Posts made by MrMalachiCrunch

I’m surprised nobody posted a link to this article as he died yesterday and it was all over the news.

AK47 assault rifle designer Kalashnikov dies at 94
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25497013

Looks like trolling behaviour to me….

The US has China right where they want them.  The US owes so much money to the Chinese that China dare not sell any of their US holdings, and in fact, the US has the power to force more loans from China.  China must continue to purchase in order to support their existing holdings.  If China were to announce a sale of US securities then the value would immediately plummet and China could lose 100s of Billions before the first security was sold.

I think its a bit of white collar ingeniousness.  The west has had 100s of years learning how to cook the books and screw the other guy using economic games whereas China is a newbie when it comes to economic shenanigans.  Now if only Canada could learn to spend beyond her means the same way the other industrial veterans spending themselves into continued world supremacy….  Sadly Canada is in the best financial position of the G8 and sadly lacks that kind of power… Always the bridesmaid and never the future X something or other…

South Korea announces expanded air defence zone

South Korea has announced it is expanding its air defence zone, which will now partially overlap with a similar zone announced by China.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25288268

I wonder when China will fly planes through their zones as Japan, Korea and the US have flown through Chinas unannounced?

I was going to be smug when I read the title and just suggest a loaded firearm up to the side of the head would work.  But then I read the posting….

Well done!

Thanks Witt!

Well not exactly the south china sea near the phillipines  but still along the same concept.  China is slowly starting to exert military muscles and sooner or later its going to end up in a clash….

Japan urges airlines to disregard China air zone rules

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25087793

Great link, thanks!

Silly swear word detectors……

I was told the family history of the Churchill’s originated about that time.  I really should verify this but a cousin went to somerset house 20 some odd years ago to do some research on the family tree.  I was told the genesis was a French knight who was granted land in England after a victory in about this era.  Shortly after that the family tree diverged to my fathers side and Winston’s side!  Normally I would wish for English victories all the time but this once has a personal connection. Had the Saxons won there might never have been a Winston Churchill…or me!

GG, I disagree but understand your position.  Is this better?  “For a smart aleck…some people really are not that smart and have to ask silly questions for what should be an obvious answer in order to rain on good people’s parades”?

Knowing history would help.  It looks like the bad word detector noticed bast_ard and replaced it with b��t��d.

As always I appreciate the time you take to provide us with these wonderful factoids.  Pity the site has to rely on a bad word detector which is easily circumvented using unicode.

May the losing streak never extend beyond one!  :-)

CWO Marc, I always like reading your posts.

When the British admiral exclaims “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today” after two of his battle-cruisers blew up with ‘lucky’ hits you know there is a ship design issue.  But that was in regards to ‘battle cruisers’.  The full up British dreadnoughts compared well to the Germans counter-parts.  The was the sacrifice made in order to make ships go fast enough to chase the enemy down.

As for tactics…a bit tongue in cheek so forgive me but…perfecting a 180 to run away does no impress me.  Yeah I know it’s actually a rather difficult feat and is by itself impressive but in the context of a military tactic that will win you battles on the sea that change the outcome of a war…it does seem to leave a bit to be desired for me at least.

Number wise yeah the British did have more but the idea was the high seas fleet was to bait a portion of the British fleet into a battle.  Everything went according to plan and the Germans ran away only to sink their own fleet a year after the war was over.  The Germans I believe even failed to dump mines over when running away.

So in Jutland the only thing the Germans had was ship design.  On average a bit better than the Brits and in the case of battle cruisers the british had fatal design flaws.  My scoring was not comparing directly to the British but just a general mark.  The Germans had enough quantity to make a threat of a fleet action possible in WWI, in WWII fleet on fleet action was never really a possibility unless 3-4 german ships makes a ‘battle fleet’, in my books that is not even a squadron.  In that context they get a 1 out of 1 for quantity in WW I even though the British had many more ships.  On the other hand the Germans had pretty much zero experience with large fleet engagements whereas the British did…albiet for the last war with outdated technology and tactics.

Plunging artillery shells were new as were the range fro which they were now being fired from, from what I remember anyways!

No love for the Leafs!  Hate is much preferred over pity!

Too much time separated the completion of the ships.  Tirpitz was completed 5 years after the Graf Spee was completed and 2 years after the Graf Spee was sunk.

A large fleet on fleet action would have been interesting but the Germans had their chance in the last war at Jutland and blew their chance.  Ship design, quantity, tactics and leadership.  2.5 out of 4 in WW I and barely 1 out of 4 in WW II.  Maybe 1/2 for design and 1/2 for tactics for sub warfare.

Leafs are still undefeated after 3 games!  All aboard leafs nation until their first losing streak!!!  May that never extend past 1 game!

Witt is correct, if there are enemy surface combat ships then combat must occur and shore bombardment can then not occur.

I came across these articles today and thought they might be useful and/or informative.

This is quite the tour de force of an article……

500 MEELLION PCs still run Windows XP. How did we get here?
Just six months to go: what to do if you don’t have $200 per PC

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/six_months_end_xp_support/?page=1

….and just because I love Micro$oft so much…

Hackers just POURING through unpatched Internet Explorer zero-day hole Oh, sysadmins. It’s so much worse than we feared � report

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/ie_0day_widely_exploited/

‘I don’t trust Microsoft’ after NSA disclosures says former privacy chief Open source is the way to go warns Bowden
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/i_dont_trust_microsoft_after_nsa_disclosures_says_its_former_privacy_chief/

Tough being a Leafs fan knowing they will sell out every game and the next year even if they go 0-82……  Actually, it’s just plain tough being a leafs fan…  Well, they are undefeated in the regular season so far…Maybe this year…

Americans got stomped by the Americans……

Watching MSNBC then FOX I sometimes wonder…

I MUCH prefer the sleuth-oriented aspect of troubleshooting, and people generally appreciate it more when you fix and issue and save the day.  I’m a people person, for the most part.  I don’t think I could handle looking at code all day.

The cartoon Dilbert is surprisingly accurate in depicting ‘computer types’.  IT does tend to be a draw to people who can’t relate that well to other people.  Now managing a strange brew of people like that requires exceptionally good people skills to tolerate them!

I was lucky in that only about 25% of what I did was coding (actually about an industry standard % of project manpower for commercial software, military software has 10% code/90% design/document/lifecycle) and that was done from home eventually.  My projects were small 1-3 month affairs with a great deal of reverse engineering.  If you like sleuth-oriented aspects of troubleshooting then you would LOVE to be an expert in tracking down hard to find bugs in code.  I was considered rather good in finding others bugs and writing code that had few bugs, probably why some of my code runs nearly 2 decades later on production systems.

I did know Gabe was a former employer and it is important to look at the source.  True, you do have to take what he says from the point of view he is a competitor to MS now and some of his more subjective comments were hyperbolic, but that being said….He was not un-accurate.

The last really good upgrade MS  did was when it went to NT 4.00 and in fact NT is still the heart of most MS operating systems code wise.

I’m looking to get back into the industry but from a sales perspective.  I much prefer dealing with people and there is an opportunity to make much more.  I hate knowing what my paycheque will be for the next year with no opportunity to make more.  Not to mention my brain does not work as well as it used to before the drunk driver nearly killed me.  My brain got quite a whack and the tests show…well they figure I’ll never be a software developer again.  They meaning the insurance company experts so who am I to argue?  Pizza slid under the door coding with people with body odour cause they are all still virgins or suits and sales…