Posts by M. Poolman

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

Gene Kranz's book Failure is not an option is well worth a read.

I'll look out for it. In the mean time I'd recommend Tom Wolf's "The Right Stuff" for those interested in this kind of thing.

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

Re: Why a 3D printed gun?

Have an upvote for beating me to it!

Countries with strict gun control

tend to be equally strict about control of sale of ammunition. Perhaps that could be 3D printed too.

Probably safer all round.

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Wait till Fat Freddy puts on his steereo headphones

One for the old freaks and pheezers out in commentard land

A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse

that reminds me

Around the same time when EVERYONE in the building having their OWN personal computer was really rather exciting. One (fairly senior) chap, complained that his PC would spontaneously turn itself off at random intervals. Cure the usual visits from BOFH types. No hardware problem, but as this only seemed to happen two or three times a day at unpredictable intervals, a bit of nightmare to diagnose.

After a couple of weeks of to-ing and fro-ing the cause was finally identified: the machine was in a tower format, and installed under the desk at the back. The power button just so happened to be at almost exactly knee height ...

Thanks to all those tax dollars, humans can now hear the faint sounds of earthquakes on Mars

Some of it was funded by UK

There's quite an interesting Sky at Night program on BBC iPlayer about it. The sensors were developed in Oxford.

Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

Didcot GWR museum and railway center

In the picture - well worth a visit. Low tech, but great engineering and restoration on view.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Chalkboard erasers.

Yep, really did used to happen, good old days...

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Re: It's an opinion. This story may even boost name recognition for ReactOS.

Sure does,

I'd never heard of ReactOS until now. Don't think I'm likely to switch to it any time soon though.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Re: Its the updates

The only only advantage the ~15yrs has given me is to reinforce the message always stick with the defaults unless you are absolutely sure you need to do something different, you understand why you need to do something different, you understand how the alternatives work, and then try it out on non-production system first.

14.5 years ago, I only had 6 months experience with apt, and I'd never seen a dependency problem. That is why I now have 15 yrs experience. 99.9% of what I have ever installed has come from the standard repo's.

PS when I mentioned apt in my OP, I meant the overall packaging system, not necessarily the command line. The synaptic package manager provides a very nice gui and is what I use most of the time, and would certainly recommend to noobs.

Re: Its the updates

To be honest, I think you might be installing things wrong.

In ~15 yrs of administering a small network of Ubuntu and/or Debian machines, I don't think I have ever seen a dependency problem installing from apt, and any other problems are as rare as hen's teeth.

Of course the situation is different if you are installing stuff from tarballs, in that case dependency problems are not unknown, and are, I agree, a PITA. However, given the range of software available in the standard repositories, it's pretty unusal to need to do this.

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

Re: ScyFy?

I wish I hadn't asked now!

ScyFy?

This surely isn't really a thing is it?

Wine? No, posh noshery in high spirits despite giving away £4,500 bottle of Bordeaux

But only if you remember to use: "software respected for its fastidious bit-accurate transcriptions"!

Re: Wine is wine

"Wine is wine" was quoting the OP, and I was disagreeing with the statement!

Wine is wine

Not really, I think most people would identify a £30 bottle as being better than a £5 bottle. The problem is that the improvement in quality is subject to the law of diminishing returns as the price goes up. Same with whisky.

Age verification biz claims no-payment model for 40% of Brits ahead of July pr0n ban

criminals, wrong'uns and law enforcement agencies

I'm sure at least one item in that list is redundant!

Geiger counters are so last summer. Lasers can detect radioactive material too, y'know

Re: Not a nuclear scientist here... (Nuffield Physics)

Happy memories. In those bygone days my physics teacher used a fag paper to demonstrate how easily alpha particles could be stopped.

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

20 minutes with an axe

Or 30 seconds and can of petrol.

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Also I think from the place where the bloke took some platinum mesh home to make a trellis.

Yep,

I heard that story too. You didn't live in accomodation with the initials RCH by any chance?

It's now 2019, and your Windows DHCP server can be pwned by a packet, IE and Edge by a webpage, and so on

Re atril seems to work for me,

Okular is well worth looking at if you want something more featurefull than atril.

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

Never assume soon means less than lifetime of Universe

Likewise always assume that temporary means permenant.

This includes locations of downloaded files that have been placed in a temporary directory until I can think of somewhere better, temporary one-off scripts to fix an imediate problem, and the temporary location of last weekends curry that I was planning to reheat.

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

By a funny coincidence the tld for Sudan is "sd" (Sicherheitsdienst)

I can hear the light! Boffins beam audio into ears with freakin' lasers

Re: Surely some mistake

Many zeroes dropped, I make it ~160THz

Friday fun fact: If Stegosauruses had space telescopes, they wouldn't have seen any rings around Saturn

Mass of Mercury = 3.3x10^23 ( https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/)

3.3x10^23 / 2x10^4 = 1.62x10^19

So at 1.54 x 10^19 kilograms, they’re slightly less than 1/20000 the mass of Mercury.

Or a fraction more than 10^16 skateborading Rinoceri

Smartphones gateway drug to the Antichrist, says leader of Russian Orthodox Church

Re Lost in translation

Two thumbs up if possible - one for the comment and one for the Master and Margarita (even if it was an Amzon link)

Found yet another plastic nostalgia knock-off under the tree? You, sir, need an emulator

And Dizzy.

And Lemmings

Influential cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist Tim May dies aged 67

Re: Tilting at Windmills ..... is the Old Way They Jousted with Ghosts

Ye Gods! why all the downvotes for aman ?

Oh Deer! Poacher sentenced to 12 months of regular Bambi screenings in the cooler

Re: Not my idea of sport

I eat some venison in Portree and it was *very* gamey

Just as long as it didn't come with its own disco rice you'll probably be OK

Re: 'Murica never ceases...

RE : "Erm I don't think that bears prey on deer"

Grizzlys do.

Really? I thought that a deer would probably be to quick.

Re: Not my idea of sport

Actually I think shooting a deer in the wilds of Jura (an area I know quite well) does take quite a lot of skill, you'd need to be a pretty good marksman to get a clean kill at half a mile regardless of your rifle (and you'd have to be able to demonstrate your capability before the Ghillie would let you take a shot).

I absolutely agree with the sentiment of "don't kill it if you won't eat it" but carcasses from trophy hunters will end up in local restaurants on Islay or the main land.

Re: Cruel and Unnatural punishment

Cruel and Unnatural punishment is exactly what I thought when I heard this on the radio. I also thought that there is possibly no better way to inculcate a permanent and psychotic hatred of deer.

But maybe, just maybe, the judge has a sense of humor. I reminds me of the story a few years back about the young Sudanese(?) goat-herd who was sentenced to marry the goat with whom he'd be caught in flagrante.

Re: 'Murica never ceases...

Erm I don't think that bears prey on deer

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

Re: Controlled experments: thats the ticket

...including but not limited to: ... Zappa

Doubtless featuring Suzy Creamcheese

A rare bit of amusement for a Monday.

F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs

Re: Oh-Oh-Whoah-Oh-Oh @ Michael Strorm

Beat me to it!

Re: Oh-Oh-Whoah-Oh-Oh

Not sure which song you're refering to but the song of that name in "Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters" is pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1gUnXFb9yM

Good news: Largest, most ancient known galaxy supercluster is spotted. Bad news: It's collapsing on itself

Re: Fascinating stuff

Sad to say it, but this schemes funding this sort multidisciplinary, multinational project(EU2020/Marie Curie) will shortly no longer be available to UK boffins, and there is no sign the government is planning (or even able) to provide a substitute.

Dust off that old Pentium, Linux fans: It's Elive

Re: Ah, Enlightenment...

I remember it well, a very nice WM it was too. I'm tempted to give Elive a spin just for the nostalga.

Drones Bill said to be ready for world+dog's crayons 'this summer'

"the bill has been noticeably absent from Parliamentary schedules – ****perhaps because of the ongoing Brexit kerfuffles**** that are tying up the Lords and Commons."

By George, you might be onto something there!

US prison telco accused of selling your phone's location to the cops

That's all citizens, by the way, not just prisoners.

Shurely you'd kinda hope that you don't need cell phone location data to know where the prisoners are.

(There's going to be a jail break, somewhere in this town)

Zookeepers charged after Kodiak bear rides shotgun to Dairy Queen

Re: Sense of humor

@ GruntyMcPugh

That's a pretty grizzly joke.

Re: Sense of humor

Yeah but you missed the pedantry icon, which makes me furrious.

Re: Sense of humor

Yeah, can't see why they needed the extra clause in their permit!

Score one for the bats and badgers! Apple bins €850m Irish bit barn bid

Evidence?

Can you provide any evidence for these assertions?

Re: I feel a song coming on...

Beat me to it! Have an upvote.

Cambridge Analytica CEO suspended – and that's not even the worst news for them today

Re: That Hideous Strength

Good call.

For those that don't recognise the reference it's one of a trilogy by C.S.Lewis. Highly reccomended.

Re: Shame.

I've never really seen the point of Godwin's "law" - is it really suggesting that any mention of the 3rd Reich automatically renders an argument invalid? If not, why bring it up?

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

What I don't understand

is how, given that this is the result of a flaw at the level of the chip design, how it can affect chips with different architectures. Even if all these chips have speculative execution, surely the in silico implementation must be quite different for the different chips?