gnifyus on OmniNerd

OllyDbg! - Comment

gnifyus — Tue Mar 09 21:36:22 -0600 2010

In the article "A Short Look into a Phishing Email," gnifyus wrote:

Hey! I thought they stopped development on OllyDbg years ago, and now I see someone has picked it back up again. I liked it because amongst everything else, it would give you the addresses of every call of any given function.

I’m not going to be able to resist diving back into the world of reversing code puzzles.

Watch out or you’ll wake up as old as me.

This makes me want to see if an old version of SoftICE I have will work in a virtual machine..

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RE: Hard is easy; easy is hard - Comment

gnifyus — Mon Mar 01 20:11:43 -0600 2010

In the article "Has the Notion of Academic Cheating Changed?," gnifyus wrote:

Subjective assessments make it much harder to get good grades.

It depends on the teacher. I had an English class in college where one of the assignments was to go to a play and then write a review of the play. Being completely uncultured, a couple of us messed around and never got out to see any play. So we went to a Red Sox game instead and wrote our paper (quite cleverly we thought) as if the game was the play. Much to our surprise we both got A’s on that paper. Another teacher would have flunked us for sure.

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Cutting and Pasting from Father to Son - Comment

gnifyus — Mon Mar 01 20:05:18 -0600 2010

In the article "Has the Notion of Academic Cheating Changed?," gnifyus wrote:

Or it could be status quo and this is simply the modern evolution of yesterday’s cheater.

I’ll never forget, years ago when I was a Cub Scout leader, at one of our Pack meetings we had a game at the end of the night called “The Peanut Race”. For anyone unfamiliar, all you have to do is hold a peanut in a spoon and run as fast as you can to the other side of the gym or playing field without dropping it from the spoon. (It’s a relay race, and someone else has to run back.) Anyway, I see over in the corner, one of the fathers “teaching” his son how to hold his thumb on the peanut so he can run as fast as possible without any danger of his peanut falling off. At a Cub Scout game for crying out loud!

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RE: Interesting angle - Comment

gnifyus — Thu Feb 25 21:33:59 -0600 2010

In the article "Laptop Monitoring by Pennsylvania ," gnifyus wrote:

They just needed a sticker..

“This ~~Call~~ Laptop may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.”

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RE: I Favor OS Apps - Comment

gnifyus — Mon Feb 22 21:16:36 -0600 2010

In the poll "Computing discussion you find yourself having most often?," gnifyus wrote:

This is the way all the company apps where I work are going. Since the development IT group is in California, and we are in Massachusetts, all the benefits you mention about making one change in one place are true.

There seems to be some disadvantages here and there though. One time the power went out in California causing a fairly long shutdown on our end all the way across the country. More often, the apps work great when you’re right next to the server, but when faced with typical slowdowns from the internet/intranet, strange things happen no one anticipated.

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RE: White collar jobs - Comment

gnifyus — Sat Feb 13 22:24:59 -0600 2010

In the article "The Pursuit of AI," gnifyus wrote:

That sounds funny and wrong on the surface, but look how much you learn when you do each automation task. Eventually you always think in that direction.

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RE: White collar jobs - Comment

gnifyus — Sat Feb 13 22:04:17 -0600 2010

In the article "The Pursuit of AI," gnifyus wrote:

It’s your own laziness and desire for efficiency that will ultimately do you in.

You’re facetiousness and satire are duly noted, but you actually have something there. It has always been pure laziness which drives me to action…

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RE: White collar jobs - Comment

gnifyus — Sat Feb 13 21:39:34 -0600 2010

In the article "The Pursuit of AI," gnifyus wrote:

Doctors and nurses are probably still in the range where they have plenty to do even as robots take over some of their functions

Many process-oriented jobs are like that. Its funny- back in the early nineties when I worked for a circuit board manufacturer I began to (slowly) automate many of the monotonous paperwork parts of our job for the group I worked in. As time went on, more and more automation was implemented. We began to talk about working many of the customer requirements, and at the same time, many of the process requirements into what came out of the system. All of that info gathering, or subject matter expertise was actually a big part of what made a person “good” at their job up until that point. One day, I realized that what I was doing, or being asked to do was to effectively obsolete the job for which was originally hired. The statement was made, “Someday a clerk will be able to release these jobs to the floor, and all the information and requirements will be automatic!”. There still would have been many functions automation would not have been able to provide, but I still remember the day it dawned on me that I was somewhat “working to obsolete my own job”.

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Always Make Predictions So Far Ahead... - Comment

gnifyus — Thu Feb 11 19:23:00 -0600 2010

In the article "Bad Religion's World Population Prediction: Ten in 2010," gnifyus wrote:

… that no one can prove you wrong.

Maybe older timers like me remember similar doom and gloom from -
“In the Year 2525…” ( Zager and Evans)

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Set a Standard - Comment

gnifyus — Mon Feb 08 21:55:42 -0600 2010

In the article "NFL Play Reviews and Slow Motion Technology," gnifyus wrote:

If they are going to use these slow motion videos for things where time matters, a standard would have to be set for each type of timed call, and a real-time clock used along with the video to be certain the ball was in control for that predetermined amount of time. In a way, this slow motion method could be real accurate in determining that.

In other situations, like “did he go over the line or not”, these videos could be a real game changer from the much more subjective eyes of a referee out on the field.

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Points and Questions on Workplace Diversity - Article

Brandon — Fri Jul 17 07:10:52 -0500 2009

Years ago, in the early nineties, a position in our Product Engineering department opened up due to someone leaving. One day my boss said to us, “Let’s go to lunch, I have something to tell all of you about a new person I’m thinking about hiring.” At this time, our group was only made up of me, in my late 20’s and another man in his early 30’s. In fact, the entire management group for the corporate division consisted of younger college educated men of similar culture, attitude and social background. Over lunch, my boss explained that he was thinking of hiring an older woman who had performed more or less the same job description for a nearby company that had recently closed. His discomfort was not with whether she could do the job (she had more combined experience than all of us put together!), but with whether or not she would “fit in” with the rest of the group socially. The closest way I can describe this person now would be as an older version of Phyllis from The Office (with static-laden polyester blouses and all). We assured our boss that everything would work out (we were all nice guys, after all), but in the backs of our minds we were wondering just how that would really happen on a daily basis.

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The Rubber Room: Endless Breakfast Club for Teachers - Article

gnifyus — Wed Jun 24 22:55:58 -0500 2009

Some of us may remember the 1985 movie ‘The Breakfast Club’ where a disparate group of kids are assigned a Saturday detention where they rediscover themselves and each other after having to spend the whole day together. But what happens to teachers when they misbehave? Do they get a detention also? Well, in New York City it appears they do, and some of them have spent years there collecting full salaries all the while. Officially known as “Temporary Reassignment Centers”, approximately 700 teachers and school employees have been moved into these “rubber rooms” while they await disciplinary hearings from city arbitrators. Some play chess, some start book clubs, Italian classes and Yoga; or some just argue over whether or not to open the window. Card playing, magazine reading, puzzles and sleeping are high on the list of reassignment activities also.

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Totalitarianism vs. Technology - Article

gnifyus — Tue Jun 23 08:21:31 -0500 2009

Most of us are aware by now of the effect technology is having on the modern totalitarian government’s hold on the information their people see and hear. The recent heavy use of Twitter in Iran is one example of how hard it now is for any government to keep all communication at bay. Despite attempts at blocking and jamming internet traffic, many images and videos are still getting through to the rest of the world, and perhaps more importantly, to the very people involved and witnessing the protests.

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Food Poisoning : It Was Just Something I Ate - Article

gnifyus — Sat Feb 21 21:13:42 -0600 2009

No matter how civilized and modern a country you may live in, chances are you’ve had an episode with food-poisoning. Scientists have identified more than 250 viruses, bacteria and parasitic food borne illnesses, with the Norwalk virus (of cruise ship fame) making for two-thirds of the known cases. Also very common are the bacteria salmonella and campylobacter (which just sound nasty, don’t they?).

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Will the 'Album' Format for Music Release Be Obsolete Soon? - Article

gnifyus — Wed Jan 14 17:41:17 -0600 2009

In the depths of my basement, lined up on an old bookshelf, I have about 300 vinyl record albums that just sit slowly rotting away as the years go by. There’s also probably about 100 CD’s also starting to gatherer dust as time passes and downloaded digital media reigns. Some of the old rock music is still popular with my two high school aged teens, so occasionally I will take the opportunity to dive down there and emerge triumphantly with an ancient album in hand when a classic old band happens to be mentioned in casual conversation. The kids look at it in the same way I might look at artifacts in a museum; with interest, but no lasting enthusiasm. The pictures are neat; the hairdos are funny, “look at those clothes”— “Was Ozzy ever really that young?”, etc. As for myself, I can remember the entire experience of buying an album consisting of more than just the music. Much of it had to do with placing the record in the player and spending an hour or so listening while poring over the album jacket, which in the more interesting cases consisted of fantastic artwork mixed with news, lyrics and pictures of the band members. Some albums like the Beatles or Jethro Tull had up to 20 pages in a hardcover book form if you had an original or early release. Many contained posters and other promotional paraphernalia along with the recorded music. There seemed to be as much work going into the album presentation as went into actual music itself.

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Gaza Tunnels and the Average Joe - Article

gnifyus — Wed Dec 31 11:36:34 -0600 2008

Though the recent bombings of the tunnels along the Egyptian border of the Gaza Strip alarms us once again to the politics of violence in this area, I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that these tunnels are in existence in the first place. Not having paid a lot of attention to the plight of the Palestinians lately, I find it amazing that these tunnels amount to what is being considered a major industry for the Gaza Strip due to the Israeli border blockade being enforced in the region. In fact, some claim there would be almost no economy in Gaza at all without the tunnels bringing to the region everything from food, fuel and clothing to Viagra, Ipods and cement.

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