Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

Probably fake his own death in a way that it gets blamed on the US.

Re: I despair.

Indeed, any modern system is capable of 256 character file names with the dot at any point within it and as many dots as you want. Hell, why do we even have file extensions anyway? OSes should just be able to figure it out from the headers and act accordingly, they already dig into the headers to grab various bits of metadata, so why not grab its file type as well? And once its determined its file type, change the text color to indicate that type to the user.

Re: "What makes people think like this?"

Time based performance bonuses will do that. It happens fairly often in companies that manufacture products, you get people in upper management that used to work on the assembly line where faster is better, then they attempt to apply that same philosophy to the development side to disastrous results. BY the time that upper management has figured it out, that person has already been promoted and is starting the failure ascent to the top.

Re: Politician brain

In the US, it could just be three lines of text:

1) Do what the most senior person in your party does

2) If you are the most senior person, do the opposite of the other party

3) If the other party hasn't done anything, do what the nice man with the briefcase of money tells you

Re: @Fitz_ I don't think the vast majority of people would even notice

"I think that he meant to write "I see an (sic) mix of Android, Apple, Blackberry, and even Windows phones in the hands of my coworkers and fellow passengers. "

"

More or less. The point I was trying to make was that there was a vastly disproportionate number of Apple devices charging vs. other brands.

I had actually posted that from the airport were I was sitting in a row of 19 other people at my gate, the flight was just announced as delayed, so everyone had their phones out for one reason or another. In my row there were 8 iPhones, 8 Androids, 2 Windows phones (bright yellow Lumias), and 2 Blackberries; yet, plugged in were all 8 of the iPhones, an Android, a BlackBerry, and a pair of outlets used to charge a MacBook.

Re: "Lyft denies any wrongdoing by its employees."

" I could see myself doing what the CTO did"

I would too, but that is also why I'm not a CTO. A C-level employee is essentially the physical embodiment of the company, their actions must reflect the ideals of the company they are part of. The difference between an executive and an employee is similar to that of a head-of-state versus a private citizen. A citizen could walk into a strip club because they are curious about it, but if the president were to do such a thing, he'd be facing months of bad press, numerous calls for impeachment, and endless inquiries into their actions.

"A few words to the people in HR sealed his fate."

I would've given him a shining recommendation, then spent the next several years making his life a living hell but staying just on the right side of the line so as not to get in trouble with HR....

Selling public information

" He didn't reveal anything that wasn't already well-known to anyone with an interest and an ounce of common sense.

There's no real doubt that Snowden got the job solely to acquire data to sell to Russia and China"

You do realize that you just contradicted yourself in a single breath? What kind of nation would buy information that 'anyone with an interest and an ounce of common sense' would be able to figure out?

So is the data worthless or valuable? And if he intended to sell the data, why would he hand it over to a journalist? The data he copied was on a offline SharePoint server that didn't have proper monitoring running on it, it would have been trivial to just copy the data to a server that the Russians also had access to, he would have gotten paid, and the NSA would still wouldn't even have a clue that anything happened.

Re: Where is Cali?

I assume that the author is from California... No rational person calls it that, just people that live there (for some reason that I have to figure out)

Would to help to defund ISIL / Al-Qaeda / cartels

A lot of terrorist organizations get a very large percentage of their money off of the drug trade, with the rest being provided by the sex-slave trade. Allow for fully regulated companies to sell drugs, and now billions of dollars are staying in the country rather than funding terrorists / cartels. Require that a certain percentage of profits must go to rehab and community outreach type programs.

The LOIC has nothing on BGP misconfigurations

I've found that installing a BGP daemon in a datacenter that has unrestricted internet access, then having it advertise all routes with a cost of 1 brings down a data center fairly easy...

Accidentally did it as part of test lab while testing a carrier-grade NAT with BGP routers behind it (The BGP routers would advertise self-assigned AS numbers for private ranges (The theory being that those routers would see my router with a cost of 1 for everything and push their traffic through it where it would get translated and re-routed onto the actual internet using 'real' IP addresses). The project was to test doing carrier-grade NAT without needing DHCP and to allow using either IPv4 or IPv6 internally and still allow for IPv4 or 6 on the outside.

Re: No exponential backoff?

I was just about to post something like that.... That technique has been around pretty much forever, hell DECNet had a setting to do just that.

Re: When El Reg says "the ad bounce visitiors" or "redirect"...

Indeed, I figure that since the NSA already has taps on all the lines going in and out of the US, they could easily slip a firewall or two in there to block malware...

Re: We're doomed....

Yeah, she'll probably merge the US with Canada and end up with the GDP of Sudan...

I think that the point of the testing was to ensure that the certificates worked properly with a fresh-out-of-the-box browser.

Re: I have a question . . .

I would think he probably used a drill and some expanding fasteners once it got big enough. Probably drilled a 7/8" hole most of the way through and threaded a 1" bolt into it.

Re: Gratuitous: Maybe Carly could ride in on her white horse and get this company better,

AH, Carly, she only managed to double profits by buying Compaq. And even then, profits should have theoretically tripled... How the hell do you merge two companies and manage to pull in $10 Billion less than the sum of what both companies made the previous year?

The closest thing to a smart watch I'll ever have

Last year I bought a TI MSP430-based watch to play around with it, it will probably be the closest thing to a "smart watch" that I'll ever touch. I've been using it to display the public keys to my bastion boxes when you put it in the right mode. This way I can be assured that my connection hasn't been tampered with by any of the spy agencies and I can ensure it never leaves my body since it doesn't set off metal detectors and the customs folk don't even bother with it and thus compromise the keys.

Re: good ole Arizona

" California slides into the ocean"

Actually the Pacific plate is pushing into the North American plate. If California where to move in any way, you'd end up with San Diego crushing Phoenix...

Re: Perhaps Amazon

Go stick your head in a pig!

Re: A much better power saving...

"piezoelectric tiles yields free energy ..." Oh god that reminds me of that whole "solar roadways" bollocks from a little bit ago...

I love how projects like this tend to leave out the part about "This would require more tantalum than currently exists on Earth, assuming we mined every bit of it". Or the insane length of time it would take for the benefits to offset the production cost...

What would really reduce air traffic noise would be to install proper high-speed trains rather than the crap diesel-electric behemoths we currently depend on that cost more, and take longer, than flying...

"So, just like software benchmarks of computers, then?"

I knew a developer that would get their code running much faster by exploiting the benchmark tuning on the processor. The code was difficult to read, but it sure ran pretty fast...

Re: "Hint: 1ml of water weighs approximately 1gm."

Ah, the metric system; where 1 ml of water at 20 degrees Celsius weighs 1 gram and takes up 1 cc of volume. It also takes exactly 1 calorie of energy to increase its temperature by 1 degree C. So much easier than the "standard" system in how its based off of some long-dead king and other archaic measurements...

Re: Dear FBI

I had applied to them before, but was rejected because I didn't have a Bachelor's degree at the time. Then after I got my degree, I ended up rejecting for a couple reasons: They wanted me to move to Washington DC to work in the main HQ rather than the regional HQ two blocks from my apartment and on top of that, the pay was shit, especially compared to the cost of living of DC.

I had also gotten an offer from another company in the city where I was living and with 50% more pay. After all was said and done, after bills were paid, I was getting twice as much per month.

Yep, the human eye cannot perceive pixels of this density. But people will buy these claiming to see a difference, just like the folk that claim that they can tell the difference between 24 and 32-bit encoded FLAC files. (I'll take a 4 MB MP3 over a 30 MB FLAC file any day of the week, can't tell the difference anyway...)