* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

1953: How Quatermass switched Britons from TV royalty to TV sci-fi

Stevie
Trollface

Re: Not I

"Notice how it's spelled, not with a single "b" like the cricketer but with two. Perhaps it's a reference to "Hob" which was an old name for the devil."

So you forgot the part where that possibility is discussed in detail by two of the lead characters then? 8o)

OWOWOW!

Stevie

Bah!

"The Brits did have experience of rockets, having been the first real targets of Werner von Braun’s creations less than a decade before."

Well *that* explains the old "Woomera Lawn Dart" thing perfectly! No wonder we couldn't get the bloody things to keep going upward if *that* was the "research" model!

Someone should have told the so-called "scientists" in charge to get a few Germans on the team, like the Russians and Americans did. *They* watched the bloody rockets going *up*!

Now you can be the NSA: Snoop on a Google Glass hipster with a QR code

Stevie

Re: Bah!

"The word "grok" has specific blahdribbledrool etc"

And you think I am unaware of this because...?

I also know where "cyberspace" comes from, though *everyone* knows you shouldn't use that one now.

A shame we don't still have AOL to make "grok" geek-unfriendly due to over-use by the hoi-poloi.

Bleh!

Stevie

Bah!

"grok"

Bleh.

Bad enough when this piece of sixties hipsterspeek crops up in human conversation, but to credit equipment with "groking" when the word one would normally use is "recognize" is going too far.

Next up: Why you and your friends should eat your Googlespex when these wonders of technology inevitably die.

Spotify strikes back at Radiohead - but artists are still angry

Stevie

Re: Catweazel

Indeed. And apposite too: "Nuthin' works!"

Planet-busting British space bullet ready to bomb ice moon Europa

Stevie

Re: M1 is a bit slow for orbital entry.

"Venus is interesting. It's real hot so there's nowhere to dump the heat to ..."

Unless you do what we used to do before the shuttle and will probably start doing again: dump the heat by ablation (usually of molten iron). Coat the projectile in a sacrificial ablative material.

Of course, you'll tend to get tumbling as the molten ablative sloughs off the projectile, but that might be alright.

Stevie

Re: So ...

"Maybe they think that if they set it to blow if it penetrates into a bunker, the blastwave will do more damage?

(It won't....)"

Are you sure about that? I reckon once this weapon gets into an airspace of a bunker *complex* (think: tunnel-linked multi-node setup) then perhaps the "line of least resistance" propagation becomes a very useful thing as the structure of the bunker is working for the weapon rather than against it.

Not only that, I suspect the heat involved will be as "useful" as the pure force of the explosion.

I can see where the idea is coming from. Whether it can be made to work at a price the armed forces will pay is another matter.

Of course, weapon manufacturers are scrambling for the Next Big Thing, wartoy-wise as the draw-down in Afghanistan and Iraq bleed away the justification for their products.

Which is a factor in the use of technotat to "monitor" the homeland of course.

Boffins want toilets to become POWER PLANTS

Stevie

"Nah, if you want free electricity from your bathroom, and you're not on a meter, just hook up your cold tap to a mini turbine generator and leave it on all day charging a bank of batteries."

A brilliant plan sir, and one that prompts my own humble effort: Mini turbines attached to the end of one's willy to recharge one's cellphone at the end of one's lunchbreak in The Dog and Duck.

Stevie

Re: Showers...

And yet there was the irresistible urge to explain in detail...

Stevie

Re: Stop!

"Send corrections to them if you have the time, and if it bothers you that much. The editors tend to appreciate it."

Though if you get it wrong you might get yelled at in caps and sworn at in Finnish.

Stevie

Bah!

Saw this "power your house with your own excrement" idea worked out in The Domebook (or was it The Whole Earth Catalog?) in 1974.

I still think the idea is a pile of crap.

Man sues Apple for allowing him to become addicted to porn

Stevie

Bah!

Thank Azathoth this poor man never once set foot in a newspaper and magazine shop. The consequences could have been publicly humiliating as well as divorce fodder.

Linux 3.11 to be known as 'Linux for Workgroups'

Stevie

Re: @AC So I suppose...

"That sounds weird on re-read - what I meant by that was that most of the versions of Windows couldn't connect - not the other OSes."

I worked once for a MS partner out On The Bleeding Edge and although I found the user experience of Windows 95 innovative you are bang on about the lower level issues for the poor buggers in the set-up and install trenches.

According to our installation and support guys we had problems mainly because firms would buy from "you spec it, we deliver it" PC-by-mail operations (once upon a time these were a lot more common than they are now) and a delivery of "identical" PCs would have so many variations in NICs, video cards and gosh knows what else that the driver configuration was a nightmare suck-it-and-see process.

And let's not talk about the IRQ conflict hell. Swap out a sound card and end up working all day to get everything else back on line (maybe by buying a different sound card than the one you were trying to install).

Ah, them were the days. The days I'm glad we're well shot of now.

Is it a BIRD? Is it a plane? Right first time – and she's in SPANDEX

Stevie

Bah!

In Seattle you can legally pack a grenade launcher?

Seattle is the best place on the face of the Earth. It's official.

Forget Snowden: What have we learned about the NSA?

Stevie

Bah!

The truly frightening thing about this is the NSA is probably using the same "intelligence" Amazon, Google et al use to "enhance" my "browsing experience" by showing me targeted advertisements.

I used to try and block this, but there are things about the browser architecture I found I don't know and somewhere in that grey area the "information" on my "lifestyle choices" was being trafficked anyway. Now I simply spend some time each session zooming around looking at stuff I have no Intrinsic interest in just so the targeting "intelligence" gets well and truly knotted.

If the biggest E-Store in the world doesn't get that data isn't information then what chance do I have communicating that to the NSA who are attempting to "analyze" millions of communications a day?

I use quoticles there because we all know that such analyzing is almost always done by a regex cascade and we also should know by now just how thoroughly those are typically tested before being deployed.

I've been flagged here for sending racist e-mails and for indulging in pornochat all because the wuckfit in charge of our mali server never tested his "clever regex stuff" for obvious false positives (the word "propertyid" in an embedded mapquest app sent to me by a multinational corporation which I forwarded got me the racist red card and having the audacity to reply to a vendor that the picture clause of the field he needed to access in his Cobol program was PIC XXX got me dunned for sexting). It is left as a nightmare for the reader to postulate the possible consequences of false positives picked up by the NSA.

The call for insular internets is the end game in the 1984/Guardians/V for Vendetta scenario from where I sit. Unless some sort of bitcoin-like mechanism can be worked out for administering the whole shebang *someone* has to have authority and They're All Bent As A Nine Bob Note.

To quote Lloyd Bridges: Looks like I picked the wrong day to give up drinking.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

ARTICLES without comment boxes - Climate, CO2, Anything authored by L. Page...

Stevie

Bah!

Green deserts? Hurrah, We're saved! In your face "Mr Scientist"!

Ethel, we're tradin' in that there Prius for a '72 Caddy Sedan DeVille!

Ciseco Pi-Lite: Make a Raspberry Pi trip light fantastic with 126 LEDs

Stevie

Re: Pi

"I've never used one, but does it not come up with a Bash prompt after you log in?"

By default (as in answering all the config questions with the default answer when you plug it in the first time) you will be presented with the desktop GUI after powering up and logging in.

As supplied the Pi comes with IDLE and IDLE3 which is a pain since there is no clear guide for the total beginner as to why there are two and what difference it makes when you use one of the other.

The IDLE editor/python shellything is good as far as it goes, but has some quirks which, added to the quirks that can present with the Pi "just because" makes life hard too*.

You can configure the Pi to drop you into a console (bash prompt) instead of a GUI but the console font is so small you need electron microscope eyeballs to read it. Better to fire up a terminal in the GUI which can be reconfigured to display better font/color combinations.

I plan on trying to make ScITE on the Pi as it is a much better way to script & test than IDLEn and styles a bunch of other useful languages out of the box.

The browsing experience with the Pi as delivered is rather basic. The kids aren't going to be impressed with that feature, so I suspect the internet distraction will be less of a problem. You could do what I do and unplug it from the net altogether. After all, you don't need the network while programming if you download the python manual to the SD card.

* For example: I found that to cure the talked about - but only behind closed doors - double click insensitivity I had to add a powered hub (direct connection of the mouse did not cure the issue) but that after about ten days uptime the Pi began to behave very oddly when IDLE/3 was running. Letting everything cool down overnight restored sanity. Why? Who the Pi knows.

Samsung Galaxy S3 explodes, turns young woman into 'burnt pig'

Stevie

Bah!

*Why* wouldn't I need you to translate that? You translated everything else under the impression I didn't speak Cheese-Scarfing Surrender-Monkey.

Sackray blur!

Radar gremlins GROUND FLIGHTS across southern Blighty

Stevie

Re: Good

Possibly the decision to relocate International Rescue's secret headquarters to an island in the Pacific has had something to do with it.

Every time Thunderbird Two launched or landed my kitchen windows would break.

Microsoft offloads heap of critical fixes in 'ugly' Patch Tuesday

Stevie

Bah!

I just watched a colleague ask for "this week's" patches (his words, don't shoot the messenger) for his Debian set-up and the list scrolled for several seconds of unpaginated humongous line. Hundreds and hundreds of issues.

When I expressed the opinion that I couldn't see the advantage over the windows patching process (which he had been loudly criticizing, lifelong, ultra-militant non-windows user that he is) he indignantly snapped "Well, you don't have to apply them *all*!

Comedy gold.

Another bloke came round while I was diddling with a Raspberry Pi in my lunch hour.

"What's it running?"

"Debian, sorta""

"Is there an Ubuntu port for it?"

"Yes"

"You should use that. It's better."

"In what way?"

"Easier to use."

"I'm not having problems using what I have."

"Ubuntu is better."

"You do get that the O/S isn't why I bought the box nor the purpose in owning it, don't you?"

"Well, if you are going to be like *that*" - and he stormed off in high dudgeon.

Microsoft's murder most foul: TechNet is dead

Stevie

Re: Icon shift/shaft?

"When, and more importantly, why did the icon move from the left to top-right of the comments?"

To prepare the way for The Register Ribbon of course.

Stevie

Re: Now is the time? [@ Trevor_Pott

Well, my copy keeps insisting on bottom quoting which is annoying beyond reason since world+dog+dog's friends use top quoting. It fucks up e-mail chains no end, and cannot be changed without hacking into configuration files. There should be a simple way to change this beyond stupid behaviour on the user interface, but I suspect someone's agenda is getting in the way.

(Nothing people complain about with top-quoting is fixed by bottom quoting either. Stupidly stupid to Carve It In Stone).

Also, the default mode is to sort all mailslots (aka folders) with the newest entries at the bottom. Another fucktard decision. Every time the software is installed or upgraded seriously, it reverts to this annoying and unhelpful behaviour. An extension of "bottom quoting is best" thinking, no doubt, but at least it can be changed. One folder at a time.

Stevie

Re: Now is the time? [@ AC 8:08]

"Good luck with that in the real world. It might suit some home users, but it is laughable inadequate in the enterprise."

That was true three years ago (yesyesyes when it was OpenOffice). Not so now. Most small enterprise functions can be accommodated nicely inside OO/OL. If you care to troll through the archives you'll find I've always been pretty demanding with this software, and dismissive of it when it fell short.

The database still needs work to be as easy and flexible as Access is (stop screaming everyone. Not everyone needs a poly-phase commit clustered database with point-of-failure journaling FFS) but the spreadsheet is a good match for excel (except for the stupid decision to make the user learn different keyboard habits than everyone else +dog has been using since Visicalc) and the word processor is easily capable of most moderately complex tasks. The integration between the pieces has been tightened considerably and as a result the software is ready for most small businesses prime time as is.

"If you havn't seen Office 2013 yet, it's worth the download just to see the amazing Microsoft streaming installer technology. "

This isn't germane to the discussion. Enterprises are used to having to wait a few minutes for an install to be done, and it's a one-shot deal anyway.

Brit fantasy artist sues James Cameron over Avatar world

Stevie

Re: Rip Offs or just similar ideas

"William Roger Dean would likely go down in history alongside artists like Storm Thorgerson for some of the most interesting or memorable album covers in history; now, instead, he will likely not go down in history as yet another bandwagon riding scavenger, taking what they can from someone elses success story"

I doubt it. Dean's made his chops in the art world and then some years before the name James Cameron was on anyone's lips.

You are aware he was known for a bit (ie a damn sight) more than the album covers by the mid 70s, aren't you?

That said, I look forward to seeing James Cameron's new picture set in swamps infested with flying, claw-footed elephants.

Stevie

Re: Spirobranchus giganteus

No-one is suggesting that Cameron took everything from the same source, just that the floating boulders and looping arches of rock match very VERY closely stuff that Dean did years before Avatar was possible. Don't take my word for it, go look for yourself. The book is in print and available from Amazon.

I normally abhor these sorts of plagiarism trawls (I wasn't 100% behind Harlan Ellison's case against Cameron - but could see his point) but the similarity in the images goes beyond homage and inspiration. At some point even the staunchest "art is born to be free" exponent has to agree that merely copying someone else's stuff isn't art, it's just stealing. What sort of value one puts on that is open to debate of course.

Artists were imitating Dean's style back in the 70s, but at least they had the decency to do their own work using the style in their own way to make something new and original, not simply lifting the imagery wholesale.

Stevie

Bah!

Well it was only a matter of time.

I sat through the Avatar credits waiting to see if Cameron, know recidivist plagiarizer of other people's work and loud complainer C/W crocodile tears of those times he feels it has been done to him, had so much as given a "thank you" to Roger Dean, so obviously the inspiration (if not the direct source) of those flying mountains and "frozen loops" of rock that made the picture so special, but wouldn't you know it, not a word.

When we got home my wife, gorblesser, said "I've never seen anything like that scenery."

"I have" I said, and went to dig out one of my Roger Dean artwork books (Magnetic Storm, I think)

"Look familiar?" I said as I held up one showing the floating boulder field.

"Is that from the movie?" she asked.

"No. It was painted about ten years ago. Here, look at this one" (the loops of rock).

"When was that one painted?" she asked, eyes wide at the near perfect match with the movie scenery.

"Nearly two decades ago. It was used on a Yes album cover in the early 90s."

"Maybe the artist did the movie scenes" she opined.

"If he did, he didn't take the credit. No, I think we are seeing the return of James "other people's work is in my public domain" Cameron here".

I'm looking at a picture on a Dean calendar right now (an old calendar) which has those flying boulders soaring majestically in the mist. No doubt Cameron actually conceptualized it, then Dean read his mind from the past in order to paint it.

Stick it to the plagiarist bastard, Roger. I'm on your side, as will be anyone who looks at the evidence. Even the colors match.

Plus, he's a repeat offender.

Yorkshire police lose 9,000 guns in rogue BOFH database blunder

Stevie

Bloody Hell!

9000 firearms in Yorkshire? Those are American-scale numbers for that large an area!

Are they expecting an invasion of Militant Scotsmen?

Ecuador denies granting asylum, safe passage to Snowden

Stevie

Re: NSA billions vs. how much for crime? Chasing ghosts & letting your own people rot.

That's an awful lot of upvotes for a post that had no actual quantitative information in it, so I went looking.

Best I could find from various sources on teh intarwebs was that on average about 11.5 thousand people are actually killed by firearms in the domestic US per year. So that would be "Ten of thousand". It is generally thought that many of those are suicides. The exact number is disputed but never lower than a third.

Discussion point: do suicides count as "gun crime"? On paper, yes. Morally? My view is that the most precious thing you own is your life, but it is yours to switch off if you want so long as you don't kill or harm anyone else. Of course, the maid that comes to clean up your hotel room* will need therapy that she won't get because she's poor as a churchmouse, but there you go. It's often said that suicide is a selfish crime.

Deaths from terror attacks amount to less than ten thousand in the Domestic US per year if you don't count those still dying from the toxic fallout of the collapse of the Twin Towers. But we can agree it is less per year than gun violence. Not sure why this is important. Terrorism is something The People feel Should Not Be, while guns are regarded as A Fundamental Right Woven Into The Country's History. Were I a politician, no matter what my personal views I know what my publicly avowed stance would be.

But your comment about it being about money is both *on* the money and naive. The way the Federal and State government does business makes *everything* about money. You want to know where the money that "government wastes" is spent? Look no further than the local contractors that government is all-too often forced by law to offer the jobs to, and who - inspired by the "low bid" system that encourages bad behaviour - gouge and overbill and lie until everything collapses under the weight of yet another "public inquiry". It is, when you get down to it, the American Way.

* I once did some research and discovered that upscale hotels are a very popular venue for people wishing to go out "with the minimum of fuss". I guess it does save the family the distress of discovering your body, and who care about strangers anyway?

Radio hams tell Ofcom: Put that Wi-Fi mob back in their place

Stevie

Bah!

If they fill the spectrum with Cell Jibberjabber how will QUARMBY get out when martial law is declared?

Ooooohhhhh...

Korean doctors: Smartphones really ARE doing your head in

Stevie

Re: TBH

It's so cute the way otherwise intelligent people (who have no kids) think that kids experience and behaviour is dictated by parental decisions even though they have their own experience that demonstrates the multiple levels of fallacy involved in that argument.

It is the clearest demonstration of the triumph of "what I want to be true" over "what I know from years of personal experience to be true" and, were I cleverer, I could probably parlay the phenomenominumnumnum into a book or six and guest spots on The Daily Show and like that.

Stevie

Bah!

Now ask Korean Doctors about Fan Death rates.

Barnes & Noble sheds Nook tablet albatross, will focus on ebooks

Stevie

Re: NST

"Mine is now full of Gutenberg sci-fi,"

I must say, that thermionic valve every author is banging on about as the Next Big Thing looks to be a very interesting device indeed if only half the predicted powers of the thing are realized.

Now for a refreshing glass of Radium Tonic and I'm off for my daily soak in the X-Ray machine to strengthen my bones.

Ex-inmate at Chinese prison: We made airline headsets

Stevie

Re: Oh yes it is

"are you rehabilitating prisoners or running a business?"

Chinese prisons were never about rehabilitation. The word they use is "re-education".

And it is made clear in the article that the prison is a for-profit venture.

The good news is we here in America are moving toward that same model as I type. Why worry about prison overcrowding when every extra body is a pair of hands (willing or not)?

I confidently predict a return to the Treadmill and Workhouse model of social reform in the future.

Stevie

The Vogon

"At least they used Tasers too. American and British troops are known to apply 240 volts to a prisoner's gonads...."

An obvious falsehood. American soldiers have access only to 110v or 220v.

Hey Britain, want to link your mobile to your BANK ACCOUNT?

Stevie

Bah!

I can't understand the logic of using your own money when you can use the bank's, especially given the fraud possibilities inherent in the data-as-cash process from the get-go.

The "lad's night out" scenario sort of makes sense, sorta, but in the same situation, if I'm the Johnny Cardholder I'll pay using my credit card and suggest it will be someone else's turn next time. Anyone who baulks under the impression I will order Chateaubriand Steak next time can pay me up front or pay me tomorrow, because I won't see the bill for a month and am not out of pocket.

If the credit card details are lifted by a waiter or manager who then buys a ton of SCUBA gear claiming to be me I won't be out of pocket.

If I lose the card later that night and it makes a trip to Vegas without me I won't be out of pocket assuming I am not too hors de combat to make a phone call.

I guess it's a cultural thing.

Chinese 'nauts return to Earth after vigorous space coupling

Stevie

Bah!

I would just like to say "Greetings to our new Chinese Space Overlords".

But I can't because I don't speak Mandarin.

Pink Floyd blasts Pandora for 'tricking' artists with petition

Stevie

Re: Music was the Greatest Bubble ever...

Yes, the paradigm has changed on ya. You can keep all the money you make at the cost of having a word-of-mouth promotional engine. Or you can join "the man" and, if you are really that good, make a shirtload o' dough at the risk of burning out early and having to go back to work for a living.

I do support local artists, when I can and when they are doing stuff I like. In Penn Station there's an officially sanctioned busking program and when I hear good music, played well (and it is amazing how many times that has been true) the artist(s) will get my money in the hat *and* I will buy their CDs, *and* I will applaud when they finish a good piece so they know I liked what I heard. I encourage everyone to do the same if what they hear is good and they can afford the support. Applause is free, of course, but that and the buck you drop in the hat will only pay for most of a cup of coffee.

The future of cinema and TV: It’s game over for the hi-res hype

Stevie

Bah!

"Fact is, the rates used in television were chosen to be the same as the frequency of the local electricity supply because of fears that different rates might interfere or beat with electric light."

Well, that and the more likely fact that making that choice makes the engineering of the timebase/flyback circuitry easier, cheaper and more compact. If you want to increase the frequency of the scan you'll need an oscillator capable of producing the desired frequency and capable of remaining stable over a range of temperatures. We can do that today, but back in the down of TV when these decisions were being made?

I also suspect the choice of interlacing was more to do with the overall perceived distortion of picture than any nefarious agenda. Consider: If you paint a picture line by line of something that is moving, by the same reasoning used in the article the bottom of the picture is out of registration with the top of whatever is being imaged. A figure moving across the screen from right to left will be perceptibly leaning backwards (and be blurred and distorted). By interlacing you distribute the effect over the height of the image, getting more distortion but less perceived "lean" as it were.

I take issue with the statement that 48 FPS movies are generally approved of by audiences. The last movie released in both 48 fps and 24 fps versions that I took any not of was "The Hobbit" and people complained that the higher frame rate "looked wrong" or "made everything look cartoonish" in comparison to the slower frame rate version.

I've no doubt the industry is a behemoth that has a very high inertia, and I've no doubt there's a move afoot to make everyone think they need to throw out their home theater system for the Next Best Thing (though there's always a saturation point at which people will ask "why the f*ck am I buying all this stuff over again?"). I just don't see that there's any great need for a panic over poor picture quality when one considers what is being shown on the screens today.

RBS Mainframe Meltdown: A year on, the fallout is still coming

Stevie
Meh

Bah!

Yes, let us replace all the old technology.

We'll get the expense whch can be written off (it has been an industry maxim since forever that IT departments are a money sink and a Tax Loss). Shareholders=happy.

We'll be able to employ lots of programmers. Jobs=popular.

We'll experience cost overruns in the millions. Vendors=ecstatic.

We'll miss deadline after deadline. CoB="Concerned".

We'll probably experience several false starts as we discover the hard way what we forget to spell out in the spec or what the Universities forgot to teach *this* crop of IT Graduates. CoB=fired (problem solved, at cost of "New Broom" policies that invalidate man years of work - and before you scream and leap, what woman would be stupid enough to get ensnared in this can of worms?)

I can see no downside to the plan.

On the other hand, we *could* just develop a migration path to a more cross-connectible solution over time. in which new development was built using newer ideas.

Yes, I *know* we all said "yes" when given those "are you planning to migrate from mainframe to client-server architecture in the next five years" questionnaires at every f---ing IT confab run in the 90s, but we did that to qualify for the free tote bag of goodies.

No-one in their right mind would seriously jeopardise their career by actually *doing* that. The vultures would start circling as soon as you ran the first project meeting and from that moment on your days would be numbered as every pair of eyeballs in the place would be vetting your every move just waiting for the main chance to crap all over you and take your job.

Rewrite everything in "C"? Are you barking mad? In what world does *that* make sense? All the expense of rewriting your financial software, but in a language intended for crafting device drivers. Remind me what your degree subject was.

Change is bad. Ask the guy who was put in charge of the Y2K project so his failures would be public enough to fire him should he continue to agitate with the board for unpopular tech reforms.

Rise of the Machines: How computers took over the stock market

Stevie

Bah!

I'm puzzled. Since the word "algorithm" is used throughout the article, why the occasional salting of "algo"?

Quick recheck: "algorithm" is used in quoting a source, "algo" when the author is using his own voice.

Hmm. So, is the author simply trying to sound more like "one of the lads"? If so, I should point out that I've never heard the word "algo" used by any of the seriously clever people we keep around here to write them.

So, I would like to ask the other commentators: Is "algo" a clixby term or a clabby one?

Stevie

Bah!

According to an NPR report on this some two weeks ago (shame on El Reg that let a not-for-profit analogue radio network whose major focus is politics, humour and classical music beat them to press: call yourself an IT "news" site? Don the Cone of Shame!) the problem is orders of magnitude worse than reported here. Trade battles happen in the space of microseconds, not seconds, and no-one is thinking of the children.

Who will get stuck with the bill for this idiocy? The very people who are supposed to benefit from the stock market - human investors. Mostly (as usual) those with their pension plans woven tightly into Hedge Funds, those sinkholes where one can "safely" stash the results of digital stupidity and malfeasance. See: Naked short selling (which isn't as exciting as you might think but the hip name for something that in any other milieu would be termed "criminal fraud").

The real issue here is that those writing the software do not have the greater good of the market front and center in their problem horizon (and probably have little interest in the business of stock market economies per se) so eventually they *will* drive the whole thing onto the rocks (again) while convinced that they are doing a good job.

Pussy galore: Bubble-bath webcam spy outrage

Stevie

Bah!

Brainstorm was a great idea, well acted for the most part, hampered by early 80s film-making aesthetics.

I often wonder if the people who think the internet spawned the Rule 34 mindset ever saw it.

Latest NASA ASTRONAUT class is HALF FEMALE

Stevie

Re: The old and the new

"There was actually a British Space program in the early 1950's..."

Well, as someone who was around at the time and who was such a life-long space nut he eagerly snapped up any and all reports of the British Space Effort (including increasingly rare film of the events as they happened), I'd like to point out that my memory is that 100% of the launches either lit up the sky and anything else unfortunate enough to be inside the radius of the fireball or lifted off triumphantly only to retask themselves as missions to the Earth's Core a few seconds later.

Woomera, home to the most expensive lawn darts the world has seen.

Also: Unnecessary apostrophe and too many commas, all in the wrong places.

2/10 See Me.

Hey fanboi, is that an EXPLODING BATTERY in your MacBook Pro?

Stevie

Bah!

Coffee all over my keyboard after reading the subheading on this one.

Well played, sir. Well played.

Offensive, iconoclastic internet trolls will not be prosecuted, says DPP

Stevie

Bah!

I just bathe people like that in the intimidating wash of my very best 12-b (Hurts Born Manfully) with a dash of my masterful 23-z (Stern Refusal to Bend to Criticism).

AXE-WAVING BIKER GANG SMASHES into swanky Apple UK store

Stevie

Bah!

Pretty shoddy gang: one axe between all the members.

When I were a lad the yoofs went properly tooled-up to a meeting of their club, whatever frame shape or wheel size their transport of choice displayed.

Tsk.

If they'd had real stones they'd have ram-raided the place in a flurry of two-stroke kamikaze glory.

Stevie

Re: Correction

"Can I just point out that people who ride scooters are not "Bikers""

Pft. Hacker/Cracker.

Adobe CEO admits need to 'tweak' Creative Suite's cloud-only policy

Stevie

Bah!

I see this as an issue of over-convergence in a way.

Adobe used to have a suite of separately priced software products that did various jobs, some of them so well there were no alternatives for serious users. There was some overlap in the products they made of course, and they kept acquiring new stuff and developing new capabilities in their old stuff and eventually it made sense to offer the whole kit c/w caboodle in one box (for about half the cost of a down payment on a car).

Then the decision was taken to offer *only* the box-o-wonder and that is when the wheels started to wobble. From the inevitable years of incomprehensibly-labelled versions that made buying what you needed a nightmare a-la Windows ("I don't care what title you write on the box front, but I need to understand what comes IN the box you morons") to the point where you could only buy the super-deluxe ultra-galactic topnotch version, the lug-nuts were falling out one by one.

And now Adobe has all-but told every loyal customer "look, some of you are using old versions of our stuff and that is taking the bread and butter out of our children's mouths. So what we are going to do is link the license to operability over time instead of over versions and you can suck our collective snoof organs if you don't like it".

At a time when corporations are looking hard at cost of ownership this lease model is bound to raise eyebrows and make those who have an option seriously think about taking it. There *are* options for the various sub-components Adobe has rolled into their Behemoth.

And (never thought I''d say this) the GIMP is looking shinier every time I look at it.

Soylent days and soylent nights

Stevie

Re: Bah!

"I was losing 4kg a day when I caught [Dengue] in an outbreak in Rio a few years back."

Pah! Y' soft Jessie! You want real discomfort, what you need is a bout of Chronic Recurring Pancreatitis!

Not only do you feel like you are being repeatedly stabbed by someone with the attention to detail of a Hanibal Lecter, not only is the pain mitigation done with Demerol - which is addictive and doesn't actually stop the pain, it only makes your brain forget to care about it for the moment - but the doctors will never believe you didn't get your Pancreatitis from long-term chronic alcoholism and will keep hoving into view with gleeful expressions as they run a pool on when you will begin the DTs.

And they will keep asking about your drinking habits and won't believe your answers because the most well-known fact about alcoholics is their propensity for lying about their drinking habits.

So to recap: Not curable, wait-it-out "treatment" regimen, drugs that addle one's wits but do nothing in the way of pain mitigation and earns you a reputation as an alky even though your wife made you quit drinking years before.

Then, when they let you out of hospital and you go to work, shuffling through Pennsylvania Station during the Democratic National Congress, a couple of hundred police officers will eye your zombie-like mein, your pallid, jaundiced complexion, your needle tracks ascending both arms and your prominent phlebitis from the intravenous feeding rig you've been subjected to for a fortnight in entirely the wrong light and label you as a habitual abuser of narcotics instead of a victim of genetics and Mars bars.

Dengue fever? Luxury!

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!

Stevie

Re: nxm

"They maintained a bunch of really old computers, and one job I had was to write some code for a dinosaur where you had to boot the machine using paddle switches on the front to load a couple of instructions to read the OS off a 2' wide unsealed Winchester disk. "

Ah, you almost had me. If you'd have said EDS instead of Winchester I'd have believed you really had worked on a really old computer.

Winchesters were and are new-fangled nonsense that will never catch on. Now load the paper tape into the reader, press the green button and type GO XKYE 20 on the Westrex so we can get some work done, please.