Posts by MichaelBirks

The bork on the sign goes round and round, round and round, round and round

Re: New Zealand has an SSD?

Battlestation New Zealand has been ... fully operational for some time now.

BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret

Re: Posters with platitudes

Not to mention the several thousand years it's take to reach the stars.

Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words

Re: Physician, heal thyself!

Even if it is not discriminatory in the fashion you describe, it could be be considered an unnecessarily violent term whose meaning could be equally conveyed by less damaging terms.

'Removing' would entirely suffice, I would have thought.

Oracle told to warp 9 out of court: Judge photon-torpedoes Big Red's Pentagon JEDI dream

Re: TWO Star Trek references??

Both of us!!

US congress-critters question prime directive of Pentagon's $10bn JEDI cloud contract

Missing Blakes.

Blake 5 was a dream given form. Hiss goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call, home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night

I find your lack of faith disturbing, IBM: Big Blue fires photon torpedo at Pentagon JEDI cloud contract

Re: Babylon 5 photo with Star Wars references...

Personally, I was waiting for the Doctor Who, Blakes 7, or at least Hyperdrive references

Setting lasers to patriotic!

BOFH: Got that syncing feeling, hm? I've looked at your computer and the Outlook isn't great

Re: Careful what you wish for

If you get (17??) bagder badges, you get a mushroom badge.

Two mushroom badges, and some more badgers, and you get a snake badge.

Snake? Snake! Ooooh, it's a Snake.

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

Website Autosaving Draft Posts.

Rule 1 of writing content - Don't do it in the Grawlixy Browser.

THe number of people I've had to train to that - even those who otherwise use Word for everything else is both frustrating ad saddening.

Don't get me started on levels of expertise in word, that's a differenent rant.

German sauna drags punters to court over naked truth

Re: Allo, Allo

It was in Herr Flick's _Gestapo_ Sauna.

BOFH: Turn your server rack hotspot to a server rack notspot

Re: new keyboard alert !

Could be worse.

A "Spinal Tap-inspired incident" involved choking on someone else's vomit.

Michael.

Why aren't you being arbiters of truth? MPs scream at Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

Re: Understanding is a three-edged sword

Zathras says, "::wheeze::Yes::wheeze::".

Meet the woman with a supernatural affinity for stiff lovers

Re: Kubla Khan - Or Succubus. Come back. Lost Girl (TV series)!

Please. "Lesbian" is so constricting. Bo, the Unaligned Succubus, swung as many ways as Captain Jack Harkness.

Giza geezers' muon-geyser visor reveals Great Pyramid's hidden void surpriser

Abso-fracking-loutely.

The headlnes are one of the reasons I keep coming to El Reg.

New coding language Fetlang's syntax designed to read like 'poorly written erotica'

Re: OK, so if there are any coders

Peter Plumley-Walker was 1989? Wow, how time flies.

Pale backside of lovely Luna flits past in imagery from 1 million miles out

Re: Where's the Nazi base?

Both.

They exist in a kind of Schrodinger-like superposition.

I don't know if the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly exists in all states and just hasn't been discovered in some of them.

It's Suntory time: Japanese whisky to be distilled in SPAAAAACE

Barkeep!

T'was good. (hic). I'll have two more.

The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who

Re: Who?

No, no , no, one cannot get to Joanna Lumley without going through the Heavy Transuranic elements like Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Grant.

::score::

One USB plug to rule them all? That's sensible, but no...

Re: As the old saying goes...

"...Providing you with amusing ways to waste time."

Such as watching Monty Python's "The Life of Brian".

Can it be true? That I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of PUREST ... BLACK?

Re: Black space craft? Whatever could go wrong

"You know space, right. It's defining colour is, well, black. And this new Vantablack, right, how it's, well, black, right?" -- Holly

"Is it 'cause I's black?" -- Vantablack.

And just for the fanboyism engendered by the title: "Percy Percy Percy Percy Percy Percy!"

Angelina Jolie 2.0 NOT an inspiration for Huawei phones, says exec

Re: Forgot all about that movie

It's worth checking out for Jolie-as-prototype-Honor-Harrington alone,but also the great riffs on the long British military tradition of flying aircraft carriers.

Spectrum is Green.

Privateers race to capture forgotten NASA space probe using crowdsourced cash

Re: Interesting idea

Superheavy Transuranic Elements cannot be used where there is life.

Selecting Agents Ducky and Patsy.

Meet NASA's Valkyrie: A silky busty robo superhero that'll save your life

Re: Are you sure you want to do that?

"All these planets are yours - Except Mars.

Attempt no landings there"

Kiwi Coroner says Coca-Cola helped kill woman

Wow, I'm impressed

Seriously. 50+ posts and not a single aspertame rant.

+1 to El Reg commenters.

We actually had an MP (Former MP?) here in NZ 'musing out loud' about Coca Cola putting something in the drinks to make them so addictive.

It was Sue Kedgley, a well known campaigner against the food and beverage industry, but still.

'Replace crypto-couple Alice and Bob with Sita and Rama'

The missing reference.

A page and a half of comments from literate tech-types and no one's commented on the obvious fact that Sita wants to orchestrate a Rendezvous with Rama.

Probably in his Garden, wherein he shall be Revealed.

Apologies to Sir Arthur, and to Gentry Lee.

Casio to enter tablet market with twin-cam scanner

As opposed to a 'scan to evernote' app?

Like the recent moleskin pad/app combination, for instance.

Or, for that matter those cheap pads that copy as JPG straight to your SD card.

ACTA can't get its act together

Re: Kiwis can remember

There would be a lot of people who could see the current NZ administration doing so gleefully, given the dim view of our honourable parliamentarians that they hold.

Top US Senator to Apple, Google: 'Curb your spy planes'

You might very well do that,

But I couldn't possibly comment.

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Re: File managers?

Heh. I actually paid for WIndows Commander before the rename.

The UI's a little dated looking now, but I still love it in terms of functionality.

Planet systems with 'hot Jupiters' PULVERISE innocent strays

Re: Well there goes Tattooine

Not if the two suns form in place, with the rest of the system forming around them.

The way I read it, it was the inward migration of the large mass object that swept the system.

Similarly, any bodies outside the sweep of the long elipse as the Jovian migrated inward shouldn't have been too badly affected. Too cold, in all likelihood, to be habitable, of course.

WH Smiths tills insist shop sells The Queen's Knickers only

Someone's not updating their stock database in the SQL, are they?

That sounds like the time (ahem, theoretical possibility) someone forgot to add the WHERE clause to an UPDATE statement.

Yes, Prime Minister to return after 24 years

Re: It applies not just in the UK

You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

Space FIREBALL over Blighty sparks hunt for rich meteorite

Spectral Analysis

I wonder if any sufficiently sensitive cameras recorded the trail well enough to get a measure of what was ablating from the rock.

Or is it just the Ni2/O2 mix of the plasma shield?

Molesworth and the New Latin

Re: Re: WTH?

Ah. My bad, then. I thought it was just written in the 'modern' style where teachers aren't allowed to correct for spelling of grammar in case they stifle the little chav's creativity.

Scottish Boundary Commission: We don't need no stinkin' PDFs

Proper Uses for PDFs

@Ralph.

And you seem to be using PDFs properly. That kind of "human-readable" use is what they're good for. I used to use them similarly in the digital printing industry.

What they're _Not_ useful for is transmitting information that you might like to be _machine_ readable, like maps that you might want to import into a GIS or mash-up with other data.

TelstraClear slams new kiwi download laws

And other places.

Don't forget Parliament.

Speaker Smiley got Gareth'd about that during Question Time the other week.

Trigger events

@Shane - the way it's written, the ISPs, like TC, sit on their hands until they get an official complaint from the rights holder (MPAA or studio) about a specific IP address (and, presumably, time)

They assume the Rights Holder is correct in all particulars and pass on the complaint to the user.

Unless Torvalds starts being a dick, you're not going to attract a complaint for Lunix distros or TED videos.

Website FAIL flings freebies at Kiwi punters

Resaonable expectation

I'm pretty sure that there an out along the lines of there being a 'reasonable expectation that this is the legitimate price'.

'Free' product, especially major purchases, wouldn't meet that expectation, particularly if the site weren't making some big song and dance about the 'bargins'.

One help desk API to unite them all

Darkness!

And in the Darkness, bind them.

If it wasn't for you meddling elves, and your stupid Hobbits!

UK census data is safe

Re: Chief Sub

Despite the face that they've posted equal reports about the various denials from LulSec?

Official Government Denial

Given that this is an Official Government Denial, does that mean the denied events actually happened?

"Look, the Government's denying it - it must be True!"

3D-printed bikini goes on sale

BitTorrent

A whole new industry to jump on the 'piracy is theft' bandwagon.

Robot pirate invented in USA: 'Yarr-2 D-2'?

They are the Robot Pirates?

Made from metal from their heads to their privates?

http://youtu.be/-XLgpReEkLc

Shaking it like a sword with a dead guy on it.

Terrorists stamp on Indy's Kate Middleton jelly bean

Yay for mod_rewrite

See title

Paramount buries Dune remake

First Three Books only.

Dune was Dune,

"Children of Dune" was Dune Messiah in part 1 and Children of Dune in 2 & 3, with an unaccounted for ageing of the children for added hawtness.

God Emperor wasn't touched. Thankfully.

BA jihadist relied on Jesus-era encryption

Re: First rule of a cyberpunk

You're quoting from the original 'Johnny Mnemonic' the inspiration for a movie with the same name starring a pre-matrix Keanu Reeves.

"If they think you're crude, go technical; If they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy."

Yay @GreatDismal

DfT 'unwittingly' bigged-up speed camera benefits

And other stuff gets swept under the carpet.

One imagines a sort of conveyor in the floor and walls that takes what one administration sweeps under the rug, and positions it ready to fall out of the woodwork under the next administration.

Cable lays plan for graduate tax

A Graduate Swap?

This is exactly what happens here.

NZ Varsity Grads leave the country, often to the UK, to avoid paying their student loans.

Or at least earn at three times the rate and pay it off sooner.

World Cup magic captured in Microsoft Paint

World Cup?

That doesn't start until next year in New Zealand, right?

Google gets happy-clappy with file transfer in talk widgets

It's Google

It's already being tracked.

"It's what we do."

::EvilGoogle Logo::/::SaintGoogle Logo: YMMV.

Senators to NASA: Get your ass to Mars

Re: Forget Mars get your ass to Europa

"All these worlds are yours - except Europa.

Attempt no landings there."