Posts by Michael Dunn

Sysadmin 'fixed' PC by hiding it on a bookshelf for a few weeks

Re: deja vu @Alan Brown

You may remember the old BBC computers, where one had to take off the cover and push all the chips down into their sockets periodically - constant on/off switching caused the chips to work loose. I never had the problem, since I didn’t ever switch mine off, except for maintenance, or installing a Solidisk board.

There's an old story of an engineer being called out to fix a machine, might have been a computer or some other machine, and after rthe machine was working again, the manager in the department which ran the machine came in spluttering and shouted "You charged us 339 quid, when all you did was to hit it with a hammer!" "Ah." was the reply: "30 pounds is me standard call out fee. The 300 pounds is for knowing exactly when , how and where to hit it."

I can seee my own way out - I've been calleed away to look at an Altair 8.

Arthur C Clarke award won by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Re: Doctor Who

Or, as it was called on its first showing: "The Spiders of Metabilis Three"

Having offended everyone else in the world, Linus Torvalds calls own lawyers a 'nasty festering disease'

Re: So, to sum up...@ The Finn

cf Henry VI Part 2, Act 4 Scene 2

UK IT consultant subject to insane sex ban order mounts legal challenge

Re: "He was found not guilty, therefore he is innocent" @ the bigger blacker box

"i.e. Presumption of innocence, it means legally, he is innocent until proven guilty,"

No, No, No! It means innocent _UNLESS_ proven guilty; the police are assuming guilt, and expecting evidence to turn up which will prove him so.

£11bn later: Smart meters project delayed again for Crapita tests

@ Toltec

"You got a discount on your electricity if you took the system."

Yeah, but in Britain, they'll probably find a way to charge you extra.

Violence, vandals and vomit: London's naughtiest tech Tube stations revealed

Re: The Tubes are too boring! @ Shadow Systems

The story <'A Subway named Mobius" comes to mind.

Here's how police arrested Lauri Love – and what happened next

Re: Although the burden of proof lies with Love @ H4rmony

How many times have I posted the correction "Innocent UNLESS proven guilty."

Saying 'until' assumes guilt.

Tracy Emin dons funeral shroud, marries stone

"As one of the most notorious artistic con-artists of her generation,"

Hey, AC of 9 days ago, wealth could console me for a lot of life's, or '

"outrageous fortune's" "slings and arrows."

They say money cannot buy happiness. Ha! It's a lot more comforting than penury.

Re: I love it when the amateur art critics come out to play

@Roo Sir, you have an upvote from me, and I only wish I could give more. You describe the whole Art Industry Scam so concisely.

Go No! Google cyber-brain bests top-ranked human in ancient game

In the immortal one-line from Emo Phillips

A computer beat me at chess, but it was no match for me in kick-boxing!

MYSTERIES of remote ICE WORLD PLUTO: New pics BAMBOOZLE boffins

Re: Dear {deity} @Will Godfrey

Sadly, Will, it's a little late for me! As Sound of Music would have it: I am 81 going on 82.....

Boffins learn to send boredom-beating suggestions to smartphone-fondlers

U of Stuttgart

Doesn't this smack of "Vee haf vays of making you enchoy yourself"?

Giant sea scorpion which prowled ancient oceans revealed

Hmm......

I' rather sorry I saw this!

Canned laughter for Canadians selling cans of air at $15 a pop

Back to "Not News" again

Surely it was in the '50s or '60s that someone was canning 'pea-soupers' and selling to nostalgic expat Londoners?

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

AC 23hrs

I presume you mean 'hara kiri.'

Put it away: Dwarf's 'supermassive' marvel is actually smallest thing boffins have ever seen

@Wzrd1

"if it's moving at relativistic velocity, " it'll be travelling through a lot of "large millimetres!:

All hail Ikabai-Sital! Destroyer of worlds and mender of toilets

Re: Flush toilets are civilization defined

O K, but visit Knossos and see the flush toilet there dated about 1700 BC, and you'll realise it's not such a complicated business!

Large Hadron SMASHER: Boffins BLOW OPEN the PENTAQUARK's secrets

This Penta thingy

Has the LHC found evidence for the existence of Satan?

Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue

Re: Perhaps @Mephisto

I'd have expected Miyamoto Musashi to have been cremated.

Say 'cheese'! Cassini probe ZOOMS IN on Saturn's craggy Dione moon

@goldfish

Yes. Thomas Watson Jnr (of IBM! fame) is believed to have said at some time in the late '50s or 'early '60s: "There is a world market for 11 computers."

("Who would ever want more than 640K of memory?")

Chancellor Merkel 'was patient zero' in German govt network hack

Re: Hooooooooooowl...

A C wrote: "Did that even exist when she graduated in the DDR? My doubts cannot be allayed..."

Quantum Chemistry has existed since the big bang; it is the study of it that is of fairly recent origin.

Creationist: The Flintstones was an accurate portrayal of Dino-human coexistence

"* For large values of 2"

OK, and if you take a ruler to ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimetre Array) there's no knowing what you may find!

CSI GALAXY: Cause of death = STRANGULATION

Re: Deus ex Machina ??

Not Hari Seldon, then?

Re: Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

An upvote from me for the reference to one of my favourite (short) sf stories.

High on bath salts, alleged Norse god attempts tree love

Re: He did not commit the other crime @Mark 85

Actually, the human centre of mass is in the pelvis.

@m0rt

"Seriously, is there no limit to human daftness?"

cf Einstein's well known dictum: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.; and I have reservations about the universe."

Incomprehensible boffins bring quantum computers a step closer

Re: '' a small electrode placed above the atom.” @Beau

I just wonder what the "small" electrode is made of if it can be placed over a single atom? A quark whisker?

Re: At Last! @Destroy All Monsters

And you wouldn't need to check the cat!

El Reg Summer Lectures Span Dark Net, Rare Earths, and Vintage Tech

Re: Give us streaming video @Mr Pitiful

And at least one of us lives in Crete!

Grandmaster FLUSH: Chess champ booted for allegedly cheating with iPod app in the loo

Re: ODWR @Jimmy Page

The photo on that page is from "The Seventh Seal" written and directed by Ingmar Bergman with Max von Sydow as Antonius Block, the knight who plays Death at chess.

Eyes on the prize: Ten 23-24-inch monitors for under £150

Re: @david bates @ Alan Brown

And in Greece, the TV license is included in the Electricity Bill, as is the council tax.

Everyone with an electric meter has to pay the TV license.

The council tax amounts to some 6 - 7+ Euros per month in Crete, with bins emptied almost every day!

Ding Dong, ALIENS CALLING

Re: Build it out of dark matter @Stevie

In the same way as you know when you've run out of invisible ink!

Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

Re: No doubt...@Nigel Whitfield

Interestingly, the "poll" in poll tax is not connectrd with polls as in voting, but a reuse of the old phrase "poll tax" where "poll" meant "head."

Boffin the boffin and his boffinry pals in double dwarf super-prang alert

Re: Very Large Telescope

Who names these things?

Often wondered that; some quite thoughtless!

ALMA - Atacama Large Millimetre Array; What is a large millimetre, and what would an array of them be like?

Eat FATTY FOODS to stay THIN. They might even help your heart

Re: >Fat is good - as long as it is the correct fats.@Bassey

Plenty of people actually like to go for a run or walk first thing in the morning, before breakfast, to "wake up" the fat-burning mechanism within the body before they consume any carbs.

Interesting to notice the body shapes of those, in travel -type films, found doing Tai Chi in various Chinese parks early in the mornings; very few of them seem to be obese.

@hitmouse

Great believer in resveratrol myself!

(Obviouslu can.t use the beer icon!)

Re: This is what is being taught @philDin

The Diet Delusion would be a good start - very thick and a bit turgid, with a huge bibliography. Paper-back edition available from Amazon, and presumably other booksellers.

It apopears that the villain is insulin; a good high protein/high fat diet with low sugar tends to kep then insulin in equibrilium, and it is the large swings in insulin levels that lead on to multiple diseases.

LIFE, JIM? Comet probot lander found 'ORGANICS' on far-off iceball

Re: Secret mode? @Javapapa

"In the beginning, God said the four-dimensional divergence of an antisymmetric,

second rank tensor equals zero, and there was Light, and it was good."

(Can't remember where I snitched this from - apologies to originator)

Men who sleep with lots of women lessen risk of prostate cancer

Re: Does it follow @Martin Maloney

I was an avid reader of Len Deighton's works when they first came out, and on later seeing many of them transferred to the screen was surprised to note that the central character had acquired a name. My hazy memory informs me that the only times he was ever addressed by a name in the canon was as "English" by Colonel Stok.; am I wrong?

Mine Bitcoins with PENCIL and PAPER

Re: Take that @ TechnicalBen

Remember Emo Phillips's one liner?

"A computer beat me at chess; but it was no match for me at kickboxing."

Inateck BP2001 Bluetooth speaker: The metalhead sysadmin's choice? Not exactly

@dogged

The "est" is superfluous - perhaps you haven't read much Tacitus?

SanDisk's record-busting 512GB SD CARD will fit perfectly in your empty wallet

ICL EDS30

Worked on testing these - hydraulic head actuators!.

Went on to EDS60s with voice-coil head movements, and with "New Range" we had 100Mb drives with bthe platters running in sealed containers with pessurised Helium; the unit was the size of a fridge-freezer.

Hawking: Higgs boson in a BIG particle punisher could DESTROY UNIVERSE

@Andy the Hat

I saw that as "manmade walrus" - gave me pause for thought!

Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe @ AC '6 hours ago'

You wrote: "Any quantity of virgins over 3 is unlikely going to be *heaven* anyway. Anyone who has a few sisters knows that the recipient is not going to enjoy himself very much.."

And think of 46 mothers-in-law!

Cops baffled by riddle of CHICKEN who crossed ROAD

Classic reply to "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

For most of my life, the "witty" answer has been "For some fowl purpose." Which led to my making up the following: Why did the dolphin cross the river? For some foul porpoise.

Brit kids match 45-year-old fogies' tech skill level by the age of 6

Re: Good @ Yet anotheranon.....

As to wor4king in Data Mines - remember PICK?

That stirring LOHAN motto: Anyone know a native Latin speaker?

@ Vincent Ballard

¨Ad astra tabernamque¨

I aḿ not happy about that ´que´; it implies an equality between the two things named by the nouns. Remember the great schism, the split between Rome and the Eastern church, was prompted in part by by the inclusion of the word ´Filioque´ in the Nicene Creed.

Cops nab suspect using CREEPY facial recog system

Re: Sorry about this..

Etonian graduates, not to forget Fettes, Harrow, Charterhouse, Westminster..... graduates!

Why are we eginning to use th American phrase: ¨high-school graduate¨?

CERN data explains how Higgs heavies other matter

Re: femtobarns @Arnaud the less

The quote was _inverse_ femtobarns; could be pretty large!

German brain surgeon flies in for vital LOHAN operation

Re: Yes a stein

An upvote for the Franziskaner Dunkel!