Posts by waldo kitty

Re: Perspective

Maybe they could have hitched a lift on Elon's space launched Telsa Roadster. It must be approaching Voyager 1 anytime soon.

ummm... the Roadster and Starman won't ever leave the Sol system... their trajectory takes them just past the orbit of Mars where they loop back, go around the sun, and back to Earth's orbit.. they never had the speed needed to leave the star system... the Voyagers used planetary gravity assist flybys to gain the necessary speed for leaving...

currently, Roadster and Starman are 5.25 light minutes from Earth and approaching at 3.6 km/s... together, they have completed 4 orbits around Sol and are at the beginning of their 5th orbit in the 6 years since their launch...

https://www.whereisroadster.com/

Re: A cat that can type "DROP DATABASE veteran-affairs;"?

Perhaps it went like this:

i was thinking something more simple... like there was a file manager up with some of the config files selected... kitteh pressed DEL key (bringing up are you sure dialog) followed by mashing the ENTER key with fluffy butt (triggering Yes response in dialog)...

speaking as l'objet d'affection of my own owners, they used to come up with some of the craziest writings when they would sit on my flat keyboards licking and cleaning themselves... those keyboards now have hard covers over them and normal angled keyboards are used... kittehs don't seem to care for sitting on angled keyboards but they do still try to make biscuits on them at times... gotta go... i'm being commanded to put food in the dishes because they can see the bottoms of them... bbl... this might take some time ^•ﻌ•^

Re: Unique keys

What's the problem with Wanda Kershaw as a name?

the login name is the first three letters of the first and last name... so "Wan" and "Ker"... now put them together and see what you get ;)

Re: "Hairy jumper"

i was thinking of a jumper block on some pins that was somehow accumulating some sort of conductive dust fibers or similar that were shorting to somewhere else and bonking up the works :lol:

Re: From orbit?

What about the current planetary shield? I think it is being marketed as starlink

are those possibly AKA AG-1 or maybe pre-1 version numbering (AG-0.1 with AG-0.2 being launched now)?

nintendoeats wrote: [...] they are trying to show a correctly dept-sorted semi-transparent object with 500k vertices on an iGPU.

O.U.C.H.!

i'm guessing someone finally/eventually takes them and their project to a properly GPU-equipped system... maybe even explaining or at least attempting to explain the difference between their iGPU and something that actually does the job they want/need done...

Re: Not very "Trusted" I guess

Foolish people (and even some not so foolish) have always been and will always be susceptible to scams.

reminds me of The Wizard's First Rule: "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

granted, it is from a fantasy novel series (yes, i've actually read the first 13 books in the series) but all of the Wizard;s Rules do actually fit in today's world and they make a lot of sense...

Re: Instructions and washing instructions

How about the instruction to "Hit any key", resulting in people apparently asking where the "Any" key is.

yes! BTDT... left an entire (legal) office, one afternoon, after having been tasked to "fix this problem"... the fix? lovely gold rubbed stencil letters spelling "ANY" on each and every space bar in said office... i recall something like 50 systems in the typing pool area and i think on the order of 10 or 15 partners so yeah... 60-65 space bars proudly exclaiming they were (also) the "ANY key"... bosses never asked how i fixed the problem... they were just happy that we were not having to field numerous phone calls from them every day... especially since someone determined calls like those were "unbillable time spent"... that firm was one of our top clients for many years to follow, too... those were the glory days! LOL

Re: Classical "Told you so"

I've seen some cable porn that will make most techies shed a tear!

yup! every time i see such i have two immediate thoughts fighting to see which gets to the forebrain first...

1. that's an extremely pretty flow of cabling.

2. i sure don't want to be the one to have to cut that apart to replace/trace a cable.

Re: Am I being Dense?

So, if this hack.... (for in my mind it is a 'hack') is a workaround to prevent cache poisoning, then surely the workaround for the workaround is to poison with all the variants.

ummm... isn't there still only one cache entry for the domain even though there are many possible case variants? it is only the conversations between DNS servers that carry the caSe ChanGes, isn't it? if i'm correct, then there's still only one normalized(?) variant of the domain name in the cache... the question is if the one that is cached is the correct one and that is determined by the conversation between the servers... i think...

if caching DNS servers were to have to cache all the case variants that cross their desks, we'd have a new(?) problem to deal with... that being "cache explosion" which could eat server memory (or storage) till OOM failure(s) lead to DOS and we certainly don't want that...

Re: Foresight

Just look how long older appliances lasted, compared to modern ones.

cars... older ones just run and run and run... in an accident, you can actually buff out the damage... with modern cars, there's no amount of buffing damage out and they seem to be engineered to be thrown away after 5 years... it really is a sad state of affairs...

Kappa -->

Re: Cool Running

The trick worked on drives in the past because back then the bearings did wear out and increased tolerances together with less than stellar head positioning would lead to read/write failures.

not only that but there was also the protective coating on the platters that, in some cases, would soften from the heat of operation... when the drives spun down the heads would settle into the now soft coating... when the drive cooled off, those head were effectively cemented to the platters...

when the drive was powered back up, the heads would prevent the platters from spinning... this is where the quick spinning or light thumping would come in handy to pop the heads loose and let the drive platters spin properly... freezing the drive would, in many cases, allow the coating to shrink away from the heads so the platters weren't held captive when power was applied...

yes, sometimes a head might get torn off the arm it was mounted to... i'm sitting here looking at a clock made from an old ST-125 that had this happen... luckily it was the last head in the count that came off... luckily? yeah, because i low leveled the drive and told it it had one less head... yeah, that reduced the available storage space and the data was lost but it worked well enough for the tasks it had to do... that drive ran for another 5 years or so before being replaced by a larger drive and one that didn't have the sticktion problem...

since it was already damaged, i removed the cover to get at the insides... the bottom side of the bottom platter had a nice clean circle scrapped into it where the head had gouged out the material... i powered the drive and used a screwdriver to carefully scrap another circle for added decoration... then i removed the platter motor and replaced it with a clock work, figured out how to mount that one platter, and applied a ring of numbers along with some clock hands... the cover was replaced with a custom hand-cut plexiglass cover and boom! one hard drive clock was born :)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rxtjboh29ee0a0b/st-125-hard-drive-clock.jpg?dl=0

Heh, I remember solving this 8 years ago... https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/5/8/512

interestingly enough, that original patch author responded in the latest thread about this ;)

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YkO7d7Eel4BVQOy4@kbusch-mbp.dhcp.thefacebook.com/

Re: X25 woes

It took me all night, many tired calls to HP support, with the first lines asking the usual trivial questions, before ending up at the X25 L3 specialist which gave me the solution, one I would have never found alone.

did you really leave us hanging like that? i mean...

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png

Re: Am I a bad person...

after watching 5 seconds of that video

wait... you got to see it? it has been marked private, now :(

Re: In summary then ...

He did but they too were accidentally thrown out with his collection of Napoleon memorabilia.

is that all in the tip with the accidentally thrown away hard drive? or is that another guy i'm thinking of? if it is the same guy, i wonder if him searching for his Napoleon stuff might get him closer to the lost HD?

Paris because crying over spilt milk (aka lost stuff)

Re: Reclaiming Private Call Costs

After all, the plumber who fixes your boiler charges for parts and labour for the hours he spends in your airing cupboard, not an additional 30 mintues for invoicing.

ahhh, but he does... you just don't notice the extra $$ or five built into the hourly rate specifically for invoicing time ;)

Re: Palemoon, check. Seamonkey, check.

Notepad++ is surprisingly competent for pure html.

the question, then, is "is there a native notepad++ for linux and mac?" ;)

Re: Clock embuggerance day

After that your motherboard clock will remain persistently UTC, and the operating system will display the correct time from that based on the time zone that you tell it you are in.

this is how it should be done, yes... then one simply has to remember that the BIOS clock is UTC if/when they have to change the battery or the BIOS clock loses its time for some reason... aside from that, be sure to select the proper timezone representation and bob's your uncle... most of the time...

same here...

i applaud microsoft/apple for bringing the computer to the common man but i thoroughly detest them for turning me into a toaster repairman...

icon because is it the only thing left at the end of the day...

Re: Ah well...

Oh - El Reg - have you given up completely on finding stories you could plausibly fit around the pic of eeePC beach girl?

are you talking about one of the ones here?

https://www.theregister.com/2008/10/02/eee_girl_saga_continues/

Re: Melting

The replacement ECU was hastily modified by removing the battery and reconnecting it remotely through two fly leads.(just in case!)

we used to do similar in our computer shop... desolder the onboard battery and solder in a replacement AA battery pack... mount the pack to the wall of the case with double-sided tape... some of these replacement packs conveniently came with plugs on the wires that plugged onto the header on the board... otherwise we just soldered the wires to the same places where the battery was soldered...

the main idea was that we 1) removed a possible corrosion problem from the board, 2) made it easy for the user to replace the batteries when needed, and 3) alleviated these types of board-level repairs in the shop... #3 especially because there are inordinate numbers of college trained electronics techs that couldn't solder their way out of a wet tissue...

i can't even begin to count the numbers of boards we had to replace the traces on because of bad batteries leaking and damaging the boards... that was if we could even get to all the damaged traces to replace them... the ones with through-the-board connections were especially painful to deal with when those were also damaged by the leaked corrosives...

Re: Wonder if there's a software developer somewhere...........

get that dosh up front, first! no development done at all until the bank account is loaded.

Re: And this offer comes

"It is easier to get money from poor people" Gunilla Goodmountain.

yep... it is easier for a poor man to get $10 each month for a pair of paper boots than it is for him to save $100 for a better pair of boots that will last for years instead of just 30 days...

Re: no such thing as a stupid question?

The only stupid question is one you ask twice.

unless you have short term memory loss and don't even remember asking the question in the first place... then it is only (possibly) stupid to those being asked the question if it is their 2nd or more time around the barrel...

signed,

yes, i do know where the ANY key is

It hadn't occurred to them to look at where things were plugged in before unplugging them.

parallel printer (DB25) into an external SCSI port (also DB25) on a SCO Unix station... on boot, things didn't work properly and took a couple of hours to figure out... especially after the system reconfigured itself during that initial post-cleaning boot... why? both 16bit cards were addons and both inadvertently and accidentally swapped into each other's slots... it was the slot position in the case, not the specific card, that was remembered for the cables to plug into... first time ever working with SCO Unix... not so much fun as much as informative and quite the learning experience...

Re: Reminds me of a server issue we had.

Or you could have adjusted the HDD delay in the BIOS?

IF the BIOS had such, yes... otherwise, you had to find some other way to delay the BIOS boot... adding more RAM was one solution... putting the HD on a separate power supply and turning it on first followed by the PC power supply a little later was another solution...

Re: How long...

Well, we are all going to die…

yup! birth is a death sentence, after all...

Re: Who got the extra time?

in many cases both, employer and employee, have benefited from W@H...

the employee benefits as noted by other responses... more rest time, more family time, being able to start work less stressed, etc...

the employer benefits by the employees being more productive and able to work their full shift due to the above...

Re: Shortest known period of time

I thought that was a New York Minute?

you're probably right... remember, NYMs are measured in picoseconds by normal humans with a true understanding of how time works...

Re: They're having a laugh

Yeah, just a tweak to the code. And some testing to make sure you don't release a murderer by mistake - could you knock that off in half an hour or so as well?

with proper unit testing, yes...