Posts by Mud5hark

Boolean bafflement at British Airways' Executive Club: Sneaky little Avioses - Wicked, Tricksy, False!

Transfer fail

They closed down avios a few months ago and I was told to transfer my miles to a BA airmiles account (which I had - it had been dormant for years and had 0 miles in it.) So I transferred the 10000 odd I had in my avios account. Signed onto my BA account the next day and - 0! BA had deleted all my miles because there had been no activity on the account for 3 years. I got on the blower to them and told them in no uncertain terms that a transfer in of miles is activity. They disagreed with this but grudgingly let me have my miles back? WTF?

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Algol 68 on a ICL 4100

When at Warwick University in 1974 I was using Algol 68 for my computing project. My maze solver did eventually work though as mentioned the bug cycle was more like one day as you had to post your punch card stack into the pigeon hole of the computer suite and wait for them to process it. I found by trial and error that why my maze solver never ran correctly on Friday afternoons was because they used to take half of the magnetic memory offline to clean it or something. The largest maze I could create an a Friday was 3 x 3!

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Re: That is the frikkin' coolest Satellite/Telescope I have ever seen

There's a full scale mock up of this thing in Toulouse. It looks like starwars on earth! Awesome.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour

Re: "They reckon it’ll only get faster over time"

It's being accelerated by the radiation coming from the accretion disk. And that radiation is going at the speed of light!

Well, well, well. Internet-of-Things speaker biz Sonos to continue some software support for legacy kit after all

I've had Sonos kit for at least 10 years now. Since an issue with the Android controller on the Significant Others pad going titsup we have stopped updating the firmware. We are stuck in version 6 (latest is 10.something) and happy for it. Don't give a rats arse about Hellexa or whatever. It still does what it did when we bought it. So happy happy.

You're not Boeing to believe this: Yet another show-stopping software bug found in ill-fated 737 Max airplanes

Re: Can't wait to see them give up on this model...

Already ahead of you there.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48995509

NASA Administrator upends the scorn bucket on Elon Musk's Starship spurtings

Re: the important thing

I see what you did there!

AGM X3: Swoon at this rugged interloper mobe then throw it on the floor to impress your mates

Re: Did I miss the part about the A3?

Are they not talking about the A9?

https://www.agmmobile.com/en/product/a9

Use an 8-char Windows NTLM password? Don't. Every single one can be cracked in under 2.5hrs

Re: The Usual Response...

Surely you don't need the passwords in this case. As long as you know the account numbers you can approach the vendor with the death certificate and you will get the funds.

Time for a cracker joke: What's got one ball and buttons in the wrong place?

One also assumes that it is a ball mouse - something unheard of nowadays. (The younger among us will be confused by this story)

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

What about the "Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion."

Openreach pegs full fibre overhaul anywhere between £3bn and £6bn

Bring it on! I'll happily pay £7 more a month for fibre. Get digging BT, only another 3km to go.

Seminal game 'Colossal Cave Adventure' released onto GitLab

Re: Xyzzy

A friend mapped it all. The mazes were particularly pretty when mapped. Such symmetry. I'll have to ask him if he kept the map!

Juno's first data causing boffins to rewrite the text books on Jupiter

6MB

Methinks it is a mistake....

"Due to telecommunications constraints, Juno will only be able to return about 40 megabytes of camera data during each 11-day orbital period. This downlink average data rate of around 325 bits per second will limit the number of images that are captured and transmitted during each orbit to somewhere between 10 and 1000 depending on the compression level used"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam

6GB more likely. 40Meg of camera data but much more of other stuff.

"Juno swoops to about 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) from the top of Jupiter's atmosphere and sends back around 6MB of data with each pass." 6MB! Wow. They'll be sending pictures next.

PayPal patches bone-headed two factor authentication bypass

2 factor!

They probably took the 3 weeks to change it to securityquestionfish and securityquestiondonkey.

Smartphone lost on QANTAS 'began hissing, emitting smoke and making orange glow'

Lithium!

Hope they had the right type of fire extinguisher, putting water on a lithium battery fire and you suddenly have a real problem

Champagne supernova in the sky: Shockwaves seen breaking star

Plot!

An hour you say? I feel a story coming on. "Captain, that red dwarf over there just went through shock breakout, we have 30 minutes to get to safe distance!"

FBI iPhone unlock order reaction: Trump, Rubio say no to Apple. EFF and Twitter say yes

Why is this possible?

What the FBI is asking for should be impossible to do. i.e. apply a firmware update to a locked phone. Surely the phone would have to be unlocked first? Otherwise these sorts of shenanigans are possible. If it's not possible in the first place then it can't happen.

'Personalised BBC' can algorithmically pander to your prejudices

That is going to get confusing when you discuss last nights Eastbenders over the water cooler? "Egad? Lucy blew Phil Mitchell you say? I don't remember that!"

Of course you can text and call while driving – it's perfectly safe

G-force sensor to airbags "Crash! crash! crash! - forward deccel 15g!!"

Airbags to G-force sensor "I'm sorry - your message is not authorised right now"

G-force sensor to airbags "But the authorisation service is offline right now... oh never mind" CRUMP!

Belgium trolls France with bonkers new commemorative coin

Lets move to Afganistan

Just bought one for my bro' as he is into all of this, what a web site - would not work in SeaMonkey, had to blow the cobwebs off IE. Complained about the +44 I put in my tel. number and sneakily changed back to the default country (or land as it charmingly put it) of Afganistan - only noticed when it billed me €6 + €2 delivery to my UK address in Afganistan. So went back and corrected the address and now delivery to the UK is €5.50!!! So do Belgium have a special deal with Afganypost?

Paul Allen hunts down sunken Japanese WWII super-battleship

Re: Not so vulnerable...

I also read somewhere (very old naval book of my fathers) that the back deck of the Hood was practically awash in most seas because of the extra weight she was carrying (I assume newer anti aircraft gun systems and extra deck armour)

LOHAN seeks stirring motto for spaceplane mission patch

In anas luctus et WD XL is an alternative.

Et anatis cum tape XL WD

With Duck Tape and WD 40

Sums it up nicely.