Posts by Stevie

Rhyme "Kleen" with "Lane"

Then spell it the way you want it pronounced!

Gordon Bennet, there can be no more worthwhile project than to get rid of all the clixby mispronounceable names infesting IT today.

Re: At scale??? Yes, easily

Why would you put them in Earth's orbit?

Inverse square law means that somewhere closer to the sun would be ideal.

Not sure what CO2 or Water have to do with anything.

One is talking about clean power, not CO2 fracking.

Power is sent back using high power maser which is converted nearby into usable electricity.

That can be cleanly used on Earth, at very low cost once the infrastructure is established.

Once can do all sorts of things with large amounts of clean electricity.

One could, for example, cook CO2 into syngas - just to get rid of the atmospheric carbon, since we'd have all the electricity for traveling that we could use.

Re: At scale??? Yes, easily

Solar orbit power sats would even better, but skittish investors and NIMBYites cringe at the “micorwave transfer” bit.

Thorium reactors, anyone?

Bah!

Didn’t the Germans use it during WWII?

They couldn’t make it in vast enough quantities to power their mighty panzer divisions though, if I remember the Smithsonian Channel documentary right.

Bah!

Yes, one must completely oxidize the carbon, otherwise, instead of Life Gas, one ends up with Death Gas.

Obvious really.

Re: drivers.old.new.newer

Heh.

Our SAs who Must Not Be Questioned set up all the trad Unix versioning tools as "SA permission required", for reasons that passeth all understanding.

I asked my Boss - who was hot to trot on getting rid of blah.old, blah.<date> files littering our servers for a copy of the git software (I had no download or install privs). Refused.

I explained it was in use around the world *and* by all our vendors. Refused. He told me we had a "Microsoft product" that would do nicely.

"What's it called?" Dunno.

"Is there any training to be had for it?" No.

"Where's the documentation for it?" Dunno.

"Who's the admin?" Dunno.

So I went away and in a rage wrote a perl script that would make copies of any file into a .old version. You typed notgit myprog.sql and would get notgit.sql.old but - and here is the !clever bit - it would first look for all .old files and move them to .old versions.

So if this was your fourth "version" of myprog.sql there would be myprog.sql.old, myprog.sql.old.old and myprog.sql.old.old.old too.

I showed my boss when he came round to nag me. He was livid. I explained with my best "keen innocence" look that one could keep track of changes and fork from old versions by simply counting the "old"s and subtracting one, but he was unimpressed and shouted at me for not using the Microsoft product.

I did my "hurts borne manfully" face and explained that I would have done so but that I did not know what it was called, how to use it, where to find the documentation for it and could not contact the admin for guidance because I was unaware of his name, at which point my boss started to make wheezing noises and stomped off.

Later, we were in a meeting and he announced our dotnet devs had a new version of Toad that had a versioning engine in it. He said he did not know what the underlying technology it was. I told him I did. He asked me for the name.

"Git".

Re: They should be enabled

Ah, but you forget that as soon as the Clever Young Things are hired they fall under the powerful illusion that companies buy, maintain and replace computers for a living.

Ollie White had a radical suggestion in his course on Material Requirements Planning: Take your software staff onto the shop floor and show them what the company does and who does it. That way, that bill of materials breakout is no longer a report that can be delivered just so good, a bit late if necessary, but a vital cog in the wheel that grinds the grain to make the bread for the table of the programmer.

I did a contract a large concern that manufactured postage machines where they turned this on its head and had manufacturing bods as IT team managers. Unfortunately, they forgot to do the walk-through for the team members too, so there was still a basic disconnect with what the IT team hunchbacks thought they did for a living.

It is truly depressing the number of System Administrators in my current workplace who believe they are the top of the heap - and therefore must not be questioned when they make decisions - rather than plumbers needed to unblock the too-small pipes they installed for the real job we do.

Time for a snack and a cuppa.

Re: Ideally they'd run off solar/wind

Because side scan sonar is so economic with the electricity.

Considering the actual business involved in doing a deep water undersea wreck search rather than simply lading and unlading cargo containers this idea simply does not stack up agains the cargo boat idea.

Re: private Tiswas Mode

How about Spy vs Spy mode, wherein one can set elaborate cheesy traps for each other?

Ejector seat chairs, boxing-glove-onna-spring in the photocopier, bucket of whitewash over door etc.

Trouble Believing It

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2018/12/07/on-call/#c_3673529

Re: Bah!

You missed the part about exchanging batteries then?

Re: Bah!

Not if you read for comprehension.

Re: Bah!

1) Easy to design a train that can break at random points along its length without the - unpowered remember - rest of the train rolling to a halt in the freeway?

Don't think so.

2) Real electric trains don't work to the powered tractor unpowered train model. Why would road-based versions work that way?

3) The streamlining issue is a bum steer. At 55-70 mph there is no need to worry overmuch about super-streamlining.

My vision simply reurposes the car. The road stays the same.

How are cars subsidised in any way?

The gasoline is subsidized for the same effect here in the USA.

At least, that’s the theory.

Re:Reading data from a file is not inherently dangerous.

Right.

Grins as he remembers the umptytump ways one can screw up terminals by people opening files with certain "harmless" character strings in them"

Must be nice to live in a world with only two flavours of O/S.

cooking EPROMs at 200C on a baking tray in an oven

Fool!

Chips go in the deep fryer!

Re: What ignorant bar steward touched this system?

See: From The Earth To The Moon, episode "Spider".