Posts by herman

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

Uhmmm. I once found a bug in an Intel C compiler and had to explain it to them and some years later I found the exact same bug in GCC and had to explain it to them. So a compiler generating bad code does happen.

Re: Explosive demonstration

In Australia a power station turbine went walkies some years ago.

Re: Explosive demonstration

Nessie? Is that you?

Re: Explosive demonstration

W0t? You don’t have a self balancing centrifuge?

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Re: Don't forget mischief

There is cure for that. Get a big 400V electrolytic capacitor, charge it up and leave it on your table.

Re: A beam in their eye... Physical Methods Trump Signs in Any Language

I still have a pair of nice expensive ($2500) laser safety glasses which I thought I could use for driving - then found I cannot see green traffic lights.

Re: Not only two signs...

Unauthorized personnel should be kept in a secure locked room!

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Go get us a can of dial tone.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

IT Support Motto

We are not happy until you are not happy.

Re: Now ask me why ...

‘Listen to the Welsh kid talk’. I lived in the Middle East for more than ten years and still have a hard time understanding Hinglish. It is almost Welsh to me.

Re: You get what you order

According to Merriam-Webster, the first use of gruntled dates back to 1904. Hooda thunkit?

Is your datacenter safe from the next X-class solar flare?

Flying Piano

I think the probability of someone flinging a piano at your data centre with a trebuchet, is rather higher than suffering an EMP event.

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

Re: Modems???

Well, fax is modem to modem - just a particularly antiquated one.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

Silvester

What is this Christmas thing? Over here it is Weinachten and Silvester

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

Noname

The band name The The is right up there with Queen and Noname. The BBC could not stick a The in front of it to make it The The The, The Queen or The Noname.

Calamity capsule: Boeing's Starliner losses approaching $1B

Could be worse

Boeing lost less on a real space ship than Meta lost on fictional junk.

20 years on, physicists are still figuring out anomaly in proton experiment

Re: New physics?

As Ol Bill Wobblestick said: Much ado about nothing.

Re: New physics?

The LHC is the modern equivalent of a caveman with a big club smashing coconuts to see if there is something edible inside.

Re: It's a facinating field

That explains it - the bump is due to string theory.

Biden wants SpaceX to beam internet to Iran amid uprising

Gee, do you even know where Iran is? The US has huge bases and many ships and aircraft close to Iran in the GCC states.

OpenBSD 7.2: The other other FOSS xNix released, runs on Apple M2 Macs

Re: Front page image

A travesty. That is not Steve on her arm.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: Bad design

The Tin Lizzy needs to get started first. That is a whole nuther problem!

Re: Bad design

Hmm and when you try to fasten the saddle, the horse will suck its breath in so the saddle ends up loose and if you would then try to get on, hilarity will ensue. If the horse does that, wait till it turns red in its face and breath out - then yank the strap - then he won’t do it with you again.

Firefox 106 will let you type directly into browser PDFs

Re: Security settings?

A big annoyance is that many Canadian government forms that you are supposed to fill in have a default setting to prevent filling it in.

Oil company Castrol slips and slides into immersion cooling

Re: Ah yes, Castrol

Ayup, in 20th century cars it would not stay in the engine either. They always dripped.

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

MS Beta test

I tried Win11 in a virtual machine. It was slow as molasses even after all the usual optimizations (configure for best performance and disable all autostarts). It would be frustrating to use on any machine I got.

Charge a future EV in less than five minutes – using literally cool NASA tech

Re: The Holy Grail

I expect that it may take you a while to plug in a few thousand battery cells though.

Double the speed

Divide and conquer. With two cables and two chargers one can halve the charging time without needing super human strength to plug it in.

IBM battles to settle yet more age discrimination claims

Indian Business Machines

Expect to see caste discrimination cases too. Now do the needful.

Elon Musk tells Twitter: My takeover deal is back on

Talked the price down

The likely scenario is that he talked the share price down, then he and his friends bought up reams of stock under proxies and now he can sell the palace to himself, to effectively buy it at a discount.

A Burger King where the only Whopper is the BSOD font

Re: Didn't say if a purchase was made?

Wimpy, eh? For auld lang syne…

Pull request

Now I want a pulled bork sandwich!

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Architect Smartitect

I am not rich enough to buy cheap equipment.

Alert: 15-year-old Python tarfile flaw lurks in 'over 350,000' code projects

Re: No need for path games

If the admin is a tool, then the problem lies with the tool.

Nobody’s problem

Fortunately nobody uses tar anymore, so only nobodies are vulnerable.

Amazon's Roomba acquisition gets caught on FTC's rug

Windows

Real windows that is. I need a robot window cleaner that really works!

White House puts $50m into floating wind turbine projects

Re: Fiddling while Big Oil carries on as usual

Hywind is the second one. The first is in Portugal.

There are quite a few floaters in Europe: Portugal, Scotland , Netherlands and Norway all have a few floating turbines.

Arm execs: We respect RISC-V but it's not a rival in the datacenter

Re: What goes around comes around

ARM is a RISC architecture processor.

Re: More bad news for Intel

RISC V is nice for FPGAs and Intel happens to manufacture FPGAs.

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Re: Perhaps, but Shakespeare had other ideas …

You may be confusing Ol Shaky-javelin with a certain very loquacious caterpillar.

Re: Wang

I used to work with two engineers who regularly greeted each other with: “Hey Paki!”, “Hey Cooly! Whatsup man?”

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

C4ISR is my favourite.

Re: Pedantic description alert!

BUB - almost like TBC used by the cold meat wagon crews - means Total Body Crumble.

Re: Pedantic description alert!

I like Slovak, because fucked means really, so it is a perfectly acceptable word.

Yeah da!

Chip delivery times fall, but so does demand as global economic conditions worsen

Re: Still no low-priority chips anywhere.

Sure, you may have to wait for a LF351 but there are so many ways to amplify audio. I never use op-amps for audio since one or two transistors are usually enough ( and of course three or four valves are way more fun!).

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: Coburg-Gotha-von-Battenberg

Monegassians(?) have French passports and if the house of Grimaldi would have no heir, then Monaco will revert to France. So Monaco is part of France - De Gaulle ensured that.

Re: Queen Elizabeth - demon driver

Err, Prince Philip also drove your Prez on occation.

Windows 11 update blocking some users from logging in

Re: 30 years of Windows...

The guy who wrote the MS USB stack died decades ago. (Not a joke).