Posts by RobThBay

They've only gone and bloody done it! NASA, SpaceX send two fellas off to the International Space Station

Trump should have been in the passenger seat of Elon's Tesla when it was launched.

Luckily I was called away from my screen during the Stable Genius' appearance.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

Adobe have a free product called DNG converter that gets updated once in while. It converts raw files (even the from newest cameras) into Adobe's DNG format which can be read by old versions of PS and Lightroom.

Gone in 9 seconds: Virgin Orbit's maiden rocket flight went perfectly until it didn't

9 seconds

Hmm.... were they using a single digit counter??

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Not surprised

MS has done that before.

I remember *years ago* when MS was talking about buying Simply Money. Then all went quiet, the deal was dropped and MS Money appeared.

SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon cleared to hoist real live American astronauts into space

Thanks for clearing that up. Seems odd they're still on EDT at this time of year

Live coverage

NASA live....

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

EST not EDT

There's only 4 hrs difference in the summer. 5hrs difference in winter (daylight savings time).

So launch at 4:33pm EST is 8:33 pm UK time.

Looking forward to it,

Alibaba to serve up Kentucky Fried smart speaker, with a $1.4bn side of e-commerce integration

KFC for breakfast??

Eewwww...yuck

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

Going to waste?

I thought beer usually went to waist.... :)

Worried about the magnetic North Pole sprinting towards Russia? Don't be, boffins say, it'll be back sooner or later

Re: @ Dinanziame

Or bird migration?

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

The edit/compile/run cycle

"When your edit, compile, edit, compile cycle starts to get above about 10 minutes, you start to pay an awful lot of attention to your source code..."

I remember those days, except I was using punch cards instead of paper tape. Those long turn-arounds forced you to desk check your code and spend time debugging it properly.

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Hhmmm..... a spaaaace Roomba

Singapore releases the robot hounds to enforce social distancing in parks

K9

All it needs is a big Tom Baker style scarf.

Bye, Russia: NASA wheels out astronauts, describes plan for first all-American manned launch into orbit since 2011

Re: Look at 'em

Who could forget Bob and Doug McKenzie?

ICE cold: Microsoft's GitHub wrings hands over US prez's Trump immigration ban plan

Invisible enemy LOL

I wonder if his invisible friends helped him decide who the invisible enemy was?

Hhmm.... does that mean the invisible enemy of my invisible enemy is my invisible friend?

Police drone fliers' wings clipped to prevent them bumping into real aircraft

Mixed measurements

Why is altitude given in feet while horizontal distance is given in metres?

Iran military manages to keep a straight face while waggling miracle widget that 'can detect coronavirus from 100m away'

Re: Hmmmm...prior art?

Frying pan lid and dowsing rod...that was my first thought when I saw it.

Reminds me of those tv commercials selling "gadgets that you just have to have...but wait, order a 2nd one and only pay the shipping..."

The masks were there to hide their laughter as they announced this thing.

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

Ahh... yes... the good old days of RS232 and wrestling with handshake/flow control lines trying to get equipment from different manufacturers to work together.

After reading this story I went down to the basement and started poking through some boxes that haven't been touched in ages. Guess what I found besides some DB25 and DB9 connections? My old 25 pin breakout box!

We could all do with a bit of empathy in our systems, says Mozilla as it ships Firefox 75 in the thick of global pandemic

I'm glad I decided to go with the ESR version. No unneccessary "improvemrnts", just security updates.

NASA reveals the new wavy Martian wheels it thinks can crush the red planet

Mach?

Hmm... mach 1.7.

Is that mach 1.7 in the Martian or Earth atmosphere?

Bose shouts down claims that it borked noise cancellation firmware to sell more headphones

I bought a pair QC25's years ago when they were clearing them out to make room for the "new & improved" QC35. I'm glad I did, no firmware updates, it uses a normal AAA battery, etc.

Rocket Lab wants to break free, hopes next mission is more 'A Kind Of Magic' than 'Another One Bites The Dust'

Re: Ring any bells?

"We cannot compete on performance or price unless we somehow cheat...."

Just like the way they took out Bombardier's C Series passenger jet. Hmmm.... their jet is *way* better than anything we've got....let's get our gov't pals to slap on a crippling tariff.

Whoa, whoa... Tesla slams brakes on allegations of 'unintended acceleration' bug: 'Completely false and was brought by a short-seller'

Re: Missed a few

You beat me to it :)

Nothing like Yankee English.

We use an American app for our vehicle and driver logs. When I asked why they spell litre as "liter" they said something along the lines of... the rest of the world spells it according to international standards... we spell it the US way.

Is there alien life on Earth? Maybe, says Brit 'naut. Well, where did they come from? How about this far-away cluster. Or this 'Godzilla' galaxy...

What about Trump?

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Trumpo-The-Magnificent as an example of aliens among us.

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Re: eleven hours off on the clock

Or the acceleration caused the sand to flow through hourglass quicker than expected.

Oi, Queenslander who downloaded 26.8TB in June alone – we see you

I'd forgotten about ZIP disks. I remember thinking they were a much better solution for moving data between locations instead of wasting a non-reusable CDRom.

Pablo Escobar's brother is Medellín in the foldable phone biz, sniffing out new markets

There was phone in the video with the "ladies"???

Boffins hand in their homework on Voyager 2's first readings from beyond Solar System

Pointing to where Earth will be

I find it amazing that Voyager knows where to point its antenna so that Earth will be in the right spot when the signals arrive here.

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

An outsider asks....

This is probably a silly question......

Wouldn't it be easier if the UK handed over their piece of Ireland? No more complicated border problems and Ireland would be a single country.

Now that's integrity: Bloke sinks 7 beers, turns himself in. Cops weren't looking for him

American 5% beer is definitely weaker than Canadian 5% beer.

Re: Ode to American 'beers'

Stella Artois beer from Belgium is also made by interbrew (whoever that is).

Orford Ness: Military secrets and unique wildlife on the remote Suffolk coast

V3?

What was that about a German V3?

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Re: Ominous

My first thought when I saw "DoH" was Homer Simpson.

Mainstream auto makers stuff in more self-driving tech: 8% of new Euro cars have Level 2 smarts

Yay! Johnny cab.

Re: And the BMW/Mercedes variant?

I miss watching Clarkson, Hammond and May. Best (almost) real world car show.

That Telegram feature that let you delete your private messages on recipients' phones? It didn't work properly

They make it sound like remote-delete is something new. Maybe it is to Telegram, but RIM's/Blackberry's BBM had that feature at least 8 years ago. It's too bad BBM wasn't made cross-platform before all the copycats appeared on the scene.

MAMR Mia! Western Digital's 18TB and 20TB microwave-energy hard drives out soon

Re: Feeling Old...

I remember reading about PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology when it was still in the research stage. Way back in the mid 80's.

Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words

WTH, WTF?

What's wrong with WTF??? How could "Wow, That's Fantastic" be a bad thing??

:))

Facebook celebrates Independence Day by lighting up American outage maps

...have to imagine what that looks like....

That's a new feature....it's called radio mode.

:)

Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you

Re: Amazing...

"...There is a control group on Earth's counter-planet (which is exactly opposite the Earth in its orbit)..."

:)

I wonder how many people remember that Gerry & Sylvia Anderson movie??

For those that don't know what we're talking about, have a look at "Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun".

Look out, Titan. Plutonium robots from Earth are on their way

Draganfly....

I used to own one of these... way back in 2010.

http://www.draganfly.com

Deepfake 3.0 (beta), the bad news: This AI can turn ONE photo of you into a talking head. Good news: There is none

I thought Rasputin would sound more like Tom Baker (Nicholas & Alexandra movie).

:)

One man went to mow a meadow, hoping Trump would spot giant grass snake under flightpath

Use another Jeremy...

He should've been met by Jeremy Clarkson instead. Now that would be worth watching.

They should have substituted a pair of comedians with hidden cameras to meet Don at the airport.He wouldn't have known the difference.

Gee, SEC, how did that get out?! 'Leaked' Tesla email claims big boost in Model 3 production

I went looking for a small station a couple years ago. The only one I could find (in Canada) was a VW Sportwagen, so I bought it. It's the first time I've owned a VW. Very impressed with build quality and dealership.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Alpha Micro backups

I used to write accounting and inventory control software for those systems. One of our customers had a massive 60Meg hard drive and trying to fit 60Megs onto a VHS tape was "tricky". Oh yeah, the customer that bought the HUGE 60Meg drive paid around $6500 (CDN) for it in the early to mid 80's.

Do you remember that you had to boot with a VHS tape if you ran into trouble since there wasn't a floppy drive? That never worked on the first try.

Partitioning those suckers was a pain in the arse. The hard drive(s) had to be partitioned into equal size partitions and you needed to build a new device driver each time you partitioned a drive.

Floppy vs stiffy

LOL!!

I wish I had thought to tell our female clients that the new 3.5 disks were called stiffy's at the time. Most of them had a good sense of humour about that sort of thing. Try that today and you'd probably end up in jail.

2.4Mb 5.25-inch ??

1.2Mb was the largest capacity 5.25inch floppy I remember.

IBM had 2.8Mb 3.5inch diskettes for while.

Two Soyuz launches, Starhopper hops, sats play chicken with Indian weapons test fallout

5 million pounds of thrust

Didn't the 1st stage of a Saturn 5 also produce about 5 million pounds of thrust?