Posts by Whiskers

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: And for other reasons

Living in the past. They do things differently there.

Re: And for other reasons

Historians using current Common Era / Before Common Era dating, have no year zero. 1CE is preceded directly by 1BCE. Astronomers have other ideas, they do count a year zero, preceded by negative numbers. Other calendars may or may not have a year zero.

Re: And for other reasons

"I never did get an answer to the question: if decades and centuries start with zero, why don't millenia?"

Oooh, ooh, I think I know this one :))

The answer is, they don't. Centuries start with 1, and so do decades. Think about it; the 20th century had all but one of it's years numbered nineteen hundred and something, it began in 1901 and ended with the year 2000 which gave it it's name. The decades likewise - the first decade ends with the year 10. We are currently in the third millenium of the common calendar, which will end with the year 3000.

Birthdays and anniversaries follow the same logic; your first birthday is one year after your birth.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: Adding up your timesheet

The first rule of lunch club ...

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Re: the idea was more than 25 years old, but he started working on it more seriously around 2002

Or Tracy Island?

AI-pushing Adobe says AI-shy office workers will love AI if it saves them time

Re: When two steps are too many, remove one step

Perhaps the ancient profession of scrivener will see a revival. Employment for people made redundant by businesses relying on AI?

Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space

Re: Understatement there.

Or even 'Crikey'

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

The Sorcerers Apprentice

Goethe, 18th century.

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

Brings to mind my Amstrad PPC 640 D, 'compatible' with the IBM PC but 'portable', with a full size clacky keyboard, tiny reflective LCD screen, twin floppies, and running off disposable D-cells (if you were desperate enough).

Microsoft claims it didn't mean to inject Copilot into Windows Server 2022 this week

Lonely

Perhaps some poor neglected AI is lurking in MS's systems, desperately reaching out for input, or just for interaction.

Solar eclipse darkened skies, dampened internet traffic

Re: Space station video

... add to wishlist

Re: Space station video

No sound here. Very disappointed that the video looked like a thumb obscuring the lens; I was hoping to see the round shadow racing across a continent.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

Reminds me of "slow glass" <https://reactormag.com/slow-glass-seen-from-all-around-bob-shaws-other-days-other-eyes/>

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

But shepherding and herding other people's data turns out to be so ... boring ...

Danish techies claim they can predict your next move (and your last)

Personal or population level?

At the level of population statistics, this sounds like an extension of what pension providers, insurers, and so on, have been doing (or trying to do) for centuries. If anyone tries to apply it at the personal level though, great care will be needed to protect us from Big Brother, and possible attempts to pre-empt predictions.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Usenet Improvement Project

<http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/index.html>

This dates from 2008, founded by the late and sorely missed "Blinky the Shark" (and with a minor anonymous contribution by me), but might still be an interesting read. Also has useful information about setting up filters for various Usenet clients and servers.

Re: A very timely RFC: RFC 9518 Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

<settles in for a bit of a read> Looks like a timely offering indeed.

Re: Demise

For those who can afford €10 a year, Individual.net ("The Berlin Server") is still around. They were very reliable for me. No binaries :))

Re: Good riddance!

The increasing disruption originating from Google Groups users, was one of the factors that encouraged me to stop using Usenet, some years ago. Other distractions from "real" life also had something to do with it. I might have another look, now. This is good news indeed.

UK government denies China/Russia nuke plant hack claim

Re: Sellafield / Windscale

The "Lymeswold" brand seems to be free

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: @base

Interesting. I was a self-taught oik when my customer-facing office had "personal computers" issued (one between 2 or 3 initially) in the mid '80s, so my technical knowledge started from nil. A few of us did learn enough to usefully supplement the corporate mainframe system but we got little or no official support.

@base

I remember @base, the database plugin for the DOS version of Lotus 1-2-3, had three settings for logical fields - true, false, and undefined. Not quite trinary, but I did have fun experimenting.

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Re: The Japanese had it all worked out

We can thank the ancient Babylonians for the 24 hour day currently in vogue.

In early mediaeval Europe daylight was divided into four 'tides'; there are still some sundials indicating these tides along with the 'canonical hours' for Christian prayers (which were timed on the basis of 12 daylight hours as used in the middle East). These tides or hours varied in length with the seasons (and latitude); fixed-length hours are a side-effect of mechanical clocks and a European inclination to let machines dictate behaviour rather than the other way round.

The French Revolutionaries tried to decimalise the day, but it didn't catch on (although Folkestone has staged a quiet local revival recently <https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/artists/ruth-ewan/>).

<reluctantly dismounts from hobby-horse>

Rooster-tiger

<plunders web for data>

Hmm. Seems I'm a Yang Metal Tiger, for what it's worth. I'll confess to the alleged character traits I like ...

I'm a night owl too; sometimes I am still awake at tomorow's dawn. I have been known to wait up for a crack-of-dawn airoplane departure time - far easier than trying to wake up early.

Perhaps we could go back to what some places did in the Good Old Days and start counting the hours from observed sunrise (&/or sunset). Local priests or government employees could visit every timepiece to adjust it - a particularly useful service if the hours were also required to vary in length with the seasons.

The Japanese had it all worked out <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock>.

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Re: could have been

Some were tangerine :))

Re: Last paragraph

Ah; "Yes, Minister". Tricky chaps, words.

Re: Once upon a time...

We (humanity as a whole) got the web search and journalism etc services we deserved. Getting people to pay money for them just didn't work; "free" and "pretty" are too tempting.

Re: Last paragraph

Tried to respond to the quesstionaire, but got too angry at the loaded questions and gobbledegook to continue. Even if normal people were aware of it, how many would persevere to provide a complete response to what seems to me to be a deliberately skewed quesstionaire designed to generate responses the "researchers" want?

That's a common fault of "opinion polls" and so on, not only government-sponsored ones.

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Re: Testing 1 2 3

Portacabins? In my day we had Nissen huts.

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit? @Whiskers

I can only report what I saw, I was a child at the time so wouldn't have been aware of what wasn't visible. I agree that old insulation can't be depended on.

I've encountered some bad wiring since then, of course - including 13A ringmain sockets with no earth connection.

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

There were Y-shaped lamp socket adaptors so that you could plug your shaver/iron/toaster into one side and an incandescent bulb into the other. Or indeed have a 'tree' of Y adaptors plugged into each other and various appliances all running at once from the light socket ... I've seen it done, in an old house with no power sockets in the kitchen but one central light fitting. I associate the crackle of the electricity with the paraffin (kerosene) fumes from the room heater/stove.

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

Indubiitably! :))

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

My grandmother did that. Likewise the (1920s vintage) toaster. I suspect the wiring in that house was fairly rugged.

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

In the '60s we moved into a house in the UK with mixed 15A (each one individually wired to a big fuse board under the stairs) and 13A ring-main power sockets, plus 2A and 5A sockets wired to the lighting circuit in some rooms. I remember the 15A plugs had switches, whereas the 13A sockets had them - although some 13A plugs also had switches. The 2A and 5A sockets had no switches.

It was handy being able to move table and standard lamps to different places in the room and still control all the lights from the switch by the door. There were a couple of non-switching 5A sockets too, for powering wireless sets. And there were hard-wired electric clock connectors too, I had one for my alarm clock. We had a large box full of assorted adaptors and extension leads.

We also had a 'transformer' buzzing away all day and night, adapting the local 220V supply to the 240V used by the appliances we brought with us from the next county; that may have been a slick bit of salesmanship by the local electrician.

In the '70s I worked in a '50s office building where the lack of power sockets for calculators had been ameliorated by wiring a 5A socket for each desk as a spur from the nearest original 13A socket So workers then built their own 5A to 13A adaptors so that we could use the power warts our calculators needed - each one of which had to be checked by the house electrician, and given a sticky label, along with instructions to hide all such adaptors at night to stop the cleaners from plugging their machines into them.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

Re: Human persychology fail

I think you have to be a cabinet minister

Re: Pointless

"We didn't pay for content before Facebook, Twitter and Google."

We most certainly did. In my family, it was a Sunday ritual to visit the newsagent to pay for the week's newspapers and magazines. Some people still do that, even though there are also "free newspapers". There is paid-for content on line too; many people seem to be happy to pay for their entertainment and other stuff.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

"What it is" is somewhat arbitrary, depending on how certain terms are defined mathematically, what assumptions and measurements are used to determine the actual shape of the planet and of its gravity field, how accurate those measurements actually are, how many of those things things change over time, ... once the axis of the original transit telescope is too far away to touch, it's remarkably difficult to describe precisely where it (or anything else) actually is with respect to anywhere else on the planet.

According to GPS, the actual physical meridian marked on the ground at the Greenwich observatory (and by a big laser beam too), is wrong by more than 100 yards.

A drawback to having a single time zone for the whole planet, such as Swatch Internet Time, is that the date and day of the week will change during the working day in many longitudes (about half as a rough estimate).

Imagine having to wait until tomorrow for lunch-time ...

Through the Looking Glass – holographic display hardware is great, but it's not enough

Re: Progress, of sorts

... or 50" TV ...

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

Re: DARPA have issued their request for information: to see if these problems can be solved,

Thunderbirds could do it. On a 405 line TV you couldn't even see the strings, sometimes.

Perhaps motorways could be re-purposed as ekranoplan tracks, after all the cars have been banned.

Elevating bork to a new level (if the touchscreen worked)

Re: Network missing AI

"Please enter the authentication code we have sent to your registered email address. You have ten minutes, starting from now ..."

This page has been deliberately left blank

Re: "We are still very keen to donate some of the proceeds to the cause"

... standard operating procedure for oligarchs and plutocrats since time immemorial

UK govt draws a blank over vaccine certification app – no really, the report is half-empty

Re: Here in the EU...

Aaah, Brexit ...

Re: Here in the EU...

The printed "NHS COVID Pass" I received the other day after applying via the NHS web site, doesn't seem to have an expiry date.

The barcode "Your unique reference use this to confirm your NHS COVID Pass" printed at the top of the letterhead is read by my smartphone as a meaningless 8 digit number (not resembling the long alpha-numeric code number printed below it).

Although it shows my name address and birth date, it doesn't reveal my NHS or NI numbers.

Wanted: Brexit grand fromage. £120k a year. Perks? Hmmmm…

Re: @codejunky

Yes. Both camps are equally to blame for the mess.

Brexit wasn't and isn't a continuing process, it was a once-only event that has happened and that's that. Its aftermath is of course ongoing, and that's what has to be handled now. Too bad there wasn't any real preparation in advance, or even proper negotiation of its terms.