Posts by Phil E Succour

Even Linus Torvalds can have trouble with autocycle … autocracy… AUTOCOMPLETE!

Back in the 90s…

I remember a poster on the office wall that said:

Always remember - Spelling chequers are knot infallible.

It seems 30 years of development haven’t greatly improved the situation…

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Re: First Response from Parker

I wish it had broadcast the “I’m not dead!" clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

ULA nears second launch of Vulcan Centaur in pursuit of US Space Force approval

Re: launch a lump of (presumably) concrete

Or maybe Dean Wormer's involved, and it's a double-ultra-secret-payload.

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

Re: If you'd asked me ten minutes ago...

>>I would have sworn that a drummer from Spinal Tap was killed by a re-entering satellite

I thought he either spontaneously combusted or choked on vomit (although they didn’t specify whose vomit). They've had so many drummers though that if a satellite strike hasn’t already taken one out it would be a good bet for the future.

JAXA releases photo of SLIM lander in lunar faceplant

Re: Thrusters

Don’t worry, Wallace and Gromit will be along shortly to put a coin in the slot!

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

I know how Elon feels about advertisers now

If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with ink and toner pricing, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

Given the rate at which most bureaucracies work I suspect regulatory approval will take longer than it will take SpaceX to sling sufficient satellites into orbit.

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

Re: Self destruct

I’ve not seen any confirmation of what happened, but my understanding from reports I’ve read is that it hadn’t (and wasn’t intended to) reach orbital speed, so unless the detonation accelerated some debris to orbital speed the resulting detritus will have found its way back to the surface somewhere.

On-by-default video calls come to X, disable to retain your sanity

It just won’t lie down and die…

Space Karen keeps raining blows on it, but the X/Twitter corpse is still twitching after a year of his efforts. Perhaps he needs to break out the garlic and wooden stake?

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Where does the time go?

I used to work at Heathrow in the 1980s, and when a Concorde lit the afterburners for take off and rolled down the runway the vibrations used to set off lots of car alarms in the multi-story car parks.

Never flew on it myself, but my parents went on a day trip to Egypt on Concorde! Happy days.

Never mind SETI and NASA, if your Ring somehow snaps ET, Amazon might give you $1M

I’m disappointed…

You’ve got "ring" and "ET" in that headline, but missed the opportunity to slip in "Uranus".

An important system on project [REDACTED] was all [REDACTED] up

That is so true. Obligatory xkcd.

Microsoft puts the freeze on employee salaries, CEO pay still as hot as ever

Re: I wonder…

Hmmm - not a bad effort.

There's a guide which will help you do better next time.

I wonder…

… whether Nadella wrote the email himself or just asked his Outlook AI bot to knock up a message to staff telling them there’s no money left?

Microsoft can't stop injecting Copilot AI into every corner of its app empire

Re: AI, AI, AI!

Absolutely there are cases where the technique (and I agree it’s not “intelligent”) can be applied to specific domains and yield some useful results.

That doesn’t though make it a panacea that will cure all of a company’s ills, however many wet dreams it might give the consultants and senior management. I’ve sat through too many presentations with titles like “Blockchain – how it will revitalise our company and transform the industry” (spoiler alert – it didn’t), or seen things which are successful in one domain taken up by management consultants, who generalise it and claim it will apply everywhere, but it doesn’t (six sigma I’m looking at you).

So, you’ll have to forgive me if I pass on the opportunity to sign up for the AI cheerleader training.

Re: AI, AI, AI!

It will be the emperor's new clothes again. Hoards of consultants and PHBs with MBAs will spend three or four years driving AI projects which deliver very little, if anything, of value to their companies, then they’ll move onto the next fad leaving a horrible mess behind.

Maybe I’m getting cynical, but I’ve been round this cycle so many times now it’s getting boring.

NASA InSight lander spills the beans on Mars' core

Dusty Panels

InSight met its fate because its solar panels, the lander's only source of energy, were covered by Martian dust, making it unable to draw enough power to carry on with its mission.

I get it that adding some kind of mechanism to clean the solar panels would be more mass to lift to Mars and would potentially introduce extra failure modes, and that such a mechanism wasn’t necessary to reach the design life of the mission, but…

It always seems a shame when these landers crap out because their power source is covered in Martian dust but their instruments are otherwise functional. Perhaps, if dear old Elon ever makes it to Mars, NASA could supply him with a feather duster and a French Maid's outfit and he could drive around in his Tesla MarsRover dusting off solar panels for them?

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Always have an innocent version of your acronym prepared…

He should have told the new boss it meant "Sub-optimal User Experience" and he might have got away with it.

'Brittle' Twitter suffers bad case of the Mondays: Links, pics, vids fail

Re: Billionaire tax

Although there’s an argument to be made that Musk destroying Twitter is also a better outcome for humanity…

Happy Lunar New Year: Beijing warns of enhanced surveillance during celebrations

Year of the Cat

Damn, now I’m going to have the piano riff from that Al Stewart song in my head all day. Good job it’s Friday.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Re: Obvious answer.

If Elon's willing to consider candidates from the afterlife, then surely John McAfee must be on the shortlist.

“After that, I will just run the software & servers teams."

Given the number of staff he’s ejected and departments he’s abolished, is there anything left other than the software and servers teams? Sounds like the new CEO won’t have too many things on their plate.

Bring on the good Baroness

I think Dido Harding has the sort of track record that Elon is looking for, particularly with technology companies…

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/talk-talk-boss-dido-hardings-utter-ignorance-lesson-us/1370062?src_site=marketingmagazine

Elon Musk picks fight with Apple for slashing advertising spend on Twitter

More popcorn please

Just when you think the madness has reached its zenith, the entertainment continues as Twitter drops its policy aimed at preventing misleading information about Covid-19:

https://news.sky.com/story/twitter-quietly-drops-policy-preventing-sharing-of-covid-19-misinformation-12757898

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Re: So more users less advertisers

Latest report on the BBC says that His Muskiness is picking a fight with Apple over advertising and the App Store 30% charge for in App purchases:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63788437

Time to pull up a chair and grab a big bowl of popcorn I think.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

“ Machiavelli thought the voice of the people tends towards insanity.”

Makes me wonder what Machiavelli would have thought of the voice of His Muskiness…

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

Re: That statue is shite

It looks like a rejected design for William S. Burrough’s Steely Dan.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

I wonder if Guinness World Records has a category for "Fastest time for a billionaire to destroy a company"?

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Men and a Man. Amen.

Or if they’re not the same person, it seems likely that they get their spliffs from the same place…

The Twitterverse will soon be silent

When you add up the numbers of staff who have left, or will shortly, as a result of the CEO's flailing around, there can’t be many employees left, and those that are still around won’t necessarily have the right mix of skills to keep the ship afloat, never mind implementing whatever Musk comes up with next.

I was going to say it’s like a soap opera, but if this was fictional it would have jumped the shark several episodes ago.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

Re: Is "The Twitter Roundup"...

Only if Twitter manages to last another week…

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs memorialized with online archive of emails, guff

That’s an interesting article…

…but I suspect it won’t increase the chances of Apple responding when you ask them for a comment.

Have a cold one, it’s Friday.

What begins with a 'B' and is having problems at tsoHost? Hopefully not your website

Re: "On-prem", or "Off-prem"?

Shirley you mean "Ootnotes" in this case?

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

Re: do grandiose brandish

So is

I hid Dad's organ boners

Give nerds their own PRIVATE TRAIN CARRIAGES, say boffins

Garland of Flowers

Reading some of the ideas in "How to make the most of UK Innovation" makes me suspect Steve Bong chaired the group that produced it...

Google's Chrome to pull plug on plugins next September

Wow, I'm way out of touch...

> As of October 2014, Google says the plugins most frequently launched

> by Chrome users were Microsoft Silverlight, Google Talk, Java,

> Facebook's video chat plugin, the Unity gaming engine, and

> Google Earth, in that order.

I must be living in the dark ages, I've don't use any of those plugins.

And yet, I don't feel I'm missing very much somehow....

NASA beams vid from space via laser

Good start chaps

Now all we need to do is get the sharks up to the ISS...

SPACE VID: Watch JUMBO ASTEROID 2000 EM26 buzzing Earth

Re: As big as three football fields??

Excellent conversions, thanks. I can visualise it perfectly now

As big as three football fields??

Sorry, that doesn't compute. Please ensure future Earth menacing asteroid sizes are given in El-Reg units

Man sues NASA: Mystery Mars rock is a UFO – an unidentified 'FUNGUS' object

Re: Reg Commentard surely?

Perhaps amanfrommars has moved into litigation?

Judging from the description of the lawsuit I'd have thought "Runs with Beavers" is nearer the mark.

Yahoo! chief operating officer de Castro exits web biz after just one year

Sub! Editing! Failure!

What! has! happened! to! the! house! style!?

Or is this a different Yahoo!?

iSPY: Apple Stores switch on iBeacon phone sniff spy system

Re: Ohhhhh,..... Eeeeehhhhhhh,...

Shouldn't that be:

...or 7 to have an Apple Store facilitator assist you with your tissue.

Exactly what kind of assistance I'll leave to the imagination.

ETERNAL PATENT WAR: Apple and Samsung locked in battle again

>>And the lawyers keep on getting richer....

'twas ever so. I'm not aware of any legal system which actually seeks justice, truth and fairness for the parties involved, the whole set up is designed to keep the laywers in yachts.

The British satirical magazine Private Eye hit the nail on the head many years ago now when it printed a photo of a high profile libel lawyer and their client following the failure of their case in court. A speech bubble added to the client said "We lost", the speech bubble added to the lawyer said "No, YOU lost. Here's my invoice".

Angry Brazilian whacks NASA to put a stop to ... er, the NSA

Re: Goodbye SAN

>>I've ordered our new £250,000 SAN destroyed because it can't be trusted. They're out

>> the back with sledgehammers right now...

Just ship it to the Guardian offices and the UK government will send some guys around to do it for you...

Ultralight party balloons in WEEK-LONG marathon flight

Re: Was it a box of balloons,

You'll be getting ribbed all week for a terrible joke like that. At least bad jokes are no barrier to commenting on El Reg.

WIN a RockBLOCK Iridium satellite comms module

Blast From The Past

Great

Iberian

Rockblok

Lever

Stops

Airframe

Landing

On

Urban

Development

Boffins lay bare exotic Lara Croft meteorite element ununpentium

Re: Your element interests me

>> I would like to subscribe to your periodical.

Put an offer on the table then...

BALLMER TO RETIRE FROM MICROSOFT

>> Microsoft shares are already up nearly 9 per cent as this article is published

>> following the announcement.

Meanwhile shares in local chair manufacturers have plummeted like a stone...

In case of LOHAN flight emergency, gobble THIS Iridium-Arduino sandwich

RIHANNA

Rockblok In High Altitude Nimbus Needs Abort

SCARY SPICE

Satellite Controlled Airborne Rockblok Yielding Safety Procedure In Case of Emergency