Posts by Andrew Scott

Microsoft fixes the ESU blues for Windows 10 users

Re: Maybe Redmond is scared for a change. . .

they've always forced hardware upgrades. window 3 to 95, new computer. newer computers supported logical blocks and partially ditched the hcs geometry describing disks that limited the size, but only the new os supported it. tried to upgrade a laptop from 95 to 98 and got a message that it had too slow a processor. nt 4 had the weird limit of 1024 cylinders, and while you might get it working with a larger disk using something like partition magic to expand the boot partition, an update might move a vital driver beyond cylinder 1024 and the computer wouldn't boot. new versions of windows has always triggered purchases of new computers. even with windows 10 we have had to retire older machines because our ITS department changed the pxe imaging process to require uefi, and many of the older machines that came with windows 10 didn't support a network stack for pxe boot in ufei. have a bunch of machines that should support 11, but have video cards that don't support uefi so the screen if blank until windows loads a driver for the video card. can't see bios for changes or see boot options with F12. would work if could use mbr boot option, but not allowed with secure boot. have to dispose of a bunch of usable machines or replace all the video cards to make them usable.

China's biggest car rental company now offers autonomous cars

sounds like medical practice in the concentration camps. if there was an accident, no one cared.

BOFH: The auditor is asking too many questions. We have just the laptop for that

60s pacemaker battery

could be 40+ years. they were making plutonium powered pacemakers back then. wouldn't make fun of their longevity.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

people go there but no one really lives there.

Re: Edible?

doubt that. people are people.

Re: Edible?

from the conversation i'm guessing the first egg will never get a chance to hatch, probably sunny side up. This conversation is why there are so many existing animals such as rhinos that are on the verge of extinction just for having horns or other coveted things used for barbaric purposes that may be examples of traditional medical practices but probably have no truth in reality.

Re: That's not an extinct bird

Considering how easily and quickly they became extinct as soon as humans arrived, i wouldn't worry too much about having them raid your trash. seem to have been pushovers despite their size.

Court cancels FTC click-to-cancel rule on a technicality

Since the orange peanut in the oval office has already engaged in practices like this, it's not surprising that the rule was squashed but judges feigning disapproval.

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

Re: Nice idea

great idea, wearing masks and throwing people to the ground who haven't done anything to deserve this? have this going on all the time in the us now. lot of fans though.

Army and Navy have both asked for right to repair, now Senators want to give it to them

Re: Sense

they should just go back to steam, everyone understands steam! electromagnetically launched planes, there's something fishy there.

Britain's 5G experience 'among the worst in Europe' says MedUX

Sister took xmas vacation about 50 miles from me recently. to get any cell service they had to take a half mile walk to a hill in 0 degree F weather with snow on the ground. Vt does have great skiing though.

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

they could get a prepaid ups box from an old photography company and have the tapes digitized. put on thumb/flash drive or dvd if they still have those players around. might exceed the gdp of that country depending on how many tapes.

https://kodakdigitizing.com/

Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum

saw a program for the 6502 that pre loaded a table with 1-90 degrees and their sines and used it to determine sines and cosines for the program without computing anything, just a lookup. quite fast and not much memory required.

Re: 48K

trs 80 had a proper keyboard and a z80, earlier than the spectrum also.

Epic Games settles its antitrust side quest that sought battle royale with Samsung

From my first Motorola droid there has always been an option to load apps from other than google. there was no option to do that at all on an iphone. At the time you needed to connect a iphone to a computer with a usb cable with itunes running on the computer to update the os or apps or pretty much anything. haven't used the feature since the days of the motorola droid razr, but haven't found anything i wanted. pretty much work with what's built in. think the only app i ever bought was something called acar, but don't use it anymore.

Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho

Re: Mixed units?

yes, probably right, built in 1860 had 60 amp service when last bought with tube and post wiring in 1996. upgraded to 100 amps and got rid of the fuse box. still haven't got grounded outlets on the 2nd floor, but 100 amp service. do wonder why the lights blink when the keurig is brewing coffee.

think they'll just put them in a car crusher and leave the remains in a junk yard.

Re: Idaho

my cousin lived there when mt st helens burped. collected ash and sent samples home.

Re: Still too small

could still burp from 1 au and destroy all life on the planet.

Re: 20% enriched fuel?

candu uses natural u. no enrichment needed.

think one of the selling points is that the operators don't have to sit on top of it, they can be hundreds of miles away monitoring the thing remotely from home. Probably easier to hire the operators if they don't have to be in the same state when something goes wrong. Seen heat pipes fail when they don't get enough air flow, caused the heatsink to warp and bend the pcb. Now you won't have to find a place to dispose of waste, you'll just have to find a way of disposing the entire reactor.

Double-detonation supernova could explain why the universe is full of candles

Re: oddly

well tempered or even tempered?

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

not sure they're thinking of doing a tow from the runway to the terminal if there's any chance the plane is going to continue to fly. once the engines are shut down there is a period where they need to stay shut down before restarting. believe i read somewhere that due to uneven cooling down in the engine the rotors can warp and starting up before things cool down enough can cause interference between the rotor and the stater. not desirable in a jet engine.

believe the article says that they will be using electric vehicles soon.

Re: Proper warm up still required

not to mention the people who get sucked into the engines when they're running. guessing any reduction of that possibility would be appreciated by the ground crew.

Re: Not really a Bot is it!

yes, but who will be held accountable if its wings clip another plane on the way to the terminal. pilot should be pretty aware of the space needed to maneuver his plane, and have a good idea of exactly where the plane needs to be parked, not to mention a possibly better perspective of the area from the planes cabin than the guy with his chin on the ground.

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

Re: why are we using dns?!!

defence is in the backyard to keep the neighbors out of mine. :-)

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Room temperature?

33 C here right now and supposed to get hotter. don't know the inside temp at work, but no air at home as the house doesn't lend itself to window air conditioners. Believe thy use co2 for heat pumps in some places. less toxic than some refrigerants and less flammable than others, and less ozone depleting than most. high pressure plumbing though.

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: smell the lovely sovrinty, feel the width

is sovrinty one of those weird uk spellings, or does it have a meaning other than self-rule that i'm not familiar with?

Mars was once a desert with intermittent oases, Curiosity data suggests

Re: Thousands of nukes have been detonated on Earth

he likely never read the martian chronicles.

Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

Re: Wikiflix Anonymous

https://wikiflix.toolforge.org/#/ gets me there.

Re: WikiFlix

M.

NASA tests shrinking metals to help it find more exoplanets

Re: Silo

doesn't plutonium shrink when heated?

China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

Re: Fake

at those speeds i would think that just a small maneuver would change the heat profile not to mention the drag profile and cause something moving at mac 12 to disassemble rapidly and unpredictably. Would wonder if accidentally hitting a poop from a high flying bird could have the same effect.

we have a hypersonic gap! spread the FUD.

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

Re: ah, painful memories...

missile command, only game i could ever get past the top level and force to start over. not as much fun as star raiders, but i couldn't afford it.

Top AI models - even American ones - parrot Chinese propaganda, report finds

out of curiosity i asked gemm3 about kent state. it reported that one of the victims was Janice Joplin's boy friend. it also listed 9 victims where there were 9 wounded and 4 killed according to a Wikipedia article.

Japanese company using mee-AI-ow to detect stressed cats

Re: Stressed cats?

mine gets stressed when i'm standing in a doorway he wants to get through. seems he thinks i'll step on him which is rich considering how often he tries to tackle me in the dark walking through the living room. think it's an attempt kill me and make it look like an accident.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Re: Phone bill must have been astronomical

Haven't seen a "hand set" since the last public phones that i've seen in a while were removed from the T station up the road. Think they took them out about 3 years before covid. Think there were two phones on the first floor of one campus building more recently, but they're gone now also. there is a mail chute on the 4th floor to deliver mail to the ground floor for pick up. could still put a letter in it but doubt the mailbox exists any longer. There used to be two phone booths outside of the registrars office back when i went to school here back when they had a cyber 70, but they're gone now too. don't miss them until i realize i forgot my phone and need to make a call.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

no the wealthy got what they paid for.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: Followed by ...

just put them in an atmosphere of ethylene that'll turn them yellow, they just won't be ripe for eating or powering your car.

LLMs can hoover up data from books, judge rules

Re: ...in the US

Perhaps the llm should be questioned on its ability to reproduce its input. Go to the source and let the llm convict its self and its owners/creators. the more accurate the output the more damning.

Mozilla rolls out Firefox 140 with ESR status and fresh features

been using firefox since i downloaded it's ancestor using ftp from ncsa. that's also where the original source code came from that's used in the A patchy server. originally because there was nothing else, but since because it was the easiest cross platform browser to find. like having a consistent look and feel on different platforms. also doesn't keep trying to get me to use different search engines.

re: firefox

Just be yourself? says anonymous?

The one thing SME IT can do that the big guys can’t: Change the world

Re: Text is better than graphics, graphics are better than video. Text is magic, ...

All i want it the damn manual in text of if necessary a pdf. today if you look for manuals you get a bunch of videos. takes them forever to get to the point, and with text or a pdf you can scan until you find what you need to know instead of listening to someone taking forever to tell you what you need to know.

Deal to 'save' UK colleges £45M in Oracle Java licensing fees followed audit requests

thought that was "dos ain't done 'till lotus won't run". early '90's and still had people running lotus from 5 inch floppies.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

could have been someone else's.

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

haven't got the desk space for something that large. 22 inch monitor currently there takes up most of the free space together with non working power supplies i haven't gotten rid of yet, disks from old non working computers that need to be erased before being disposed of, my morning coffee and the 4 docking stations in boxes that haven't got a home yet.

Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

Re: Au contraire

doubt that ms invented dhcp. we were using it on a system where only the clients were windows based, and mostly dos initially. they all got their ip addresses when the connected to the network in. had a subnet and used a server that handed out static addresses to mac's it recognized and ip's from a pool if it didn't recognize the mac. a variation of bootp that could hand out addresses to new computers but didn't handle leases.

Re: Just.....

left out the 80's. goes back to 1975.