Posts by timrowledge

Black holes are like buses: You wait for one – and three turn up at once in galaxy merger

Re: @Jake That's going to make one hell of a racket.

Say what? Didn’t hear you.

Pro tip: Plug in your Tesla S when clocking off, lest you run out of juice mid hot pursuit

Re: This is the unfortunate weakness of battery operated devices.

Obviously not - why, if you google for things like “police car runs out of gas” you get no hits at.... oh, wait. One day people will find something else to whine about, eh?

Astroboffins baffled after spotting solar system with great gas giant that shouldn't exist

I can’t access the full paper but the abstract mentions planetary mass that doesn’t seem likely to work out to “270 times its star”. Maybe 1/270?

Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

Re: "they haven't found out a way to make a zoom lens flat enough to fit in the phone yet."

Human eyes are not equipped with zoom lenses.

Cloud, internet biz will take a Yellowhammer to the head in 'worst case' no-deal Brexit

Re: Transhumanism for the win

Err, a transhuman would be a bit short of piss to take...

Raspberry Pi head honcho Eben Upton talks thermals, stores and who's buying the kit

Seriously? Never seen mention of the (probably) dozens of knock-offs? Pineapple Pi, Roseapple Pi, Banana Pi.... a long list of terrible attempts at puns. One or two have even been reasonable hardware but have ever had decent support.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Eh?

Your lack of decency seems only to be exceeded by your lack of knowledge.

A challenger appears: Taiwanese devs' answer to Gemini PDA wraps a Raspberry Pi in a tablet

Re: Not enough bandwidth, and given me a proper keyboard

A) Pi 4 has usb3.

B) meagre usb 2 bandwidth hasn’t stopped quite a few of us doing interesting things with prior models.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Re: Still a PoE hat?

Welcome to the world of success...

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

Is this “Nunberg Code” the next Dan Brown novel?

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

Ah, those were the days...

Now even a watch has more cpu and memory than (probably) all the Altos that ever existed.

And a simple webpage uses more memory than that.

Meet the new Dropbox: It's like the old Dropbox, but more expensive, and not everyone's thrilled

Re: Guido

About time he got suitably punished

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Re: Windows CMD.EXE

... but it can’t even handle their own UNC filenames!

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

Re: Aluminum

Remember, it’s ‘C’, eh, ‘n’, eh, ‘d’, eh?

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Re: Time enough

If Man is still alive, if Woman can survive?

Microsoft's Edge on Apple's macOS? It's more likely than you think for new browser

No. Just, no. No way, no how. Damn thing doesn’t even work properly on a damn windows lump.

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

Re: A total failure

Foldable isn’t really the end though - rollable is much more desirable. Think scroll. Think something like an 8” dildo with the screen pulling out to maybe A4 total size. Pull out a couple of inches to see messages or contact list for a phone all. Pull out all the way to get a nice big view of a map.

And you - yes, you boy, stop sniggering.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

Re: Extremely poor

*My* ancient iPhone 3 & 4 are still working just fine, thank you. No screen issues, nor battery problems, at worst a bit of scuffing around the home buttons.

I couldn’t comment about old android phones because nobody seems to keep them very long.

IBM bid to unmask age discrimination whistleblower goes down in flames

Re: Yeah..

In the far distant past when I was an IBM research Fellow, I tried to persuade them to name the workstation window system ‘panes’ purely for the joy of having aix and panes. Didn’t work :-(

Brit rocket boffins Reaction Engines notch up first supersonic precooler test

Turbine blades are not milled - at least, not for RR turbines. Hell, I worked on some of the early single crystal blade stuff back in ‘78/9.

Apple bestows first hardware upgrades in years upon neglected iPad Mini and Air lines

Re: Quote from Saint Jobs himself

Exactly - and you have that option. Problem solved.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

Re: Look and Feel

Wrong. Smalltalk had overlapping windows since round about 1974. They saw the Smalltalk 80 system during that visit, despite Adele fighting her management hard. But Apple paid for the visit and the Xerox higher-ups said to let them in.

Re: 1 MB of RAM ?

Look at the August 81 Byte - yes, the Smalltalk edition, relevant here since that is what a lot of the Lisa/Mac ui was replicating - and boggle at the adverts for a 64kb ram card for a mere $695.

Re: As a dev system? No, startup biz!

I know for sure it was a 68008 - I remember having a loud but friendly argument with Clive about it during my RCA degree show, which was broken up by his then girlfriend tell him “you know he’s right so stop arguing “. I was using an NS32032 for my project, which turned out to be about as bad an idea at the QL.

Dev's telnet tinkering lands him on out-of-hour conference call with CEO, CTO, MD

Re: Well, there was this time...

Yow. I actually remember hearing that story from you in some random Cambs. pub circa ‘88. Scary - 30 years ago. I’m even still using RISC OS at least occasionally... and Smalltalk all the time.

Pasta-covered cat leads to kid night operator taking apart the mainframe

Re: Burroughs/Unisys...

.. and some monster is thinking about trying the jazelle insanity with cobol. Call it ... cobollox ?

Big Falcon Namechange for Musk's rocket: BFR becomes Starship

Re: You'd have to be a Dummy,....

The entire expenditure for NASA during the Apollo years never got as high as 5% of the federal govt budget, which is a lot less than GDP. I see claims that Apollo cost roughly one third of the NASA budget.

Re: Starship

Sorry, can’t use “Revisionist” because I bagged (with no backsides!) ages ago for my backup server.

But being from California, surely the appropriate name to borrow is my old friend “May contain nuts”?

How one programmer's efforts to stop checking in buggy code changed the DevOps world

Re: Oracle

Did Oracle ever make *anything* it didn’t subsequently ruin?

Raspberry Pi fans up in arms as Mathematica disappears from Raspbian downloads

Re: 300 baud!? You were lucky...

Please don’t expand upon what you were going to use it for...

Apple to dump Intel CPUs from Macs for Arm – yup, the rumor that just won't die is back

Re: What else can a move to ARM bring ?

Where on earth do you get that idea from? Are you perhaps confused by the way the the very earliest Raspbian releases used a slightly uncommon FP configuration.

It’s all normal now. That’s why quite a large range of OSs run happily on any recent Pi.

UK good for superfast broadband, crap for FTTP – Ofcom

Good grief - 30Mb is considered super fast? I live miles into the rainforest on a Pacific island and I have fibre to my server cupboard (in my underground laboratory, of course) and gigabit internet.

Linus Torvalds says ARM just doesn't look like beating Intel

Re: ARM is not very popular as desktop

Likewise (hi druck!) but dating from 1986. Never been without an ARM desktop machine since then. Made a nice living almost exclusively from Smalltalk on ARM the whole time.