* Posts by STOP_FORTH

946 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2018

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Blue Origin spins up lunar gravity for New Shepard flight

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Unhappy

Re: Deep mine shaft

Now I know how Elisha Gray felt.

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Re: Deep mine shaft

I have rethought this. All we need to do is drop a centrifuge from a Zeppelin. If we drop it into a deep mineshaft, so much the better.

This means we can simulate any gravitational field up to the breaking point of the centrifuge.

Am just off to the Patent Office.

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Re: Expensive solution

Actually, forget the jelly. Just dig a really deep mineshaft.

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Re: Expensive solution

I apologize. Are jelly filled mineshafts not a thing?

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Boffin

Expensive solution

Are centrifuges not a thing?

DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?

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Re: An Inevitability

Brute force versus elegance.

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Joke

Old AI concept

I favour OpenGobshite. Colin from the pub is self trained on Daily Mail articles and will give you an opinion on anything if you feed him with beer.

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

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Facepalm

HR are Heartless Rascals

Once Upon a Time there was a big broadcaster which informed, educated and entertained the merrie folk who lived in a constitutional monarchy.

This was back in the days when people still printed internal telephone directories, for it was a big organisation.

Big, and riven with internal strife between various factions. One group of apparatchiks took over the production of the internal directories from another inefficient and wasteful group. (How difficult can something be if those idiots can do it?)

All you need to do is collect all the information from the HR database.

Come the joyous day of publication the grateful staff eagerly opened their personal copies of the telephone directory.

It was important to check that your name was spelled correctly, your impressive job title was up to date, your address was correct along with your internal telephone number.

The day was not joyous for everybody, specifically those poor devils whose details had been replaced with the dread phrase "TO BE MADE REDUNDANT".

Many of them lived happily ever after.

Meta blocked Distrowatch links on Facebook while running Linux servers

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Angel

Considered harmful

Big Ironically, the folks who browse around Distrowatch are the kind of people who have access to the hardware which underpins much of the Internet.

It would be a real shame if Facebook/Meta disappeared completely.

Not that I would ever suggest such a course of action. Those folks are also not petty fanatics. As long as you don't mention vi and Emacs.

Infosec was literally the last item in Trump's policy plan, yet major changes are likely on his watch

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Re: Hold on a sec...

Concepts of a policy plan. Details to follow.....somewhen. Probably.

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Trollface

Stealing our secrets

They are moving the North Pole to Siberia.

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Black Helicopters

The invisible enemy

Stealthily infiltrating our infrastructure.

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Trollface

Nobody knows about IT

They'll be the biggliest ones and zeroes you have ever seen.

Ransomware scum make it personal for Reg readers by impersonating tech support

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IT Angle

They despise their readers!

I think the implication is that Reg readers are too sophisticated to fall for simple phishing approaches. We are, however, craven enough towards authority figures to fall for anything coming from someone in IT support.

Possibly they also assume that many of us work in IT support and would have to clean up the resulting mess whilst suffering reputational damage.

It's all hooey, my first virus infection came from an e-mail from some eejit in IT. I hate the feckers.

SEC sues Elon Musk for allegedly screwing investors out of $150M before Twitter takeover

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Re: The SEC's beef

0xDEADBEEF surely?

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Facepalm

SpaceX ate my homework

Gotta hand it to Qantas. Much more imaginative than "leaves on the tracks" or "wrong type of snow".

Still not as good as "badger ate a junction box", but you can't have everything.

I didn't get where I am today by writing intelligible comments online.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

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Joke

Going backwards?

Are they making Harriers now?

Absolute Linux has reached the end – where to next?

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Re: Debian can be tiny

Porteus used to create customised ISOs for you to download. I can't remember how fine-grained it was, probably not very.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

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Happy

Re: Sadly, I could foresee the current internet issues arising YEARS ago...

You're absolutely right. Reading the writing is where all the problems really started.

Don't get me started on speaking.

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Thumb Up

Re: I miss the old Register

Thanks for that link. I shan't be clicking on it. I'd rather moan in the comments section than re-visit the glory days. It takes less time.

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Unhappy

Re: I miss the old Register

I miss the old Register too.

Unfortunately, the tech bros who dominate the Internet have moved into politics.

Japan's wooden satellite exits International Space Station

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Happy

Re: Everything burns!

Thank you!

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Flame

Everything burns!

Solid boosters wouldn't need an outer shell or parachutes. Main rockets become solid boosters.

This has to be a good thing for that pesky rocket equation. Assuming you can find wood with as much thrust as a liquid rocket.

How many knots is escape velocity?

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

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Linux

Re: Stretching

Surely you repair software by modifying it? Although I have worked with coders who made it worse by modifying it.

Without the source you can't modify.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

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Thumb Up

Re: Well I like it

NetPositive's best feature, besides it's moniker.

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Re: Well I like it

That's one possible explanation. Or maybe all of the helpful BOFHs with a sense of humour died from COVID-19?

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Angel

Well I like it

Not everybody needs an OS with commercial software. Some (retired) old Gits just like tinkering with old machines.

An OS doesn't need to be a Windows or Linux competitor to be interesting.

If you don't like or need it, don't use it.

It's free.

Similarly, if the latest Raspberry Pi isn't to your liking or doesn't meet your requirements, I'm not really interested.

There was a time when the comment section here was full of useful technical tips and very funny posts.

NASA's lunar Roomba set to suck up Moon dirt for study

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Headmaster

Hang on a mo'

This is plain wrong. It's a pressure cleaner. You might as well call it a water jet washer. That wouldn't be any wrongerer.

Honey co-founder's Pie Adblock called out for copying GPL'd uBlock Origin files

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Joke

Honey scam

A colleague of mine suggested siting beehives in the Manchester area and selling the resulting produce as up-market Mancunian Honey.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

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Happy

We don't need no steenkin' numbers

Grab punch cards in one hand. Align them by bashing one end against a hard, straight surface.

Draw a sloping line on the edges of the cards with a pencil.

No need to even learn numbers, though they might be helpful for programming, especially bloody FORTRAN.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

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Re: re: end of Gatport Airwick runway

Main road?

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Trollface

Beastly Eastleigh

I used to work in Eastleigh. There is no goodly part. Not since they closed down the bakery anyway.

It is also an anagram of eagle shit.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

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Happy

Re: Christmas Fun

Perhaps my sample size was too small?

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Facepalm

Re: Christmas Fun

At one stage, virtually every GP's receptionist here in the UK had an Amstrad PCW on her desk.

They were CP/M based weren't they?

Obscure? To whom?

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

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Holmes

Psychic paper works on motion sensors

A colleague was working at a new divisional HQ. This was during the 80s so the building had brand new access controls. Most of the staff worked 9 to 5.

They wouldn't give him an access card because he was based at a different site.

During the install process he decided to go for a cigarette break in the car park.

It was after five o'clock so the solitary security guy was on his rounds.

Consequently, he was unable to get access after he'd finished smoking.

He decided to have another ciggie and a think.

He noticed somebody exit the building without having to present an access card. (The main door was double sliding glass doors.)

He took a piece of A4 paper from his car, slotted it between the two glass doors and wiggled it about.

You shouldn't be able to enter a secure, expensive building that way.

SpaceX hits 400 launches of Falcon 9 rocket

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Thumb Up

Man of Culture

I like the names of his spaceships and barges.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

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Happy

Nae bother

Scottish first name and surname here, and I'm not looking for a job.

Or do we count as Anglo-Saxons in this study?

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

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Alien

Re: Absolutely Magnificent!

There's very little oxygen out there, and not much water. I suspect there's no rust either.

Japan's wooden cube-shaped satellite rockets to space

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Trollface

Re: We Are Groot

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

The Hawker Hurricane was constructed by draping Irish Linen over a wooden frame. They had to use metal for the engine, machine guns and some tubes forming an interior frame.

First RAF kite to fly at 300 mph.

Of course, when Concorde was designed they couldn't get the wood any more so had to make do with metal.

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Is it possible that wood produces less secondary radiation when it interacts with cosmic rays, solar wind and all the other bad stuff up there?

Or is it because wood is considerably less dense than metal and presents fewer nuclei as targets?

NASA narrows Artemis III landing target list to nine

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Alien

Re: Impossible

I never said a disc couldn't nutate. It obviously has a lip on it like the edge of a pie dish, but facing away from us.

It's a sort of flying saucer.

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Joke

Impossible

The Flat Mooners told me you can't go to the South Pole because of all the Nazis down there.

If the Moon is a globe, how come it doesn't spin?

China refreshes crew of its 'Celestial Palace' space station

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Unhappy

Trivial pursuit

Fair's fair, surely the PRC are entitled to a quarter of the Moon? India could probably claim 26%.

Who said the US gets the biggest piece of cheese?

Man in the Moon is sad. Jade rabbit is happy.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

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Big Brother

Re: Making things worse

I can remember (more senior) colleagues discussing this in the 1980s. Presentation to us might be separate copper pairs going in different directions to different exchanges at each end of circuit. There was no guarantee that they wouldn't be multiplexed together on some PDH/SDH link somewhere in the middle.

These were mostly "music" circuits rented from BT, plus some of that new-fangled data that would supposedly replace our venerable 75 baud telegraph.

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Happy

Re: Making things worse

We were about 2-3% of their workforce. Tails don't wag dogs.

Their e-mail storms were a thing to behold.

Outsourced IT is obviously better!

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Happy

Re: Making things worse

I must admit, I had to read this a few times before I understood it. (Native English speaker here!)

It looks a lot like code.

Where is the "Else"?

What language is it?

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FAIL

Re: Making things worse

Yabbut, site was surrounded by private land, only way out was drive. Unless you wanted to start negotiating for wayleaves with neighbouring farmers.

The real problem was that they took the compiling hardware plus the associated authentication/digital signature box. Without the sig/hash/whatever, the code wouldn't run on our proprietary hardware.

Had they left things alone we could have couriered the signed code to another site or Internet access point.

But they had to make things better.

Eejits.

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Re: Making things worse

Um, grateful. Apologies.

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WTF?

Making things worse

I worked for a medium sized company (Medco Ltd).

We were taken over by a very big company (Jumboco)

Jumboco's HQ and labs were in a different country.

Jumboco insisted that our nightly builds must be done on their mighty compilers in their labs. They could then be released to our greatful customers as required.

We only had one fat pipe to the outside world, this was obviously a single point of failure and could not be countenanced by a big important company.

Pro tip:- If you are going to dig a long trench alongside the existing cable for the new cable ensure that a) this work is performed on a Friday afternoon and b) a very important software upgrade is being released to one of your most important customers on Saturday.

Anthropic's latest Claude model can interact with computers – what could go wrong?

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Claude, you say?

I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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