* Posts by STOP_FORTH

978 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2018

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Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

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Re: Isn't Colossal Biosciences the outfit that ...

Can't fly or swim, yet. I know nothing about the Pacific Ocean, but if it's less than a metre deep they could just paddle.

I counsel caution.

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Linux

Not just Moas

Didn't they have a colossal eagle in New Zealand? Not making a Hobbit/LOTR reference here, they really had giant eagles, bring some of them back too!

(Actually, ISTR there were giant penguins not too far from Kiwiland, hence the icon. Bring them back too!)

Shiny object syndrome spells doom for many AI projects, warns EPA CIO

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Happy

Re: "I wish I could lash our CEO"

Take a lesson from Homer (not that one!)

When the Sirens of new technology come a-calling, lash the CEO to a chair AND fill his ears with wax. Not quite the same as the original, but it will do.

Also applies to the crayon munchers in marketing.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

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Re: Manual?

Err, handbrake surely? Or are we thinking of different models?Had a nifty little release trigger inside the "spade handle". If you were in the left hand seat, the trigger was conveniently placed for the forefinger of your right hand.

If you were driving the UK model the trigger was under the pinkie finger of your left hand, unless you twisted your hand through 180 which felt awkward.

If it was parked for more than about ten minutes, you couldn't put a Denver Boot on it!

Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

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Joke

Au contraire

I have not looked up the relevant RFCs (and, in any case, they may not contain the information required).

RFCs were often written by (or anonymously sponsored by) the original inventors/proposers.

A long time ago (last millennium!) somebody told me that MS invented DHCP to manage IP addresses in large networks.

I have no idea if this is actually true.

If it is true, their implementation is obviously the best because it works exactly as they envisioned it, and not the way some Godless, Commie, bearded, sandal-wearing script kiddie implemented it.

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Happy

You idiots!

You're all NetBEUIng it wrong.

Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole

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Re: Southern side?

Yes, I know that, and you know that, but I suspect the author either does not, or is showing typical Northern Hemisphere bias.

There is no up and down in space.

The poles on the Sun and Earth swap regularly (but at vastly different intervals) so labels like North and South are somewhat misleading.

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Re: Other bright stars

The weird thing is that the first time you see it, it looks the same way up. Then you notice that the blue and red stars have "swapped" positions.

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Boffin

Southern side?

As seen from Earth? Which hemisphere?

Asking for any Aussies and Kiwis who are too polite to ask.

If you live in Singapore, please disregard this question.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

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Outlook and Word unfit for purpose

I retired eight years ago, so my experience of MS products may no longer be relevant. I'm sure they have improved since I last used them.

One role I had involved co-ordinating responses to technical issues in our Asia Pacific region. We had offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Sydney. We had customers in all of these countries plus New Zealand, Japan, Vietnam etc.

Many of these places had different timezones and, depending on the exact time of day, different days.

Although we had regular conference calls much of the nitty-gritty technical work was by long e-mail chains. When someone from a new timezone appended an e-mail to the end of a chain, Outlook "helpfully" overstamped the send times, and sometimes the dates, of all of the previous e-mails in the chain.

Conversations that included phrases like "in your e-mail of date/time" became impossible.

An ex-colleague who still consulted for us had his hardware clock on his laptop set differently from whatever our corporate standard was. When setting up meetings by e-mail the Outlook calendar would often disagree by an hour at each of the parties, because the recipient was having the content of the e-mail overstamped by an over-zealous Outlook. (He was not part of our corporate Outlook domain.)

I have rescued corrupted Word documents that either wouldn't open in Word or actually caused Word to hang. I did this by opening them in Open Office (and, latterly, LibreOffice) and then saving them in a Word compatible Document format.

To preserve my sanity I often composed longer documents in Notepad and then opened the finished item in Word for formatting, insertion of screenshots etc.

Don't get me started on the IP stack and subnet masks.

It's sh1t3.

Bin it.

NASA to silence Voyager's social media accounts

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Save APOD

One of NASA's most popular outreach initiatives, probably.

Although they could possibly stop showing us the Crab Nebula pictures.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

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IGY

I'm fairly certain that the Ozone holes were discovered during the International Geophysical Year (1956-1957?).

The CFC connection was made later. Mid seventies or thereabouts?

Mainstream hand wringing started even later probably around mid eighties.

Of course, the more things you measure the more data you have.

Astroboffins analyzed old data and found a candidate dwarf planet in the Oort cloud

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Re: I'm not sure

Objecting to someone objecting to an order of magnitude error being considered to be pedantry is pedantry though, isn't it?

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Re: Excellent news!

Yes, I spotted that too late. However if you believe all that tosh, a solar system body could also effect your horoscope, at a linguistic stretch.

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Joke

Excellent news!

How will this effect my horoscope?

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

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Happy

Re: fairly obvious

You will never get a job in marketing!

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Boffin

Professors know nothing

I was in a computer architecture lecture in about 1976. Prof says "One day a computer will fit in a briefcase."

How we chortled. What a ridiculous concept. Even if true, you'd need a forklift truck to carry all of the batteries.

What a maroon!

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

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Yobba rays on.

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Ditto, plus Supercar!

Curious tale of two HR tech unicorns, alleged espionage, and claims of a spy hiding in a bathroom

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Re: A.V.A.

Wrong fillum!

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Re: A.V.A.

Arrest all the usual suspects!

The ups and down of a virtual trip to the Moon in Zero G's 727

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Re: Take my money!

You don't have to jump, you sort of float off the floor.

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Go

Do this now

Go to YouTube look for a video by OK Go yclept Upside Down & Inside Out.

You can thank me later.

There is an interview (or possibly another video) where they discuss how they made it.

It was basically multiple parabolic arcs stitched together into one video. I think they also had to lip sync to a wrong speed audio track for some reason.

The mystery of the rogue HP calculator: 12C or not 12C? That is the question

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Unhappy

Re: Re-implementing the Pentium

It was a digital joystick, I think. Although I bought an A I added extra chips and connectors (I think?) so that it was more like a B. There was one expensive bit I didn't add which meant it wasn't a proper B version.

It's still in the loft. I suspect all the capacitors have burst open and there is probably mould growing on the motherboard.

Einstein Probe finds two stars that have spent 40 million years taking turns eating each other

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Re: could something blow up, flare up, collapse or go kablooie?

Disc world doesn't have an Equator! Or does it?

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Re: could something blow up, flare up, collapse or go kablooie?

I have been South of the Equator four times. First time was in 1996, so I missed that one. Didn't even notice the neutrinos.

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Re: Disappointment

Good example. I've been watching that damp squib since last year. It's not even going to be that spectacular.

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Mushroom

Disappointment

There is a growing list of things that are going to collapse or go supernova. It's like waiting for a damp firework to go off.

I realise that I am not the main character in the entire Universe but please, could something blow up, flare up, collapse or go kablooie?

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

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Stop

I don't think that number means what you think it does

It's OCTAL folks. How many times do I have to mention this?

International Space Station's out-of-this-world selfie booth turns 15

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Happy

Not required on voyage

You don't need a selfie stick in space!

Might want to consider a lanyard, especially if you go outside.

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

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Trollface

AI is really useful .....

For jobs that don't have any purpose.

Good for reports that nobody reads, marketing bumf that sort of thing.

Non LLM AI may be useful for spotting cancer, cracks in airframes or girders.

Do the chattering classes not realise that their game is nearly up?

Is this the Schadenfreude icon?

CentOS Connect conference announces return of Firefox

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Linux

Tortured metaphor

Linux is like the peanut butter aisle in a large US supermarket. It does not need to be ALDIfied or LIDLed.

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.

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