Posts by ABehrens

CERN sends AI-trained robot mice scurrying through LHC beam pipes

Vacuum tubes

Vacuum tubes? I thought those became obsolete when transistors were invented.

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Re: Yeah, right

I hear it in a Spanish accent. As in ¡AI, Dios mio!

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Re: To quote Mark Twain

It is unlikely that Mark Twain ever said this. It can't be found in any of his writings, not in recorded accounts of his lectures.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said, "The problem with quotes on the internet is that they are so often misattributed."

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: Blessed are the cheese makers

What a friend we have in Cheeses.

Users left scrambling for a plan B as Dropbox drops Dropbox Passwords

Marketing hasn't gotten the news

Just today (1 Aug 2025) I got a marketing email from Dropbox, suggesting that I might want to upgrade from their Free plan to their Business plan. One of the benefits of upgrading, they said, was

• Safely store and access account login info across all your devices with Dropbox Passwords

I don't think their marketing department has heard the news yet.

Microsoft dangles extended Windows 10 support in exchange for Reward Points

That will be helpful in case hackers violintly attack your system. "All your double bass are belong to us".

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Upper-case litre

The upper case L has been an approved abbreviation for litre since 1979. (The script ℓ, which is sometimes seen, is not approved).

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: Strange keyboards are the bane of IT support

I'm pretty sure that Ctrl didn't start on the bottom row at all. I grew up coding on a Model 35 teletype, and Ctrl was directly to the left of A. That's why I always remap the useless CapsLock key as a second Ctrl key.

The Model 35 put the Esc key directly to the left of Q, not far off in the corner. Much nicer for 'vi' users.

Get off that old Firefox by Friday or you'll be sorry, says Moz

Re: Forced obsolescence

Root certificates, by design, are not renewable. Before they expire, they get replaced by new certificates. Mozilla did that a few years ago, and included the new certificates in Firefox releases. Once people update to a version of FF that's not ancient, they'll automatically pick up the new one.

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

Cheese Cookbook

All necessary ingredients can be found at Mr Wensleydale's cheese shop.

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Upvoting solely for the annus / anus pun.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

And the CapsLock key redefined to be another Ctrl key.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

> I find it easier to use the standard US keyboard, with appropriate compose (Linux) or AltGr (Windows) sequences

If you install WinCompose, you can use Unix compose sequences with Windows. Much more intuitive then AltGr.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Spanish formerly treated CH as a separate letter, alphabetized between C and D: CZ < CH < D. (It's still a separate letter, but now officially collates as if it were C followed by H: CG < CH <CI...).

When I lived in San Juan (Puerto Rico), the city had a moderately large number of people with English surnames. In the phone book, Spanish names were alphabetized using the old Spanish collating rules, BUT English names used English rules. So you had Cabrera, Calderón, Cervantes, CHAMBERLAIN, CHRISTIE, Colón, Costa, Cruz, Cuellar, CHACÓN, CHÁVEZ, Dávila, Díaz.

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Re: The user replied: "The same electrician who changed that plug rewired my house last week!"

Your second paragraph is incorrect. A GFCI (sometimes shortened to GFI) and an RCD work *the same way*. They trip if the current flowing in the live and the neutral are not the same. Neither device looks at the ground circuit. The name RCD is more common in Britain and Europe, while GFCI is what they're called in the US. In the US they often are in the sockets, while in Europe they are more commonly in the panel.

The "GF" in GFCI stands for ground fault — if there's greater current in the live than in the neutral, it means some of it must be leaking to ground, but not necessarily to the ground circuit.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Re: Poor On-Call this week

Are you sure she wasn't asking "are ye courting this wether?"

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Boat?

But a splash of it improves ones whisky and whiskey.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: erosionem linguam

* ... en mia bideo

That's a Tor order: Library gets cop visit for running exit relay in US

UPDATE: Tor node was restored

The library in question (the Kilton Library in Lebanon, NH) held a public meeting in which residents *overwhelmingly* supported the Tor node in the library. Following the meeting, the library trustees voted to bring the node back up, and it is still running. The node name is "LebLibraries".

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp3dzm/these-public-comments-saved-a-librarys-tor-server-from-a-government-shutdown

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/16/440848324/n-h-public-library-resumes-its-support-of-tor-network

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Re: point of order

Must have been the USDOD

Micro molten salt reactor can fit on a truck, power 1k homes. When it's built

Re: film plots

I was impressed by Marcel Marceau's speeches..

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: No doubt it's easy to do if you know how...

Using a grave accent to type the word café — now that's a cute trick.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Next time

I've never been to an estate sale where livestock needed to be deterred. I suppose it might occasionally be necessary if the Dear Departed had been a farmer.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: Honesty kills

Allllgh, matey! Shivel my timbels!

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

Go home, Stallman, you're drunk again.

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

Six hours?

It would be more accurate to say that the planet survived for 4.5 billion years without Facebook. And did quite well at that, if you discount the last few millennia.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Re: Haynes Manuals

* Remove engine

See "Replace starter motor"

Happy 'Freedom Day': Stats suggest many in England don't want it or think it's a terrible idea

Re: SNAFU

Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour PM, studied science, botany, agriculture, mathematics, and physics at Birkbeck College.

FCC urges Americans to run internet speed app to counter Big Cable's broadband data fudging

Re: There's a problem with the app...

Ask a friend with a smartphone to download the app and visit your house. When they run the test manually, it'll detect that your network is Comcast and report those speeds.

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

Re: Blessed are the cheesemakers

What a friend we have in Cheeses.

Something fishy is going on in Taiwan as folk change name to include 'salmon' for free sushi

The Grouper Beneath Her Feet

The promotion is over? Looks like Salmon Rushdie has missed his chance for a free dinner.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Wheeled office chairs Alsace-Lorraine

That's not a left-pond spelling. It's simply wrong, on both sides of the water.

Re: Wheeled office chairs

They just call it a German Shepherd dog. But of course in German: "Deutscher Schäferhund".

Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel

Sid Marshall — is that you?

What are we more likely to see? A smooth Windows 10 May release... or a xenon-124 decay? Oh dear, bad news, IT folks

Re: The Xenon-verse

You meant "odder than we thought".

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

Alpha Micro backups

In the 1980s, I was writing software for Alpha Micro computers. These were inexpensive multi-user systems designed for small offices, with hard drives and multiple RS-232 ports. Because standard computer tape drives would have been prohibitively expensive, you could buy an adapter card that would allow you to use an ordinary consumer-grade VCR as backup storage.

These video recorders had a pretty high error rate: if you're watching a movie, you'll never notice a few dropped bits in a video frame. The software got around all the errors by massive redundancy. Each block was recorded 16 or 32 times. You could take a hole puncher and punch half a dozen holes in a backup tape, and it wouldn't care. If the tape broke, just trim it back an inch and use a splice kit. The missing data would be repeated later on the tape, so it didn't matter.

Google to kill Symantec certs in Chrome 66, due in early 2018

Re: Old certs surely?

Topbulb.com got one of the last Symantec certificates (issued Nov 2017), and it won't expire until Jan 2021. They haven't yet noticed that the number of customers dropped off sharply last month.

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

"Domin, Sue" is certainly an unusual pseudomyn.

Printer blown to bits by compressed air

Re: Dangerous

Think of the possibilities: you could open a tattoo parlor for people who are needle-phobic.

Perhaps the AIpocalypse isn't imminent – if Google Translate is anything to go by, that is

Re: Translating Czech

The Czech Republic shares a long border with Germany and Austria. People who often deal with tourists are likely to understand German also.

Can't rely on humans either

Even if you don't use computer translation, you can get in trouble. Consider the Welsh municipality that emailed their staff translator to find out how to say "No entry for heavy goods vehicles". The answer came back promptly — "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd" — so that's what they painted on the new road sign.

Unfortunately, that Welsh phrase wasn't their translation; it was an automated response that means "I am not in the office at the moment".

HP Inc's rinky-dink ink stink: Unofficial cartridges, official refills spurned by printer DRM

Re: The 'quality' of its printers was enough to do that

> it's clearly better than most of the shitty printers being pedalled these days!

You must be referring to the ones that use re-cycled ink cartridges.

'Toyota dealer stole my wife's saucy snaps from phone, emailed them to a swingers website'

Re: @Emmeran: Maybe...

If you write mean spirited folk, you're taking about people who are mean and also spirited. If you meant "people who are mean of spirit", that's a compound adjective and needs to be hyphenated; mean-spirited folk.

User needed 40-minute lesson in turning it off and turning it on again

I've got better things to do

I always leave the toilet after using it. You think I want to sit there all afternoon reading my email?

Microsoft ❤️ Linux? Microsoft ❤️ running its Windows' SQL Server software on Linux

Re: Thank You

That's worth repeating: "Zero redundancy doesn't necessarily make for good writing/journalism".

Read America's insane draft crypto-borking law that no one's willing to admit they wrote

Congressman Ted Lieu has a degree in computer science from Stanford. He certainly would understand the utter stupidity of this bill.

How long does it take an NHS doctor to turn on a computer?

Re: And your point is?

There seems to be some confusion between key fobs (which attach to the key ring) and key transponders (which are built into the key).

Fobs transmit a signal to lock or unlock the doors. They certainly require a battery, which can go for years before it needs to be replaced.

Key transponders do not have a battery. They are powered by induction, and transmit a code while they are near (within a few cm) of the ignition lock. When away from the car, they have no power and don't transmit anything.

519070 or blank: The PINs that can pwn 80k online security cams

Re: Too much information?

Specifically, if's the postal code for the Zhuhai Science & Technology Industrial Park.

Hey! Want a FREE TOASTER that makes BITCOIN? What? You DO?

Re: no heating needed

Did your electrician forget to install fuses or circuit breakers on this circuit?