Posts by Nolveys 811 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2012
I think someone reminded the Chinese that if it goes hot hot, the only things left floating in the Chinese navy would be driftwood!, that and a tape of Gulf Wars 1 & 2 to remind them what happens when the US takes the gloves off.
I think that we should all take this opportunity to think about any and all who have disagreements with the US being utterly annihilated by a crushing barrage of superior fire power while we furiously masturbate.
Also a carrier groups not much use without a carrier.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/chinese-submarine-appeared-in-the-middle-of-a-carrier-battle-group.html
This not only has a lot to do with how quiet the propellers on the new Chinese subs are but also with a revolutionary new sonar system that makes them much more difficult to hear and locate. Rather than using the characteristic "ping" sound, which is easy to both hear and triangulate, they use a specially designed sound wave that sounds like a "yoink".
I imagine that they used this new system to precisely locate the drone prior to capture. Given the accuracy of the system they were probably able to locate the drone with a single yoink.
I was on site once and was called over to a user's machine because it was running extremely slowly. It turned out that he had received an email containing "some_slutty_string_of_enticing_characters.avi.exe" and had decided to run it.
A small group of people had gathered behind me and were watching what I was doing, though mostly what they were doing was gabbing with each other (I've never understood why this happens, I would think that watching me work would be like watching paint dry in slow motion). There was a vast amount of network traffic coming from the machine so I fired up wireshark. I immediately noticed that there was a torrent of smtp traffic (and no mail client running). I clicked on one of the packets at random and there it was. The way it come up made it plain as day for the entire group, which had come to include the business owner: "Preteen Deep Throats Horse Cock.avi.exe"
The business owner and his brother were known for their extremely crude senses of humor, so the only consequences were gasps and laughter. Very luckily the malware hadn't opted to use the user's contact list.
if a so-called "professional" tried to pass off junk as working code, and expected you to put YOUR name on it?
Hell no, you don't tell them when you put their name on your shitty code. You let them find out about it much later, when it has become much more difficult to figure out where the shitty code came from in the first place.
He also needed one of those desks where the monitor (90s - the monitor was the size of a minibus) sits underneath a glass section of the desktop.
That reminds me of a computing area of some uni library that we were called out to once. It had similar desks with the monitors mounted under glass and the PCs mounted in these little cubby-holes. Due to certain physical realities the PCs were mounted in such a way that the floppy drives were upside down. Guess why they called us.
After pulling one of the drives out and popping it open we found not one, not two but three 3.5" disks in the drive. The first one had been forced in upside down (or right side up, depending on perspective) and become hopelessly jammed. The second had slid in above the first and the third had split the second in half and had gone in between the two halfs.
I would have thought the force required to get the last disk and even the second would have set off alarm bells in the users heads.
My feeling is that every Windows PC should be supplied with a short, helpful user guide to the shell commands that may be needed, and how to use them, in case of emergency.
A good option that keeps with MS's new policies would be to include a sealed envelope with "open me in case of OS failure due to updates" printed on it. Inside would be a large, glossy picture of SatNad with a big smile, giving the thumbs up as he fucks your wife.
I think I should admire all involved here as they've stood by their principles instead of accepting roles as Cabinet Ministers (along with the extra money) in a coalition they have no real faith in.
I also get the initial impression that Iceland's government seems to kind of actually work properly. Trouble is that this is so far out of my experience that my body rejects it and I return once again to bitter cynicism.
They banned things before harm could be proven, like the approach adopted by Chile, the Netherlands and Slovenia. Layton found that there was more digital application level innovation under neutrality regimes that allowed more experimentation.
Specific examples that explain the pros and cons of both "hard" and "soft" neutrality in specific cases would be nice. The article seems to allude to a whole bunch of things but doesn't really say anything.
"You get more locally made innovation under soft rules. Do many people use any Dutch apps? Traffic to apps made in the Netherlands has fallen, while in Denmark it has risen." She noted that Netflix had made Holland its European HQ and Netfix was involved in the policy-making that pre-emptively banned the zero-rating of rival HBO Go.
That sounds like the kind of crony capitalism that Trump would want to be seen stamping on.
Zero-rating strikes me as crony capitalism. Wouldn't granting a zero-rating to HBO Go give it an unfair advantage?
They [net neutrality advocates] don't believe consumers can make their own choices.
I don't think that most can, I mean, I know that I can't.
I live in a country with some of the worst cellular data prices in the world. There are two cellular networks available in my area, one of which already attempted to zero-rate their netflix-a-like service (which was knocked down, due to net neutrality regulations). So, assuming the particular cellular company was on the level, sending netflix-a-like data over the cellular network costs effectively nothing while sending Netflix data costs a fortune.
The above seems to suggest that the source of the scarcity that leads to exorbitant cellular data prices is not the cellular network, but the cellular network's internet connection. Assuming that the free market provides the best services at the lowest prices, why hasn't another company managed to marry the seemingly freely available cellular bandwidth with the somewhat reasonably-priced and high-speed internet service that's available to wired customers?
Skimming the linked paper it seems that the argument for zero-rated services is that the free market should decide the shape of cellular "internet"* service. This seems to assume that there is a competitive market and that those who want unfiltered internet access at a reasonable and constant price per unit data used will be able to receive it by virtue of said market. The problem is that in many areas, particularly in sparsely-populated areas, there simply is no competitive market and virtually no hope for one to come into existence.
Having had fairly extensive experience with the cellular companies available in my area I am 100% certain that they use their duopoly in the cellular market to attempt to create and enforce monopolies in other areas.
I want nothing to do with software or data that's in any way specific to an ISP, a cellular provider or their partners. I have encountered ISP-specific email, web hosting, antivirus, router firmware, video service, etc in the past, they are almost universally of horrible quality. Cellular service companies and ISPs already have far too much power to influence or even force their clients to use inferior services. All I want from a service provider is to be able to purchase the transmission of a certain amount of data at a certain and reasonable price to and from an Internet service of my choosing.
It turns out soft rules work better because you have the power of the carrot and stick,
I assume that "you" refers to the government? I have almost no faith in my government when it comes to enforcing anything but hard-and-fast rules, I have even less in the US government.
* "internet" is in quotes because the linked paper states that many people do not internet access at all and would instead prefer to just have access to specific services as provided by their cellular carriers.
Later the user admitted that they had spilt water onto the keyboard the day before but had tipped it out quickly (apparently there wasn't much) and the keyboard had been fine afterwards therefore didn't worry too much about it.
I had a user come in once with a keyboard he'd spilled coffee on. He was almost in tears, having taken the whole thing apart, cleaned it thoroughly, let it dry, reassembled it and it still didn't work. He was so very, very sorry for wrecking the keyboard and asked if I could fix it.
Immediately behind him was a pile of 20-or-so perfectly functional keyboards, some were brand new. I told him to shitcan the broken keyboard and to grab another off the pile. He was still apologizing profusely when he left with his new keyboard. You'd have thought he'd accidentally killed the owner's kid or something.
There used to be a good one on the side of a barn on the 115 to Toronto. It took up almost the entire side of the structure and was of a police man pointing. The caption read "If you drink, that's fine. If you drink and drive, your mine."
Some helpful soul was kind enough to add an apostrophe and an "e" to the "your". Some other helpful soul added a huge fluffy mustache that looked like it was made of giant public hair.
Let's see, there's the server closet in which it rains every spring. The servers in there are placed on little chunks of wood to prevent them from sitting directly in pooling water.
There's the server closet which contains a furnace, water heater and hydronic equipment to heat the entire office. Oddly enough the temperature is somewhat reasonable in the summer. In the winter it's probably pushing 40C. With the massive amount of complex and occasionally sketchy piping I'm just waiting for the day when the server, switch and comms are introduced to a torrent of boiling water.
Then there's the server...thing...which consists of a 12 ft by 3 ft area with a shelf mounted on one side at neck height and another mounted, on the opposite side, at gut height. Getting in there requires some interesting contortions. It's also filthy as dust from the attached shop accumulates in thick layers.
Another one has a little broom specifically to get rid of the vermin feces. I recommend against sitting on the chair in that particular closet.
The best one I've seen was a crawl space full of our old friend vermin feces along with fiberglass insulation and broken glass. The server was placed on some old 2x4s to prevent it from resting directly on the dirt floor. Luckily I was only at that place twice. I wouldn't be surprised if they had relocated their server to the bottom of a literal cesspit by now.
When it comes to voting nothing beyond the understanding of a lobotomized tape worm should be accepted. Print the ballots on paper, have voters clearly mark them in pencil and have volunteers representing ALL parties monitor the process and count the ballots, manually.
Any system of voting that requires electricity for anything beyond the overhead lights (and even this should be optional) needs to be cut into little pieces and sent to the scrap yard. Anyone responsible for implementing such systems needs to be fired...out of a cannon...into the sun.
They probably tried to collect it from wherever it should have gone in the first place.
Unfortunately the submarine, lacking inertial navigation, became hopelessly lost and wanders the oceans of the world to this day. Its crew survives by converting sea life into a crude form of diesel, that is the sea life which isn't used for food or companionship.
None of the people that the German company sent out to retrieve the unit were ever heard from again.
"I guess you're the new guy, eh? I'm Frank, I'll show you the power substation."
(Frank opens the door to the substation, inside is shrouded in darkness)
"For some reason you have to walk across this room in the dark to get to the light switch. I'm not sure why the - OW! MY DAMN SHIN!"
(With a click the lights turn on, revealing what Frank has walked into. It's a Ford Pinto)
"How the hell does this God Damned thing keep getting in here?!"
And afterwards? Mice swapped round onto the opposing desks?
We used to do that with keyboards back in high school. There were two rows of back-to-back computers, just swap the keyboards of the two with their backs to each other and wait for someone to log in, type the user name and password as it comes up along with the next 20 characters or so. When the user starts whacking at the keyboard that's "stopped working" say "there's something wrong with that one, use a different one".
You have to be a decent typist for that to work. Luckily they still had typing class back then.
We got the admin password that way. The next day the intern we got it from said that he had a nightmare that we got the admin password. Poor guy.
"Hello, is this Mr. Chrendelschmutz?"
"He's out back, I'll go get him."
(Time passes)
"He wasn't out back, I'll check out front."
"Thank you."
(Time passes)
"He wasn't out front, I'll check upstairs.
"NO, WAI..."
(Time passes)...
Over the last ten years or so it seems that software everywhere has been turning into complete shit. Decent and functional interfaces have given way to useless half-assed attempts at phone interfaces. Complexity has exploded in the service of features that no sane person could possibly want. Vital features that people have taken for granted for decades are becoming impossible to use. The list goes on.
It seams like everyone is doing this shit these days. Is there something in the water?
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