Posts by Stevie

Linus Torvalds passed a kidney stone and then squeezed out Linux 4.13

Bah!

Dislike the man's public persona, but sympathize with his ordeal.

The code comments should be a thing of beauty though.

/ here we protect against buffAAARRRGGGHHHOHGODOHGODOHGOD /

/ we only get here if AAAAAAARRRRGGGHHHWHYME? /

Well, whad'ya know? 'No evidence' that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower

Re: No 'evidence' != didn't happen.

And MY point was that "I think" has about as much validity as space alien pyramids.

ie none.

I'm surprised that you discount the Russian thing though. There's a mountain (and mounting) circumstantial evidence of collusion and evildoing of the sort specifically forbidden in the Constitution, which the Americans had the wit to write down.

Much more than there was for, to pick one from the bunch unopened on the hall table, the Vince Foster affair.

Re: No 'evidence' != didn't happen.

No evidence is a strong indicator that it didn't happen to those of us who don't think the pyramids were built by space aliens as grain silos. Or something.

The "everybody knows" deductive method is, however, the official OPOTUS sanctioned method of determining facts, so I suppose I cannot argue with your self-evident truth.

Yes, "they" eavesdropped on Trump. No doubt using more space alien technology that cannot be detected with mere earth science.

Bah!

So, you are trying to tell me that OPOTUS has got nothing? That this has all been empty blovation?

I'm shocked and appalled.

Oracle staff report big layoffs across Solaris, SPARC teams

Bah!

Do Oracle have any Solaris software bods to lay off?

Every time our very large enterprise asks Oracle for a Solaris-trained tech to give us a hand with the various Oracle products we use we invariably end up with a Linux expert who doesn't have a clue about anything involving Solaris.

I think the Solaris Internals bods all jumped ship years ago.

Paris Hilton inflates cryptocurrency bubble some more, backs Initial Coin Offering

Bah!

I'm rather less excited than Ms Hilton.

Perhaps she could explain her glee so as to interest those of us who need more than 140 characters of hype.

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

Bah!

I know it takes three times longer to do what I need to do one a month at an ATM newly refitted with one of their bug-ugly flatscreen guis (get a balance, use it to decide which account to pay my credit card bill, transfer remaining balance to deposit if that was a checking account and grab some folding money). Mostly because each of those operations now spits the card out, requiring me to re-insert it and log back in to do the next bit. It's like the ritalin-addled foetus that wrote the algorithm didn't even use ATMs ...

Asteroid Florence buzzes Earth, brings two moons along for the ride

Bah!

Aiee! Fools! Anyone can see this is the opening salvo from Klendathu!

Connect at mine free Wi-Fi! I would knew what I is do! I is cafe boss!

Re: Bah!

My work is done. Sorry about typos. Train and iPad auto-correct at work.

Re: Bah!

Unless it's lump hammer-proof we are still good.

I've got a proper sledgehammer if sterner measures are called for.

Bah!

Just dawned on me that playing a stereo under one of these daft lightbulbs could induce vomiting in no short order.

Playlist:

Donovan, "Colours"

Dawn, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon". (Max Vom-Factor without the light bulb)

I Forget, "Love is Blue"

I Forget Again, "Black is Black"

Bing Crosby "White Christmas"

Roxy Music "Grey Lagoons"

Tom Jones, "The Green, Green Grass of Home" ( see comments for Dawn above)

Rolling Stones, "Paint it Black"

Rolf Harris, "Six White Boomers"

I Forget Once Again, "I Can Sing a Rainbow"

Lindisfarne, "Clear White Light"

And so forth.

Most important: anything with "white" in the lyric should ideally follow some idiot singing about something black, someveryone in the room is periodically Blinded by the Light.k

Re: Obession with (free) Wi-Fi

Incredulation? Is that anything like incredulity?

Have an e-beer for unnecessary word coinageationment.

Bah!

There's only one way to sort this out: Lightbulb v Doorbell Thunderdome.

Two stupidly web-enabled devices enter, one stupidly web-enabled device leaves.

And then is smashed flat with a lump hammer.

Big Tech slams Trump on plan to deport kids

Bah!

When asked for a quote, Ken Paxton said "glug"!

Crushed Juicero now officially a fruitless endeavor

Bah!

This Keurig user is wondering who the hell would pay 600 notes for a juicer unless it was a genuine razor-thin iJuicer?

User thanked IT department for fast new server, but it had never left its box

Bah!

couch?

Microsoft's fix for web graphics going AWOL? Disable your antivirus

Re: IE8 diehard

I must know; do you use a keyboard macro to do inline replacement or do you compose in an editor and do something like :%s/MS/M$/g ?

Bah!

This advice mirrors that I got from a GW drone when I called Glen Burnie to have another 200 Praetorian Guard cast up (there was a rumour in the commuunity some years ago that it was while casting one of my special orders that certain PG moulds were ruined, but I don't believe it).

The GWD said they didn't do special orders any more. I was so taken aback by the news I was momentarily rendered stupid and I asked what was I supposed to do now. The GWD said "use eBay".

The irony here is that for two decades and more, GW's official line was that all eBay sales were illegal recasts*.

I told him that I was quite capable of manufacturing my own moulds and casting my own GW-revenue-free minis now I had official GW permission to do so and hung up.

So "Always use anti-virus software except when you shouldn't" is the new Microsoft Law of Safe Downloading I guess.

* I was once lucky enough to be lectured on the subject by a foetus in a GW shirt while attending a Grand Tournament in Baltimore, who supercilliously announced that you could tell counterfeits by the cast-in backpacks. "All official GW marine minis have separate backpacks" he proclaimed. I told him that before he said such things again he should check the catalog archives because GW had quite a few offerings from the time he was just a glint in the milkman's eye that contravened his Law of Minis, and collectors might take a dim view of his implied accusations of forgery and the subsequent devaluing of their collections.

Stephen King's scary movie reboot provokes tears from 'legit clowns'

Re: Why do Clowns think they are funny or entertaining?

All this shirt-talk from an AC who can't fix a toilet?

IT Angle

See what you did there ukgnome. I'll pour this e-beer down the nearest drain for you.

Bah!

If there's one thing I hate more than a quoted tweet that repeats word-for-word what the linked source says, it's an artilce that quotes a tweet then embeds that tweet so we can read the "wisdom" imparted twice.

Quite detracted from the other witty brilliance embedded in the article.

Couple fires sueball at Amazon over faulty solar eclipse-viewing goggles

American sue culture at it's best.

*sigh* South Carolinan sue culture.

Fifty states, all with their own laws. One of the rallying cries during the run-up to the civil war was drawn from being able to tell the difference between state laws and federal.

Terry Pratchett's unfinished works flattened by steamroller

unfinished symphonies

The Mezetian Gate was published in the unfinished version with author notes interpolated to stand in for missing text.

Reactions on discovering that are mixed.

the steamroller didn't do all that much damage,

Should have given all the "to be crushed" things to that mad Finn infesting YouTube with his hydraulic press.

Not much survives contact with him, not even paper.

Of course, there will be a backup that somehow survived so the "estate authorized" travesty monster can be released again.

Nasty firmware update butchers Samsung smart TVs so bad, they have to be repaired

For the most part those kinds of things come to monitors before they arrive in TVs,

Don't think I've ever seen a monitor with multiples of the same input, never mind the five HDMI inputs my TV has. A monitor is usually assumed to be a dedicated device, which is why we need KVM switches when we want to share them. It seems the monitors in your locale are rather different to those available in NY.

The flatscreen monitor I recently purchased had one HDMI input and one DVI input.

But I fully believe yours has more, Cuddles.

Re:Come to the US. BBC shows are what make watching telly bearable.

You're pulling my war wound MachDiamond.

BBC America has so many adverts it even beats The History Channel. I timed it during one Dr Who episode and there was one point where I got seven minutes of show followed by nine minutes of commercials. I only got eight minutes of show after the opening credits had rolled.

And what are these important commercials being rammed down the viewer's optical nerve? Why, adverts for more BBC shows delivered in Jeremy Clarkson Received Pronunciation at volume 11 by some shouty twat. We used to call that Aversion Therapy.

Game of Thrones, Ray Donovan and Netflix make TV bearable. The BBC is intoxicated with adverts much like a pre-teen on Woodpecker, and about as annoying.

Who wants to watch YouTube on a tv?

I do DailyLlama.

After a hard day dealing with know-all idiots who think "I think x so everyone should too" I like to relax in the last ten minutes or so before beddy-byes with some dashcam footage of mad Russians driving drunk at a hundred miles per hour on bald tyres that were re-engineered from badly-worn tyres when "new" as they T-bone each other's vehicles, stray into oncoming traffic or best of all just drive off the road into the treeline for no adquately explained reason, all while I have my feet up and sip a nice hot cup of tea.

You, of course, are free not to consume such fare on your TV and I would not dream of telling you otherwise.

Samsung computer monitors don't have this problem

Do they come in five foot versions? Curved screen? Multiple HDMI inputs?

If not, to quote the bloke returning the Norwegian Blue, it's not much of a replacement,is it?

VW engineer sent to the clink for three years for emissions-busting code

Re: Can you say scapegoat?

You are aware he is a boss, not a trench-monkey, right? A deciderator not a gofer. A scientist, not a hunchback.

You don't, which is exactly and precisely the point.

Except that in this case the engineers and the head engineer in the dock assuredy Did know they were doing something illegal. The emmissions laws were a matter of public record and the device designed to specifically fool the testing equipment that the filthy diesel engine was "clean".

To Rura Penthe (either of them) with them all.

Throw away the key.

Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!

Re: Bah!

Not talking about symbols, names.

In base ten, in English, nine plus one gives us not "One-zero", but "ten". Double that and we don't get "Two-zero", we get "twenty".

There are 21 individual names for numbers between 0 and 20. There are another 12 names if you want to count up beyond 1 000 000 000.

Now, how many names do you need for the sexadecimal digits that make life so much "easier".

Bah!

So now, instead of remembering the name of around thirty-two numbers to do sums I have to learn the names of 60 before we shift (presumably) to the left and incur a new number name?

Count me out. In base ten.

Paris nightclub red-faced after booze-for-boobs offer exposed

Re:there is NOT enough Tequila

I admit that while I was shooting for Granny Weatherwax I might have actually come closer to Nanny Ogg in the realization.

Re: Surely men should be offered a free shot

...for showing their boobs or wearing a short skirt as well.

Well I wore a dress, fishnets and hobnail boots when I went to a Halloween party as Granny Weatherwax.

All I know is I've never felt so free and I'm never going back.

Re: Wanted!

Ah, Miami. Where business casual is apparently a dental floss bikini.

(Cue obligatory "And the women wear even less" punch line).

Re: snapped by a Polaroid camera

I rather think, given the expense of obtaining Polaroid film, that if it is in fact Polaroids we are talking about and not some journalistic shorthand for a more modern alternative, that the point is that the subjects of the photos have some expectation of them not hitting the internet and dogging them for the rest of their days.

Of course, all it takes is one drunken lout with a cell phone more intelligent than they are to make that problematical - assuming there is no "no phone snaps" policy at the bar in question.

Were I the bar staff, I would be making damned sure that no-one in the audience was taking their own snaps of the event itself too.

But then again, I was brought up with the Sunday Mirror's pictures that accompanied the serialization of Desmond Morris's "The Human Zoo" and "The Naked Ape", and the Mirror's page five model. I don't freak out when shown a pair of breasts, nor do I place any expectations on the owner of them if she should show them to me - providing that if she whips them out she doesn't get bent out of shape if I cop a look. I am a hetero male after all, and have my own hard-wiring (Ha!) soldered in place by millions of years of evolution and 60-summodd years seeking wisdom (and the occasional exposed female chest).

Anyway, they are breasts. They need air.

Bah!

Did anyone actually say "no drinks unless you lift up yer shirt?", because I'm having difficulty seeing the outrage myself.

AccuWeather: Our app slurped your phone's location via Wi-Fi but we like totally didn't use it

How many people use the "Iron" browser,

I don't know, and if they are telling the truth about "without the snooping" no-one else does either.

Re: '"Unix Philosophy" would be utterly unusable'

Gotta say that while I'm not a phone app engineer I would have expected a phone o/s of any stripe to implement access to phone features and the gatekeeping of same to a core API of such robustness it couldn't be weasle-coded around or just ignored.

Codename Brainwave: Microsoft reveals tricks and tips for whipping cloud FPGAs into shape

Bah!

Ah, yet another implied redefinition of "AI".

Still no HAL though.

Sysadmins told to update their software or risk killing the internet

Re: I feel the need to raise a change request

I'm gonna print that post and stick it to the desks of everyone currently trying put ServiceNow for the first time in our site.

They need a reason to laugh non-maniacally.

Bizzby balls-up: Handyman app spams customer's details to world+dog

Bah!

Huh.

"Bizby" was the name of the derogatory Buzby parody used by the illegal CB radio enthusiast media* during the years when the GPO still had a stranglehold on interpersonal radio communication.

He was a showcase for incompetence and clueless blundering.

Perhaps a more fortunate name would have been in order.

* - So I'm told**

** - By others

Private sub captain changes story, now says reporter died, was 'buried at sea' – torso found

Bah!

Sounds about as reasonable as pulling the rugs and seats out of a brand-new car and hosing it out being a "normal" cleaning regime.

British snoops at GCHQ knew FBI was going to arrest Marcus Hutchins

After all, it's 'entirely possible' _anyone_ did it... no?

No. It's possible that someone else with the necessary skills did, which isn'tbthe same thing. There is enough evidence to start looking a him though, crummy take-down ploy situation notwithstanding.

No skin in the game. No fish to fry on either side until the case is underway.

Open AWS S3 bucket leaked hotel booking credit card authorizations

Bah!

Oh dear, someone persisted ccv codes despite being told by Visa et al not to?

Well, I see no alternative. Canings all round, followed by a week wearing the conical hat of extreme stupid.

Uh oh, scientists know how those diamonds got in Uranus, and they're telling everyone!

Bah!

Diamonds contain no bonded hydrogen. I learned this as a callow yputh at St John Backsides Comprehensive from Mr Thomas, head of Chemical Indoctrination.

Fire all these so-called "scientists" and make them give back their certifications of cleverness to the universities that awarded them.

Atari shoots sueball at KitKat maker over use of 'Breakout' in ad

Bah!

In the case of Atari vs Nestle:

Chief Justice Once presiding.

Resolved: Nestle are very naughty and owe a small fee. No damages accrue on account of people being smart enough to tell a video game from a chocolate bar. Even the very stupid people infesting the world these days.

Also resolved: Atari are still the same grubbing company that foisted crap games on the world when Nintendo had rebuilt an industry destroyed in a large part by the actions and products of Atari.

M'lud was heard to mutter on rising for lunch "I wish you would both FOAD".

Voyager antenna operator: 'I was the first human to see images from Neptune'

Re: Bah!

Yes, Captain Dense, that was my point.

No more Space Roombas. People in the High Frontier. What's the point of just looking through a camera? Might as well play video games. Let's get working on people feeling the crunch of the granulated bleach of Mars's "soil" under thier boots and forgetting about arguing over whether to call Pluto a planet or not in favor of actually going for a look at it.

It's there. Yes it's hard to do. No, Bill Maher, self-proclaimed fiscal expert, doesn't have the last word on whether it is worthwhile or not any more than any other TV pundit does, and he is willfully misreading the impetus behind the push in order to fuel a "bit".

Besides, it isn't an either/or situation; we can have social programs on Earth *and* Space for Humans. We just have to decide we are going to get serious about national/international bookkeeping instead of pandering to corporations.

There are solid cultural reasons for going out there that are important no matter the politics of your particular culture at this point in time.

Too late for me. I'm from the generation that decided to do more with less (aka doing less).

No, the cops can't get a search warrant to just seize all devices in sight – US appeals court

Bah!

The Totalitarian Secret Police State Clock just reset to December 16th 1983.

Daily Stormer booted off internet again, this time by Namecheap

Bah!

There is no free speech guarantee on the Internet unless the (US) host is run with taxpayer money.

There is only "can we afford to be seen taking this assclown's money?"