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cdh

171 karma · joined August 6, 2011

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cdh··on Gemini 4 Argon
I downloaded about a thousand videos (300gb) from YouTube this past week without logging in.

I used two IP addresses in a datacenter. Both were blocked after a few hundred videos, but the block expired after a day or so. It is not as hard as you make it sound.

cdh··on New approaches shed light on the magnitude of sex differences in personality
It is almost certainly legal to hire based on assessments of intelligence. If I insisted in a job interview that 4+9=12, the moon is simply a sky-reflection of the lights from Manhattan, and that I can’t stand to be in the same room as tall people since they affect gravity in disturbing ways, you would draw conclusions about my intelligence. Would you then avoid hiring me?

IQ tests might be illegal under some circumstances, but I would point out that they are not a reliable measure of intelligence anyways, making this all a bit of a moot point.

cdh··on Open Letter to the Linux Foundation
I am surprised you feel that way in a time where much of our government is controlled by Republicans, including the presidency. I think I understand why you feel that way given how localized politics can be, but I would counter that it does seem unlikely the 50+ million registered Republican voters will be made homeless and jobless by the government they presently control.
cdh··on ASK HN: Has anyone adopted Chrome OS as their primary OS?
> how are you even going to download a third party browser, if the OS doesn't come with a client you can use to download it with?

Software was distributed offline as well. It seems like a long time ago now, but there was no shortage of AOL installation discs at the time.

(In fact, I believe both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were distributed on floppy disks at one point, although that would have been long before the antitrust case.)

cdh··on Security Checklist
You might want to consider switching to the uMatrix extension instead. My understanding is that uMatrix rules can be created to apply to all domains.
cdh··on No privacy rules needed: ISPs say Web browsing isn’t “sensitive” data
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but while it is certainly uncommon, it is absolutely possible to directly deliver mail to a recipient's SMTP server. In many cases, this can be done without any authentication whatsoever.

I run my own mail server. When I send an email via the web interface, would you not agree the MUA is attempting to directly connect to the destination host?

Depending on different factors, it may be classified as spam by the recipient, but from a reputable IP address it shouldn’t normally be rejected outright. Of course there are other factors like SPF, greylisting, etc... but email can be directly delivered.

cdh··on Thepiratebay.se is back online
I'm not familiar with the specifics of the protocol, but your download speeds would be much slower without uploading. I believe that with BitTorrent, you are penalized/rewarded somehow for not uploading vs. uploading.
cdh··on PostgreSQL vs. MS SQL
I've done a fair amount of work importing CSV files into SQL Server 2008. I have no idea if this is still broken, but I can confirm that 2008 mishandles CSV files where the character used to surround string columns appears escaped within the column itself. Such as:

57,4.3209,"green","He calls himself""Waldo""",98,"Y"

This is a perfectly valid CSV file, but SSIS will choke. I ended up writing a custom script component to load these files anyways.

That said, I absolutely love SQL Server, and I think this guy is a little over the top in his religious hatred of it. In an Enterprise setting, it works really, really well.

cdh··on The Science of Interstellar [video]
I may have misunderstood this aspect of the movie, but it seemed to me that the government was determined to convince the public that space exploration, and NASA, were excesses of the past to be avoided. The spacecraft they asked Cooper to pilot was a type of craft that crashed during his testing of the ship, prior to the public (and false) shutdown of space spending.

If this ship had the capability to repeatedly leave planets without the rockets shown in the beginning, would they have been able to reveal that to the public? The rockets could have been used for the launch from earth to avoid making that disclosure to the public.

Also, it seems like another possibility is that it was simply done to conserve fuel. Maybe the small spacecraft was capable of holding enough fuel for the 3-5 launches shown, but no more? If it wasn’t capable of holding additional fuel that might be needed for the mission, the extra rockets for an initial launch seem like a fair idea, even if they were very expensive.

I don't know anything about this, so I could be very wrong, but to me it seems like there are some plausible explanations.

cdh··on HSTS for new TLDs
It is a bit confusing, but I'm not sure that this is actually an error. It sounds like he may be in a position to directly make that change to Chrome, but is trying to clarify that his thoughts on Firefox and Safari are his, and he can't speak on their behalf. When you read it that way, it makes sense.
cdh··on Massive increase to Onedrive storage plans
A major frustration for me is that OneDrive does not show up as a folder in Windows 8.1, unless you link your Windows account with a Microsoft account. I absolutely won't be logging into my computers with my Microsoft account, which has made OneDrive much more difficult to use. It works well from Office, but nothing else. I've tried installing the old version of the client, and it fails with an error that I already have a newer version.

It sounds like ExpanDrive would probably solve this issue for me. (At least until Microsoft hopefully adds back support for using OneDrive with local accounts at some point.)

cdh··on Live Google transit directions change the value of transit
I'm not sure that's the case, but if it were, perhaps more people would start using Waze again after Google Transit became worse. (Repeat process forever.)
cdh··on It's Time For a Hard Bitcoin Fork
I'm not sure this is true, regardless of how large Bitcoin grows to be. If a significant enough problem were discovered, wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to protect the value of their wallets by accepting a forked blockchain?
cdh··on Microsoft Said to Be Preparing to Make Satya Nadella CEO
I like Bing, I've found it to be excellent. I've been using it for about a year now, and there's no way I'm going back to Google now.
cdh··on The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal
OpenXML is a proprietary format?

That seems like a stretch to me.

cdh··on The Real Reason The Poor Go Without Bank Accounts
Well, that's not quite true. There is always a small risk of losing some (or even all) of your money, particularly if you have a large amount in your account. Obviously that risk is very, very low for smaller amounts of money.
cdh··on Did the FBI Lean On Microsoft for Access to Its Encryption Software?
PGP? It does whole disk encryption, but I don't think it does hidden volumes. (I could be wrong.)

I'm not sure if you consider it reputable or not, but the source has been available, at least for recent versions. I'm not sure about the current version.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/downloads/symantec-pgp-deskt...

cdh··on 10,000 Bitcoin Mining ASIC Chips Arrive in Switzerland – 3 TH/s
...and keeping Bitcoin working, and possibly enriching the ASIC's owners. So it's not just burning power and creating heat.
cdh··on Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write
I laughed, because it's funny to think that someone concerned about Microsoft snooping on their chat sessions would be willing to somehow publish those same messages into a (very public) blockchain.
cdh··on What Bitcoin Is Teaching Us
You may have lost bitcoins, but you did so before you knew they'd be worth hundreds of dollars. I'd expect that in the future, people will be much more careful to backup (or print out) their private keys.

In any case, the ones you lost just increased the value of all the other bitcoins still in use. Since each unit is theoretically divisible into infinitely smaller units at some point in the future, people will just trade smaller amounts for larger values. That's a feature, not a bug!

A lot of people are claiming that deflation is a death sentence for a currency like this. Something they overlook is that new coins will continue to be created for many years still, and that all it takes is a new version of the protocol to 'fix' any fatal flaws in the current system. If the majority of users have a financial interest in defending the value of their coins, it seems logical to me that they are likely to act rationally to achieve that if a threat were to emerge.

But then, who knows.

cdh··on Dear Microsoft, Samsung Isn’t Very Happy With You
What, so it is in their best interest to release crappy devices? I (excitedly) bought a Windows 8 Samsung tablet last year as soon as I could find somewhere that actually had one in stock. It was really terrible. Horrible, unusable hardware and software problems. Bad pixels, sound that cut in and out, scary overheating, constant crashes, etc.

I could understand them wanting to focus on Android, but if that's their plan, they should stop releasing crappy Windows tablets.

cdh··on BitInstant hacked: What and how it happened
I can see that some people have had serious problems with them. For what it's worth, though, I used their service for the first time last week. It worked fine, and only took a few moments for them to complete the transaction after I deposited the cash.
cdh··on How AT&T Is Planning to Rob Americans of an Open Public Telco Network
USPS is expected to remain profitable as a commercial business, but to some extent is still treated as though they were part of the federal government. Their ability to make tough business decisions when they need to is crippled by a slow, ineffectual congress which refuses to allow that. I think the lesson here is that you can't have it both ways.

If USPS were allowed to make their own decisions, they wouldn't necessarily be in this mess.

cdh··on Gabe Newell: Linux is a “Get-out-of-jail free pass for our industry”
Thankfully, we don't have to guess about this particular metric, or use silly results based on web-surfing of certain websites. Almost 9% of Steam users are already on Windows 8:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey#cat0

8.76% is much higher than 2.26%.

cdh··on Applebee's fires server for sharing receipt on Reddit
I don't think that changes the situation, though.

(Incidentally, I'm apparently not the only one who got that detail wrong, since the original post on Reddit was titled "My mistake sir...")

cdh··on Applebee's fires server for sharing receipt on Reddit
She didn't just "point out" an idiot. She posted the receipt with his name on Reddit, and ended up inciting an internet mob against him: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/17i382/my_mistake_s...

I agree the guy was a jerk, but it should be common sense for any employee that they can't expect to keep their job after revealing private customer information, publicly humiliating that customer, and in this case very likely damaging that customer's career. Duh?

cdh··on Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins
Not to mention, it's free PR. I'd forgotten I needed to order some stuff, but this reminded me, and so I placed the order once they were back up. I'm not sure how common that reaction is, but it might offset the downtime to some extent.
cdh··on Office 2013: Just what on earth has the Office team been doing?
I've been using it for a while. There was a beta version available for free, and I believe most enterprise customers have had access to the final RTM version for months. I know that some MSDN subscriptions include a production license, and I was able to purchase a consumer copy from Microsoft's Home Use program last week, as well.
cdh··on 64 GB Surface Pro will only have 23 GB free
That's not an entirely fair description. Windows RT is a real Windows 8 installation, but running on ARM, and restricted to running only executables signed by Microsoft.
cdh··on WTF Google, you stole my $5
Unless Google retaliates somehow. I’d be surprised if they didn’t immediately ban or somehow freeze all of his Google accounts and services in response to a chargeback.
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