cybergrue - Slashdot User

Comment Long history of this happening at SFO. (Score 2) 248

by cybergrue on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @12:19PM (#44424783) Attached to: Second SFO Disaster Avoided Seconds Before Crash

There is a long history of this type of incident at SFO. Check the Accident section of the Wiki entry,. Probably the best known of these types of incidents was the Japan Airlines Flight 2 incident in 1968. The pilot landed his plane in the bay 2.5 miles short of the runway. Amazingly, there were no injuries, and because the he landing gear was extended, most of them didn't even get wet. I was going to say everyone walked away, but actually they had to wait for boats to pick them up. Furthermore, the plane was salvaged and returned to service.

When asked what happened, the pilot stated "As you Americans say, I fucked up."

Comment Re:IP-level blocks (Score 1) 449

by cybergrue on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @04:04PM (#38452300) Attached to: Coders Develop Ways To Defeat SOPA Censorship

Hmm, good to know. I guess the news report I read about this scheme being mandatory must have been wrong.
The point I was trying to make though is that this type of traffic detection is possible and has been implemented. See my comment below for what my own ISP does to encrypted traffic.

Comment Re:IP-level blocks (Score 1) 449

by cybergrue on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @03:59PM (#38452232) Attached to: Coders Develop Ways To Defeat SOPA Censorship

Umm, my local ISP does this now. Well actually it throttles all encrypted traffic so much it makes it hard to use. A colegue of mine discovered he could not use his banks encrypted site at home, but had no problems at work. A cryptic reply from the ISPs tech support implies that certain sites are white-listed, and that his bank's site had been added to the white-list. Immediately afterword, he had no problems accessing his bank's encrypted web site. And its not just ssh connections. Certain games use encryped communications to talk to their servers, which led to problems as well, the most prominent was WoW, which uses a bit-torrent like protocol to transfer game updates.

This news is old, and the ISP has said that it will stop, but the point I am making is that it is technically feasible to do this, and the Powers that Be don't care if the internet is usable or not by the little people (you and me).

Comment Re:IP-level blocks (Score 5, Insightful) 449

by cybergrue on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @09:58AM (#38447658) Attached to: Coders Develop Ways To Defeat SOPA Censorship

It has been said that the Internet routes around problems (censorship), however there are plenty of choke-points (transoceanic cables for example) where a reverse DNS look-up could be used to filter the IP addresses of the packets going through. And before you say encrypted VPN, the technology already exists and is being used to detect and block encrypted traffic (Pakistan and Turkey) on the network.

Yes it is possible to get around these countermeasures, but it will not be easy and probably result in a significant decrease in transmission speeds (sending and receiving). And when these techniques become widely known, they will be blocked in turn.

In short, this legislation will break the Internet. Laughing at the dumb politicians who don't understand technology is a dangerous thing to do because there are no simple workarounds that will keep the Internet working the way we know it if this passes.

Comment Re:Question for those more knowledgable than I (Score 1) 139

by cybergrue on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @03:48PM (#36976156) Attached to: Earth May Once Have Had Two Moons

I agree. The prevailing theory of why the Moon's sides are so different is because the tidal lock caused the magma flows on the near side. This smoothed things out on the near side while as you stated, the far side was exposed to more meteor impacts. Also, the magma flows are thought to be relatively (in geographic and astronomical terms) recent and possibly ongoing, hence erasing any signs of older impacts under the lava.

What probably happened here is someone decided to model what would happen if the Earth had multiple moons and then realized they would eventually collide.

Comment Cory Doctorow doesn't think much of it. (Score 2) 44

by cybergrue on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @01:36PM (#36230052) Attached to: Civil Society Statement To the E-G8 and G8

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing thinks this conference is an attempt to push Sarkozy's agenda to control the Internet.

Websites That Don't Need to Be Made Anymore 161

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 20, 2010 @01:47PM from the do-not-want dept.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but there is a finite number of social networking or selling websites that the world needs. Here is a collection of the eight kinds of websites that absolutely don't need to be made anymore. I'd add dating sites and anybody who uses pop-up ads myself, but I think that would eliminate half the Web.

Comment Re:I see lousy coders.... everywhere (Score 1) 359

by cybergrue on Friday April 09, 2010 @03:51PM (#31793864) Attached to: How To Find Bad Programmers

Umm. I think that depends on which standard version of C++ you are using.
Classes in C++ were originally implemented as a C struct with function pointers for the methods. (Long Long ago in a ... ) and the public/private aspect was hacked on top. I haven't kept up with the latest C++ standards to know how much this has changed over time but I do believe that this is one of the areas where it is now very different from the old implementation and as a result inherently incompatible with C.

Comment Re:looking for C/C+/C++ programmers (Score 1) 359

by cybergrue on Friday April 09, 2010 @03:07PM (#31793270) Attached to: How To Find Bad Programmers

There was actually a language called C+. No one has used it since the mid 80s though.
It was an early attempt at extending C. C plus more I think was what they were calling it.
I may be showing my age here, but I remember reading about it in Byte Magazine (OK I am defiantly showing my age) .

Comment No problems here! (Score 1) 1231

by Viduliya on Wednesday November 04, 2009 @09:20AM (#29976942) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

I am surprised by this article. I have installed and upgraded a few machines to Karmic and this had been on of the best releases since Gutsy. Ever since they had pulseaudio included by default in Hardy I had issues with new releases, specifically with pulseaudio. Hardy and Janty was the most painful and Intrepid caused much less pain. Janty had issues with pulseaudio and then issues with the Intel video drivers which made it a much worse release than Karmic. As far as new releases of Ubuntu go I am happy with Karmic.

Comment There is just one Myth. (Score 4, Insightful) 483

by cybergrue on Monday November 02, 2009 @02:26PM (#29952830) Attached to: IT Snake Oil — Six Tech Cure-Alls That Went Bunk

It arises when the salesman tell the clueless management that "This product will solve all your problems!"

Bonus points if the salesman admits that he doesn't need to know your problems before selling it to you.

Comment Re:I remember being inside a Sage (Score 1) 238

by cybergrue on Friday August 28, 2009 @11:00AM (#29231065) Attached to: Big, Beautiful Boxes From Computer History

The pictures of the SAGE doesn't do it justice. It had some really cutting edge features for the 1950s, including a GUI accessed via a light gun and an ashtray (both built in).

Comment There is more to it (Score 4, Informative) 238

by cybergrue on Friday August 28, 2009 @10:47AM (#29230897) Attached to: Big, Beautiful Boxes From Computer History

Enigma started out as a commercial product marketed to commercial entities (mid 1930's) and early versions were sold to the public. IIRC, technical details were published (patents, etc) and it was from these commercial models that the Poles did a lot of their work. When Poland was invaded, the Polish cryptography team made its way to England and helped kickstart the Allied effort.

After figuring out how the machines worked, it became a simple matter to brute force the machines (try every combination) using mechanical means, ie the Bombes. This was simpler then it sounds because of some exploitable weaknesses (the same letter will never encryt to itself, the wiring in the disks wasn't changed, etc) The Bombes tried every possible combination of settings of an encoded message looking for the string "EIN" (German for one, Turring himself was said to have come up with this neat little hack) These possible decrypts were passed on to a human to check if the made sense. Remember that this was all done with a mechanical system. Late in the war, when the Germans were changing their codes every hour, this system was able to keep up.

Comment Not the first time (Score 4, Funny) 77

by cybergrue on Thursday July 30, 2009 @07:03PM (#28889917) Attached to: DHS Tries to Safeguard Against Giant Monster Attack

A few years back, Canadian Customs blocked an expansion of WotC's board game 'RoboRally'
It might have had something with the expansion's title that was clearly displayed on the side of the shipping boxes.

The name: "Radioactive Waste"

The Best Games of 2020 136

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @07:02AM from the congrats-duke-nukem-forever dept.

Gamasutra held a contest this year to describe what hit video games in the year 2020 would be like. Over 150 detailed entries were sent in, and they've posted the top 20. One persistent theme is the ever-present connectedness to the outside world, both in reality-based games and with multiplayer modes that are part of typical daily interactions. Quoting: "It's just an average day at your job. Noon swings around and it's time to amble out of the cubicle farm and venture outside into the city to find some lunch. You put on your slick steel framed Hunters Glasses, place your Hunters earpiece, and with black and white Hunters Gloves on, step out of the building and onto the street. After a block suddenly your dark tinted shades switch to a red tint. A silky female voice echoes in your ear, 'Players within range. Good Hunting.' The glasses are acting as a WiFi enabled computer screen. You swivel your head to scope the scene and find someone standing out within the red crowd as a white outline. The man with the white outline is scouting the area as well, trying to find who else is in the game right now. You get within range, pack a virtual snow ball with your gloves, approach slowly, wind up and throw with all your might the virtual snow ball at the man with the white outline. 'Player Eliminated,' says the female voice, 'Uploading Statistics.'"

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