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.
Posts by STOP_FORTH
978 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2018
Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds
Shiny object syndrome spells doom for many AI projects, warns EPA CIO
Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it
Friday 20th June 2025 19:34 GMT 
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
Thursday 19th June 2025 10:59 GMT
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.
Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole
Sunday 15th June 2025 21:38 GMT
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.
Danish department determined to dump Microsoft
Friday 13th June 2025 19:04 GMT
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
Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'
Sunday 8th June 2025 10:33 GMT
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
Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way
Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?
Curious tale of two HR tech unicorns, alleged espionage, and claims of a spy hiding in a bathroom
The ups and down of a virtual trip to the Moon in Zero G's 727
Tuesday 4th March 2025 15:02 GMT 
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
Wednesday 26th February 2025 16:47 GMT
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
RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101
International Space Station's out-of-this-world selfie booth turns 15
Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit
Friday 14th February 2025 11:57 GMT 
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
Blue Origin spins up lunar gravity for New Shepard flight
DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?
The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster
Wednesday 29th January 2025 08:03 GMT 
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
Wednesday 29th January 2025 07:08 GMT 
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
Ransomware scum make it personal for Reg readers by impersonating tech support
Wednesday 22nd January 2025 12:06 GMT
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.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
