* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Sophos was gearing up for a private life – then someone remembered the bike scheme

Stevie

Re: Well that's embarrassing

Sort of like Edmund Blackadder's piss-up invite list, when Percy says "Oh, and Lord and Lady Whiteadder, of course".

Stevie

Bah!

"Off yer bike!"

Talk about making a rod for your own back: Pot dealer's seized €54m Bitcoins up in smoke after keys thrown out with fishing gear

Stevie

Re: Daft or smart?

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

Great movie.

Come on baby light me on fire: McDonald's to sell 'Quarter Pounder' scented candles

Stevie

Re: Bah!

No-one who has smelled chips cooked in beef dripping will ever forget the Lorelei tug on the nose dragging them o'er hill and dale in order to buy a bag soonest. When I were at the University of Climategate you could smell them cooking in the market from the Unthank Road.

Irresistible.

Stevie

Bah!

So, beef-dripping candles then?

I see no downside.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

Stevie

Bah!

Curves inward, though. Cool the way palm trees bow to me as I drive through Florida.

Stevie

Re: What an incredibly stupid way to die.

Positively splendid comment.

This was about as 1930s space-nut approved as is possible to get. Dead EE Doc Smithy.

Positively Brabury-esque until the bit where it ploughed into the empty sea.

Stevie

Bah!

Well, the Earth may not be flat but Mad Mi ...

What? Too soon?

SpaceX Falcon 9 meets watery end, and NASA needs someone to go to Mars and whack its mole

Stevie

Re: Mars Insight

Public Ridicule:Awesomeness ratio climbing rapidly?

Google product boss cuffed on suspicion of murder after his Microsoft manager wife goes missing, woman's body found, during Hawaii trip

Stevie

Re: Well done The Register for not ignoring the question of feminicide in the world

Feminicide: The act of killing a woman's sub-compact car.

Stevie

Re: Evidence?

Who fails to realize this in an age of Law and Order, CSI and NCIS?

Why so shy, Samsung? Weird Find my Phone push notification did not only affect Galaxy mobes

Stevie

Re: I almost feel left out

Never mind. Reminisce about the bad old days.

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Stevie

Re: If a piece of tape can do it - what about dirt?

Tee-hee. Here in New York they mount suburban speed signs on what looks like really naff Dexion. In high winds the signs rapidly twist and turn from side to side like a twisty-turny thing.

I wonder how *that* plays inside the mighty brain of the Tesla.

Stevie

Re: Sigh.

When I took *my* test you could fail for doing a handbrake start instead of a proper hill start.

Once you had your license you could start saving your clutch, not before. The instructor had to see the handbrake come off, then you do the mirrors, look signal thing, *then* pull out without the car moving backwards an inch or creeping forwards until the signal was out.

As a matter of safety one shouldn't have the car declutched, in gear and on the footbrake while at lights. One rear-ending and you are screeching into traffic (in every sense of the word), probably also demonstrating the Kangaroo Hop all instructors are familiar with.

Holding the clutch down for extended periods also leads to early failure of the thrust bearing of course, which leads to sudden onset cash starvation.

Which is why I, now in New York (land of the stop-go rush hour freeway parking lot) drive only automatics. Stick the bugger in gear and ride the footbrake until the road opens up, then it's cruise control city, baby.

One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump

Stevie

Re: The US is important, but not important enough to be able to destroy China's tech industry.

Did the sub-prime mortgage fiasco not teach you guys anything?

If America's economy goes into the garbage disposal, it drags everyone else with it.

America is a great country at its best, but when it sucks it sucks hard.

Stevie

Re: Racketing?

It's the official term for fixing tennis matches.

Stevie

Re: I blame Rupert for this...

sure junk food tastes good but if you continue to feast on this continually it eventually catches up with you.

Wait, what?

You'll never select all and mark as read again after this tale of peril... Oh, who are we kidding? Of course you will

Stevie

Re: and it was said to rip the keys from your trousers.

And for all the thumbing down, the observant person will note no Youtube link or even a text link to a firsthand account of this happening has been posted.

The only reference I could find was in I Remember the Future: The Award-Nominated Stories of Michael A. Burstein and that is a secondhand hearsay account of something a technician said to clear a room in a science fiction story, *not* a report of actual trouser ripping in an actual lab.

More to the point, I've operated an NMR machine, and written of that here before.

The (ferrous) retort stand claws required no heroic measures to remove, just one waggish lab tech.

I stand by my disbelief in this magic Key-Ring Attractor of Trouser Destruction.

Stevie

Re: and it was said to rip the keys from your trousers.

Normal people don't link more rings than keys.

At this point I'm going to say "YouTube or didn't happen".

Stevie

Re: needing to haul together on a rope to remove a ferrous tool

Keys not ferrous, as I said before.

Non-ferrous metals can be affected by the magnetic field, but usually the problem is the heating from induced currents and the radio emissions in MRI machines.

Wearing a key ring in the pocket while working an NMR machine (different beast, similar technology) would be, in my opinion, no risk to trouser material but likely ruinous to the spectrum being prepared.

Stevie

Re: Assaulted

Well, so would I, but then I'm old and don't understand modern networked electronics.

At least, that's the working assumption of some of my colleagues.

Stevie

Re: Today, I'd probably get life without for even suggesting such a stunt

Depends. Was your horse wearing a test harness?

Stevie

Re: and it was said to rip the keys from your trousers.

Said by lab technicians no doubt.

Unless your keys are made of steel (quite rare I imagine) I'd have to slap a big "DISBELIEVE" on this bit of folklore.

They *might* cause mayhem in the spectrum as you swanned around the instrument tweeking veeblefetzers and adjusting the grunewallop. Depends on the instrument and how old it was.

Stevie

Re: User problem: needed to be escalated.

There's a lad 'er two that came here for the same reason.

Stevie

"The doorway that led to the stairwell had been covered over with cardboard, newspaper and orange tape. [...] Undeterred, Graham swiftly dispensed with the obstruction"

Was this place of higher education perhaps the University That is Very Difficult To See That Has A Very Big Tower?

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Sparks count some.

But flames are the sine qua non of an exciting tale of Man Versus Machine in A World Gone Mad.

I blame all these low-voltage CMOS electronics. Can't get a decent blaze out of three anna bit volts. Stands to reason.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Excellent! This is more like it!

I've had more pyrotechnics while vacuuming the carpet than some of the other tales being trotted out.

Stevie

Bah!

I have only one hing to say about all your tales of woe: BORING!

Not one tale included the phrase "flames shot out".

What a sad day in I.T. In my day magic smoke was accompanied by gouts of mundane flame, or it didn't count. You'd be laughed out of the lounge bar of the Brewer's Elbow if you said "A bit of smoke came out and that was that" over a Friday lunchtime pint.

And as for these reports of otherwise completely ignorable "noises", well, I don't know where to start.

Don't know you're born. Fought two wars. Rationing. Mafeking. Etc.

*grumblegrumblegrumble*

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Stevie

Re: Carniverous computer

Well you got your dead cat and you got your dead dog

In the middle of the night you got your dead toad-frog

You got your dead rabbit and your dead raccoon

The blood and the guts are gonna make you swoon

You gocha dead skunk in the middle of the road ... &c.

Loudon Wainright

Stevie

Re: Might have mentioned this before...

LONE STAR!

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Stevie

The only other language that seems to offer that is C.

"C" as in "Cobol"?

Get off my lawn with your pathetic johnny-come-lately 20-year-old programs, sonny!

Stevie

Re: Not really a situation in which Access worked

I like Access a lot. I developed a scad of single-user niftiness using Access 97 and prototyped a megascad more for porting to a network-capable database.

I think when all is said and done, MS Access is like any other complex piece of software; if it starts showing odd behaviour or odd results it is a pretty good indicator it isn't being used within its designer's specification.

My personal fave was a system I wrote to fill time and track a code-conversion project I was budgeted to take six months on but actually spent one afternoon writing some SSG (call is perl for Unisys mainframe) and automated the thing so it all ran in less than an hour. Because the worthless bag of smell in charge hadn't requested disc quota, the results all got deleted, so I was forced to run the automation again. And again. I tracked all this on an Access database I wrote, as I said, just to have something interesting to do.

WBOS mused that it was a pity we had no way of knowing how far along the project was in terms of converted code. I disappeared for about an hour and provided him with a report of exactly what he asked for (a byproduct of mi'Access database). He bemoaned the fact that to be useful it would have to be grouped by one of the subordinate data items. I took the report away for about 30 minutes and brought it back the way he had wished, sighing theatrically, for.

After that he didn't ask me for anything else. I think I genuinely frightened him with mi'powers.

Best blade on the swiss army knife? Getting a full command of the combo box events. You can make absolutely gobsmacking proof of concept stuff once you've mastered that little trick.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Stevie

Re: I got a verbal warning for refusing to help once.

Absolutely. These days I always respond to a snotty RTFM with “wot, the whole thing?”

Because if I am ever moved to point someone at a manual, I always try and be as specific as possible. They are my colleagues, not my competition.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Stevie

They just sound like typical consumer speakers.

Only if you fail to support them on gold-plated, stainless steel cones.

The time that Sales braved the white hot heat of the data centre to save the day

Stevie

Re: why not just call someone on the access list

Could be. I'd call DC manager or get person who called *me* to call DC manager and work backward from there.

Because I've seen people fall through false ceilings.

Stevie

Re: Yes. air con that doesn't. thanks all.

Well, okay, and yea! Mission Impossible and all that, but why not just call someone on the access list and get their combo?

Stevie

Re: The quiet hero almost never gets the beer.

Of course any sensible tech support manager would have run the tape systems in parallel for at least 4 weeks gradually migrating processes to the new devices.

But this was a government site, wasn't it?

Government sites don't tend to have the kind of provisioning that allow for this extravagant style of migration. Either there isn't enough floor space or there aren't enough power outlets or the contracts aren't funded to overlap in that way.

Been there, done that.

15 years on, Euroboffins finally work out what it took to send the Huygens Titan probe into such a spin

Stevie

Bah!

Meaningless blither.

Youtube video or haven't shown working, 2/10, see me etc.

Boeing aircraft sales slump to historic lows after 737 Max annus horribilis

Stevie

Bah!

According to NPR the Boeing simulator wasn't much better than the actual aircraft.

From comments inside Boeing during the build, experienced pilots reported crashing in the simulator "the first few times" a landing was attempted in the MAX.

And Boeing *still* recommended to airlines that no simulator time was needed.

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

Stevie

Re: 2038

How about perl then? The localtime function is based on a 32-bit library.

Good luck diagnosing the sorts of issues that will pop up from that.

Why yes, I *have* been there already.

From Soviet to science fiction icon, the weird life of Isaac Asimov 100 years on

Stevie

Re: He certainly wasn’t misogynist in his science fiction..

Better check your mind-shield wasn't flushed away, or you could fall prey to the vile Hag-Loos.

Stevie

Re: My experience with Dr. Asimov

Oh Danny, if you can't work the jargon don't play with it.

Stevie

Re: He certainly wasn’t misogynist in his science fiction..

Anyone who has chortled through an EE "Doc" Smith epic should look for these two Harry Harrison works:

Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (novel)

Space Rats of the CCC (short story)

Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers takes the framework of Skylark, sorta*, and tweaks the nose of just about every famous SF book available around '71. Space Rats of the CCC is just a delight from start to end. All written in the extreme hyperbole-riddled style of the Doc and side-splittingly funny. I'm laughing now just at the memory of some of the scenes from each.

* - The spacecraft is a jumbo jet, and the FTL is courtesy of a chunk of irradiated cheddar - the Cheddite Projector.

Stevie

Re: He certainly wasn’t misogynist in his science fiction..

You "read" EE Doc Smith? - I gave up on chapter two of whatever book it was - absolute trash.

I think you meant to say it was sheerly, starkly unthinkable.

Stevie

Re: frustrating genius

The Gods Themselves contains a rape scene that takes place between "married" non-human aliens that is entirely non-titilating, hinging as it does on a (probably over-explained for some) mechanism of reproduction that has no equivalent in human terms, and that entirely outraged me on the victim's behalf.

Asimov's work may not age well sometimes, but even in the 1980s he retained the power of imagination to come up with an astounding and disturbing idea, and the ability to write it up in an effective manner.

I found some of TGT to be tediously written, and it took some effort to get into the story because of that same effect others have noted - my tastes have changed over the years of reading SF since the heady days of finding "I Robot" and "Foundation" in the Panther edition circa 1970.

But the ideas in the story are astounding. Nip down your local library and try it out for yourself.

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Stevie
Stevie

Re: Octal? You lucky bastard!

Wire wrap? Wire wrap?

Y'soft southern jessie!

We 'ad t' use crocodile clips fabricated from spring clothes pegs wi' drawing pins stuck in t'ends, an' edge contacts were old straightened paper clips nailed t' circuit ends. Chassis voltage were 3kv DC on account o' t' valves. Every time one changed t' zero, paper clip 'ad t' be unclipped, an' the arcing an' screamin' and catchin' fire were summat awful.

But it were better than workin' up at mill.

Hate e-scooters? Join the club of the pals of 190 riders in Austin TX who ended up in hospital

Stevie

Re: Darwin's old friend Mr Crap Design strikes again

I detect the odour of the Penny-Farthing Riders' Group. A sanctimonious bunch to a man.

The top hats and frock coats are spiffy though.

Stevie

Re: The High Way Code needs to be enforced 4MPH!!!

Electric scooters are illegal full stop in NY. Yes, including the Segway and Hover Boards.

No-one gets stopped for riding one, though.

Stevie

Re: I do not like these scooters

Actually, John , the speed limits in most urban and suburban locations hereabouts are designed - from data captured by those suspicious-looking cables "they" sometimes stretch over the road - with the goal of ensuring a given amount of revenue from speeding tickets.

'Round here the "magic number" is 65%. That is: after measurement, the speed limit is set at the average which 65% of the local traffic moves at in that place. I'd bet time of day plays a part too, but cannot confirm that rush-hour is a favourite sampling point.

So in point of fact, at least in my locale, speed limits are *not* a limit, they are a threshold for end/beginning of month revenue generation.