Posts by Hero Protagonist

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

The difference between Administrative State and Operational State

Re: Bad design

Glad I’m not the only one who was perplexed by this – took me a good five minutes to figure out how to turn it on the first time!

Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of

Re: Vital detail missing

Roasted guinea pigs Shirley, unless they happened to jump into a vat of oil to escape the flames

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: Ah, the equivalent of a modern day rollback!

Nowhere in the story does it claim that it was Walter’s idea, he just appears to have been there and lived to tell the tale.

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

Re: Sandia Labs

“ the comedy from the other SNL is increasingly questionable.”

Oh it’s always been questionable, we’ve just mercifully forgotten all the dross from the early years and only remember the gold.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

So many questions

My question is, how is it that the backplane was so easily pulled out of the server instead of the the cable connector breaking?

Why you should start paying attention to CXL now

Cliques

*Clichés

Battle of the retro Unix desktops: NsCDE versus CDE

Re: before my time

Spent a good chunk of my career using those terminals! Loved being able to open a couple of 60 row by 80 column windows on the 5620, which was a tall portrait orientation screen.

Did you have the GEBACA (Get Back At Corporate America) game? Corporate logos flying around the screen that you had to shoot. I think it was the AT&T logo that when you shot it, spawned the logos of the Baby Bell companies that were divested in the 1984 breakup. And then there was Crazy Eddie, who spewed out a stream of words like his TV commercials, and you had to shoot the individual words. Good times!

Toyota, Subaru recall EVs because tires might literally fall off

Obligatory pedantry

It’s the *wheels* that are in danger of falling off, not the tires. (Or strictly speaking, not just the tires – the wheels+tires as a unit. Heading off any pedantry of my pedantry….)

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Re: First time on the internet...

That’s what she said!

Could have saved himself some effort by crashing directly into the pole!

We sat through Apple's product launch disguised as a dev event so you don't have to

Re: Revolutionizing the way we tell you what to do with our products

If they took away the ability to make and receive calls, a fair number of people probably wouldn’t even notice or care

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: nice story

“Actually, my comment on safety of nuclear power was a joke. Apparently, a dozen of Reg commentards can't spot one, this friday.”

That should be your signal to tell better jokes.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Ohm my god, watt a collection of electrical puns, each one a precious joule. I think I’ve diode and gone to heaven!

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Re: Effect as a verb

> For old times' sake, I leaned over a shoulder and clicked a few buttons. Sure enough, that message had reverted yet again to "effect."

So what you’re telling us is that you were unable to effect a permanent change.

<ducks>

Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist

Re: "it's game over"

Nope, it’s a don’t-has-bean-anymore!

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

Dust from the Big Bang

Couldn’t the entire universe be considered dust from the Big Bang?

Icon because deep question

You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier

Re: “anything but common”

There’s common sense and then there’s uncommon sense, but mostly there’s common nonsense.

Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer

Re: Jack Dorsey

So what you’re saying is, you don’t know jack?

The month I worked for DEADHEAD: Yes, that was their job title

Re: he/she

The singular “they” has been used for hundreds of years. To quote another song co-written by Mr. Henley: “Get over it!”

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Re: don't spoil the magic

I think heros are expected to perform their feats for no pay — that’s why Superman needed his side hustle at the Daily Planet.

Re: Forget the turtles...

Well obviously you store the key for the second safe in the first safe — simples!

(Hmm, why do I have this nagging feeling I’ve overlooked something? Oh well, I’m sure it’s not important )

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

A scenario where yes/no/cancel makes sense: you exit a program with unsaved work, it asks you if you want to save your changes. Yes means save and exit, no means exit without saving, cancel means don’t exit.

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

Ooh, you’ve just hit on how humans are more like bananas than like bees (per another thread in this comment section) — we both have Peels!

Europe's largest nuclear plant on fire after Russian attack

Re: Like primitive man putting his hand in fire

“Don't forget this is war, and the first casualty are innocents. OK, truth.”

It’s also said that the first casualty of war is the plan, and that certainly seems to have held true for Russia.

Proprietary neural tech you had surgically implanted? Parts shortage

The original AT&T PCs were manufactured by Olivetti as I recall (I bought one with an employee discount); there was a Unix variant at one point. Unless you’ve talking about the 3B2 computer which was a very different beast made by Western Electric which was not an IBM-compatible and only ever ran Unix (System V probably).

Back in the day, I had just sat down to use my Mac Quadra 700 when suddenly it emitted a loud screeching sound. Nearly gave me a heart attack, thinking it was the swan song of a dying hard disk or something equally dire. Turned out that my daughter and a couple of her friends had replaced the general system beep with a recording of themselves screaming at the top of their pre-pubescent lungs.

You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual

% in email addresses?

I recall well the use of ! in uucp-style email addresses, but never encountered a %.

This is going well: Meta adds anti-grope buffer zone around metaverse VR avatars

Re: Hedonistic tendencies for the win!

“That’s what people liked to do! Folks who didn’t want to take part just didn’t, how refreshingly simple!”

Did you ask the girls you were messing with if they liked it as much as you? Of course not. You were having fun, that’s all that matters.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Buy a treadmill from Peloton and you’ll find yourself on two treadmills: one’s a piece of equipment and one involves your bank account.

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Re: Rumour has it .....

+1 for creative icon usage

It's more than 20 years since Steps topped the charts. It could be less than that for STEP's first fusion energy

Re: All aboard the next part of the gravy train trip

Hmm I wonder if I mark your words now, will I still be able to find them in 40 years to check?

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Re: Along the same lines but in reverse, I suppose...

“…and push back in after starting”

NASA's Mars InSight trips into safe mode and ESA's Sentinel-1B gives scientists the silent treatment

If only…

I have a fantasy of Ingenuity flying over to InSight and using the prop downwash to blow the dust off the solar panels. (Yes I know this is not even remotely feasible.)

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

The two types of software hardest to get right

Cryptography, and date/time/calendar calculations

NASA confirms International Space Station is to keep orbiting through 2030

Re: Any manned trip to Mars is going to need a lot of radiation shielding,

As I recall, Roman lead is used specifically for shielding sensitive electronics where the radiation from ordinary lead would do as much damage as the external radiation that’s being shielded against. Overkill for shielding humans I think.

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Re: The chicken or the egg?

Well the contents of the egg is identical at the DNA level to the chicken that emerges from it, so the egg came first.

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

“ the screen cleared and slowly filled with block art”

Maybe the client was just unhappy that it took too long to display?

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Fresh eyes

Sometimes we get bogged down by assumptions and preconceived ideas, while someone else who is not as intimately familiar with the system can come in with fresh eyes and analyze things from first principles to discover things that we overlooked because we immediately jumped to the conclusion that “it must be a problem with X”. And maybe 99% of the time it is a problem with X, so we don’t even think of checking anything else.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: Wood Panelled Offices

And presumably tried to set you up with their daughters?

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

Leftover pants

As a reward to the marketing team that came up with this idea, they will be gifted with any pants that remain unsold. And as punishment, they will be forced to wear them.

'We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted' says Intel CEO on quest to keep Moore's Law alive

Re: "We will not rest until the periodic table is exhausted"

Just think of the opportunities for planned obsolescence!

Missouri governor demands prosecution of reporter for 'decoding HTML source code' and reporting a data breach

Re: Dare I admit to the govenor ...

I thought I read somewhere that the SSNs were rot13-encoded…so maybe 1/10

UK funds hydrogen-powered cargo submarine to torpedo maritime emissions by 2050

Re: Box ticking

They forgot to include blockchain

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: Ah, a first time user

I also took a typing class in probably 8th or 9th grade (early 70s), and learned to use both the left and right shift keys as appropriate. When faced with a keypunch machine in college, however, I had to unlearn the use of the right shift key since the keypunch only had left shift (I don’t recall what took the place of right shift), and to this day 40+ years later I still never use right shift.

A speech recognition app goes into a bar. Speak up if you’ve heard it already

Re: Only once a month ..

In my neck of the left-pondian woods, it’s 10am first Tuesday of the month. I used to have a collie that would howl along in sympathy with the siren.

Apple's iPhone computer vision has the potential to preserve privacy but also break it completely

Re: Lovers or dolphins?

“This is how AI, that was trained on dogs, sees a supermarket”

You have completely misconstrued what that video is. In the comments, the creator says he used DeepDream to create it. The Wikipedia entry for DeepDream states:

“The software is designed to detect faces and other patterns in images, with the aim of automatically classifying images. However, once trained, the network can also be run in reverse, being asked to adjust the original image slightly so that a given output neuron (e.g. the one for faces or certain animals) yields a higher confidence score. This can be used for visualizations to understand the emergent structure of the neural network better, and is the basis for the DeepDream concept….After enough reiterations, even imagery initially devoid of the sought features will be adjusted enough that a form of pareidolia results, by which psychedelic and surreal images are generated algorithmically.”

So it’s not how the Ai “sees” the original image; all those “false positives” are intentionally generated by iteratively modifying the source image. It’s more like a video effect of “make everything in this image look like a dog.”

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

Marmite? Or…

s/marm/therm/