Posts by Jim_E

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Not magnetic field, more star field?

OOD Officer of the Day, duty officer when the ship is in harbour. At sea it should be OOW, Officer of the Watch, in charge of the ship for the duration of the watch, 4 hours usually. Used toi be the case anyway when I was in the Royal Navy at the dawn of the computer age.

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Pre-wet when I was in the Navy was a system for wetting a ship's decks and superstructure to reduce the effects of nuclear fallout. Never did find out if it worked. :-) Almost certainly salt water.

British naval food doesn't look half bad... so we're going to try it out for ourselves

The menu is not a patch on the menus after the Navy catering scandal in the late 60s. Roast haunch of wild boar anyone?

Cyberlaw experts: Take back control. No, we're not talking about Brexit. It's Automated Lane Keeping Systems

Re: So let’s forbid anything that’s new?

My car lacks several features I have found I can do without as it looks after the functions for me. Manual transmission, manual choke, steering column advance and retard and mixture control levers to name a few. I find the radar cruise control a boon but then I do live in Australia. The book says the ALKS only operates above 60 km/hr and on motorways. I may get around to trying it out soon but then I am a bit old fashioned.

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

The model K in our office. An evil thing, the engineers needed their own coffee cups in our tea room.

Alibaba chief says China's new internet laws aren’t just good, they’re right and welcome and necessary

To quote Ms Mandy Rice-Davies "He would say that". (Paris 'cos she is blonde too.)

Google won’t let Australia have shiny new toys unless it picks apart pay-for-news plan

Getting news filtered by Google does not seem an attractive proposition when there is such a variety of news media available on line.

The American Murdoch's stable is not among my current selections.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: The elevator did it

A long time ago teaching science I had a large coffee tin with a spark plug soldered into the side of it. A teaspoon of flour, lid firmly on, induction coil attached to the spark plug, shake the can, trigger the coil from a distance. The resulting bang, flying lid and fireball impressed the kids no end.

nbn™ hits the half-way mark – but has more than half of the job left

Malcolm Should Have Left Well Alone

If Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott had not gutted the original NBN plan for fibre to the premises we would have been much better off by now. The promise of all connections by 2016 was not even non-core, it was "pigs might fly". The cost blowout would probably have been the same as most Government projects include this feature.

We would probably have been at the same stage of rollout by now but with a proper expandable service, far fewer faults, inability to connects and bandwidth pinches.

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

Re: a septic tank is small

In Australia rhyming slang for Americans is "septic tanks"

Yanks -> septic tanks or seppos for short.

Sure, we could replace FTNN, says nbn™, if you let the unwired wait even longer for broadband

FTTK?

As one who has not yet gained a firm foothold on the nbn plan I'm hoping that by the time they get round to us they will have come to their senses. The bean counters can be consoled that FTTK is cheaper and that if they want to perpetrate #fraudband on us they will have to replace the street cable.