Posts by PerlyKing

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: fixing Model M switches

Thank you for taking the time to make this very helpful reply!

Re: my Model M gave up the ghost

You wore out a Model M?! Remind me not to cross you ;-)

Mind you, one of the keys on mine has started to work only intermittently :-( Are the switches fixable? So far I've found a lot of information on cleaning the keycaps but not much about any deeper work.

70-knot winds so far blamed for yacht disaster that killed Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch

Re: Luxury yacht

The only yacht I've ever been on was a racing one. Sleeping accommodation was bunks in tiers of three, with no room to swing the proverbial cat anywhere below deck. It was jolly good fun for a weekend, but not what I would call luxurious.

Icon: the nearest thing to nautical, arrr!

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Settings

My understanding was that the AI isn't to change a setting but to find the setting that you want to change.

Because it's much easier to teach an AI to do that than it is to rationalise where settings are hidden. Apparently.

Red, white, and blew it? Trump tariffs may cost America the AI race

Re: Trump always puts his name in the branding

Trumpistan

Re: Why is that "unfortunate"?

Fair point :-(

Re: Why is that "unfortunate"?

From my point of view it's unfortunate because driving trade to China empowers an authoritarian regime with an appalling record on human rights.

China might be a useful counterweight to the USA's current madness, but that doesn't mean that they're suddenly the good guys.

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Re: Out of date

Operation Sealion was cancelled in 1940, so I'm a little surprised that they were printing maps for it in 1943 - I think that they would have had other things on their minds by then.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: 30m drive radius from the site

Having a hotel within 30 metres doesn't sound so bad, but why bother driving? ;-)

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

While I upvoted you, please don't insult orangutans with such associations.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Re: cold calls

I once witnessed a friend of mine take a cold call, it went something like this: "Hello. Yes. <pause> AAAAAARGH! YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT DEATH! I CAN'T HANDLE THIS!" <click>

It turned out that he'd been cold-called by someone trying to sell funeral plans ;-D

Geography fail

Apparently there was a similar conversation between two branches of my family a couple of generations ago, both of which emigrated from the UK to Canada. The people who had settled in Vancouver were asked to meet the next wave off the boat in Nova Scotia. The reply which came back was along the same lines of "you go to meet them, you're closer!" :-D

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Isn't Perl an interpreted language?

Perl source is compiled into an internal structure which is then optimised before being run (see here for more details). This happens every time rather than doing it once to produce a separate executable, which makes it look like an interpreted language. Producing a standalone executable is difficult at least in part because of the presence of the eval function.

Differently-competent developer

Stop me if I've told this one before ;-)

I was working in a team of Perl developers and was asked to review the first change made by a new contractor. It didn't work. At all. Somehow the guy had managed to write Perl code which not only didn't do the right thing, but didn't even compile! And he confidently submitted it for review without mentioning that he'd had any trouble with it. Two days later he was gone.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

The problem that governments have with that approach is not the ethical one, but that it doesn't scale well.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

I recently helped out an elderly neighbour with no payment expected, and a few days later a case of beer showed up on my doorstep %-}

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: ZERO attempt to make GTK4 backwards compatible

While you have my sympathy for the potential loss of a useful toolset, this is generally what a new major version number means: breaking changes which will not be backwards-compatible.

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

Re: Working differently

This must be up for some sort of newspeak award!

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

Re: Windows

Or just sedate everyone, as in The Fifth Element :-D

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: average houses at average times

First assume a spherical house?

First private moon lander to touch down safely starts sending selfies

Re: I'm assuming retroreflector is NASA-speak for mirror...

Not quite. A mirror reflects incident light at an angle; a retroreflector reflects it back to its source, hence "retro". Details in Wikipedia.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Southeastern US accent

Many moons ago I was given a Georgia (US) <-> English phrase book which included the useful information that a "tar arn" is something that you use to remove a wheel from your VEE-hickle :-D

Re: Fiver

Er, no. "Five" is pronounced "fife" and "nine" is "niner", to distinguish between the two and because the English "v" sound is difficult for some non-native speakers. There are a few more (scroll down for numbers), but I don't remember ever hearing native English speakers using "wun" or "tree".

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: I usually refused - until he insisted

I used to try to save people from the gory details that they won't understand. Now I almost enjoy watching their eyes glaze over >:-)

James Webb Space Telescope to size up asteroid 2024 YR4 before it rocks our world

Re: The way things are going

Or Hot Fudge Tuesdae.

Democrats demand to know WTF is up with that DOGE server on OPM's network

Re: Laws are pointless...

The point is to do their best to highlight what is going on. It may be hopeless, but what's the alternative? Bend the knee and kiss the ring? Anyone in the US who stands up for truth and justice right now deserves more than a little respect.

Who will be the USA's Alexei Navalny?

Blue Origin spins up lunar gravity for New Shepard flight

Spin gravity

You'll get lunar gravity at a precise distance from the axis ("at the midpoint of the crew capsule lockers"), but at every other distance it will be either lesser or greater than that. In such a small capsule the difference will be pretty noticeable, and the Coriolis force will probably also be apparent. So I suspect that this is only going to be useful for pretty small experiments.

Still pretty cool though :-)

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

Re: Engines from an obscure name

According to their press release the "obscure name" is Florida Turbine Technologies:

Boom has selected Florida Turbine Technologies, a business unit of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., as its engine design team. FTT has leading supersonic engine design expertise, including key engineers among the team responsible for the design of the F-119 and F-135 supersonic engines that power the F-22 and F-35.

Obscure, but maybe not inexperienced.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Re: Typical Trump – don't look there, look here

Charlie might have been referring to the dangers of lunar regolith?

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Re: citizens are expected to pop their postcode into a website

Which is lazy on "their" part, and an abuse of the postcode system which is designed to facilitate the delivery of post. The last time I wanted to report a pothole it was at a rural road junction not near any property - what's the postcode for that? No postcode, no pothole, no problem, right?!

If they're really interested in finding out where the potholes are, they could make it easier for people with Actual Intelligence to report them, maybe by sticking a pin in a map?

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Re: TV licensing

You didn't miss much. A friend of mine has no TV and has been ignoring these for years with no discernible effect.

The first year he was a good little boy and followed the instructions to declare that he didn't need a license.

The second year he sent a slightly snotty letter to say that he didn't have a TV, that he would tell them if he ever got one, and to please leave him alone until then.

Then he got a few escalating in tone from "please pay now" to "you're risking a £1,000 fine" to "we'll be in your area next Tuesday". He still gets one of those every so often, but has never had a knock on the door.

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Re: Do they?

1. It seems to be working so far

2. These are prototypes

3. You didn't understand it

4. Tesla != SpaceX

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

Re: camp cooking

Not cooking a camp, you're being obtuse.

Cooking while being camp - fabulous!

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

Re: Are there any ethnic Russians in Poland?

At the risk of feeding the troll....

Are there any ethnic Russians in Poland?

Are there any Nazis in Ukraine? As I recall, Putin's given reason for invading was to get rid of the Nazis there. What are the odds that if he ever succeeds, then as soon as his military has recovered it will turn out that Poland (or wherever) is also being run by Nazis and needs to be "liberated"?

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: A week is a long time in politics…

"Don't Feed The Troll" works when the majority of readers can recognise a troll, for example (hopefully!) here. It doesn't work so well when most of the troll's 200+ million followers believe the last soundbite they heard in their favourite echo chamber.

I think that political leaders have to respond to these accusations because their silence is more likely to be taken as an admission of guilt than the contempt which the original statement deserves. Unfortunately the troll's followers are not likely to see or believe the responses, but they should be on record.

Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in Lego

Re: Read The Book...

I'm not sure if that's the book I read, as I later lent it to someone and haven't got it back >:-( But the story is definitely one for the ages.

It bears repeating:

“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

Something which isn't always mentioned is the support expedition on the Aurora which set up supply dumps on the other side of Antarctica. That ship also became icebound, stranding the shore party which completed its mission and lost three men in the process.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: missing closing "]"

If all else fails, read the error message ;-)

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

They've dealt with it, in the usual "goodwill" way, meaning not admitting any liability.

It's just another example of shoddy systems. Wasn't there any testing which would have shown the meter readings being overread by a factor of 1,000? No sanity checks on bills suddenly leaping by the same factor? Or are they just hoping that people will pay up without questioning the infullible (sic) computer?

On a related but slightly different note, we've recently had a "smart" meter fitted by Thames Water. As with Lee, the meter appears to be working perfectly. But Thames Water have managed to ignore the decimal point and tried to charge us for cubic metres instead of litres! The bill even had a "real world" translation which helpfully told us we'd been having four showers per hour, 24/7, since the meter was installed X-(

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: Numeric keypad

You use that phrase a lot. Maybe some of us don't need/want a numeric keypad.

Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon

Re: All that goes into picking products to shove in your face to sell things

And yet they still seem to think that because I recently bought a fridge, I'd like to buy another one! I wish I were joking.

Re: Fundamentally broken

Google search isn't broken at all, it's working brilliantly to show you ads and make money for Google. But I suspect that you knew that.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: Jumping into orbit

Well I suppose you're technically right, which is obviously the best kind ;-) And also highly elliptical!

Have one of these ---->

Re: Jumping into orbit

by that standard, every time I jump in the air, I'm in orbit.

Only if you jump at around 17,600mph. Please turn in your nerd card at the door on your way out.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: Return to Base

The first usage of "RTB" that I came across was "Rufty Tufty Biker". My curiosity was piqued when I first saw an "RTB Warranty" :-D

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

Re: design your program properly so that concurrency is eliminated

Good luck with that!

SpaceX Dragon gives ISS a helping hand with altitude

Re: Space is a commercial world now

Hmmm. I'm still smarting from the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic, so I'm not holding my breath.

While I generally find the two-hour (ish) movie format is too short to do justice to a novel, I'm not sure that Neuromancer has enough material to last for ten hours or so. I suppose they could start with Burning Chrome and carry on with the other books. Maybe that could be interesting :-)

Although the blurb at Apple TV has dampened my enthusiasm again:

The series will follow a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.

Re: Space is a commercial world now

I regret that I only have one upvote to give for the Neuromancer reference.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: large screwdriver as a stethoscope

Some engine work on my car was delayed because the mechanic was using a large screwdriver as a stethoscope. The tip slipped, contacted a moving part, and the blunt end fractured the mechanic's eye socket. Let's be careful out there.

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Re: Why would that pose difficulties for a passenger jet?

Surely Concorde already solved this problem with the famous "droop snoot". Of course with a nose this long they might have to go one better and have a second hinge in the other direction to prevent the nose from touching the ground. Or multiple hinges so that the nose curls up under the body like a butterfly's proboscis :-D