined with it. People get confused when things are called "cryptographic hashes" thing they mean encryption when they mean really hard to recover, which with unsalted inputs and simple database comparable inputs they are trivial to recover.

Comment Re:Slashdotters get Java wrong, again (Score 1) 583

compared to Erlang and many other languages and VM run times.

>>Java's JVM does true multithreading. The memory model is tight, efficient, and predictable. The language includes useful mechanisms for writing for concurrency (everything from traditional locking mechanisms to concurrent data structures and the convenient "synchronized" keyword). Productive, predictable concurrency is possible in Java and not in many other languages.

The JVM is bloated, in-efficient and the threading non-deterministic and you have no control over the threads once they are spawned.

>>Java includes a lot of well-organized, stable libraries for doing everything from handling HTTP requests and crafting responses to doing cryptography. Its collections API has many data structures that just aren't present in other languages without looking to a third party.

Java includes a lot of redundant chaotic kitchen sink libraries for doing lots of stuff you don't need to do and should be part of the core language. Its collections library contains many data structures that just aren't NEEDED in other languages.

>>One can write reasonably expressive, straightforward code and expect that the hotspot compiler will optimize it. It's a boon for getting maintainable, quality code out-the-door quickly.

One has to write tones of boilerplate code that can be done in an expressive, straightforward way in other languages. It is a nightmare to maintain and have quality code when there are thousands of lines of code that just aren't needed in other languages.

See what I did there ? :-)

Comment What is arugable is that humans are the cause (Score 1) 1657

I still haven't see any evidence that proves this change in climate isn't some sort of natural cycle that happens every few thousand or tens of thousands of years. I think that this might be happening regardless of any impact we are having on the planet, considering that cows produce more methane than all the cars in the world and that volcanoes spew out way more pollution than all the humans combined.

Comment Re:Gps sucks in many places. (Score 1) 160

this is FUD, my 3GS pin points me in the building I am IN within a few dozen meters, and outside it is dead on. Also state of the art OCR is pretty close to 100% for the right use cases, my bank scans my checks at an ATM machine and reads hand written deposit amounts with 100% accuracy every time I have deposited a check that way. If you last experiences with these technologies were in the early nineties you might have something, but now in 2010 you just sound like a Luddite.

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