Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Pulling down a partition or knocking through a door does not necessarily make for a properly connected workspace

Re: Condemned

Just so long as you don't have any of those big long red tube shaped fuses at the end.

Not joking, we had a high voltage power supply to a flash x-ray (what the kids today call an x-ray laser) where the connection from the bunker full of capacitor banks to the head was a glass tube full of copper salt solution wrapped with explosive tape.

It's rather difficult to turn off 10,000A of high voltage DC with your typical 2 pole switch.

Truckload of GPUs stolen on their way out of San Francisco

Re: GPUs or Graphics cards?

>..did you simply not read the article in the normal order?

Programmer, Forth, am I

Hibernating instrument on Hubble roused as engineers ponder message problem

Re: weird components doing funny things

ICL opd (the last vestige of the Sinclair QL) running nationwide Bingo games

Re: Use the backup

There was a 'backup' mirror blank made but never polished.

It's in the Smithsonian (or it was last time I saw it)

This is normal practice for large or expensive mirrors - sometimes things happen in the grinding or polishing, a flaw is discovered or an accident takes a chunk out.

Zeiss made a spare 8m mirror blank for the VLT (made 5 used 4) that they were trying to sell off to anybody who needed an 8m mirror - don't know what happened to that, probably got melted down.

Re: weird components doing funny things

Mine in my first job as a schoolkid was a printer that would sometime ignore linefeed

So I set it to 1/64 of a line (the minimum) and always sent 64 line feeds - if it missed one you would need a micrometer to tell.

Still proud of that

No day in court: US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rulings will stay a secret

Re: Remind me

Remember this is a country founded by rebellious terrorists - it's a good idea to keep them under control

NASA advised to study up on what open source, free software, and permissive licenses actually mean

Re: What free means

>Free means free as in free beer,

That's why Free English Citizens work for nothing

>I don't know if that applies to software. But it sounds like it should.

That's where it gets complicated.

If the software was created by Nasa from scratch, yes

What if it includes a numerical library, what if that library is built on another library and so on ? (hint all numerical libraries are ultimately BLAS)

What if it calls a NAG or Matlab routine, those libs aren't opensource but what's the copyright on the calls to them? Is it open source to call a commercial library? Are the argument names to a commercial library function proprietry?

The UK's official astronomy software used commercial NAG libraries under a national academic licence that came with such onerous terms you weren't allowed to even show your results to non-UK collaborators.

Until everybody just switched to using free Nasa-Space Telescope software instead.

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

Re: Probably the flapper valve

Or you could have proper syphon cisterns like in the mother country.

Microsoft: Many workers are stuck on old computers and should probably upgrade

Re: Modern Slavery

Mechanics, even if they are employees, are skilled craftsmenpersons who expect their tools to last a lifetime.

They aren't just drones expected to turn up a desk to mindlessly press buttons to generate Powerpoints.

Re: Please think of the revenue stream

But business is so much more different than the start of the pandemic.

Adding those new letters to the alphabet, and Global Britain switching back to L.S.D. and feet/furlongs/leagues is going to need a lot more processing power

Re: Nobody dares ?

>Microsoft exists to make money;

That's the irony !

Old machine too crap to run Windows11 Turbo Super Edition?

Use Microsoft Online for only $$$/month (payable for ever)

Special offer if all your users switch to Microsoft everything online

Starry starry night? No, it's just more low Earth orbit satellites as BT and OneWeb ink deal

Re: On that GPS replacement

>What is the betting that buried somewhere is a bit of code that means the OneWeb satellites have to check in with an existing GPS system......

Now they will just phone the speaking clock

(is that still a thing? I'm feeling distinctly over 40)

Our decades long plan to infiltrate the Tories is finally working comrades.

Re: "this is an important step towards"

>Until recently, to put a satellite into space you needed to be part of the space industry, work with NASA, generally be reliable.

Or be military, blow up a satellite with a missile and classify any report on debris

Re: Tell me it isn't so...

They re-nationalised the Railways, they are re-nationalising telecoms.

Who would have thought that Arthur Scargill in a blonde wig would become prime minister

Xiaomi has developed a mini heat pipe so your smartphone doesn't get too hot to handle

Re: Heat piped to where?

Obviously it's heat pipes all the way down

Red Hat forced to hire cheaper, less senior engineers amid budget freeze

Re: All too common

But firing 10% of your workforce saves 10% of the budget and that's nearly the same as making 10% more money and if you keep doing it you eventually get profitable once all the people are gone

Re: The fate of Little Red Riding Hat.

Some parable about a Golden Goose might also fit

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: On call cash cow

Good job if they expected 365 * 24 * 7 in one year

Re: my response

But there was no F in Film, that was the error

The best Bond movie is Chity Chity Bang Bang. Best car, best villain, best Q.

The Rock, aka what happened to Bond, is the best Connery Bond film

JEDI mind tricks: Google said Pentagon contract didn't align with company values. Now it's chasing another defence gig

Re: Don't be evil

But less old-hat for their non MAGA hatted employees.

Opinion among the young devs we hire is that Amazon is toxic and Google is the more acceptable place to work. Only those who actually worship Satan, rather than merely being members of the temple, woudl work for Oracle

Locked up: UK's Labour Party data 'rendered inaccessible' on third-party systems after cyber attack

Re: Let there be smug....

I think it's something they put in the water.

If you made Ghandi home secretary he would be building gas chambers within the week

Re: Let there be smug....

No but Pritti will use it as an excuse why everyone's computer needs to have a license

GitHub CEO forks off: Nat Friedman to quit this month, replacement will report to exec behind .NET Hot Reload fiasco

instrumental - the bit where you're being played

US Dept of Commerce sanctions NSO Group, Positive Technologies, other makers of snoopware

So it's the 3 letter agency equivalent of a 5 star review?

"The phone hacking software the US wanted to ban" click here for our special offers!

Sheffield University scales back student system after Oracle integration stumbles

Re: Raising the Titanic would probably be easier.

> have standard best practice processes

We had that, "standard best practice" was that all the IT infrastructure was to come from a single supplier. Naturally the only supplier that could offer mainframe + mini + workstation + PC (back in the 80-90s) was IBM.

So we had a single "integrated system" that had an IBM mainframe running God-knows-what, AS400s for HR and accounting, RS6000 unix workstations and PS/2s for student desktops.

Strangely this didn't all work together seamlessly and was gradually abandoned. But only after getting rid of all the sock+sandal wearing beardies in this basement that knew how everything worked before.

Or they could have just copied a system from another university.

What if there was a way of creating free software collaboratively and licensing it in such a way that lots of users could take it and adapt it for their own use and contribute changes back?

I suppose the student processing requirements for Sheffield university are so vastly different from those of Sheffield Hallam university that only Oracle could handle the technology transfer

Re: let's be sure to mention that!

The Oracle consultant turned up from London, everyone was friendly and called him 'love' - he thought he was in American Werewolf and ran away

How much?

Unless Sheffield has got a lot bigger it can't have more than 30,000 students - so that's a grand per database entry.

They are aware you don't need a separate computer for each record?

Samsung releases pair of jeans that can't do anything except cover your legs and hold a Galaxy Z Flip 3

And yet it's being shown for free on Global Britain's premier hang-out for technology super-influencers

Re: Pocket Phrendly Phablets?

No it's for when you convert into a kiwi - one of Marvel's lesser known super-villains

Re: No wrong

Or if your phones burst into flames on aeroplanes -

Re: UtiliKilt FTW!

Sorry for the gibberish, typing on my phone while making coffee.

But I do want a "tactical sporan" for work. Something in black ballistic nylon with molle pouches.

Re: Trouser version

I believe they are both rappers

Re: UtiliKilt FTW!

Not sure, the AC in the server room is cold and breezy.

My northern genese allow me work in their in a t-shirt but not sure I want a freezing blast up the trossachs

Re: "Who needs big pockets?"

We can't let women's jeans have pockets for the safety of the universe.

Have you seen how much stuff they keep in their bags?

Imagine if they had jeans with 5 pockets - it would result in a blackhole consuming the Earth.

I think Samsung phones have the included vape by default

Re: Sony Walkman

Little known fact, the poacher's pocket on a Barbour jacket was created to take Babbage's portable analytical engine - which was never launched

Re: Pocket Phrendly Phablets?

>iPhone XR, 20 quid black jeans from Asda

Maybe for you hipster metropolitan-elite media types at el'reg

With your brand label clothes and fancy coffee

What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams

Or just being able to have multiple instances of teams open at once.

Or even be able to view 2 documents in teams at the same time.

Re: This reminds me of Second Life

I'm happy with the metaverse at work - so long as I'm allowed a Katana and can use it in business meetings

Re: Green

It's ok, corporate standard Powerpoint templates now have a dark background

Re: Shouldn't Teams WORK before adding 3D crap?

But then how would you be distracted from its fundamental design flaws if it wasn't for the superficial design flaws

CyberUp presents four principles to keep security researchers out of jail for good-faith probing

Because the permission probably comes with a requirement not to tell anyone.

And 'owner' gets complicated these days, what if you find a flaw in a clients. oracle install on AWS, can Amazon and Oracle still sue you?

Remember the 'guy in a jetpack' seen flying close to passenger jets? Probably just balloons, says FBI

Re: It was “Witchie-poo” of the West, astride her “Vroom Broom”

And the police arrested somebody 100mi away for owning a Tim Burton dvd

Of course we've tried turning it off and on again: Yeah, Hubble telescope still not working

Re: Dragon?

No I'm saying that if you want a 2.4m class visible scope in a leo (and it's not clear why you would) you get a commercial outfit to build a bunch of them with modern instruments and launch them for cheap on a SpaceX flight

You don't try and limp an ancient maintenance nightmare in a poor orbit along for another few years

Re: Dragon?

By which logic, SpaceX should be refurbishing Space Shuttles instead of building Starship