Posts by RobThBay

Japan assembles superteam of aircraft component manufacturers to build supersonic passenger plane

Subaru and helicopters

Cool.... so my next Subaru might be a helicopter.

I wonder if a Subaru Bell 412EPX will still have the turbo hood scoop?

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: Obvs

...unless the year is divisible by 100, except if the year is divisible by 1000.

1800, 1900 and 2100 aren't leap years, but 2000 and 3000 are leap years.

Plus, years divisible by 25,000 aren't leap years.

:)

Baby Space Shuttle biz chases dreams at Spaceport Cornwall

Re: It's a bit big to ship back to the USA

Or when the Moonraker shuttle was brought over in a James Bond movie (don't remember the movie title).

Four women suing Google for pay discrimination just had their lawsuit upgraded to a $600m class action

It's Hedley Lamar, not Hedi....

This icon was the closest to a blazing saddle I could find.

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

Re: SMD 80 meg

I used to questioned when taking a single platter drive pack from a CDC Winchester unit through airports.

Ahhh... the good old days....

BlackBerry says it’s virtualised macOS for M1 on an x86 CPU

Re: Who?

Yup, they're still here and doing some interesting stuff.

Unihertz Titan Pocket: Like asking Mum for a BlackBerry and she tells you 'but we've got a BlackBerry at home'

New Blackberry phone coming soon

Don't worry a new Blackberry/android phone is supposed to be out later this year. Made by an American company (Onward Mobility) using tech licenced from Blackberry.

https://www.cnet.com/news/blackberry-phones-to-return-in-2021-with-5g-and-physical-keyboard/

Yay!!

China says its first Mars rover Zhurong has landed on the Red Planet

Plop?

Did the news release actually say "plop"? LOL

Elon Musk hits the brakes on taking Bitcoin for Tesla purchases

Coal powered Tesla

Tesla is concerned about the "increasing use" of fossil fuels, particularly coal....

I guess he should quit selling his cars in countries that use coal fired generating stations.

Vietnam’s biggest industrial conglomerate quits smartphones and TV biz, bets on electric cars

VinFast, sounds like a Fast & Furious title. Followed by:

VinFaster, VinFurious, VinFaster & Furiouser...

Chinese rocket plunges into Indian Ocean, still lands sharp rebuke from NASA

Re: I love watching heavenly bodies...

You're right. It was from one of his books, but I don't remember which one.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

Re: Another Attempt By Large Corporations To Erode Privacy

Age snooping. I've been getting hassled by google lately that I *must* give them my birthdate to continue using their calendar.

I give all these services the absolute minimum amount of personal info.

American schools' phone apps send children's info to ad networks, analytics firms

Re: Really ?

Hmmm.... I wonder how many of that 130 million voted for Trump?

China claims it has stolen a march on 6G with colossal patent portfolio

Re: How many were actually developed

I read a book about rise and fall of Blackberry (RIM) a few years ago. When the RCMP were moving into a couple RIM's former research centres they discovered all kinds of spy stuff hidden in the building. They think it was feeding back to China and helped them accelerate their "research".

JavaScript developers left in the dark after DroidScript software shut down by Google over ad fraud allegations

I wrote an app several years ago to help students learn Canadian Railway signals. It didn't ask for any info and it didn't have any ads.

After year or so Google suspended the app declaring it was malicious. No explanation and nothing I could do about it.

Maybe Google didn't like the app because there weren't any ads??

Nigerian email scammer sent down for 40 months in the US, ordered to pay back $2.7m to victims

Re: I'm in the wrong job......

Our Canadian banking systems sound like they're very similar to the European ones. I can transfer money all over the place instantly with only occasionally a small service charge.

A few years ago we sold some used equipment to a US company. Actually getting the money took quite a while after it had been sent. Yes, faxing was involved between the US bank and our bank.

US cell service seems to be behind the times as well with their use of CDMA tech instead of GSM.

Where did the water go on Mars? Maybe it's right under our noses: Up to 99% may still be in planet's crust

Re: I've seen how this goes

I Recall seeing that in an Arnie movie.

Telecoms shack in the middle of Scotland put up for auction at £7,500

Re: Mind as you step out the door

Were their names Clarkson, Hammond and May?

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Re: English is definded by it's users

Definded? Did you mean defined?

Re: Too late

I thought people that performed calculations were called "computors".

Robinhood plays Sheriff of Nottingham as it pauses GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry etc stock sales, gets sued

Cramer's guide to market manipulation

Jim Cramer explaining the basics of stock market manipulation

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CpMEFtPZJLc

He doesn't seem too worried about admitting what does.

Boeing confirms last 747 to roll off production line in 2022

Re: Who rides the top deck?

The Herc's I been in had a passenger toilet (sort of). It was a small chemical toilet hidden behind a curtain.

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

What ever happened to doing a job properly?

Way back when I was a programmer/analyst we were developing financial software and it *had* to be accurate.

These days the investment statements that my wife gets from her bank don't add up. For example the statement will show Total Dividends $27.52 and the first dividend (of many) shown is $45.60. I called the bank last Spring to complain about it and they gave some rambling bullshit answer. They obviously didn't have a clue what they were talking about and the Total Divs line disappeared the following month.

Well guess what just reappeared on the latest statements? Yup, Total Dividends line is back and it still doesn't add up.

The bank involved is CIBC (in Canada).

Hmmm..... just had a slightly evil idea.... At tax time I'll report her dividend income according to her bank statements. When Revenue Canada sends a nasty letter about unreported income I'll play dumb and send them copies of the bank statements.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Li-Po?

Just wondering Li-Po battery tech hasn't been mentioned?

Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Re: A Television you say...

>Like the square root of one hundred, I suppose it is something we will never know;

That sounds like something trumpo-the-magnificent would say.

Dell Wyse Thin Client scores two perfect 10 security flaws

I didn't know thin clients were still a "thing". I thought they vanished about 20 years ago.

Boffins from China push quantum computing envelope for 'supremacy' in emerging photon field

Millions of qubits??

Nah.... 640k qubits is all anyone will ever need.

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Re: I found the learning curve

IrfanView is still around??

I used it a lot about 20+ years ago and thought it had become abandonware.

I use PMView these days for quick edits. Another ancient program that began life as an OS/2 v4 program.

Linus Torvalds hails 'historic' Linux 5.10 for ditching defunct addressing artefact

Re: Random

The crown seems to toggle between normal time, stop watch and calendar ("D" is displayed).

Kick Google all you like, Mozilla tells US government, so long as we keep getting our Google-bucks

Re: Location:

I'm using the ESR version of FireFox. It gets all the security with none of extra "features".

It's that time of the year when Apple convinces you last year's iPhones weren't quite magical enough, so buy this new 5G iPhone 12 instead

The next one...

Will the next one actually be called iPhone 13?

Virginia voter registration website falls over hours before deadline. The Russians? No, a broken fiber line

So no one thought to do a site inspection and call in a buried utility locator crew before digging?

Was he sent on a spool's errand or something? Library staffer accused of stealing, reselling $1.3m of printer toner

Re: aow much, actually?

My old and reliable HP6p is still going strong. It dosen't know what the date is, so it's safe from firmware expiry dates.

India makes buying a used cow easier than buying a used car

So if someone in India calls tech support.... which country does it go to?

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

I was doing the same thing with about 50 PC's until an enthusiastic employee wondered why the computers were left on all night. I told her she could turn the screens off but leave the computers on in case we needed to update them overnight. That worked for a while until noticed the seti logo in the tool tray on most of the computers.

US Air Force shows off latest all-electric flying car, says it 'might seem straight out of a Hollywood movie'

Hmmm.... a one person flying thingy.... anyone remember the jet pack that Sean Connery wore in an old James Bond movie?

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Giant banner

I remember seeing a *huge* Win95 banner hanging down the side of the CN Tower in Toronto during the launch.

iPhone soon to be Hecho en Mexico? Taiwan's Foxconn, Pegatron mulling going south of the US border – report

My 2017 VW Golf was made in Mexico.

Blackberry used to manufacture some of their BB10 phones in Mexico.

Whoa-o BlackBerry, bam-ba-lam: QWERTY phone had a child. 5G thing's newly styled

My BB Passport is still going strong. I use all the time, it has been powered up for years and still lasts 2-3 days before needing charging.

The only quirk I've noticed is that it needs to be restarted after crossing time zones otherwise images attached to text messages don't arrive.

Eagle-on-EGLE* violence: American icon sends govt-flown drone hurtling into the waters of Lake Michigan

Since when is $950 considered pricey for a drone? Especially when the government is involved.

It sounds like he was operating BLOS (beyond line of sight). Isn't that frowned upon by the US gov't?

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

Don't forget Red Dwarf

The tv show.

Re: Intresting...

And Kitchener, ontario (also Canada) used to be called Berlin. There's even a place called Swastika in Ontario.

Two large flightless birds walk into a bar... The pub's owner was not emused *ba-dum tsh*

I was wondering about term toileting as well. What word or phrase did he really use?

Not-so-paltry towers to float: Vodafone reveals IPO plans for mega European masts biz

To bad they think to name it Fawlty Towers.

China successfully launches Mars probe that packs an orbiter, lander, rover

"...yet another display of China’s emergence as a scientific superpower."

I would have it thought is was yet another display of China's emergence as a massive IP thief.

Pakistan pitches ‘most relaxed tax structure’ in the world to tech investors

Re: two thirds of humanity are within four air hours of Pakistan

Air hours?

Does that include time spent at the airport waiting in line or seated in the plane while it's taxiing around airport?

Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

Re: There are a broad number of reasons why Trump’s approval is falling

The trump fanbase of pandemic denying "I ain't gonna wear a mask because it violates my freedom" are starting to catch Covid and probably won't be around to vote.

Your 2.3m Instagram fans won't stop the FBI... Web star accused of plotting to launder millions from cyber-crime

Re: FBI Special Agent Andrew Innocenti

I guess Noinnocenti would be the surname of an unlawful relative.

China's internet watchdog freezes 10 too-trashy online video services before they undermine socialism

Re: Vulgar content

I'd forgotten about Naked News. Yay Canadian content!

Folk sure like to stick electric toothbrush heads in their ears: True wireless stereo sales buck coronavirus trends

Dr Who

Funny that no one has mentioned how much the apple airpods resemble the recent Cyberman ear pieces.