* Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

6335 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

If you need funding, you're not omnipotent.

Indeed. And also, if you have a supervisor then, by definition, you ain't omnipotent..

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Re: The whole point of simulating a universe

Newtonian mechanics was all that was intended.

That'll be fixed in Universe 2.0. Or in 2.0.1 if the bugfix doesn't work quite right.

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Re: Don't need to simulate that star a few billion light years away...

Is this the bit where I say "Right on, Commander"?

I prefer "smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast"..

Microsoft may have its groove back but it's binned 'Groove'

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Microsoft has/had a groove?

I think they mis-heard - the original phrase was "Microsoft is in a rut[1]"..

[1] No - not the one that stags go through in autumn..

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niggles like streamed tracks stopping at exactly between 2:20 and 2:30

That's barely past the intro for most of the stuff I listen to..

Patch your Android, peeps, it has up to 14 nasty flaws to flog

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At least on the Nexus phones you have some hope of getting them.

Or, at the very least, heading over to XdaDevelopers and finding a decent custom ROM based on LineageOS..

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd reads 'mean tweets' about his 2025 vision

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Re: So...

I'm surprised Leisure Suit Larry lets him voice this publicly though.

LLL has probably already plotted his own exit from Oriface. Y'know, retiring to that Pacific volcano island where he can mature his evil plans in peace.

After all, it's not like he needs to work any more.

Equifax couldn't find or patch vulnerable Struts implementations

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Just why Equifax couldn't find vulnerable Struts implementations remains the subject of ongoing investigations

Because "DevOps"..

Probably.

Thomas the Tank Engine lobotomised by fat (remote) controller

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Re: Self driving trains are low hanging fruit

make sure that all the signalling and routing is absolutely reliable

I don't wish to worry anyone but one of my older brothers works for Siemens as a railway signalling engineer. And I helped do some of the DLR design work.

Now you know why I drive everywhere :-)

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advances in automation

So they have done away with the cardboard controller then? (Old-style train management done with big sheets of punched card..)

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make sure the train goes to the right destination.

"Use the tracks Luke!"

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As long as you can keep kangaroos and people with earbuds off the tracks..

If you can see them, it's probably already too late to stop..

Nobel Prize for boffins who figured out why you feel like crap after long-haul flights

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Re: ..why you feel like crap after long-hail flights

Now all I want to know is why I feel like crap most of the rest of the time.

It's called life. One day I might get one..

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Re: It's a start, but how to mitigate the effects? Bright lights, drugs etc

In my very misspent youth I managed 12 days awake

I think I'd be post-chef sushi after about 3. As well as out of my mind on migraine medication (quickest way for me to migraine-hell is not get enough sleep for two nights..)

Mind you, I'm old and crumbly. Or at least, it feels like it some days.

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Re: It's a start, but how to mitigate the effects? Bright lights, drugs etc

Drugs. It's *always* drugs..

(Better living through chemicals. Yay!)

Man with 74 convictions refused permission to fling sueball at Google

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Streisand Effect

With the added bonus of performing a ln -s ./"Stuart Townsend" ./"Callum Downsend" just to make sure that everyone links the two..

Ofcom head Sharon White slams 5G hold-up in spectrum auction

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The bits of the UK that aren’t London.

I dunno. Here in the bucolic delights of Swindon we have pretty good 4G coverage. That *might* have something to do with the fact that the Road to Power (the M4) runs right past the town..

SanDisk man tipped off his family to Fusion-io fusion, bagged $220k in share snatch – says SEC

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The real question is, how many of those "notionally smart" people get away with it.

Lots. Especially with those of net worth > 100 million.

Harvard, MIT boffins ink up with health-monitoring 'smart' tats

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Re: I don't do tattoos...

I wonder how long it lasts?

Even if it's a year, I'd still sign up for one.

Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine

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Re: Dockyard

At another client, we had a lightning strik and they lost a couple of hundred VT100s.

I had two defunct SuperBrain computers in the boot of my old Ford Cortina Mk3 when it got nicked at Arnos Grove tube station (this was back in the late 1980's - I'd been given the Superbrain computers by someone who knew that "I did computers" in the hope that I could get them working. With some work I got them to boot to the stage where they were looking for the OS on one of the floppy drives. Given that I didn't have said OS (and neither did the person who gave them to me - they had been chucked away) I decided that it was futile working on them and put them in the boot in order to take them to the dump).

Someone nicked my Cortina from the tube station in order to get home (it was raining heavily that weekend and, according to the police, things like that happened fairly frequently). No damage to the car - it was already pre-disastered so a few scratches round the you-could-open-it-with-a-screwdriver lock didn't matter. The ignition lock was equally as worn and you could pretty much turn that with a penknife or screwdriver too. So the only effect other than a day or so of wondering whether to get another car was that I no longer had to worry about going to the dump.

I'd love to have seen the face of the thief when they realised how utterly valueless the Superbrains were. They probably thought that they could get rich off a couple of computers!

At last, someone's taking Apple to task for, uh, not turning on iPhone FM radio chips

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Re: People who live in hurricane prone areas

Oh, except the corporations this administration and its minions are in thrall to.

It's particularly ironic that a number of US telcos disable the FM functionality themselves and charge the end-user a fee to reactivate it..

So, Pai is just doing his masters bidding again and trying to gain more money for the telcos.

One other point - the headphone-socketless Apple phones would have great difficulty doing FM as they won't have a nice cable to do the receiving with. I suppose that they could bring out an FM dongle (and I seem to remember that they used to for the iPod). And, I believe that the latest phones don't have the chipset with an FM radio.

Bless their hearts: Democrats want $40bn to spruce up America's bumpkin broadband

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Re: IT'S FRICKIN EASY

it takes about 8 hours or so to drive from Cornwall to northern Scotland in the UK

Huh? Have you ever tried it? Between the tourists, roadworks, psychotic road-users and traffic jams you'd be lucky to do it in 24 hours.

And that's not factoring in food/comfort/de-stressing breaks.

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Re: IT'S FRICKIN EASY

as one cable company is prevented by law from offering service in another companies area

How the hell does that accord with 'Muricas addiction to raw capitalism? I would have thought that the Elephants would have got rid of that law in a heartbeat.

Then I realised two things - the Republicans don't have hearts and secondly, their corporate paymasters would be displeased if such a blatantly anticompetitive law was axed.

Patch alert! Easy-to-exploit flaw in Linux kernel rated 'high risk'

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Re: Fortunately only superior *nix coders can cause this sort of mayhem.

A sort of ELF Lord as it were.

I'm sure that they can ork out all the issues. After all, they are dwarfed by the massive advantages.

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Re: Easy solution

I run MSDOS, there hasn't been any major (or minor) security patches released for years!

Here - can you just check this floppy disk for me please? I want to check that the FORM virus is still on it..

The UK isn't ditching Boeing defence kit any time soon

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You can probably kiss a good chunk of the 4000 jobs in Ireland gone.

And the collapse of the Conservative-DUP pact.

Which will make the whole Brixit thingy even more 'interesting'..

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Re: IRE-land

That or you are a geographically-challenged illiterate.

You missed option 3: a moron.

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Re: nowhere else to go and buy defence aircraft rather than Boeing

80% of the budget will be spent on committee meetings determining what colour it should be, and the remaining 80%

You see! There really is a magic money tree! That extra 60% budget had to come from somewhere..

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Re: A curious note, thinking of the C17

they might care to note that it is ALL THEIR FAULT for years of dithering, poor decisions

No, no - you have it all wrong. Any mistakes in the past are quite clearly 'the fault of the previous government' and nothing whatsoever to do with the current incumbents.

Even if they were part of the previous administration.

Politics. Where teflon would be seen as an unacceptably high friction substance and memories are often conveniently short.

NatWest customer services: We're aware of security glitch

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Re: password specifications..

A standard? There are lots of standards. Just pick one.

No, no, no. *Far* more fun to generate another one. After all, even if it only becomes the standard in your organisation, it'll be your standard and they can never sack you..

Especially if you make it as internally-consistent as Windows.

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Re: Had simi9lar issues

"You may need a new keyboard judging by your"

By your what? BY YOUR WHAT??!?

By the look of it, sudden bursts of silen

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Re: Next time, screenshot it and post it on Twitter with a link to the story

It's PR that needs to be hung out to dry

Well - you do have to remember that PR is the slightly-backward ugly cousin of HR (HR exists to protect the company from the employees, PR exists to protect the company from the public).

It's where the people who fail the HR empathy tests[1] go.

[1] Which, in most HR departments I've seen, consists of filtering out anyone that has, or seems to have, any shred of empathy.

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obscure greengrocer's apostrophes

Not so much feral, more 'reverted to wild and slaughtered all the humans within easy reach'..

Microsoft gives all staff a marked-up 'Employee Edition' of Satya Nadella's new book

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Re: Manic Street Preachers and Microsoft

Microsoft, however smiley and cuddly the face, are hiding the face of hell: that they are an emissary of Beelzebub, vomited onto the corporate and computing landscape

So, not a fan then?

I have, in my small humble corner of the computing world, a slight reputation for not liking Microsoft stuff.

But it appears that my small flame of dislike is as nothing to the solar-mass of burning hydrogen that is your fear and loathing.

Good work! Keep it up.

Alleged dark web drug baron cuffed – after he flew to US for World Beard Championships

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Re: United States of Arrest

actually do their job of finding and prosecuting criminals.

Yeah. After all, it's perfectly fine to shoot someone convicted of walking while black..

(For the avoidance of doubt, I know this also happenes elsewhere. It's just a lot more prevalent in the US)

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Watch out, you're going to get a lot of down votes from people with sleeve tatoos and ripped jeans

It's also going to get votes from people who have beards and have done for a long time (early 90's in my case).

After all, why scrape your facial hair off? It hurts (even with a properly stropped cut-throat razor or one of those fancy multi-blade razors with 'built in lubricant'.). It's not the first one that hurts - it's all the subsequent ones.

And don't get me started on electric shavers - the only time I've ever had ingrowing facial hair (which hurts - a lot) was when I tried using an electric.

After that, I decided that facial hair was the way to go. It gets strimmed once a month or so to keep it short and vaguely presentable.

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Re: I believe the word we are all struggling to vocalise is ...

intermittent French

My French is also very intermittent. As in, I have used it in about 10 years. And that was for about the first time in 20 years..

Do I have to worry too?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: I believe the word we are all struggling to vocalise is ...

What sort of idiot takes electronic devices to the USA on a visit these days?

Someone so confident that he is really, really clever and won't ever be caught..

After all, he's got a business to run! He's really just an small-scale entrepaneur. Honest!

TalkTalk once told GCHQ: Cyberattack? We'd act fast – to get sport streams back up

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Re: 42 Million??

Either we aren't being told the truth, or they're still too ignorant about information security.

Place bets now!

(And they really are missing a trick - think of all those lovely tax-writedowns they are missing!)

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Re: Is this PR

Our biggest security priority has always been protecting our customers..

...ability to put money into our bank accounts.

All that other networky-techie type stuff is just too difficult. Apparently just having a load of blinkenlights isn't enough any more.

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"We do not recognise these comments" != we didn't say that

Indeed. More akin to Her Ladyship no longer being "at home" to her former aquaintance who was caught diddling the 2nd Footman..

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Re: TalkTalk was a negligent custodian

Blessed Dido Harding in the job she was supposed to be doing.

She did a brilliant job in preparing her golden parachute. Which, as far as she was concerned, was the one area she wanted to concentrate on.

SQL Server 2017: What's new, what's missing on Linux, and what's next?

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The first hit is always free..

Microsoft also decided to offer the paid editions on a trust basis

Until, one day and unannounced, they turn up to do a license audit.

With plenty of wheelbarrows to carry away the cash.

¡Dios mío! Spain blocks DNS to hush Catalonian independence vote sites

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but they sent it to the constitutional court to confirm it, and the answer came back a day later saying it was indeed illegal?

The finest legal decision that money and influence can buy..

Have MAC, will hack: iThings have trivial-to-exploit Wi-Fi bug

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Cool.

Apparently, iOS now runs on Apple Macintosh computers..

(Yes, slightly sarky, but could you at least try to make the subheads vaguely correct? Macs don't run iOS..)

Is this cough cancer, doc? No: it's a case of Playmobil on the lung

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

such batteries can get lodged - and the electrolysis then destroys flesh

I'd also be pretty concerned with the toxic chemicals used in such batteries. Minor things like mercury..

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Re: This is why

have finally arrived at caltrops for kids :)

I remember, as a youngster, throwing one of Mum's crotchet-hooks at an annoying older brother. Trouble is, I'd selected one of the very fine ones and thrown it hard enough for it to stick in..

I still think that he was a wimp for running around shouting at me to pull it out (quite naturally, as the smaller sibling, I'd thrown it at his back. My career as an assassin^W extreme troubleshooter started young..)

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Re: ...bronchogenic...

witnesses say it's now raining Datsun cogs.

Same witness that reported on the pride of the US space Navy that went too close to the sun and broke up? All they found was one star-mangled spanner..

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Re: @Dave

Hersheys is the Devil's vomit.

Spookily, I seem to remember that Hersheys does have in it some of the compounds that you would find in vomit.

Can't be bothered to use $SEARCH_ENGINE to find it now though.

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

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Re: Pollution impact

keeping the bodyshells of smelly old diesel cars on the road with clean electric powertrains.

And Morris Minors. Don't forget the moggies!

(My wife is actually quite concerned with the lifespan of hers and whether she'll still be able to get petrol in 20 years time. There is one guy in Bristol who is working on a project to electrify the Morris Minor - if he can get it working then I would imagine that the various companies involved in the classic car scene would be quite interested..)