Posts by John Hawkins 181 posts • joined 7 Feb 2008
Strictly speaking, the Finns were colonised first by the Swedes and later by the Russians after the 1809 war. Though the Russian colonisation didn't get heavy handed until a bit later on. Then of course there was the Winter War 1939 - 1940, when the Soviets basically tried to do to Finland what the Russians are trying to do to the Ukraine.
So the Finns have been on the receiving end of colonisation rather than the other way round and have more reason than most to be suspicious of Russian motives.
I hate office landscapes - always a lot of noise and movement - never enough rooms for meetings/calls so people take calls at the next work station.
Good enough reason to start looking for a new employer if my current situation of mostly working from home ever changes.
Workshops and some meetings can be taken in the office, I don't have any issues with that, but I prefer to leave office space for the poor sods who don't have room for a proper home office.
The Register spoke to Richard Dinan, CEO of Pulsar Fusion, who told us "2040 sounds about right" once one considers the infrastructure and sign-offs needed to build a power station.
"That's what's taking the time," he said, "it's not the fusion."
I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but it does suggest we're closing in on fusion reaching the business-as-usual state and getting bogged down the same way as other infrastructure changes do.
I agree also - I first came to my current country of residence when I was 23 and had the good fortune to work in an environment where few spoke English. After a year I was fully fluent and after a couple more people started wondering which part of the country I came from.
Learning languages at school felt pointless and a waste of time. A good comparison would be learning a new IT skill by taking a course and getting a certification as opposed to learning by doing.
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries.
I am a little disturbed to see that even after a few hours there are no references to this quote, given the subject matter and M. Dabbs' country of residence - or perhaps I am just getting old.
There'd likely have been a lot of more posturing here in Sweden from all sides (there was plenty of it as it was), but I never saw anything that made me think he'd have been handed over to the US. Except in the minds of various paranoid individuals, but that's nothing new.
Personally I think that doing a runner like that was an admission of guilt by him, but it did save the Swedish government quite a bit of money and by extension me as a local taxpayer.
Nothing ever designed by a committee of any sort is going to be 100% fit for purpose so it doesn't matter if the committee consists of scientists, bureaucrats, politicians, tribal witch doctors or marketing managers. The important thing is that something needs to be done about the tech giants so that the next generation of them can grow up and take over.
If Microsoft had manged to buy Google and IBM Facebook, the online world would have been a different place today.
Don't know if regulating content is the right way to do it though.
Regardless of which side of the discussion you are on, the pommie negotiators have been a bit useless; they seem to have seen themselves as a combination of James Bond and Hercules Hurricane, but in reality they been more like Derek Trotter and George Mainwaring.
And I don't mean that in a bad way either - both Del Boy and Captain Mainwaring are sympathetic characters, just a bit out of their depth.
Every time I see something like this I think these people lack imagination; instead of using data that creates a monster like this, why not use data that results in something a little more entertaining. Feed it the transcripts from the all Python TV series for example. I guess there must be some reason (copyright?) for this not being done, but there must be something in the public domain that could be used.
What I'd really like to see would be what happens if Roger Irrelevant is used as the example.
One of my old cats liked to chew on network cables as well as the occasional USB charging cable. Her teeth were OK as she happily ate kibbles, so I guess she just liked the taste of them. Never any marks on power cables though so maybe she'd learnt to leave them alone with her previous owner.
Mentioned this to the chap behind the counter when I was stocking up on unchewed cables one day and he said 'yeah, you're not the first customer to say that'.
I remember one of my history teachers pointing out that another major reason for the US dominating the sharp end of NATO was that they didn't want Europe and Germany in particular to be able to rival the US in military capabilities. Interesting therefore that MAGA seems to include encouraging the EU to become a military power.
Hmm, would be interesting to know how they got that past the PCIDSS auditors. A few years ago you could wave a bit of paper at them with a list of possible mitigations on it, but in recent projects I've been involved in the correct answer to the auditors saying 'jump' has been 'how high?'.
Sounds very much like my sysadmin work on Solaris of twenty-odd years ago. Servers were relatively expensive, so we had multiple applications + support scripts on each server.
Add a few patches and middle-of-the-night quick fixes and you ended up with weird behaviour caused by things interacting in unexpected ways.
Gut-feeling got you through at least as often as linear thinking.
Not as far fetched as it sounds; I've a vague memory of the idea being discussed back in the '80s, using various French overseas territories in the Pacific as an example. Though as the Poms are now leaving the the EU, NZ might need to become part of French Polynesia to join.
There was talk of banning USB drives at my work so I tested using my Nexus 6P as an alternative solution. Mucking around with a cable + 'phone wasn't as simple as a USB drive, but worked well enough that I've started using the setup to back some essential files up.
Would be interesting if IBM banned all smartphones - business and private - as well.
The code compiles and runs OK on my Ubuntu laptop once I'd installed the Python package NumPy. Could be interesting to download some text from Project Gutenberg to run through it - many of those old books are a bit iffy by current standards even if they were mainstream back then.
Maybe they did - not everybody is OK with the thought that the Wright boys weren't first with powered flight.
Old cockies in the area in the 1980s (mate of mine worked on a farm there back then) remembered Pearse as a cranky old bloke, so my guess is he had Asperger's or something similar.
Somewhere along the line I read that the reason why Uranium 235 fission reactors got the nod in the 1950s was because the military of the time considered plutonium (handy if you've got bombs to build) production high priority. Which seems reasonable enough given the recent history of the time.
So, yes, in context plutonium was very useful indeed.
To quote H G Wells' newspaper editor in 'The Sea Lady' from 1902:
"Stuff that the public won't believe aren't facts. Being true only makes 'em worse. They buy our paper to swallow it and it's got to go down easy."
You couldn't click on it back then, but bait it was.
I've got an old recipe for red squirrel that suggests first skinning, gutting (guess they could get a bit gamey otherwise, but YMMV), then rubbing them in salt and pepper, basting with olive oil and grilling.
Sounds intriguing, though I would avoid the ones with warts just to be on the safe side. Unfortunately they (squirrels, not warts) are protected where I live :(
Gearing up to take back Outer Manchuria perhaps? The Chinese certainly have a better claim to that than for example Argentina has to the Falklands, as well as a need for more space.
I think Russia has a great deal more to fear from China than the West. Pity Lewis Page isn't still with El Reg; would have been interesting to hear his views on the subject.
I worried a lot about my brother until he got a new pacemaker installed, so I get this.
I have the same heart defect myself (though not as serious as my brother; his heart stops, mine just slows until I faint) and I now use a Fitbit HR so that I can log my pulse. I'd have no problem sharing that information with concerned family members. Or at to least alert them when I'm having problems again.
Perhaps sir would find this short video amusing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx1ovD-o5l4
(There really ought be a sheep icon available - one feels let down by The Register)
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