Posts by Geoff May (no relation)

India lands Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Moon, is the first to lunar south pole

Re: Milestone moment

Astronaut 1: "I can’t find any milk for my coffee."

Astronaut 2: "In space no one can... here, use cream."

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Should have said PLUGH.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Re: 6 weeks

Of course the request is denied, mackerel do not deserve that kind of treatment.

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

Re: Interesting design

You just need something to distract you at the critical moment and totally fail to hit the ground.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

digital motor

That explains what "digital motor" means, he printed the housing with from a digitally file on a 3D printer.

Thank you, I had always wondered about that.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Someone is going to trade mark "WTCLOI" ...

Boffins think they've decoded mysterious 819-day Mayan calendar

"and have yet to return to a sense of normalcy"

Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.

With a mighty hand, and an outstretched arm, Musk scraps Pope's blue tick

I clicked on the link to The Reg's gold icon and got an error from Twitter.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

I thought ISDN stood for It Still Does Nothing.

Duelling techies debugged printer by testing the strength of electric shocks

I can confirm that Stan is alive and well and is working for one of my customers.

SpaceX demonstrates that it too can shower the Earth with debris

Re: Raising the odds?

As long as we don't get to one in a million odds.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

Re: Space bar

Would be nice and quiet, though.

Lithium production needs investment to keep pace with battery demand

Re: Hmmm....

You shouldn't be so negative about this.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Damn

I've been rumbled ...

ExoMars parachutes just about good enough to land rover safely on the Red Planet

Re: Ob H2G2

Or the rover could be distracted at the critical time and total fail to hit the ground.

Pension cold-calling financial services biz cops largest ever fine from UK data watchdog

Re: Fine

If 187 people had resulted in a lead, that would make £140,250. Anything above that is profit.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Re: Will be interesting

One of my work mates says he got a letter from his bank stating they were moving from VISA to Mastercard. His new card arrived a few days ago. He did not tell who he banks with.

Perhaps there are banks that are not happy with VISA too?

After failing to make it to orbit, Firefly Aerospace asserts it has 'arrived'

Re: Keep going

I wish I could get 9 out of 10 of my development changes right ...

Good news: Japanese boffins 3D print what looks like marbled Wagyu beef. Bad news: It's tiny and inedible

"The meat is tenderized in some cases by feeding the cows beer or massaging them"

I'm off for some personal tenderising in the pub ... I hope the barlady doesn't get the wrong idea when I ask for the massage, though.

Gartner Gartner on the wall, which is the hypest cycle of them all?

Re: Wonderment in words...

... and I bet they nicked the code from the BOFH Excuse Generator.

You wait ages for a neutron star and black hole to collide, then two pairs come along at once

Re: GW200105 and GW200115

Thank you for that, very interesting.

GW200105 and GW200115

I bet they are going to wish they used the 4 digit year in about 100 years time.

Mars race: China dreams of nuclear rockets, manned bases, and space elevators

Re: Cosmic Dodgeball

Kim Stanley Robinson also discusses this in the Mars trilogy he wrote. Very interesting series of books:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

Space is hard: Rocket Lab's 20th Electron launch fails

"Space is Hard"

No it isn't:

Space is infinite, it is dark

Space is neutral, it is cold

etc.

NASA pops old-school worm logo onto Orion spacecraft

Watching at the time?

Anyone old enough to remember Apollo 11 landing?

I am and I recall that the picture was just a white splodge on a black background. Admittedly, we only had B/W but some of my school friends had colour TV and I asked them what they saw (me expecting colour to show more details). Almost all of them said they hadn't watched it live. I think there was only about 3 or 4 of us in the class that had watched it live.

Very disappointing.

BOFH: Postman BOFH's Special Delivery Service

Re: Still laughing..

@Trygve Can we have your contact details, please? I'm sure I can send you a large number of items ... none are working but they are vintage and used to be called "computers".

NASA's Mars helicopter spins up its blades ahead of hoped-for 12 April hover

There has been a change in plan

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/291/mars-helicopter-flight-delayed-to-no-earlier-than-april-14/

There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online

There is an "I" in teams

See:

https://polysyllabicprofundities.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/there-is-an-i-in-team.png

China's Chang'e 5 probe lands Moon rocks in Inner Mongolia

Re: I'm reserving judgement

Yeah, Wallace and Gromit scoffed all their's so they have no proof.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

This happened to me. I sarcastically suggested gluing the plug to the socket excepting the manager thought I was being serious so he did.

Several years later, the electrician was asking which dimwit glued the plug to the socket ...

China's Chang'e-5 lands on the Moon to scratch surface

Space docking

Is that like Space Trucking but for ships?

Ho hum: If you're so artificially intelligent, name this song while my videos go viral

Re: Welcome back!

Or in your bookmarks:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/Alistair-Dabbs

It's in their DNA: Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing tool

The world has been going downhill since we started experimenting with fire.

That is because we still haven't decided if it should be nasally fitted or not.

And now for something completely different: Ultraviolet aurora spotted around comet for first time

That explains why I can never see any comets. The UV is making my glasses dark and thus hiding the comets.

Future airliners will run on hydrogen, vows Airbus as it teases world-plus-dog with concept designs

Re: OTOH

And the economy seats might even be an appropriate size for an adult human being.

Only for future generations because Genetic Control will have a restriction of four foot to humanoid height.

Help your fellow IT pals spruce up their virtual meetings: Design a winning background, win Register-branded gear

One of the lads I work with took a picture of himself at his laptop.

Now, when the meeting gets boring, he loads that and wonders off to do something useful

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

May I suggest "Standard Setters"?

Very often when they release new versions, they change the standards set in previous incarnation and set up new "standards" ...

Corona coronavirus hiatus: Euro space agency to put Sun, Mars probes in safe mode while boffins swerve pandemic

Most satellites store data on board the spacecraft and then it is downloaded at regular intervals. The down load needs an extensive team as you need to:

1 - Calculate exactly where the spacecraft is;

2 - Point the antenna to the spacecraft;

3 - Initiate the download (this usually stops recording on device #1 and starts recording on device #2);

4 - When the download is complete, start downloading from device #2 and restart device #1 (sometimes the recording is left on the second device and that is downloaded at the next schedule);

5 - Release the antenna team so they can start working on other satellites.

This requires at least 4 teams and they are almost always shift workers so that is a minimum of 20 people (to allow for time off and covering 24 hours per day).

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

Jupiterians?

Shouldn't they be Jovians?

Ancient Ore Crusher or KillBot 2000? NASA gets ready to pick a name for its Mars 2020 Rover

Re: Marsy McMarsface

Noachin?

It's about the only thing beginning with N relating to Mars in some way I could find with a quick search.

Astroboffins baffled as Curiosity rover takes larger gasps of oxygen in Martian summers

Re: Tiptoeing around the elephant in the room

Just once I would like to read something on The Reg where some pillock does not fucking mention Trump nor Brexit.

Too much to fucking ask, I know but one can always dream ...

Astroboffins capture video of Mercury passing across the Sun's surface

Re: Kind of humbling

Who nicked the fairy cake?

Tough luck, Jupiter, you've lost your crown for now: Boffins show Saturn has more moons

... are there any in Klingon yet?

Apparently there are bootleg versions out there:

https://www.asterix-obelix.nl/?lng=bootlegs

Scroll down near the bottom.

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

Vegan Custard

Unfortunately, such a thing exists :-(

Uses semolina and soy milk.

Loss-making $15bn hipster chat biz Slack suddenly less appetising to investors as it predicts deeper losses

Re: I just don't get these massive losses

Those letters that spell "Go Stick Your Head in a Pig" don't come cheap.

Russian spacebot stranded outside the ISS as Soyuz fails to dock

Re: SciFi trivia teaser...

WALL-E

Robots

Apollo 11 @ 50: The long shadow of the flag

Re: 25 seconds of fuel

Post-flight analysis indicated there was about 45 seconds fuel remaining. I believe the discrepancy comes from where the fuel sensor was located. As the LM was tilted slightly, this read as less fuel than was actually available.

Ranger etc. missions

Already touched on in the article but I get the impression I am the only person who remembers Ranger and Surveyor missions ...