Posts by fobobob 323 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2016
Nothing like needing to reboot a machine quickly and have to wait 1.5 minutes per filesystem for it to figure out there's nothing left to do (and with no easily accessible explanation of what exactly is causing it to wait). It's all configurable, and can be quite useful, but the defaults that seem to have been pushed out are not particularly great.
Only time (that i'm aware of) that i've had a device get comped - I forwarded SSH(22) to a machine that I had forgotten had a users/pass combo test/test lying around. Several weeks later, the computer suddenly began DoS'ing... log analysis suggested it was entirely automated, and took around 8 hours (and many thousands of tries) to guess test/test after it was found (with maybe a few dozen entries from the weeks prior, almost entirely from myself) .
A slight one-up - the warehouse inventory computer at a custom bolt+fastener shop. Metallic dust that I vacuumed as best I could, but otherwise didn't want to mess with. Was working on a software issue, though provided a similar solution: put the tower inside of a large cabinet to minimize the death-glitter incursion.
Had a power supply fan that was making a noise, and I kept putting off replacing it... one day, I guess it seized (never checked, but the assumption seems reasonable), and the other fan in the front of the case was moving just enough air to draft the blue-white smoke from the PSU's internal immolation out the back. Computer stayed running up until I shut it off at the power strip.
Most of the slow instances of Gimp I've encountered stall while loading fonts. Start it with the -f option and see if it loads any faster. Why it sometimes has issues with needing to regenerate the font cache on every load, I do not know.
Retroreflectors ideally reflect photons parallel to their original course (i'm ignoring the specifics of how photons interact with mirrors, as i feel it needlessly pedantic), with a varying degree of offset dependent on the original course and mirror arrangement. If designed properly, they come very close to what you say they are not. A simple mirror just deflects light dependent on the angle of incidence.
Does not mean they're actually useful for this application, just I feel they've been mischaracterized here.
Never got certified, but I took a few classes in the XP/2K3 days and can say my experiences aligns well with yours. Between those and a full Cisco CCNA course (never certified, again) in high school, it provided me with a pretty robust set of skills for dealing with all things Windows/networking. I have never felt it was wasted effort/money despite never having administered a corporate domain or deployed/managed an extensive Cisco network.
It's already huge and slow to launch (seems like 2-3 seconds is the fastest I've EVER gotten a prompt, and the range is normall 5-30) compared to cmd.exe ... so why the heck not? Would certainly be more approachable if you could get some context-sensitive help as you were typing, rather than just cycling through lists of CamelCase-Hyphenated tokens. Otherwise, I find I frequently have to abort the command to invoke contextual help, or do it online.
DC-9 in particular has control tabs (operated directly by the yoke and pedals) for all primary flight controls. The rudder is hydraulically powered, but will fall back to tabs automatically if lost. Also has a hydraulic pusher for the elevators that would be used when trying to recover from high AoA situations where airflow might be insufficient to allow the control tabs to move the elevators properly. It is a very 'analog' plane by today's standards.
To elaborate, control tabs are a smaller control surface that moves opposite the desired control deflection, and basically fly the control surface into position. As their effectiveness increases with speed (up to a point), controls remain reasonably light on a smaller aircraft.
For more details on this and secondary flight controls (flaps and spoilers are also hydraulic), see http://www.hilmerby.com/dc9/flap.html
- I had originally written in 'servo tab', but that is a related concept used to reduce control forces on otherwise directly linked surfaces... on DC-9, the control tabs are the only thing linked directly to the controls.
Monster Truck Madness predates Midtown Madness by several years (1996/1999, respectively). Really enjoyed dialing up the horsepower and other vehicle parameters in the game data files of Midtown, leading to such fun as accidentally driving up the sides of buildings and other glitches. :) ...
Both great games, along with Motocross Madness. Each of them have at least one follow-on version that provide additional content, improved game engine, etc. Still good fun if you're not looking for photorealism, accurate physics, or realistic damage models.
I remember seeing the lonely Warp machine languishing at a standalone desk with a burned in Mag CRT every time I went to my dad's office as a kid, well into the early 2000s. I was told never to touch it. Would not be shocked to learn that it still exists in spirit form, in a VM.
I'm probably somewhat biased as I never got to use a new one, but at a previous job, those were the standard deployment. Unfortunately, it seemed that about 3/4 of them had 'sticky' keys that couldn't be depressed smoothly (key support tube binding in its channel), making it impossible to do more than 40wpm without significant error rate.
Recently upgraded my ~7 year old Latitude E5430 to the fastest Ivy Bridge dual core (higher clock is more desirable than more threads in my use case) I could get my hands on; with 8GB of RAM and a decent SSD, it's more than enough for most tasks. Sandy/Ivy bridge was about the point in time where it seems like Intel stopped trying, until recently, so it has worked out quite well. Sadly, can't upgrade the machine past 8GB, though it seems a factory option was available for 16GB. At work, we have a few Ivy Bridge laptops with 4x DIMM slots, and support for 32GB RAM, good for a few more years running Windows 8.
16:10 monitors are a wonderful thing, especially when one must work on 16:9 content. Trying to work on 1920x1080 content on a same-sized screen is a nuisance. I finally got my hands on a lot of 5x ~7-8 year old HP 1920x1200 monitors for work and home, and couldn't be happier. Heck, I even found the 2x 1680x1050 monitors I had been using previously at work to be significantly less annoying than a single 1920x1080 monitor, as the 30px vertical loss isn't noticeable when you already have to scroll.
The CVE mentioned in the article is for a buffer overflow exploit in Philips' firmware; the exploit does seem to be doing something within the ZigBee software stack (ZigBee Light Link), as implemented there. That does raise concerns that maybe this is not limited to one manufacturer.
On long hauls, modern airliners with very high passenger loads can easily rival or exceed the fuel economy of the best ICE/hybrid cars. On average, they seem pretty comparable, especially when considering the amount of driving done with only 1 or 2 passengers. Of course, I'm guessing this guy's flight wasn't particularly packed.
Recently had an ultrasonic motion detector at my office go haywire and emit a high frequency whistle at an unusually high volume. The pitch was roughly what one might expect from a large CRT television, but much louder. It also created hot/cold spots (constructive/destructive interference) where it was unbearable/inaudible. Even older employees whose ears had poor high frequency sensitivity could hear it at times, or at least feel the sound pressure. Solved by wrapping masking tape around it until the interference patterns were 'adjusted' to not bother anyone while they were at their desks. It eventually stopped emitting noise, having failed entirely. Still has a working PIR module on the same unit, so all is well.
After having seen more photos of the damage (more available now at that link), in this case photos of both sides of the vertical stabilizer (i suppose they flipped it over), that puncture (seems to have gone clean through it) does suggest something of relatively high velocity striking it, from the side. I've seen more than my share of crash photos, but I don't recall having seen anything like that on a relatively undamaged tail; the vertical tail seems to be the one flight surface that often survives relatively intact, in all but the most forceful of impacts... plenty of exceptions, but it's quite often the single largest contiguous section of aerodynamic surface that remains after impact.
Large photo of the purported 'shrapnel' damage can be seen here (there's a link above the photo to load the large version), and turns out to be rocks/other debris:
http://avherald.com/h?article=4d1aea51&opt=0
There's a large hole torn above one of the passenger windows, but also inconsistent with warhead penetrators.
For an example of a piece of computer software with a truly terrible ribbon, look to Articulate Storyline. Totally non-customizable, beyond being able to kind of set up some quick access shortcuts. The whole program is like a post-lobotomy PowerPoint; no VBA, no custom keyboard shortcuts, glitchy drag-drop...
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