Posts by Steve

Dodgy wet wiring caused ISS computer crash

Wet wiring

When I read "Dodgy wet wiring" in the title I was expecting to ready about some new embedded man-machine stuff that had gone wrong. Ah well, too much Peter F Hamilton perhaps...

Met used 'dum-dum' ammo on de Menezes

@Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Shooting to disable is pointless (no pun intended). If you shoot someone in the legs you won't stop them firing back or setting off a bomb, so the only reason to do so is if you don't think they are a threat to you.

In that case, of course, there's no excuse for shooting them at all.

If you shoot someone, it should be with the sole intent of killing them as instantly as possible. If you don't need to do that, you don't shoot.

Airbus delivers first A380

@Anonymous Coward

You really believe that an airline is going to spend all that money to fly 100 more people in more comfort? They'll cram 'em in.

They may not get to 800, but the only people who'll see any improvement are those above economy class, where sadly my company won't pay for tickets :( Those of us in the cattle class cabin won't see any improvement, and we'll have even more people in front of us at immigration and baggage claim. I got bumped to United "Economy Plus" last week. Whoopee, 3 more inches legroom, same crap seats and grub, and thank goodness one of the people beside me was petite. Still wasn't enough elbow room for a wank even if I'd felt so inclined... Roll on the Dreamliner.

sardines

It's bad enough being crammed 400+ in a 747, who in their right mind wants to be one of 800 people flying in a tin can for 12 hours? Time to strike singapore airlines off the preferred airline list...

Vodafone UK loses roamers worldwide

Not just Voda UK

My phone service is supplied by SFR, the French operator who is a Voda partner. I spent the last two weeks in Italy, during which I could roam onto TIM and WIND, but Vodafone Italy (the preferred network) was showing up as "Forbidden". My wife's SFR phone, though, happily roamed to Vodafone Italy...

Google Maps rolls out the Mesopotamian nil-cubit

µFortnights

One of the VAX/VMS system parameters was officially listed as having units of "microFortnights", which according to the online help were approximated to as seconds (it's within 20%)

Scots tell ET to eff off

@Jon Kale

The salt round described by "Rhys" is generally known as a 'gamekeepers load', and was commonly used by legitimate shotgun owners against poachers in the days when Plod was a real person with some judgement, and not a jobsworth with a radar gun and 25-page multiple-choice crime sheet. It probably delivered a much more salutary lesson than does an ASBO...

Microsoft spins standards defeat into victory

ISO/OSI

The organization is always ISO, which somehow stands for the International Organization for Standardization. In French it becomes

Organisation internationale de normalisation but remains ISO.

OSI is the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, not the same thing at all, although OSI is a standard maintained by the ISO

Eurostar inaugurates UK high-speed track

Re @Matt:

"How embarrassing for the English that it's taken so many years to install a high speed line, when France, Belgium and Germany do these things so much quicker.

I just don't understand why everything is so expensive and so difficult in the UK."

There are two main reasons. Once is that France has twice the surface area of the UK for the same population (with no areas as wild and empty as N. Scotland, and so nowhere as crowded as SE England), so finding land is easier. If France was long and thin, with a mountain range up the middle, things wouldn't be so easy :)

Secondly, a large part of the area of France from Paris to Calais is seriously depressed ex-mining territory with high unemployment, where the local towns were using legal action in an attempt to force the TGV line to run *through* them, to create extra jobs in the area.

On the other hand, the part of the UK from Folkestone to London goes straight through prosperous Kent, the "Garden of England", where no-one wanted a noisy train, and campaigned to keep it as far away as possible.

Also, don't fall into the trap of comparing heavily subsidised French TGVs with British commuter rail and assuming that all French railways are great. Live here, and you'll hear the French complain just as much about the terrible service on their commuter rail as the British do about Network South East, or whatever it's called these days.

Voting machines ditch ballots in Scotland

STV

STV has been used in N. Ireland for decades, with manual counting. Despite all the bad jokes it isn't difficult to use, nor to count. It takes time, certainly, with a few days before the results are available, but so what? Isn't it worth waiting 3 days to get a reliable result that you'll be stuck with for years?

China looking to develop scramjet missile tech

Dolphins

"anyone know what effects flying 20 foot above the sea at mach 6 has on dolphins and the like"

I bet flying at Mach 6 would give a dolphin a hell of a buzz... Might cause problems for the whalewatching boatds, though.

eBay hard drive spills out governor's campaign documents

Hammers

My Mum wanted to dump an old (very old, 486/W95) system. She asked me to destroy the hard drive, since at a massive 340Mbytes it wasn't ever going to be worth reusing.

I learned something interesting. Even with a drive that old, it is *really* difficult to take a hammer & chisel to it :)

BOFH or not, after years of always taking backups to protect data it just goes against the grain to assault a disk with a hammer! As for that little pinging 'chime' when the chisel hit the platter... ouch, that hurts.

Google Adwords dive-bombed by American Airlines

Sabre-rattling...

American Airlines is no stranger to careful use of branding tricks, of course. It was the developer of the first computerized airline reservation system, Sabre (more familair to web users these days as Travelocity).

As Sabre became widely used by travel agents, other airlines complained that it always offered Americal Airlines flights as the first choice, even when they were not the cheapest or most direct options. The courts upheld this, and ordered AA/Sabre to present the results in a more neutral form.

So it was changed to display flights in simple alphabetic order...

Some Skypers get reconnected, but most still offline

France Telecom

You can call them from any line, it's just the 1013 that only works from a fixed line. From a cellphone it is 0800 xx 1013, where xx is your department.

They're still much more reliable than jokers like Free...!

ISPs hijack BBC in tiered services push

Bandwith not infinite?

Very true, so why don't these ISPs make some attempt at being pro-active and work with companies willing to use multicast (like the BBC, for example) as the carrot, linked to the shaping-of-P2P stick?

Space Shuttle Endeavour heads for the skies

Junk?

Where's the NASA sense of private enterprise? That's not junk, it's potential eBay profit :)

One slightly-used solar panel, genuine micro-meteor holes, be the envy of your neighbo(u)rs and help save the environment...