Posts by Bernard Lyons

NASA seeks cooks for Mars trip simulation

Sounds like a job for Jamie.

British Medical Association calls for long, slow rollout of NHS 111

Title is optional, hurray!

Who the hell picked 111? Don't they know that every GSM phone sold in Europe must be able to call 112, with or without a SIM installed?

Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge

Title

It seems to me that the flight crew updated the PAN to a MAYDAY because they couldn't figure out what was wrong with the flight computers and decided to stop trusting them and land the aircraft manually, as soon as possible.

In any case, having one or two pax injured is a medical problem; having over 100 and lots of your cabin crew injured becomes a safety problem IMO.

Kiwi rugby rats warned to keep eye on the hacker ball

Contains text

Deny inbound calls access to outbound trunks. I did it in the early Nineties.

Not that big of a deal.

Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

A title

"Eventuate" Is Not A Word. Not even in Australian English.

DEC: The best of systems, the worst of systems

$ SUBMIT SYS$MANAGER:AGEN_FEEDBACK.COM/LOG/KEEP/NOPRINT/QUE=CORRIB$BATCH

I don't remember the model numbers of all the VAXen I've worked on, from '85 to ES40s in 2009, but I absolutely loved VMS. None of those machines ever let me down and DEC's field service was fantastic. I still refer to babies' changing bags as Field Support Kits.

My modest claim to fame was to hook up the Call Detail Recorder printer output from a Nortel SL1/st PABX (another box I loved) to a terminal port on a DECserver 200, to capture all the call details. I wrote a billing system to charge all the phone calls to the proper department's budget, instead of the IT budget. It was a part-time project, what would now be called a 20% effort. But it was a great success and reduced our annual increase in phone bills from around 40% to 5% or so.

3,300+ lines of DCL. Took about half an hour to run, once a week. Worked perfectly. It was right at the limits of what one DCL program could do.

I also had some small batch jobs which checked through backup log files and emailed me a report. One of those ran automatically every night for 8 years without modification. And a bunch of batch jobs which purged records and compacted files in a TOLAS ERP system on a 13 week cycle. Again, all automatic, and ran for several years more or less by itself.

First thing I always did was to remove BYPASS from the privs on the SYSTEM account.

Legend has it that there was a VAXcluster somewhere in DEC Engineering in MA with 200 nodes in it. IIRC, the officially supported figure was 32.

VMS, virus free since 1978. Nothing to match it for reliability. I miss it immensely.

Windows malware dominates Mac malware detection chart

Title

Virus-free since 1978.

I'm a VAX.

Boffins learn to adjust body clocks

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Let's spare a thought here for those poor miners in Chile who won't be seeing the sun again until Christmas or so. I hope their rescuers try to keep them on a 24-hour cycle.

Canadian flyboy prangs CF-18 Hornet

Headline options

Pilot screws pooch.

CF18 unable to recover from airshow manoever.

Lucky escape for pilot.

Ejector seat works perfectly.

So many ways to spin the same story. Take your pick...

'The internet's completely over', declares petulant Prince

Requirement met

Ah, Prince. Daft as a brush, always has been. Love him to bits. His after-show shows are legendary.

I wouldn't have minded, er, loving some of his protoges along the way... Shiela E especially. Awesome percussionist, looked great in a lace bodysuit. Sigh.

ESA proposes ion drive Sun-dodge Mars commsat ploy

Pah!

"Eventuate" IS NOT A WORD. I don't care if it's used in Australian English, it's STILL not a word.

Governator outs Dubya's global-warming 'time bomb'

@Webster

I'm a patient man, but even my patience has limits.

Phuck Off!

And take your right-wing, bigoted, homophobic, racist, recidivist, misogynistic, spittle-flecked bilious rants with you. Go away and annoy someone else for a while. You are a narrow-minded intellectual pigmy.

To everyone else: I'm sorry to be abusive, but not only is it fully justified, it's long overdue. Enough is enough.

Buffy mastermind returns with new TV series

The pitch reminds me of...

All My Sins Remembered (Joe Haldeman, 1977)

I really miss Buffy, AH as least as much as SMG. And AFAIK it was the first US-produced TV to use the word "Bollocks!" correctly in context.

Aeryn and Chiana in Farscape on DVD are the only things keeping me going these days.

ITC upholds Qualcomm phone ban

It's about the battery, stupid.

I'm getting fed up with people advancing all kind of nonsense reasons why the iPhone isn't 3G.

Listen closely: 3G EATS BATTERIES.

That's the only reason which matters. Apple do not want to release a device which needs to be recharged every day or two, and which will need its battery changed in 18 months or less.

iPods are different. You don't need a music player to work all day long, you can listen to it until it needs a charge, then plug it in. The user's expectation of a phone is that it works when you need it. Especially one that costs 5 or 600 dollars.

And since 3G doesn't penetrate buildings very well, if you live/work more than 2m from a window, the phone spends 95% of its time stepped back to 2.5G anyway.

It's all marketing hype. 3G's dirty little secret is that it works fine in a lab, but not very well in the real world.

I'd love an iPhone, but won't be able to afford one. It's going to be very interesting to see exactly how hard the usual dollar/pound/euro ripoff bites when it finally arrives over here.