Posts by Tim Cockburn

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: Similar but different...

Cable guys at a MOD site in Germany. Squadron leader asks if he can have a bit of fibre. " I want to have dashboard lights inside the cab in the model locomotive I'm building" I guess he was going to melt the end to make a bulb .

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

Docked weight?

Doesn't sound right, maybe docked surface area catching passing whisps of atmosphere slowing down and lowering orbit.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: Curved sausages

I did washing up at the all night Wimpy in Earls Court in 1968. People actually came in at four in the morning and bought those things . Mind you the oddest thing there was the fish scales in the ice cream. Made with herrings perhaps?

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

Re: Inkwells

When I was about 12 in 1958 or so there was an eclipse of the sun. I poured a pool of Stephens best ink on the desktop and the class and I watched the image of the sun being eclipsed in the pool.Someone can probably tell me what year that was. Once a nerd...

Fujitsu admits it fluffed the fix for Japan’s flaky ID card scheme

Spanish motorhome park example

Stayed at a motorhome "aire" which required passport number plus email to enter. Ok, maybe a know your customer requirement. But thenrequiring a further trip to the login terminal to get a barcode id to empty your poo. Is there really a problem with pirate poo dumpers?

" Whose poo is it anyway?"

NASA tests bot built to slither across, and beneath, alien worlds' ice

Typical Nasa

Spend almost all your money on futuristic research into how to behave when you get somewhere. Much easier than actually concentrating on how to arrive in the first place. Oh you can spend the rest in going somewhere you've been before.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Destroy a DVD

Wanting to destroy a DVD I put it in the break room microwave. Don't do this. It emits a lot of smoke, fortunately not enough to trigger the alarm before I stopped it. And no I can't recall why it was marked for destruction, I remember thinking it would jam the shredder though.

Hyundai and Kia issue software upgrades to thwart killer TikTok car theft hack

My flatmates and I in 1965 had a shared Morriss 8 which used silver paper from a fag packet as a key. You tucked it behind the lock.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Re: Critical

Voltage. Back in the 70s Istanbul had different voltages in different parts of the city. Moving from the centre to the suburbs I found a 110 volt lightbulb made a photoflood for a brief time.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Quick time

One of the great inventions of ECTubb in the Dumarest stories.

The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system

Re: Concurrent CP/M and ICL 80286 hardware

Didn't Microlan use something called "rotating master", presumably to veer round a token ring patent? Or was that the Drs 300 version ?

The whole CPM saga on ICL hardware digs straight into why the company went out of manufacturing. Written as someone who remembers recommending ITT XTRA as the only viable route if you wanted to run Lotus and were an ICL shop.

SpaceX Falcon 9 reaches MONEY RING with successful launch

Re: What I love about this site.

please, please, let me be the first to snipe at the apostrophe.

>Kudo's

Belonging to a certain mr kudo perhaps?

Mystery X-37B robot spaceplane returns to orbit on Tuesday

Re: X-37 - Prototype weapons platform?

Perhaps El Reg mean 'Hoovering' as in hoovering up the data?

Samsung printers have secret admin account

Annoyware

If we could have access to that backdoor perhaps we could prevent the samsung printer from claiming that it was out of toner and refusing to accept a nicely shaken 'empty' cartridge as a replacement.

Beached whale on Suffolk coast - Reader snap

Whales beached in the age of Nelson

But I suppose that was from the sonar effect of the bosun's whistle when the jolly tars raised the anchor.

Male, female Chinese 'nauts prep for trip to Heaven and back

Re: boy oh boy

The Chinese still seem to have an odd Lamarckian view that having been in space will change the progeny -they have grown 'space cucumbers' or something where the seeds have been for a voyage. So a lab rat (but single lab rat policy applies so only one ) is not out of the question.

Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

Normal eyes?

Your eyes were made by Canon?

Kindle Fire: An open letter to Jeff Bezos

Inverted

If 'inverted' means upside down not 'left to right and upside down' I suggest an easier solution would have been to turn the device top to tail!

Bletchley Park lands £4.6m restoration bonanza

Bletchley Park Pics

Some great pictures here including ones of my mother in law Merriss, a Y service vet showing the radio hams how she copied morse code 67 years after she took German messages down for Bletchley park.

http://www.fntn.co.uk/rodwp/BletchleyPark-4Sept11/

Waterstone's to take on Kindle and Nook with own reader

Not a Sony

Lets hope it is not a Sony reader clone. Nice piece of kit (I've had one for a couple of years) and absolutely dire user interface on the PC. Thank goodness for 'calibre'

New tumor trial rules mobiles 'not guilty'

Hams

I think a study involving Radio hams would be worthwhile, we hams are divided into those who do and those who don't use hi powered handheld transceivers.We are mostly old codgers as well so in the age group for brain tumours!

ANU plasma thruster gets research boost

Europe?

That's Europe as in Australia is it?

Missile defence FAIL: US 'kill vehicle' space weapon flunks test

Aliens

The testing is all a front for the research to make us ready in case the aliens arrive

Gov pays Greens to lobby it, says report

TPA

Thankfully not all ELReg readers are mad lefties. Some of us are rabid right wing nutjobs and appreciate the 'fair and balanced' reporting from the likes of Lewis Page and this kind of article.

Chinese go beyond binary with ternary molecule

Maybe its a marxist thing?

According to 'Mike Hally-Electronic Brains' the Russians had a ternary computer in the 1950's using core store

EU rolls out out astroturf guide for consumer laws

Keep off

Here we go again- if the Brits want to regulate something then fine- but why should the EU interfere? How many British customers go to a French comparison site to decide on the cheapest supermarket in France (Actually there isn't one since the French still stick to retail price maintenance!). They might not have noticed that there are a whole bunch of different languages and cultures. Perhaps they ought to insist everyone speaks English as well.

Cell phone supercomputing II: in the flesh

Cell phone grid?

Ok now for someone to work out how to create a grid computer by running workloads on ACTUAL mobile phones. <just send a text saying 'include me in' to SETI at Phone...>

ESA proposes ion drive Sun-dodge Mars commsat ploy

Better latent than never

"signal strench will cause serious problems." I assume the strench is caused by the methane in the martian atmosphere .