Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

Considering how much has been spent on the F-35 project vs the fact that only 162 have been 'delivered', it works out to be just over $8 Billion per unit...

Of course, none of the 162 delivered are actually combat ready, but rather only usable for testing and evaluation. Oh, and they won't even have all the promised features until 2022, at the earliest. Even then, they'll still be experiencing some pretty spectacular problems such as the fact that the helmet is so heavy that any attempt to eject would snap the pilot's neck; a MiG from the early 80's can trounce it in a dogfight; overly-complicated power-plant causing numerous engine failures and maintenance headaches; the designs have been modified so much that there are very few parts actually compatible between the three variants...

Re: "my sites are all perfectly usable in lynx."

"What's wrong with HTML 5? "

Plenty, for one, it tries to replace HTML4, JavaScript, and Flash and fails at everything.

Second, its becoming a full-on programming language, not a simple document mark-up language. I am an assembly/C programmer, I don't want to have to learn yet another full language to produce useful documentation.

Third, I hate the idea of mandatory codecs. A chunk of binary code that can run on my machine without my consent, hell no. I don't want my systems getting compromised because of a video tag pointing to a malformed video file.

Oh, and that site you pointed to, the only things that actually use HTML5 are the god-aweful glow effects on the text. It reminds me of a bad acid-trip while trapped in a warehouse full of old 80's pop-art...

Re: Soon...

"Do you know of a nice site that lists atrocities by country, by year/period?"

No, but I'm sure there is one. If not, it really should be built... Might take a while to put together given the mass amount of terrible things we humans have done to each other. But then governments tend to cover those kinds of things up pretty well.

In all my research, it seems that the only place that hasn't committed a horrible war crime in the past century is Antarctica. I wonder if there is an opening for an IT guy at McMurdo...

Re: I have seen the films

@ linicks

That is the most offensive and ignorant thing I've heard today, and I read through some excerpts of Trump's speeches and some NDP propaganda....

Re: BTaaS - Bomb threats as a Service

Well, the oldest profession is "Servicing as a service", so not exactly new. I'm waiting until the rest of the service industry gets hold of this construct. "Cooking-as-a-service", "Driving as a service", "waste disposal as a service", etc...

Re: Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSAC) - $1500 price class

"So probably Apple would have to think it is worth including"

Well they have to do something other than slightly increase processing power and storage to get people to buy new iphones...

Re: And they managed

Probably because they could still snoop on people all they like since they'd be requesting data about a specific -account- not a specific -person-. They could reason that they weren't aware that the subject of the search was a European, as they were just investigating accounts that were tied to their investigation, the fact that an EU citizen happens to own that account is irrelevant.

Don't forget the luxury team-building retreats to Dubrovnik or the industry trade shows in Maui. The expensive auditors to ensure that the development process is complying with all the random ISO standards and six-sigma training, then halfway through, trying to implement the "lean" methodology (Because something that works for Toyota is -totally- going to work fro a software product...)

I wish I was being facetious, but that happened to me last year. A project that was supposed to be 6 weeks (which I almost finished in week 3) but has been going on for 8 months now because the managers keep going to seminars about how to get projects back on track by using some new, cutting edge process...

Re: Always mount a scratch monkey

Mounting a scratch monkey, isn't that how AIDS spread to humans?

Re: Won't someone think of the eaglets?

Ah yeah, the old punt rifles. Because who couldn't use a rifle with a 3-meter barrel that fired a 2.5 caliber shell?

Distribution vs. randomness

I'm addressing the issue of randomness vs distribution in my next by measuring the percentage of cache hits when the processor is updating the counts. Since the counts are stored at memory address: 0_<prefix><32-bit Number>00, numbers within that same block of 3 million results (The count for each number takes 4 bytes of RAM and the processor has 12 MB of cache).

In the case of sequential numbers, I'd theoretically see a cache hit-rate of 99.99997% on the second chip. I'd also see a block of a specific color stream across the images as I'm checking them. I'm also looking at the intermediate images to see if there are any purely uniform spots. I expect to see a small amount of deviation in each image.

But then, any sort of sequential chicanery would be noticed almost immediately by anyone running a basic check on the RNG, what I'm focusing on is long-term randomness of an RNG.

Re: Personal parachute

Most LA/ULAs that I've seen with parachutes, its on the plane itself, not the pilot.

Wouldn't the RAM be soldered on as a BGA part? In which case the PFY would need a hot-air re-work gun.

Re: "1.1.1.1"

How the fuck is 1.1.1.1 safer? Its an actual IP address and is owned by the US DoD and was later given to ICANN / APNIC for testing so there very well could be something alive that responds to that IP. Or someone could poison BGP and start hosting attacks on that IP block. Much better to just point it to 127.0.0.2 if you really are afraid that you have a webserver running on your local machine that you don't know about (Which if you do, you have much, much bigger problems to worry about)

Re: Stop the Fighting: American -v- British Bacon

"Firstly, True American cheeses can be damned good."

Certainly not denying that, one of the best pieces of cheddar I ever had came from a dairy in the US. Its that weird waxy, bright yellow stuff that is labeled "American Cheese" that , for some reason, doesn't spoil, that I find grotesque. Our bodies harvest nutrients, proteins, etc. from food in a very similar manner to spoilage, so if something doesn't spoil, is it also not digestible?

Well, it only needs one or two shots to deal with the missile. And as a last resort, it could just kamikaze itself into the missile, its not like anyone gives a crap about the loss of a drone when it prevented the deaths of millions.

But isn't this something the X-37 could do? Those things run for over a year, so stick a bunch up in space and have them orbit over the most likely apogees for ICBMs and shoot them when they get close enough.

But I really only want to see anti-ICBM systems developed if it means that we start getting rid of the nukes we waste hundreds of billions of dollars a year to keep around, we're never going to fire them. The whole concept of "Nuclear deterrent" is about as stupid an idea as strapping hundreds of grenades to yourself and carrying them everywhere to dissuade anyone from trying to kill you: if someone is going to be the first to use, they don't care about the results and a lot of innocent bystanders are going to die pointlessly.

I'm just happy to know that they'll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. I understand the need for the IRS and have sympathy for sot of the hapless drones that work there, but the corrupt ones who abuse their power like this really get my goat...

I suppose my sympathy for those workers is due to all the hatred they get from the average citizen when its the law-makers with their badly-written tax laws that deserve the hate. I wish it were just a simple "An entity gains money from another entity, that entity now owes 20% of that in tax", no more of this "If you make between X and Y dollars per you year, you owe Z dollars, but if you happen to fall under rule A, you now owe 1.1*Z dollars, however, if you fall under exception b addendum c but not addendum d, you only owe 0.95*Z dollars".

I want to live in a world were "Tax Account" is no longer a valid occupation and the government doesn't need to produce "EZ" versions of your tax return and you just have to trust that you aren't getting screwed over by taking the easy route (rather than getting screwed over by some guy charging you to do it for you).

I would have no problem with taxes if it was a simple as seeing that 30% was taken from each paycheck and that would be the only time I ever dealt with the IRS.

Re: I'm confused

We really need to build an A, B, and C ark, except we'd leave the B ark on earth and let the politicians and other useless cruft to argue over scraps of a dying planet while we build a new one correctly from the ground-up.

Saudi Arabia doesn't have an age-of-consent nor a minimum age to marry... You only require parental consent. And given that in many areas of the country, women and children are property, it isn't all that rare that parents will give their daughter to someone as a gift.

A former coworker of mine found out about that after getting some guys daughter to celebrate the signing of a multi-billion dollar partnership deal between our company and theirs. Once he returned to the US, he enrolled her in a boarding school and emancipated her (She was 12 at the time). The whole deal actually hinges on their staying married. Good thing for them that adultery and cohabitation aren't illegal here...

"Can't GCHQ or even NSA spare Ukraine a few experts"

I wouldn't trust their 'experts'. They couldn't even protect themselves from IT contractors lifting gigabytes worth of classified data from their networks...

But this is a problem that any rational security engineer could fix. Simple separation and packet inspection would go a long way to fixing things. Other than a few heavily monitored end-points, no data should be entering the operations network and only a few well defined pieces of data should leave it.