Posts by John F***ing Stepp 408 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Aug 2007
Sometimes, it is nice to write the tightest, most obscure code possible. Knowing, as you do so, that you will not have the slightest idea what the hell it actually does within two weeks time.
A 'work of art' snippit that should have been done in ASM, or INTERCAL, and you think 'job security' of sorts.
And later, so much later, find this little code calttrop with the simple comment:
// don't change this part
And wonder, "What the hell was I thinking?"
We did this all the time at my last shop.
No, going back over the relevent equation and subsituting a negative mass you do not get infinate velocity as a result.
In fact, at very high levels (infinate energy) you come up with the speed of light, as observed.
(or as close as makes no never mind)
Actually I should point out to you that simply parroting what some non traditional fringe sceince has to say without thinking hard . . . is a bit ironic.
Oh, well; down vote bait.
The exact center of the Earth would not be subject to a gravitational force (because the mass around that point would be balanced). Full force of gravity at the surface, less the deeper you go.
I am fairly certain that even Jules Verne knew this.
Sometimes things go wrong 'under pressure'.
Sounds like server admin 101. Run tail -f on the server log so it actually appears you are doing something, screw with the log in script so the MFC encounters the random core dump (yeah, that's listed under RFC whatever, schedule us some over time and we will get it fixed)
And of course. . .
Keep the cattle prod charged.
James Clerk Maxwell developed four equations that derived the speed of light.
He had to find two constants (constants in a vacuum) to do this.
Good to resolve some arguments (speed of gravity being a compression wave does not care -pathetic fallacy be damned- about units of electric charge and permeability) and no other mediating particles travel at C so there.
Crap is all over empty space, random ions, solar winds, dead stars and wandering planets: the poor little photon never stands a chance.
As an aside the wiki page has a major (and very irritating) error on it
The same error that Microsoft's Encarta had
Any one else see it?
The first recorded name for "#" in an English publication out of a British writer (presumably) was an octocet.
So I kind of laughed when Bell Labs coined octothorpe thinking, well reading.
(which they didn't do.)
But they got away with it so I have taken to calling it a tic-tac-toe game for ants.
De-orbiting from LEO seems pretty easy, and as of now LEO is the problem area.
(Where all our manned stuff sits.)
Attach one of those 60-70s era mylar balloons to the sucker and it will come down on its own within 12 months (air drag); even earlier if it is hit with a solar flare.
I am just thinking of cheap; more fun would be ground based ablative laser systems perhaps controlled by a co-operative system of video gamers and background distributive processing.
(satelliteKiller@home)
I tend to use a 1k or larger key; sometimes many times the actual information length. This key is, of course, based on that dandy pseudo random function with either the time of day to the millisecond or the actual message as the seed.
Most of these things are rotations (remember ROT 13?) around the 256 ascii set, the number of rotations used against the key and message are many and randomly based. This allows you to play with modular math.
I used a conversion to hex mostly to allow the message (or log in, in some cases) to be sent as post (well, you try to escape a chunk of binary.)
This essentially doubles post size, but a real clever person could encrypt the hex code and throw it back into hex (rinse, repeat, etc.)
Most of this is just because it is fun and fairly easy.
Now if we were dealing with credit card numbers or socials I suppose I would have to get serious.
(Sorry, wordy.)
Actually, to increase entropy on a bit of data one would decompress it.
That is, you have 4 kilobytes of data, send 8 kilobytes after encryption. One way of doing this is to cut down on the alphabet used, sending data as fake genome information GATC and so forth or just send as Hex code, the less letters in the alphabet the longer the word size.
Of course this schema is just an add on to existing encypherment; the problem being as I see it is we have simplified the number of actual gross methods.
What happens, I wonder, when a machine runs across some new method?
Larger hard drives.
It took 2 or 3 days to compsurf a 20 megabyte drive; suddenly, you had a 200 megabyte monster available and the customer wanted it. Novell tryed to soldier on with something called a hotfix and in some cases this worked. In the case of the machines I worked on the supplier sold us hard drives that were crap (company is still around and probably still crap but I don't feel the need to be sued.)
I would end up increasing the hotfix area every week as more and more sectors were going bad, eventually the customer converted over to a windows net work which had no problem working with crappy hard drives.
In a perfect world (hard drive wise) Novell would still be king.
The level of spying seems to be much less than I expected and I wish that it had remained secret.
Because while secret it was constrained by being secret; the Feds would not deploy a nuke on a parking violation offender. Now, of course, if I telephone my lawyer and enter into a conspiracy to avoid a parking ticket the NSA can feel free to drop any and all collected information in the inbox of the local Stazi.
Of course over where you all live it is 1984 all over again and I feel for you.
And sometimes I would require an internet connection to use the software.
An internet connection that no longer existed because the only links existed in the "After Cloud" and was only available to "internet mediums".
Which since "internet mediums" don't exist means I bought a cheap "box of rocks".
Adobe had best hope that Gimp and Gimp2 never become replacements or that people will not decide to get by with MSpaint.
And if I used Adobe, I would be on a scramble for a replacement,just in case.
@bazza
I should have been clearer on one thing, our business depends on Windows servers.
This is because of a very obscure glitch in post that is not handled by Apache*.
So, Windows.
But client side we don't really care what operating system or browser they use.
As a lot of our back and forth communications are done with pdf, and huge bloated exel spread sheets we are not really concerned with file size.
Except the final product.
*or windows without a dll hack.
Since various models of Microsoft Word are incompatible with one another I send documents in RTF.
RTF can be handled by Word, StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibraOffice, even WordPerfect (someone here still uses that) and WordStar (somewhere around here we have the 5.25 disks for that.)
Text files I reserve for readmes and other fluff.
Linux is nice and grown up now, much more stable than say Win8 (dealing with a customer problem on that today) but I recently migrated my laptop from Debian to FreeBSD just because it was harder to use and I am getting older and need the aggravation to keep my mind alive.
I actually liked ME better than 98.
It only had two or three major memory leaks and after a while I pretty well knew which bit of software would have to be killed after use (oddly, the win help facility was one of them).
I still routinely fire up task manager first (I've got it running now on Win7) and miss it on LINUX or BSD (ps followed by kill -9 process# works as well).
A lot of us use Windows for a very good reason; Windows operating systems are where our customers live.
You know, money, root of all evil and that sort of thing. I am not at all sure that I would even have a computer if I didn't need it for work.
For personal defense neither is perfect.
The 9 (a S&W 59) was somewhat underpowered and would lead one to use up ammo for a positive takedown.
This is fine for the police but I, personally, do not want to injure or kill a bystander (the police have insurance and attorneys).
The 44 (a S&W 659) had only 6 shots but would stop a Mack truck; over penetration and inaccuracy were other downsides; again, bystanders.
I currently have a pair of 1911 single stacks; 18 shots overall and the caliber still has the number 4 in it.
After firing a 44 magnum, a 45 feels a bit like the old 22 caliber target pistol I had as a kid*.
Best choice for defense seems to be, not being in a place where crap happens and not pissing the crazies off (being thought of as one of said crazies helps a lot too).
*'Murica.
But Bountyquest seems to have died so finding and pointing out prior art(1) (as in smoky cave paintings from prehistory) is only an exercise for outraged people.
About three years from now this is going to be a non issue.
Microsoft has this really dandy device(2) that responds to gestures; they (unlike others) don't seem to have a problem with open source hacks. Rumor has it that the device will eventually be refined to the point where it will be able to read lips (hello HAL) and I can see where this will eventually lead to a nice predictive speech enabler (3)
Software patents are always fighting that end run, as just finding a permanent cure for some disease does really affect profit on any higher priced pharmaceutical that just treats the symptom.
There does, by the way, seem to be a lot of Open Source stuff out there that is doing about the same thing.
(1) Prior art, this was done for dogs once using a typewriter keyboard (no joke).
(2) Kinect
(3) Google "ducking pizza ship" for another opinion.
Wordstar, Wordperfect, Word, Staroffice and Open office I must say it is a matter of absolute hate falling off to minor annoyances; I would guess that it is just what you can actually stand out of a word processor* that makes it your favorite.
I might as well try LibreOffice next.
*Wordstar and early Wordperfect; know those ctr cokebottle shift combos yet?
Word; kerning? who in the hell kerns a space?
Staroffice; No, dammit, that is the persons name you autocorrecting POS.
(I just haven't used Oo enough to find the pointy bits.)
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