* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

YouTuber cements head inside microwave oven

Stevie

Re: the challenge was "to nearly die".

Shame no-one thought to test how harmless the Gas of Life is by feeding Captain MiocrowaveHead some through his breathing tube before the butinski fire brigade got to work.

Valuable science could have been done.

Stevie

Re: Average IQ

The first paragraph of most Wikipedia entries is incomprehensible blither. I commend the reader to the article on mechanical stress, or perhaps the one on transcendental numbers.

Stevie

Re: YouTube has a lot to answer for

But it also had the answer, had anyone thought about it long enough.

They could have sent Mr Microwave Head to that mad Fin with the hydraulic press channel and see if his head would explode "lyke the pay-perrr".

That bloke and Russian dashcam footage are what make life living sometimes. Viva YouTube!

PS

Oh, and I forgot those kids who jump onto corrugated plastic shelter roofs and look surprised when hey plunge right through, or those idiots who ride a skateboard down the railings of a concrete staircase then have the nerve to look surprised when they smash scrote-first into the handrail, then teeth-first into the concrete stairs.

Ooh, ooh, and idiots who make spud guns from PVC pipe and then fire them with their faces next to them.

Stevie

Bah!

Damn. I was expecting to read:

Firefighters simply plugged in the microwave and set it to "potato (mushy)". After jumping around for a bit with sparks from his amalgam fillings shooting out of the breathing tube, the idiot's head exploded, shattering the cement and allowing the microwave to be salvaged almost undamaged.

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

Stevie

Re: What no-one has mentioned yet... - DRUMS

Fastrand drums were actually made by a sewer pipe manufacturer. They were the only people who could make a drum of the size true enough to spin up to the high speeds needed.

The cabinet for them included mount points for a hydraulic crane that would be required if you ever needed to remove the drum.

The Fastrand standards were still echoing through OS2200 15 years ago in the various options available.

I think my favorite drum device was the ICL one that used 255mag cards in a hopper and a drum transport. The cards would drop and secure to the drum, then you could read and write to them, and they would eject back to the hopper.

Of course, as time went on the mechanism would loosen up and the cards wear and then would come the day two or three cards wold drop at once. The operators said it sounded like when you were a kid and used clothes pegs and cigarette cards (ask yer grandad) to make your bike sound like a motorbike. Often wished I'd seen that one up close, but I came in ten years too late.

I've seen manuals for exchangeable drums that were conical - you screwed them into the drive small end first, pushed the go button and they would be lowered until the heads would fly. Never seen it in the wild though. I think they were ICL equipment, but can't be certain. Working from memory here.

Stevie

Re: When I started in the business (1968), we all wore ties and jackets to work.

The ICL engineers at my first place wore chemistry teacher jackets (burn marks, threadbare and leather patches on elbows) , ties (probably clip on) and carpet slippers while they worked.

Comfy feet were more important than industrial safety.

Stevie

Re: 50 MB in the '80s?

That same scenario was quoted to me by my chief programmer at my very first job as the reason a certain operations manager was told never to touch actual machinery again and his position respecified to an all-paperwork and supervisory role.

Same kit too. Must have been an institutional thing.

I was told by an engineer that if the big red "FAULT" light ever came on with an ICL eleven-high pack drive, it was critical to leave the room at once and punch the Big Red Off Switch as you went (machine tool factory, cast iron Big Red Off Switches were everywhere).

So while I find the original story to have many questionable details, exploding disk drives are possible under *some* conditions. At least, our chief ICL site engineer felt so.

Tape spools would fall to bits at speed at the drop of a hat, as I recall.

Stevie
Pint

Re:They also make nice seekquins...

e-beer for you, Big John.

Stevie

Re: "Cut the red wire..."

"There's another bloody wire!"

Toby Wren

No, BMW, petrol-engined cars don't 'give back to the environment'

Stevie

Re: The only way to make cars give back to the environment

You're a f*cking piker, Bob. I drive everywhere in first gear, with the a/c and heater on, lights ablaze and radio a-blare.

But then, I have the courage of my convictions and access to gasoline almost as cheap as water (cheaper in some badly polluted places like former chip fabbing towns).

Stevie

Bah!

Slow day all round, I reckon.

I'm going to turn up my gas furnace and open my windows, just to spite the electric brigade with their convenient blindness to the pollution the industries that make their cars possible create. Poisonous chemicals, heavy metals, you name it, the electronic and electric fabbing industry is dumping it.

Former US State Department cyber man: We didn’t see the Russian threat coming

Stevie

Re: 1 word. STUXNET*

According to one documentary I've seen, Iran has counter attacked, specifically the banking system.

They backed away, again per that documentary, after demonstrating their muscles, which could be one reason the Obama Iran Deal was so quickly passed. Maybe not. Documentaries are not historical record, after all.

Same documentary claimed that the original attack was by a third nation state -named as Israel - who broke a tech sharing agreement and infected the world with a cavalier release without consulting the US. The logic runs that the widespread and unintended infections blew the gaff and negated he whole point.

Again, not history, documentary. I don't doubt that the truth is quite different.

Stevie

in four years time

Don't kid yourself.

There's no accounting for the sheer levels of stupidity a voter can bring to bear on any problem even at the best of times.

And in three years if OPOTUS hasn't gotten himself a nice new shootin' war with his own name on it to help give him a landslide re-election I'll be very surprised indeed.

Well, you didn't think all that Nork and Hamas baiting were from conviction, did you?

IBM opens emergency escape hatch to TSS volunteers

Stevie

Bah!

From the New Script

"You have a category one issue with your AIX hypervisor software?"

"I will in one minute connect you with a Linux expert. But first, Oh my God, I must tell you that your Vindows are infecting the internet with viruses."

Apple looks forward to wiping $47bn off its overseas profit tax bill – thanks to US shakeup

Stevie

Re: Reg Trolls Readers

You're suggesting that Apple "up one nostril and down the other" pricing is because they have to pass taxes (that they haven't actually paid in years) onto the low-income customers that flock to buy their products?

Who is trolling whom?

If you are suggesting that after 24 years demonstrably failing to work that Trickle Down Economics are gong to save the country, well, I'm not biting.

Reagan, George the First, And George the Second all proved in double term administrations that Trickle Down is Cock-Up.

Indeed, I remember in the second four of Reagan's reign, the newspapers were wryly pointing out that at the height of his loudly touted "boom economy", growth was actually behind that at the height of the Great Depression.

But I'm sure if the Republicans just try it often enough it will work. The law of averages would suggest it has to, eventually.

Stevie

Bah!

Meanwhile, in completely unrelated news, I can no longer deduct state property taxes I've paid from my fed tax bill.

Yes, a very equitable new tax code and one guaranteed to make America great again.

As it was before all that unpleasant Standard Oil business.

Hyperloop founder goes on immediate leave following sexual assault 'smear campaign'

Stevie

Re: Brogan BamBrogan

And your point is?

To quote Chief Inspector Clouseau:

"I must warn you, Tania of the Easter Lotus, I am not a fan of the women's libs. Man is the master and a woman's place is in the home."

Stevie

Re: Three different things

Rather: Pishever has specific allegations against him made by certain staff members, backed by witnesses,

Your wording makes it read that Pishever is accusing them.

Stevie

Re: Do you guy's actually read what you write?

"Each of them knows", surely?

Viagra's Irish plant STILL giving local men and dogs stiffies (not really)

Stevie

Bah!

It would explain the popularity of Presley's "Blue Christmas" on the pub jukeboxes though, given the vision artifacts the drug produces.

Or so I'm told. By others.

Brit bank Barclays' Kaspersky Lab diss: It's cyber balkanisation, hiss infosec bods

Stevie

Bah!

Next step: a visit from the government Department of Approved Digital Assets auditor to make sure you aren't hosting any software written in, for or by a listed nation.

List subject to change without notice.

No 2017 bonus for you, HPE tells employees

Stevie

Bah!

Hehehe, bonus time ... here's the envelope ... just slit it open and pull out the payslip and ... PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?

That 70s Show: Windows sprouts Sets and Timeline features

Stevie

Re: the 70's? *ANYTHING* but the 70's!

Oh Dave, that was *pop*, not rock.

You want some equivalent nasties from the 80s?

"Dah dah dah".

"The Devil Went Down To Georgia"

"Karma Chameleon" and "Do You Really Want To Squirt Me (Do You Really Want To Hose Me Down)"

"I Just Called To Say I Love You"

Stevie

Re: the 70's? *ANYTHING* but the 70's!

Fuck everyone who says what is in the Title bar.

Whole genres of music were being invented and improved on in the 70s. All the Old Wild Men bands still drawing mega crowds today were coming of age in he 70s.

Industrial Light and Magic were being invented in the 70s

Clive Sinclair was still On Topic in the 70s.

Dr Who was still going strong in the 70s. It died in the shoulder-pads-and-big-hair 80s.

70s girls were cute and approachable and not completely fucked-up because of the lastest flavour of STD or what some idiot on arsebook just said in the 70s.

The Campaign for Real Ale was founded in the 70s.

You're right. The 70s were great for those that lived through 'em. Those that grew up in the Duran Duran/Soft Cell/Ultravox/ decade have my sympathy. We had "Maggie May", they had Maggie Thatcher.

I got about halfway through the 80s and bailed for the States in disgust.

Linux laptop-flinger says bye-bye to buggy Intel Management Engine

Stevie

Bah!

System 76 are actually shipping computers? Every time I look they have a "coming soon" sticker over the goods.

Report: Women make up just 17% of IT workforce, paid 15% less than men

Stevie

Bah!

So ... we need to be paying them 83% less ... ? That can't be right. Hang on ... insumscribensee carry the four and round ...

83% of the workforce is paid 100% wage.

So 1% of the workforce would earn 100/83=1.204 anna bit

17% x 1.204 anna bit = 20% ish.

So we should be paying them 1/5th of the men's salary.

I can't see that going over well with the fairer programming sex. Indeed, the manager tasked with informing them is likely to receive a number of punches to the throat and kicks to the Lower Hurtybits.

Not it!

Jingle bells, IBM tells more staff it is D-day ♫

Stevie

You're a "resource" or a "head count".

Luxury! We used to Dream o' beiin' 'eadcount er resource.

We wuz assets, and proud to be assets.

But yer tell the young 'unz terday and the dorn't believe ya.

Stevie

Re: IBM... the f*cking xmas grinch!

I had a boss who knew he had to let a person go on New Year's Eve weeks before that, but who refused to tell him because "he didn't want to ruin Christmas".

I argued loud and long that he should tell the poor guy so he could curtail any unnecessary over-the-top spending (typical middle class American behavior, fixed in the next two months of frugality which this guy would not have).

Eventually he did tell the chap, but right before Christmas, when it was too late to do any good. Result: The exact reverse of lessening the pain.

Stevie

it is only revenues which are declining.

Well, that and shareholder value.

Which is why a company that still makes money can be said to be in a death spiral. Stupid, but inevitable.

Stevie

Bah!

The fun part is that the people being used as Outsource Resources (pauses to refit teeth) are all in places where a little geography knowledge should put the fear of the weather gods into the C-level IBMers.

Of course, no-one has had proper geography lessons in decades, and Social Sciences classes are an excuse to sleep in most schools.

As it is, the first test of the new outsourced customer support and ticket resolution systems will be about the same time the monsoon hits.

"Trouble Ticket could not be opened due to river Ganges now in basement machine room".

Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Siemens tease electric flight engine project

Stevie

Re: Bah!

I haven't flown on an aircraft where smoking was permitted in over 20 years. I don't doubt that the airlines and airspaces in which one can light up are those in which no sane person would be caught dead anyway.

So, not a problem.

Stevie

Bah!

The aircraft will be made lighter by filling the passenger compartment with hydrogen. Passengers will be required to use the oxygen masks throughout the flight, or breathe hydrogen for a 10% discount on ticket price. Passengers will also be required to wear (hydrogen-inflated) life vests for the flight's duration.

Also, luggage will be sealed in airtight bags and injected with hydrogen before loading in the luggage bay.

Which will then be filled with hydrogen.

Also: Special hydrogen-filled "air-soled" Doc Martens air-travel boots.

Undercarriage: Filled with hydrogen.

Avionics bay: all hydrogen, all the time.

All unused internal airframe spaces not dedicated to fuel and/or batteries will be filled with hydrogen. Fuel tanks will be purged with hydrogen as the fuel is burned.

All courtesy of Siemens Chemical Division Applied Hydrogen Project.

A certain millennial turned 30 recently: Welcome to middle age, Microsoft Excel v2

Stevie

I would think it would be easy for them to migrate to Libre Office,

Which shows how little you know about either product Bob.

Stevie

A move to Libre Office would require a rewrite (4 Vimes)

Amen.

Also a complete revision of finger memory, learned on Lotus 123, continued through Excel and abandoned in favor of, what, TELNET/EMACS/CLI keyboarding shortcuts.

Why this was chosen beats the living daylights out of me, but if you want to zoom around a wide and/or deep sheet in one of the open "equivalents" and find data boundaries, you'll need a completely different set of shortcut finger habits than those the world leaders established when the OO/OL crowd were still crapping into their underwear.

It's almost as if the designers couldn't see the point in asking a real spreadsheet user what their job involved before putting fingers to coding keys (a problem that infests IT to this day: "I use Word as a typewriter, so everyone uses it that way and I understand everything I need to know about the thing").

Formulas also use a different field separator. This, at least, is almost completely catered for by the import process, but if you write them you'll need to learn a new vocabulary.

FWIW I use only OO on my own machine, and hate struggling with the new cloudified Excel at work. The problem is I have no training in the new cloudified Excel and such little reason to use it I won't get any. That and the quart from a pint pot network we have, slowing things to a manageable speed.

Stevie

Re: "I have to say Excel is one thing Microsoft got right."

"but what boils my piss is the fact that if you then try to interact at all with it... it starts the whole bloody calculation again (or so it appears)!"

a) Learn to use the software properly, and turn off automatic sheet recalculation. Just because the software makes it all look "dead simps" doesn't mean you can get clever without doing some reading of the manual. See: post #1 in this thread.

2) Are you sure you ae using the right tool for the right job? Hundreds of thousands of rows? This isn't what spreadsheets are for. You can make them work that way, but the user experience is a diminishing returns calculation inversely proportional to the data density.

2001: A Stob Odyssey

Stevie

Bah!

The real gem for me was "nineteen one hundred and one".

Took me a long time to learn that everyone was so busy making fun of Antique Cobol's date routine* they forgot about how you have to bugger about with arithmetic to get C-like language dates to make sense.

* Early Cobol date routines returned no century, causing one class of the many issues lumped under "Y2K Bug" **. This is now fixed, of course.

** The local ATM door locks that failed to unlock on New Year's Day 2000 weren't running Cobol but some C-like nonsense. How come they didn't work right? Nineteen one hundred.

IBM does what IBM does best: Raises the chopper again

Stevie

Re: How is IBM making money these days?

Well, I'm sitting in a place where people are alternately ruing the day and chewing out whoever IBM sends to be shouted at this time.

The guys wot perpetrated the offenses moved on during the tuning-up for Prelude To An Axe Opus 1 and are out of everyone's reach.

Stevie

Bah!

But IBM are in a very hard place right now. All their Vindows are infecting the internet with viruses.

'Gimme Gimme Gimme' Easter egg in man breaks automated tests at 00:30

Stevie
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Unprofessional bollocks (4 Daggerchild)

You stupid sod!

Soup this time! Hot soup! That stuff has lumps in it for god's sake! *AND* spices!

They must've heard my screams two counties away.

Stevie

Re: Unprofessional bollocks

And your point is, John?

CEO: 'Claying the ongoing continuous chaos of info into one logical masterpiece'

Stevie

Gah!

I googled "claying" and then threw up in my desk drawer.

Your work here is done, El Reg.

Don't sweat Brexit, big biz told: Your shiny data protection sticker will remain intact

Stevie

Bah!

Just as the licensing rates for professional drone usage have remained stable post-vote.

Level 5 driverless cars by 2021 can be done, say Brit industry folk

Stevie

Re: Hmm...

Indeed so. I note there is no explanation of how to source the enormous amounts of quantonium that will be required to power this fleet of class 5 road automoata.

Stevie

Bah!

"so what is being proposed is at-scale deployment "

And thus does roger Zelanzy's vision become reality.

Also: "Oxbotica". Worst name for a company ever.

Chainmail tires re-invent the wheel to get future NASA rovers rolling

Stevie

NASA used similar tech (without the titanium) on the lunar rovers.

If we took the Titanium out it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?

Stevie

Bah!

Nitinol?

We've known about that for years.

UK.gov 'could easily' flog 6m driver records to private firms this year

Stevie

Bah!

Only another 335 megaquids to find.

This week.

Car tax evasion has soared since paper discs scrapped

Stevie

Bah!

Who, who could have predicted this entirely unexpected behaviour from the British public?

Connected and self-driving cars are being sent to Coventry

Stevie

Bah!

And finally I understand why the Broadgate Ring was demolished and the place made a twisty maze of one-way streets.

A plan 40 years in the making finally comes to fruition. BWA-HAHAHAHAHA!

Dick move: Navy flyboy flings firmament phallus for flabbergasted folk

Stevie

Bah!

Thus do semiotics cause trouble for an innocent aircrew.

I put it to the assembled court marshal that this image was not obscene, but a tribute to our WWII veterans. If one orients the image correctly and puts one's own prurient schoolboy nudge-nudge=wink-wink sense of "humor" on hold, one will see that the image is clearly that of Kilroy, also known to our brave Tommy allies as "Mr Chad", a satirical WWII-era cartoon used both by the British and the Americans to wryly comment on the shortage of various essential commodities and the unpleasantness of war.

"Wot, no toilet paper?" might for instance be found on walls when the quartermasters had done an imperfect job provisioning for a new British base of operations. "Kilroy was here" was often the caption on American efforts, to indicate that no matter how cold, wet and shell-infested a theater of operations might be, those who came before wanted to offer a friendly "chin up, fellers, we're in this mess together!" to new arrivals.

This patriotic and to my mind overdue salute to those brave men who fought to put Hitler and Tojo in their place can hardly be cause for the besmirching of the records of two fine airmen, who stand ready to defend their country and answer the call no matter the personal cost.

Defense rests.