Posts by AlgernonFlowers4

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

The Four Laws of Robotics

The Three Laws of Robotics:

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Zeroth Law (Later Addition)

A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

When Disaster Struck and Clippy Answered!

It’s wild to think about, but Microsoft hit its peak with a talking paperclip.

The kids are trapped in a cave, panic everywhere — and suddenly Clippy appears:

“It looks like you’re trying to save your offspring.

Would you like me to create a step-by-step rescue plan?”

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: Oh please

'It'd also need someone to think about security from day one and for one big customer (waves at NHS) to apply some pressure on the vendors'

Why the NHS does not use it's purchasing power to insist on security is a complete mystery

An idea that won't sink: China planning underwater datacenter deployment

Don't Let The Blue Meanies Block IT!

As we live a life of ease (a life of ease)

Every one of us (every one of us)

Has all we need (has all we need)

Sky of blue (sky of blue)

And sea of green (sea of green)

In our yellow (in our yellow)

Submarine" (submarine, aha)

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Real DBAs Don't Delete

Real DBAs Don't Delete they Archive!

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

Bah Humbug!

Bring back the ICL DAP, CAFS, Indepol and Clacks based computing so things get done at the speed of light!

NASA solar sail tech is ready – now who's up to use it in a mission?

Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?

In order to reduce the risk of the sun probe melting, wouldn't it be better to send it at night? Do Light Sails work in the dark?

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Building software is easy.....

... With the My Easy Software Development Methodology (TM, Pat. Pending etc, etc).

Step 1: Collect Underpants

Step 3: Deliver Successful Project

Just need to work out Step 2 and ..............

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Re: Love/Hate

If you can run with Microdrives and keep your data,

Or walk with Microdrives —nor lose the database;

If neither load errors nor successful updates can hurt you;

If all data bytes count, but none too much;

If you can recover the unforgiving minute data lost

With sixty seconds’ worth of tape looped run—

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Backup Man, my son!

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Paper Tigers

Back in the day the main user interface for Computers was paper. So a document printed on a business system (£500 pc + £200 matrix printer), was inferior to the Spectrum version (£200 pc + £500 matrix printer), even the user could see that!

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Three New Starships

To save humanity from the consequences of climate change, Elon Musk anounces the construction of three different Starships.

Starship A will be for the thinkers and leaders, C will be for the workers, people who do useful stuff and Starship B will be for sanitiser middlemen, telephone sanitisers, hand sanitiser executives, management consultants etc. Starship B will be the first to launch to ready Mars for colonisation.

Unfortunately after successful launch, Human Swine Flu H1N2 begins to spread uncontrontallably because the remainers didn't grok the need to sanitise and thus perished those who do not believe in Sanity Clause!

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

Bing Knows

Sent message. Does this imply Microsoft do not understand what today means?

I’m not sure why the Microsoft Rewards dashboard uses the term “today’s points” instead of “total points”. However, it is possible that the term “today’s points” refers to the number of points you have earned today, rather than the total number of points you have earned.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Sent message. Does microsoft understand english?

I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience.

CAPSTONE mission is Moon-bound, after less rocketry than expected

Touching Cloth?

What exactly is a near rectum liner hello orbit?

China is trolling rare-earth miners online and the Pentagon isn't happy

Re: The Pentagon

It was all set out in a documentary film called In the Loop and the Pentagon laid the blame on some guy called Malcolm Tucker.

Malcolm Tucker: Yeah. Now do excuse me, I've got work to do. [pause] Don't ever call me fucking English again.

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

Programmatic Automation Always Rocked!

Back in the 1980s we had SCL running programmatic automation on ICL VME systems.

The long gap between then and Powershell on Windows was far too long for my liking. So well done Mr Snover for standing up to the naysayers.

Programmatic Automation Rocks!

Chinese boffins suggest launching nuclear Neptune orbiter in 2030

Roundworld

Archchancellor Ridcully: Rincewind, these Agateans want to put a nuclear bomb round Uranus!

Rincewind: Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!

(With apologies to Sir Terry Pratchett)

Big Tech falls in line with Euro demands to fight bots, deepfakes, disinformation

Guards! Guards!

Quis custodiet custard?

US fears China may have ten exascale systems by 2025

Re: Yup...Graphene Innit!

Graphene has been produced in small quantities for centuries, ever since Pencils were used to draw graphs!

Robo-Shinkansen rolls slowly – for now – across 5km of Japan

Wilford Industries

Automating trains easy. Just put everyone on a 16km train with 1001 cars (30 cars for growing food) running on an endless loop. As everyone is already on the train, no need to stop or worry about crashing into another train!

UK.gov wants mobile makers to declare death dates for their new devices from launch

Mobile Intergalactic Liberation Front!

Siliconia is going to be a cold lonely places if mobiles are stopped from going to landfill.

Won't no-one think of the Mobile Intergalactic Liberation Front?

Microsoft welcomes 'raddest' and most 'feature-dense' Kubernetes release to AKS, shows 1.17 the door

Re: Hello fellow kids

As the uncool kid pretending to be a Gradian of the Galaxy every time I tried to say 1 radian was 63.66198 gradians it just came out as I am groot

Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave

Re: Hirsute Hippo?

My Wily in the right circumstances, at the sound of a wolf whistle transforms itself into a mighty beast which has led people of the opposite gender to exclaim Is that Wily Werewolf or are you just pleased to see me!

Travel agent leaked customer data by – this is embarrassing – giving it away in a hackathon

Re: Dummy Data

Better than the real thing! Not using unreal data as dummy data to test, only results in you looking like a dummy when the system crashes because unexpected items were found in the real world inputs.

Elon Musk's ancient April Fools' gag about 'Tesla Tequila' made real in lightning-shaped bottle

Re: Coming Soon

May Tesla never be forgotten

Nvidia unveils $59 Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB mini AI board, machine learning that slashes vid-chat data by 90%, and new super for Britain

Re: Wrong!

Are you talking about Jeffrey or Sterling?

USA seeks Moon and Mars nuke power plant designs ready to fly in 2027

Send In The Clowns

Krusty - Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology

SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon cleared to hoist real live American astronauts into space

Free Falling Paris River

What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?

Sky Broadband is not the UK's cheapest, growls ad watchdog

Is it man made?

'And people would rather buy chap shit than expensive shit'

Bye, Russia: NASA wheels out astronauts, describes plan for first all-American manned launch into orbit since 2011

Re: Way Cool...

From Space.com

NASA will likely pay about $90 million for each astronaut who flies aboard Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule on International Space Station (ISS) missions, the report estimated. The per-seat cost for SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, meanwhile, will be around $55 million, according to the OIG's calculations.

To put those costs into perspective: NASA currently pays about $86 million for each seat aboard Russia's three-person Soyuz spacecraft,

CFAA latest: Supremes to tackle old chestnut of what 'authorized use' of a computer really means in America

Book 'em Danno!

'He was charged with two cases: committing computer fraud for financial gain (violating the CPAA) and honest services fraud and violating the CFAA. '

Three 'and' clauses do not make 2 cases or am I reading it wrong?

Academic showdown as boffins biff-baff over when Version 1.0 of Earth's magnetic core was released

Unobtainium

Shouldn’t they be looking for Unobtainium? A ship made of Zircon would have melted long before it got to the centre of the Earth and they wouldn’t have been able to start The Core spinning in the first place to generate the magnetic field!

Ethernet standards group leaves its name in the dust as it details new 800Gbps spec

Insane Speed

Oh goody, soon a lie will be able go round the world several times while truth is pulling its boots on.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

Cursed to Live in Interesting Times

Wasn’t one of Blind Io’s commandments that thou shalt use bcc or be cursed to live in interesting times!

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

The Road to Bohemia is paved with good intentions!

(Galileo) Galileo.

(Galileo) Galileo,

Galileo Figaro

Magnifico-o-o-o-o.

Oh oh oh oh

No, no, no, no, no, no, no

Oh, mama mia, mama mia (Mama mia, let me go.)

Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me.

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

Days of Future Past - Cobol

In the 1980's, I remember Cobol as the programming language for writing real-time client server applications running on Virtual Machines with IDMSX databases, where validation rules and data definitions were held in Data Dictionaries (define once and reuse) but this was a long, long time ago.

Dark matter's such a pushover: Baby stars can shove weird stuff around dwarf galaxies

Matter of fact, it's all dark!

By the way, which one's Pink?

The 'roid in Spain drills mainly on the plain: Plucky Brit Mars robot laps up sun, sand and, er, simulated science

Make Mars Great Again!

This is the voice of the Mysterons. We know that you can hear us Earthmen. It will be useless for you to resist for we have discovered the secret of reversing matter and we are going to build a wall to stop your robotic rovers from crossing our borders and attacking our shrubberies. Make Mars Great Again!

It's big, it's blue, and it'll be raining down on you – it's 3200 Phaethon

Monty Phaethon?

Is it Norwegian Blue? Does it prefers keepin' on it's back! Is it PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!?

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

Barium Meal?

When they said come and have a barium meal, I was expecting fish’n’chips!

NASA to celebrate 55th anniversary of first Moon landing by, er, deciding how to land humans on the Moon again

Re: "real possibility of no US astronauts being present aboard the ISS"

We're all living in Amerika

Amerika ist wunderbar

We're all living in Amerika

Amerika, Amerika

We're all living in Amerika

Amerika ist wunderbar

We're all living in Amerika

Flying to Mars will be so rad, dude: Year-long trip may dump 60% lifetime dose of radiation on you

Re: Anti-ageism

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids

£1 in every fiver that UK biz, public sector spent on software in 2017 went to *drumroll* Microsoft

Money for Nothing!

Having seen at first hand, it is all to easy for large organisations to carry on paying Microsoft for CALs for users who never logon or have stopped using the system. It took a while to get the message across but let's only pay for accounts that have authenticated on Active Directory in the last quarter and stop giving away money for nothing!

Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China

Alien vs Pooh

http://godxiliary.com/alienvspooh/Medium/

Gov.UK to make its lovely HTML exportable as parlous PDFs

Print to PDF

On webpage press Ctrl-P to Print, Select PDF as target printer and save as a file (.pdf)

Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle

Re: Lost In Space

Even virgin trains let you pick if you want to sit in a quiet carriage or not, so why the downvotes against the right to choose?

Lost In Space

Divide the office into quiet zones and noisy zones. Allow people to sit in their zone of choice and let battle commence.

USA! USA! We're No.1! And we want to keep it that way – in spaaaace

Re: Isn’t NASA announcing life/water found on Mars tomorrow?

Nasa announcement video footage https://youtu.be/DngcYImh0-Q