• (disco) in reply to PWolff

    TIL the average citizen knows that they can kill a person by changing files on a computer miles away.

  • (disco) in reply to Vault_Dweller
    Vault_Dweller:
    TIL the average citizen knows that they can kill a person by changing files on a computer miles away.

    Sorry, I don't get the joke.

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff

    With your previous post you are implying that most people would have known that Frank would have died by changing files on the server. I find that highly unlikely.

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff

    http://i.stack.imgur.com/sgctZ.jpg ?

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif
    aliceif:
    http://i.stack.imgur.com/sgctZ.jpg ?

    hmmm alarmist, and full of misinformation..... however..... it is theoretically possible to cause a CRT to implode in a manner that kills the user of the computer.

    you'll not likely be able to do it with a stock CRT, you'll need a bit of help, but still you could doctor one up to do that.

    of course unless you're looking to make it look like a freak accident if you had that level of access to the computer you could just put a chunk of C4 in there to take out a lot more area....

  • (disco) in reply to Vault_Dweller

    Maybe this article can explain the difference between a syllogism and its premises clearly enough.

    Or, when I say, "When it rains, the streets get wet", do I imply that it is actually raining today?

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff

    Sorry, it may just be me, but I fail to see the connection between the article and Greg's situation. Please elaborate.

    My reasoning, however, is this. Your original statement:

    PWolff:
    it is sufficient to prove that he knew or had to have known

    so, you must prove either:

    • He did know it would kill Frank, which, given his already stated intention (playing a prank), is unlikely, or,
    • He should have known it would kill Frank, which, according to your reasoning is based on the fact that the average person would have known it would kill him. I am saying that I highly doubt the average person knew this, and thus, by extension, Frank also couldn't have known.
  • (disco) in reply to Vault_Dweller

    No comment.

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff

    People reading entire posts? That's madness!

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif
    aliceif:
    That's madness!

    YMBNH

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff

    Thanks for the demonstration!

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    hmmm alarmist, and full of misinformation.....

    What else would you expect from Weekly World News?

  • (disco) in reply to antiquarian
    antiquarian:
    What else would you expect from Weekly World News?

    more grainy pictures of bigfoot and/or incredibly blurry pictures of what are supposed to be celebrity wardrobe malfunctions that are in fact staged by "lookalikes"

  • (disco) in reply to Severity_One
    So he came in after hours, probably dressed in black and wearing a balaclava….
    As one does when one comes in after hours.
  • (disco) in reply to Vault_Dweller

    I contend that most people know that posting stuff to the internet (i.e. a server) can destroy a person's life. Just look at all the dead teenage girls that just die all over the place from those embarrassing pics of their past boyfriend!

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    if you had that level of access to the computer you could just put a chunk of C4 in there to take out a lot more area....
    But that would cause suspicion. Better to blow up a CPU “like a large hand grenade” and make it seem like an accident!
  • (disco) in reply to Gurth

    Nah, just make the printer catch fire and burn the place down :smile:

  • (disco) in reply to kupfernigk
    kupfernigk:
    Management, of course, wouldn't want it known that they employed vampires outside the c-suite.

    Atleast that means no Oracle consultants...

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif
  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    however..... it is theoretically possible to cause a CRT to implode in a manner that kills the user of the computer.

    Only if you can first persuade them to remove the back cover and stand close to the back. The front of CRTs is not only implosion-proof, it is strong enough to stop collapsing glass from escaping. Around the back, if you were close enough, a piece of thin glass from the gun might bounce off in the implosion and cut an artery. It is very much a might due to the amount of wiring around the gun region, and the large connector at the back. On the other hand, people have died in fires caused by TV sets due to capacitors catching fire while the set was on standby. ...yes, I did spend years working in the product safety field.

  • (disco) in reply to kupfernigk

    At an earlier job c.2000, one day they sent around an email telling everyone to always switch off their (CRT) monitors when leaving work for the day - with an attachment showing pictures of a monitor that had been left on and caught fire over the weekend. There wasn't much left of it.

  • (disco) in reply to kupfernigk
    kupfernigk:
    The front of CRTs is not only implosion-proof, it is strong enough to stop collapsing glass from escaping.
    And rock-resistant. Back around 2008, I was made to be in some place where we refurbished old computers and had a few monitors standing outside the building for some reason. One day we found some unknown parties had stood one on its back and thrown rocks at the screen. Lots of damage, but nothing more than maybe a few millimetres deep at the point of impact.
  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    a CRT

    Who has one of those any more?

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    accalia:
    a CRT

    Who has one of those any more?

    For example people that need reliable color reproduction over more than 5° view angle from the perpendicular axis.

    Other examples:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube#Resurgence_in_specialized_markets

  • (disco) in reply to Vault_Dweller

    I am reasonably certain, IIFC, that Daneel Olivaw and "colleagues", in their role of Guardians of Humanity, had opposition - another group of robots. All that needs to be figured out now, is who belonged to which group.

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff
    PWolff:
    For example people that need reliable color reproduction over more than 5° view angle from the perpendicular axis.

    You'd think that if that was important anywhere it would be in large animated advertising hoardings — advertisers are very picky about colour — but they don't use CRTs. Instead, I think they use OLED displays where each pixel actively glows with a particular colour and there's a little dispersing lens (or maybe a thin colourless translucent layer) in front of each.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf

    I think, in that scenario, the cost savings from the greatly reduced power consumption overrules perfect colour reproduction

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    PWolff:
    For example people that need reliable color reproduction over more than 5° view angle from the perpendicular axis.

    You'd think that if that was important anywhere it would be in large animated advertising hoardings — advertisers are very picky about colour — but they don't use CRTs. Instead, I think they use OLED displays where each pixel actively glows with a particular colour and there's a little dispersing lens (or maybe a thin colourless translucent layer) in front of each.

    Depends on the display really, the ones in mall windows actually tend to use plasma TVs IIRC and the giant building sized bilboards use a custom made LED matrix where the LEDs ara actually a fair bit apart.

    for example here's one particular sign i found. 60'x20' and 1152x384 pixels or 1.6 pixels per inch. That gives them room to do a lot of tricks to make the viewing angle much larger and relies on the distance from the viewer to the billboard to make up for the low PPI.

    RaceProUK:
    I think, in that scenario, the cost savings from the greatly reduced power consumption overrules perfect colour reproduction
    there's also the weight... a 60'CRT would weigh, i think the correct term is, a FUCKING ton!
  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    plasma TVs IIRC

    They might do. My real point is that they don't use CRTs, and that some modern display technologies give pretty good colour reproduction over a wide viewing angle, or at least better than LCD-based techniques.

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    there's also the weight... a 60'CRT would weigh, i think the correct term is, a FUCKING ton!

    More, I think. I once hired a CRT display with a diagonal of about 30" (or so) for a public demo about 20 years ago, and it took several of our custodial staff to lift it from the carry cart onto the table for use. It was comparable in weight to a full-height filing cabinet.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    I once hired a CRT display with a diagonal of about 30" (or so) for a public demo about 20 years ago, and it took several of our custodial staff to lift it
    That seems a little off (depending on your definition of "several"). The last CRT TV I had (my ex may still have it) was IIRC 27" or 29" and weighed about 90 lbs (~40 kg). I could move it a short distance by myself, if I absolutely had to, but it needed two people to move it comfortably.
    dkf:
    accalia:
    a 60'CRT would weigh, i think the correct term is, a FUCKING ton!

    More, I think.

    How much more? Call that 90 lb TV 30" for the sake of a convenient number to work with. A 60' CRT would be 24 times the linear size. Since volume, hence mass, scales with the cube of volumelinear size :headdesk: (thanks @Scarlet_Manuka for catching that), the 60' CRT would be 243 times the mass, or about 1200000 pounds (540000 kg). It would probably be less, since some parts wouldn't need to scale 24x in all dimensions (e.g., some things wouldn't need to be 24x thicker), but it would still be on the order of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek
    HardwareGeek:
    The last CRT TV I had (my ex may still have it) was IIRC 27" or 29" and weighed about 90 lbs (~40 kg).

    The monitor was heavier than an equivalent-sized TV. Don't know why, but it might've been because it was from an earlier generation of technology before they'd figured out how to correctly reduce the amount of glass needed. CRTs got a lot slimmer before they became entirely obsolete…

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    there's also the weight... a 60'CRT would weigh, i think the correct term is, a FUCKING ton!

    The correct term is "metric fuckton".

  • (disco) in reply to Dragnslcr
    Dragnslcr:
    "metric fuckton".

    Imperial Units > Metric Units

    .... at least for hyperbolic statements

  • (disco)

    I don't think I will be finding any CRT monitor on Amazon any time soon

    [image]
  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    More, I think. I once hired a CRT display with a diagonal of about 30" (or so)

    I just gave away an old 36" CRT TV. It weighed 248 pounds.

  • (disco) in reply to Jaime

    That's heavier than me! (I'm 231lbs)

  • (disco) in reply to Jaime

    248 pounds =112.491 kilograms for those of us who think in metric.

    Which is pretty damn heavy.

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif

    I remember there was a way of setting one of the original micros on fire (could have been the BBC-B, I misremember) by getting a register on one of the chips (video driver, perhaps) to flip between 00000000H and FFFFFFFFH at clock speed. The power dissipated in the chip when you did this was enough to make it burst into flames. Allegedly.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Who has one of those any more?

    I do. It's sitting on the floor in the spare bedroom, but I do have one...

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    More, I think. I once hired a CRT display with a diagonal of about 30" (or so) for a public demo about 20 years ago, and it took several of our custodial staff to lift it from the carry cart onto the table for use. It was comparable in weight to a full-height filing cabinet.

    My last CRT TV was a 34" Sony. 400 pounds.

    Edit: Should mention it was one of those flat-screen ones.

  • (disco) in reply to dcon
    dcon:
    Should mention it was one of those flat-screen ones.

    The later versions of the Trinitron system were rather nice pieces of kit that produced a virtually flat viewing area. Marvels of engineering, but heavy.

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek
    HardwareGeek:
    Since volume, hence mass, scales with the cube of volume
    :wtf:

    Yes, from context it's clear that you meant the cube of linear size, which of course is correct

  • (disco) in reply to Scarlet_Manuka

    :headdesk:

  • (disco) in reply to Vault_Dweller
    Vault_Dweller:
    TIL the average citizen knows that they can kill a person by changing files on a computer miles away.

    Everybody knows Cluedo. Programmer Plum was killed in the server room by Coder Colin using the Unauthorised Code Change.

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff
    PWolff:
    When I started to learn Fortran, we had two floppies - one for system, one for data etc. We were explicitly told to keep the system disk write protected all the time.

    Well, the root directory wasn't much of a problem, with a text file containing the task of the day, a text file containing my docu, one source file, and one executable file

    Hah. We had three floppies - one for system, one for compiler and tools, one for data. The thing occupied an entire carpenter's bench (only thing we had that was strong enough.) Those were the LP-size floppies (I mention LPs because vinyl is coming back again, unlike huge floppies. Nowadays, you could hide 64Gbytes of sd card under the write protect tab of one of those things).

    The problem was that each drive had a number and so did each floppy, so task one of the day was to match the floppy number to the drive. This could not be automated because, of course, until slot 0 had been mapped to floppy :127 using the firmware, the system couldn't be booted. The firmware was in ROM.

    You may have noticed the problem with the system. There was no way to make a backup other than to remove the compiler, or output to punch tape. Just making a backup copy of an output file required about five minutes of disc swapping and remapping. And backups were essential because once a month or so one of those huge floppies would develop a fault and become partly unreadable.

    kids today, get off my lawn, etc. etc. But it does explain why some of us who have had to live with obsolescent systems for so long are so paranoid about code changes. (I escaped that, but those who did not escape the past of computing are condemned to live with it.)

  • (disco) in reply to kupfernigk
    kupfernigk:
    kids today, get off my lawn, etc. etc.

    Anyone here of the generation of my cs teacher who had to punch cards, send the card batch to the data processing center where they were read in, processed, and sent back with a pile of fanfold 14 7/8'' x 11'' green bar paper the next day?

    (Btw, at school, we got those green bar printouts too, but we had the big advantage of being able to type our stuff into a multi-user terminal – 2 KiByte RAM per user, and an 11" amber-on-black monitor which was le dernier cri that time)

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff
    PWolff:
    For the benefit of our kids: this is where the expression ''batch processing'' comes from
    I always thought the 'batch' part was because the work is split up into batches, in much the same way a baker bakes bread in batches
  • (disco) in reply to PWolff
    PWolff:
    –

    You're probably just spreading misinformation and making fun of gullible kids, aren't you?

  • (disco) in reply to kupfernigk
    kupfernigk:
    hose were the LP-size floppies (I mention LPs because vinyl is coming back again, unlike huge floppies. Nowadays, you could hide 64Gbytes of sd card under the write protect tab of one of those things).

    Ooh. Cool idea for USB dongle thingy...

    Edit: Too late... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXhS8OQrORE

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