Posts by molletts

Science fiction great Brian Aldiss, 92, dies at his Oxford home

Re: The AI ending

>> Aldiss ... wasn't keen on the happyish ending...

> I've only seen the film once ... I said much the same thing at the time

Yes, I felt that too - it should have simply faded to black with the solemn narrator voiceover. The tacked-on ending feels like gratuitous added sugar.

That said, when I saw the film again some years later, the epilogue seemed less "jarring", but maybe that's just because I was expecting it. Watching it "without prejudice", it didn't feel quite as "empty" either, although I still don't think anything would really be lost by simply truncating the film (and arguably the whole might be improved as a result).

I suppose we should just be grateful Disney didn't get their hands on it. I don't even want to think what the result might have been like after they'd finished dumping truckloads of sugar into it.

Photon scattering puts a shine on CERN ATLAS boffins' day

Re: Heavy Metal?

> "Photon Scattering" sounds more like an Indie band

They would probably play an interesting mix of heavy metal and light music.

Programmer's < fumble jeopardizes thousands of medical reports

Sadly, nothing new here

I've encountered similar lack-of-escaping bugs on a pretty regular basis for years, in part because of my persistent habit of working in schools with apostrophes and/or ampersands in their names.

Some websites totally crap out when you try to submit the name to register a product or download companion software. One even had a hyper-sensitive "hacking detector" that admonished me then locked out the county's outbound IP address for a minute each time I submitted the offending text. (They probably thought they were being really clever by detecting attempts at SQL/script injection or something. Maybe I should have set up a script to submit it automatically every minute to see if they noticed the sudden lack of business coming their way from an entire county.)

One major technology retailer's site accepted the address but munged it on the shipping label, which isn't disastrous but is rather ugly - "St. Brutus&apos;s School &amp; Deranged Orang-Utan Containment Facility".

Another completely omitted the address line containing the name of the school which is a little more troublesome - it took several failed (i.e. not attempted) deliveries before someone at the courier's depot thought to phone the contact number on the label (apparently, the drivers aren't allowed to carry phones) to find out exactly where in Snafu Road the parcel should be sent.

Some would say I should just omit the non-alpha characters as a matter of course but I like to break systems then see how (if) the companies' tech support folks handle the bug report.

LHC finds a new and very charming particle: the Xi_cc⁺⁺ baryon

Re: XICC - how do you pronounce that?

I must admit that I read it as "Xi (as in the Greek character Ξ/ξ)-double-charm-two-plus" but I'm no expert on this kind of stuff.

That said, "chic-plus-plus" has a certain ring to it (and is a darn sight easier to say). Doesn't sound sufficiently particley to me, though. New programming language with a focus on style, perhaps?

Fighter pilot shot down laptops with a flick of his copper-plated wrist

He'd started up a retirement job selling magnetic "health" bracelets. But also a magnetic doodah... He was a mechanical engineer.

There's a difference between making a profit selling such things to people who believe in them and believing in them oneself ;-)

I remember a discussion in class at school just after the (UK) National Lottery started up in which someone asserted the old Gambler's Fallacy that because all the numbers have equal probability of coming up over a long interval, ones that haven't come up for a while are more likely to do so in the next draw. After much, increasingly mathematical, discussion which resulted in the teacher proving conclusively that, on average, it is impossible to do anything other than lose money on the Lottery, I shocked everyone by asserting that I knew a guaranteed way to profit from it. My method? Write some software that took as input a log of all draw results then spat out random numbers after much on-screen number-whirling à la computers in Hollywood movies (hell, I could even have gone to town and used the draw history as a seed for the RNG) then sell the software to people wanting to make a quick buck by actually playing the Lottery.

Meteor swarm spawns new and dangerous branch

Re: I welcome our new meteor overlords

"... if they can flash cook a pizza for me!"

I'll have heaps of pepperoni, spicy beef, ham, salami, chicken, basically all the ones for carnivores.

The meteor the better.

IT firms guilty of blasting customers with soul-numbing canned music

For a truly soul-numbing experience, try being put on hold by Volvo Insurance for several minutes. Last time I called them (some years back, admittedly), their hold muzak was a loop about 10 seconds long...

London City airport swaps control tower for digital cameras

Re: Flying between skyscrapers?

> Citation needed!

Nah, you can do it in an Airbus, easy! :-P

Windows 10 S forces Bing, Edge on your kids. If you don't like it, get Win10 Pro – Microsoft

Re: Bing?

"ask Bing anything uncommon" - I don't even have much luck asking it "common" things. I wanted to grab a copy of the Win7 Convenience Update Rollup (or whatever it's called) a few months back for a PC rebuild I was doing for a friend and all I had to hand at the time (i.e. not requiring me to expend unreasonable amounts of energy moving across the room) was a newly-installed Win10 machine. So I fired up Edge and typed something like "windows 7 convenience rollup" into the search bar (what could possibly go wrong, after all?) and got... bloody double glazing! *facepalm*, www.google.com, "windows 7 convenience rollup", ah, the Win7 Convenience Rollup.

FFS Microsoft, at least get your search engine to find stuff on your own site! There's a reason people use Google: It Just Works(tm). (That's also why I use Linux these days.)

PC survived lightning strike thanks to a good kicking

Re: I so dislike those switching power supplies.

I had a bunch of Compaqs like that in a school too (evo d530s, I think). Usually, they would trip out the breaker for about a third of the classroom when they went bang, which was inconvenient but not disastrous. Sometimes, though, they would trip the next breaker up, which was the whole IT department including the server room. The servers were on a woefully-undersized HP UPS which ran for about 90 seconds on batteries - nowhere near long enough for the sluggish ProLiant servers to shut down cleanly. (Seriously, HP, why were your RAID cards so slow?) Being a Private Finance (PFI) school, I had no access to the electrical cabinet so I couldn't simply sprint down and turn the power back on before the batteries ran out.

The annoying thing was that, having glued the voltage selector switches on "230", HP then quibbled when I tried to return a genuinely-failed power supply under warranty, saying that the one I had sent back was "damaged or modified".

Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

Re: I sometimes wonder how we can justify your salary

"I'm more than happy to pay my wife do to a job even if I can get someone cheaper and faster to do it."

Sage advice there... Cheap, fast ladies can be really risky - make sure you install good anti-virus before employing one ;-)

X-ray scanners, CCTV cams, hefty machinery ... let's play: VNC Roulette!

Not just VNC

This reminds me of a time a few years ago when I was looking for something to do with one of our laser printers at work. Having typed a phrase from the web interface into Google, I was shocked (but not that surprised) when the search results included links to dozens of similar printers with internet-facing web interfaces. I tried half a dozen random ones and found that they all used the default username & password.

I could have printed documents to incriminate the owners, changed settings to make them do 100 copies of everything or even uploaded PostScript code or modified firmware to siphon off (possibly sensitive) documents that were being printed to them.

I did toy with the idea of printing a warning message to them, alerting the owners that their printers were insecure and giving them step-by-step instructions on how to change the password and a suggestion that getting a firewall would be a good idea but didn't bother in the end.

Toaster cooks network and burns 'expert' user's credibility to a crisp

That cybercafe incident reminds me of a neighbour I once moved in next to who claimed to have a severe WiFi allergy, along with her children. She had obviously spotted my SSID on her laptop and guessed it was the new guy, so she came around, looking as haggard as possible and, having ascertained that it was indeed my network, explained the family malady and asked if I would kindly refrain from using WiFi.

Of course, I made a show of graciously turning off the AP while she was there. Later on, when I knew she was out, I turned it back on and set it to "hidden". She was perfectly fine with that - her allergy must have been to beacons containing non-null SSIDs rather than to WiFi itself :)

Eighteen year old server trumped by functional 486 fleet!

Nostalgia alert

[Totally off-topic - it doesn't relate to a still-running system; it's just an excuse for me to reminisce about the good old days!]

> I can't remember what the server was but it had a 32 port serial card in it and a QIC drive.

> On looking up the specs it appeared to be run from a 68020 and was connected to clone

> VT-100s. It ran a database similar to view store.

There were probably dozens of systems like that but it reminds me of an old ADDS Mentor I used to have. (I think it was an M4000.)

I inherited it, along with a terminal and all the manuals and tapes, from a company for whom I worked on my year out between school and uni in 1997/8. They were having a clear-out before converting some storage space into offices and I just couldn't resist damn-near busting an artery carting the thing down a fire-escape and loading it into the back of my elderly car. I remember nearly going off the road when driving home that night - I took a sharp bend at my usual speed and found that the car didn't handle quite the same with all that weight in the back. (There were a few other boxes of stuff too - left-over electronic components from discontinued products, "reject" PCBs laden with gorgeous chunky 200A MOSFETs, other old computer bits, etc.)

It had similar hardware to the one you describe. I think the main CPU was a 68020 but it also had two 68010s powering the serial I/O card. There were two huge boards stuffed with DRAM chips, which gave it (I think) 1MB of RAM. One was bigger and plugged directly into the planar (I guess it must have had some refresh controller circuitry on it or something but I can't remember now) while the other was perhaps ⅘ [I love the Compose key :)] the size and plugged into a small riser off the first. Then there was the CPU card, the SCSI controller and the serial card. I remember being somewhat amused to find that the memory retention battery was a large sealed lead-acid brick!

I have fond memories of the time I spent formatting the Maxtor 160MB 5¼" full-height SCSI-2 hard drive and reinstalling the PICK OS from a QIC-150 cartridge, then teaching myself how to use PICK and program in DataBASIC. (I have a vague recollection of directories being called dictionaries, but little else.)

I was sad to have to dispose of it (and numerous other old computers and peripherals) when my parents wanted the room that had been my "lab" for other things. I may still have the tape drive and tapes somewhere, though. I seem to remember using them to back up my PC at college - I'd leave a tape in the drive in the morning when I went to lectures, then pop back and change it at lunchtime, then again at the end of the day. I've probably got all the bootleg MP3s I collected from CDs borrowed from the library stashed away in NT Backup format on those cartridges. I actually installed an NT4 system a few months back (just to see if I could get an old Smart Array 2 card from my collection working) so I could dig them out and try recovering them! (Man, NT4 went like s**t off a shovel on an Athlon XP 3200+ in 2GB RAM!)

Ahh, those were the days...