Posts by Gene Cash

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

Re: Sinclair and the SSD

The same thing happened in Silicon Valley: Shockley left Bell to start Shockley Semiconductor Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the bipolar transistor then As a result of Shockley's abusive management style, eight engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor; Shockley referred to them as the "traitorous eight". Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel. according to Wikipedia.

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

Re: "So my urgent 200-mile round trip ended, …

Or the even better "UNDEFINED FAULT - CONTACT SERVICE" that I got from an important piece of hardware a couple weeks back.

What was even better is the hardware worked just fine, and the root cause was another piece of hardware not doing it's job properly, so the first piece of hardware panicked and decided "I'm broken"

US Federal Aviation Administration issues draft assessment of SpaceX Super Heavy impact

The EPA didn't exist at all in the '60s.

Space tourists splash down in Atlantic Ocean after three days in orbit

Re: "space is for all of us".

Eh, just remember how airline flights used to be thousands of dollars (and still should be, IMHO)

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

His legacy is the British tech scene as we know it today.

No need to be rude to the gentleman!!

Seriously though, I see on Wikipedia he's credited as the inventor of the pocket calculator. Is this actually true?

A friend here at college in the US had a fully kitted out ZX-81, with the requisite duct tape keeping all the connectors from wobbling. Those were the days.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

"Yes, I talk to myself, it's the only way to get an intelligent conversation around here!"

Businesses put robots to work when human workers are hard to find, argue econo-boffins

Slaves

Well, a lot of folks argue Greece, Rome, etc didn't have an industrial age because they had cheap & plentiful slave labor, in the literal sense.

Supposedly the Black Death lead to a middle class and higher wages because, well, it killed off most of the serfs, so workers were in short supply.

Not a historian, but it fascinates me when something as dire as the Black Death led to an overall improvement in human daily existence. Or maybe it's late at night and I'm very drunk watching my 3D printer do its magic.

Hopefully it's the shittiest jobs that get automated first, so people don't have to do them.

Bepanted shovel-toting farmer wins privacy payout from France TV

Re: I wouldn't have gotten into a fight...

As my grandfather used to say, "I've got 220 acres, a backhoe, and 20 pigs - you won't be found"

SpaceX successfully sends four amateurs into orbit for three-day tour

Crappy video

Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLVfdGO7tHw about 2hr 6m in for a poor video of it.

It was far far better in person. That whole area was lit up white. I don't know why it doesn't show in the video.

Edit: the entry burn afterward was a streak, not the little red dot shown. His camera is an absolute potato.

It was spectacular

The launch was a particularly loud and bright one, to start with. You could hear windows rattle across the street, and nobody even bothers to use car alarms around here any more.

When the stages separated, the second stage passed into the sunlight and put out a huge white oval plume, and you could see the first stage cold-gas thrusters firing, as the bursts disturbed the plume. I can't wait to see decent pictures and videos of that in the days to come.

I even saw the reentry burn from my house, which is very unusual. This was an orange flare moving downward really fast for about 30 seconds. (edit: the YouTube lag is apparently about 17 seconds)

There was an ISS pass at the same time, so I watched that afterwards. I caught about the last 2/3rds of that.

The mosquitoes were swarming. I was swinging around one of those electric tennis racquets and it was snapping like a string of firecrackers.

Ransomware crims saying 'We'll burn your data if you get a negotiator' can't be legally paid off anyway

Re: It is easy for us to say "don't pay"

Yes: there should be good backups but not everyone does. Yes: bad backups is stupid/negligent/... but it happens.

If you're that incompetent, possibly you deserve to go out of business.

Doing backups is a necessary task and cost of business, like keeping the lights on, maintaining a website, tracking your finances, and paying your employees.

UK gives military's frikkin' laser cannon project a second roll of the dice

Didn't the Greeks do that once?

Java 17 arrives with long-term support: What's new, and is it falling behind Kotlin?

Most of these are "screw the coder" misfeatures

I don't see any useful use-case for sealed classes or strong encapsulation other than control-freakishness.

There have been (very few, but important) times I've needed to access internal APIs on my phone. And fuck you, it's MY phone. I want my garage door app to be able to turn on GPS and data so it can function, and I don't want to spend 5 minutes tapping all sorts of extraneous "enable" dialogs just so I can go home.

You want us to make a change? We can do it, but it'll cost you...

"It turned out she had never read"

Yeah, I just had my electric bike flash up a number of error messages (including the gem "UNDEFINED ERROR - CONTACT SUPPORT") so I emailed the dealership through their service contact form instead of trying to repeat all the gibberish over the phone.

So I bring it in and get "did you get any error messages?"

"Yes, the ones I listed in the email, there was a bunch"

[angry stare]

Turns out the service department had no access to that.

C'mon people... don't put the goddamn form up if you're going to ignore it.

Off yer bike: Apple warns motorcycles could shake iPhone cameras out of focus forever

Oops

I did have a Nexus blow out of the holder once... I might possibly perhaps maybe have been going just a wee bit faster than I should have been.

Re: another excuse

Japanese parts fit together tighter than a nun's knees. Italian machining is done after a 3 hour liquid lunch, and Harley Davidson tolerances are measured in feet. -- RyanF9

You meet the nicest people on a Honda. You meet the seemingly unhappiest most insular group of people on a Harley.

Harley Davidson -- the most efficient means of turning gasoline into noise without the unpleasant side effect of horsepower.

98% of all Harley Davidsons are still on the road, the other 2% made it home.

You'll never get lost on a Harley... you can always follow the oil trail back home

Re: What did you expect?

I used to use dedicated GPS units like Garmin or TomTom, but then I decided I wanted something that had been updated this decade, and that "lifetime updates" didn't mean "2 updates and now you're no longer supported"

Also, my Moto G6 is readable in sunlight, unlike the last 2 TomTom units I had.

I try to use the newer gloves that have the touchscreen compatible fingertips.

This is not the tech unicorn you are looking for... and other stories

Re: Thanks!

That's the most fucked up stuff I've seen in weeks - and I live in Florida.

Tased while twerking

Florida man tased for twerking during rainy traffic stop https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2021/09/09/florida-man-tased-for-twerking-during-rainy-traffic-stop (trigger warning: Facebook)

Florida woman fights off large alligator while paddleboarding in terrifying video (maybe the same pissed off alligator?) https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2021/09/10/florida-woman-fights-off-large-alligator-while-paddleboarding-in-terrifying-video

You're welcome.

Austin and Seattle say "keeping it strange" while Florida just goes "hold my beer"

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: Floppy solution

The old PS/2s could remap the keyboard at boot. Fun times such as mapping everything one-to-the-left, or when people tired of that, you could move the physical keycaps to match the mapping.

Re: Ah, a first time user

Wow, just took a look. Never thought I'd hear the words WordStar and Unicode in the same sentence...

Tennessee agrees to pay Oracle $65m for Nashville location plan

$1.2B? Really?

That's a hell of a lot outside of California.

Or is this one of those "up to" things where they put in a couple temp office trailers for $10K and shrug their shoulders?

McDonald's email blunder broadcasts database creds to comedy competition winners

I wouldn't have given a damn

A hole in McD's security? This is the company that can't distinguish between no onion and extra onion.

I would have giggled and gone about my day.

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

Re: Intelligibility fail

On my machine, it's some sort of snake thing. Or maybe a worm? In front of it is some sort of salad colander? I don't know why that's there.

Compromise reached as Linux kernel community protests about treating compiler warnings as errors

Re: Seems like a good idea

bit.ly? Seriously?

Astronomers detect burps of interstellar cannibal from 480 million light years away

I wonder how many civilizations ended?

And if any of them made it out "by the skin of their teeth"?

If only Iain M. Banks was still around...

HashiCorp runs low on staff, calls a halt to Terraform pull requests

Which one is it?

So we've got LiveCode dying because nobody's working on it... and Terraform dying because too many people are working on it.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

Eight years and this is the first I've heard of it??

I think I see a problem right there.

After failing to make it to orbit, Firefly Aerospace asserts it has 'arrived'

Re: Keep going

> To be honest, when this is the first flight, not exploding on and destroying the launch pad should be considered a bit of a win.

That's Musk's main goal of his first Starship flight... the launch pad is VERY expensive and hard to build. Something like 4 or 5 rockets worth.

Alpha adds to tally of exploding rockets, takes out space sail prototype with it

California Polytechnic State University

Are you sure that's not California Pyrotechnic State University?

Perseverance rover drilled a rock on Mars and probably snaffled a core sample

Re: Holy Rock, Batman!

> The engineers could have fitted an LED

Actually they DID. After Martian sunset on the last attempt, they shined an LED into the hole to reveal that it was empty.

Give us a CLU: Object Oriented Programming pioneer arrives on GitHub

Every language has its flaws

"It has been said that CLU laid the groundwork for languages like Java and C#."

World to make 1.37 billion smartphones in 2021 says IDC – about one for every six humans

Re: Please A 5G, or Even 4G Mast To Allow Data Receiption?

> Is anyone twisting your arm and making you upgrade?

AT&T is sending me incessant texts saying 3G/4G will be EOLed by February and I need a new phone.

I don't know how true that is, and I also don't know if this is spam because I have no way of confirming the number is indeed AT&T. I have marked them as spam, though.

This drag sail could prevent spacecraft from turning into long-term orbiting junk. We spoke to its inventors ahead of launch

Electrodynamic tethers are even better

https://spacenews.com/tethers-unlimited-says-early-results-of-deorbit-hardware-test-promising/

It just unspools 70m of conductive tape and it deorbits 24x faster.

Logitech Bolt devices support secure Bluetooth Low Energy – but forget the 'Unifying Receiver'

F*ck wireless

Or you can avoid all this BS and just use a mouse with a damn cord with whatever flavor of USB you need. Bonus in that it doesn't need batteries!

If I'm further than 3 feet from my PC, then I'm not going to be needing a mouse.

Et tu, Samsung? Electronics giant accused of quietly switching SSD components

Re: Is it such a big problem in this case?

> what sorts of applications

Backups? But if you're backing up to an SSD...

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Re: Haynes Manuals

Oh but Haynes (and Chiltons) fucking KNEW nested function calls!!

*Replace starter motor

See "Remove throttle bodies"

* Remove throttle bodies

See "Remove airbox"

* Remove airbox

See "Remove left fairing"

See "Remove right fairing"

See "Remove air horn"

* Remove air horn

See "Remove engine"

Online disinformation is an industry that needs regulation, says boffin

> concept of an expert has all-but disappeared

I think the concept of "someone that actually knows what they're talking about" has disappeared, because 1) "of COURSE *I* know what I'm talking about!!" and 2) there's a lot of bullshit artists out there

Not really... people don't listen. Or really think about things. They've made up their minds AND YOU ARE WRONG!

You can bring the horse to water but you can't make him drink.

Re: Interesting concept

That's like California's Prop 65 warnings ("contains stuff that might cause cancer or reproductive harm") which is literally on everything, including coffee.

What use is that?

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Need to smash the hell out of that power brick

Otherwise someone will fish it out of the bin and use it on another box that starts to mysteriously fail.

Anyone remember the horror that was active SCSI termination? Where the drive at the end of the chain had to be powered on (so it would have termination) before the server or it would all go to shit?

I remember trying to explain that "this drive needs to be turned on first" and being told I was complete rubbish.

Brit says sorry after waving around nonce patent and leaning on sites to cough up

"chancing his arm"

Awright, I learn something new every day from El Reg...

Bumble fumble: Dude divines definitive location of dating app users despite disguised distances

What?

No self-serving PR statement about how highly they value their customers' privacy?

(Though apparently they do, considering how fast they implemented a fix and didn't argue)

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Still have my Red Hat red hat

I got a red fedora when I bought RH 2.0 (?) on CDROM.

It has the old all-lowercase RH shadowman logo inside, and was apparently made by a company named "Lite Felt"

Apparently they're still a thing: https://www.millerhats.com/store/Lite-Felt-Hats/Lite-Felt-Fedoras

Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years

Re: For everybody...

Yes, I remember when highres game cards didn't bother to support standard VESA modes.

It's called bleeding-edge for a reason. You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.

I remember buying stuff based on if it was supported by Linux or not. There was a lot of sites that told you if a particular laptop was hostile to Linux. Remember the Sony VAIOs that had the floppy drive select line inverted just for the fuck of it?

I remember when you had to hand-calculate X11 "mode lines" for EVERYTHING, and if you screwed it up, you had a good chance of blowing up your expensive monitor.

I remember when EDID showed up and you could ASK the monitor what resolutions it supported! What a concept!

Things have changed

I remember when Slashdot would have been all over this, and they haven't even noticed.

The 1st version I installed from scratch was 0.99PL13 in 1993.

Remember when the system froze when you accessed the floppy drive? (Remember floppy drives?)

Re: I've got a suggestion...

> Would you refuse to open a letter addressed to "JOHN" or "john" because that's not your written name?

Actually, yes... because both of those indicate it's just spam. Or illiterate. Neither of which I want to deal with.

Robots don't smoke, says Alibaba, and that's why they deliver parcels so fast

Robots don't care

> Delivery people can get lost trying to find a flat in a tower block or navigate a large housing estate

So instead the robots won't give a shit and just drop the parcel where-ever? I think UPS has a patent on that already.

Edit: also, if that thing came trundling down the sidewalk, it'd be spare parts inside of an hour, at most. "Look! Stepper motors!"

Cop drone crashes into flight instructor's airplane

Expensive

A prop strike means the engine needs to be removed, dismantled to the crankshaft, and carefully inspected. It's usually a toss-up to if it's cheaper to buy a new engine, and insurance usually instantly totals it.

I wonder if the owner (or insurance company) has any recourse for the costs?

38 million records exposed by misconfigured Microsoft Power Apps. Redmond's advice? RTFM

ObXKCD

https://xkcd.com/327/