* Posts by defiler

1469 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2010

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

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Re: Mouse ball sucked up by vaccum cleaner?!

Only decent mice had the steel balls coated with rubber. Cheap ones had plastic balls that might as well have been teflon...

Having had an Archimedes, I can attest to the difference between the Acorn mouse and the Clares mouse.

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Re: How I met your mother

Come on, even in Scotland we don't have Rosé in cans! They're too small...

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How I met your mother

First time I met my wife I inadvertently knocked a can of Irn Bru into her keyboard...

Starship bloopers: In touching tribute to Tesla shares, Musk proto-craft tumbles – as Bezos' Blue Origin rocket lifts off

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Re: ...pretend to be astronauts.

I think the typical astronaut pilot does at least a fair amount, but probably not as much as a GA pilot in a Cessna... Alan Shepard, on the other hand, was pretty-much a ballistic trajectory. I'd be surprised if there was much piloting to be done in that instance.

Before I get shot down in flames, I know he was a very accomplished pilot / aviator. I also know he'd have to have balls of steel to sit on top of that Mercury/Redstone contraption. I also know that on Apollo 14 he would have had to fly and land the LEM. Without Mechjeb.

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...pretend to be astronauts.

it intends to eventually take moneybags tourists to the edge of space and back home again, so they can pretend to be astronauts.

Let's not be too mean here. Alan Shepard didn't really go very far in Mercury, and I'd like to see anybody stand up and claim he wasn't an astronaut before Apollo 14.

Sure, he worked for his ticket rather than buying it, but since it appears to an an arbitrary line in the sky...

Court orders moribund ZX Spectrum reboot firm's directors to stump up £38k legal costs bill

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Money wasted?

Money is never wasted - it just moves around to be used on other things.

Oh... Legal costs... Wasted it is then.

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

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Re: FX8350 4.2ghz OC Black Edition

That's kind of not the argument at all. The argument is that if you were performing a large amount of FP work the performance would be strangled by the availability of resources. There will always be a bottleneck, but the accusation here is that the bottleneck was purposefully introduced but not made clear to purchasers.

Similar to putting a restrictor onto the inlet manifold of an engine - it reduces the airflow, and creates a bottleneck. The rest of the system could run much better, but when you're reliant on that inlet you're dragged down. If that were put in quietly by the manufacturer without updating the published spec then they'd be in trouble.

I also have the 8350 - great CPU, but a but thirsty on power. I remember reading about the shared FP units when it came out. I also saw the benchmarks and the price and decided that it was the best poke I'd get for the money. I'd suggest that if these people were reliant on FP they should have paid attention to those aspects. Or just grabbed the great price (was for me, at least) and sucked it up on the speed.

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Re: /proc/cpuinfo Never Lies (or does it?)

Strikes me that there's no reason for that downvote. A citation is exactly what's going to be available if this runs to a verdict. A citation is exactly what's required to prevent it going to trial (or to finish the trial in opening statements).

For me, a core on a multi-core CPU has always meant that I can run an additional thread without impacting performance. And it appears from other comments that there are very few instances where the shared FPU would actually impact performance. So squeezing extra instructions into unused silicon (like HT) would not justifiably be a core, but the extra integer units in Bulldozer would be. But that's entirely my opinion. We shall wait and see if it's backed up by law.

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The Clinton connection

Is that like defining "sex" when Bill Clinton was on trial?

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

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Turbo display

My first PC (moving from Acorn) was a P90 on an Intel Plato board (self-build job). The Turbo display was a 3-digit 9-segment display for showing the frequency. I set mine to switch between Foo and Bar.

And then used the "reserved" jumper to hit 100MHz. RAW POWERRRR!!!

PCI and 16MB of RAM too. I think it was 1993 - Magic Carpet was my first game on it, and I was the only person I knew who could play it at 640x480.

Vodafone signs $550m deal with IBM to offload cloud biz

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Outsourced downsizing

That's all IBM means to me any more - a professional downsizing and redundancy system. Voda have just outsourced.

Good luck to those in the inevitable firing line.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

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Re: It is possible to produce an idiot proof interface.

Akhter... Akhter...

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.

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Re: It is possible to produce an idiot proof interface.

To be fair, I worked in John Menzies in the early 1990s, and the people there (while very nice) were not exactly ready to deal with the Computer Revolution. My boss could barely deal with working a till...

I remember when the Lottery machines came out, and there was an 'issue', which was really a lack of understanding. One of my colleagues was on the phone to Camelot (or whomever) trying to get to the bottom of it, but the machine wouldn't connect. I asked how the machine plugged in - into the phone line. What, the same phone line that you're using for that call...? She finished the call and the machine sprung to life. What a surprise...

Most munificent Apple killed itself with kindness. Oh. Really?

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She's had a rubbery "bumper" cover on it since new, and dropped it on occasion. This time, though, it landed on the curved edge of the screen. That's it - new screen time.

Pricey as hell to change, though, so she's running her old S6 just now. Just like I'm running my Note 3 until my new screen arrives.

We'll have a look at screens once I've done mine and she's confident enough to let me near it!

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Lucky you. My Huawei is on its second screen, and the third is in the post. And I don't much care about a cracked screen unless it stops me operating the thing. (Shard of glass in my fingertip was unpleasant, though.)

This time I did it a good one at New Year. Still, cheaper to replace the screen in that than the wife's S8 that she's just dropped too!

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

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Re: The FCC, eh?

That is indeed the one.

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Joke

Reverse engineering?

Then we could build our own universe, complete in every detail. And without an EU. And Mexico can pay for it.

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Re: The FCC, eh?

Careful with the Small Beer...

Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grenadier,

Who caught his death by drinking cold small Beer,

Soldiers be wise from his untimely fall

And when ye're hot drink Strong or none at all.

Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

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Fastest I ever saw on dialup

I *think* it was 0131 3535 666 for one of the Demon POPs. I turned off compression and error correction, got 54666bps (fittingly) and ping down to 85ms.

And so to QuakeWorld!

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

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Re: Peckham Spring

I personally like the bit where they claimed:

"It's just that Dasani is as pure as water can get - there are different levels of purity."

I'm pretty confident that drinking demineralised water is extraordinarily bad for you...

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

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Re: Genius at work...

He's smarter than you give him credit for. QR codes have error-correction built into them. He's maybe ramped that right up to level H.

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If the dude was able to come up with a QR-code for an extortion letter, he/she is most likely IT literate

Umm - not so much. I used to know a guy who started a company creating QR codes for peoples' adverts, business cards, whatever. I think my shoes are more IT-literate.

Note - that does not make him a bad person. It just means he wouldn't know a MAC address from a serial number.

Hubble 'scope camera breaks down amid US govt shutdown, forcing boffins to fix it for free

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Re: Easily solved

but those need some element of goodwill to make it work

And from 4000 miles away, that's the problem I see. The two sides of the political divide don't seem to realise that they're there for the people, not for their own ideologies. There needs to be some kind of compromise. We get the wall, and we'll let you have universal healthcare. But we all agree that we need a few less bombers to pay for it. That sort of thing.

As it stands from here, it looks like each side genuinely believes that they are messengers from God sent down to cure the ills of humanity, and they believe the other side is made up of a big, thick soup of evil with croutons. What one side says, the other side will vehemently deny/refuse. Even if it means promising that black is white.

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Re: the Eagle Nebula dubbed the Pillars of Creation

Dammit, Dabbb! _Now_ you tell me I didn't have to calibrate my monitor for infra-red?

Well that was a waste of a morning.

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Nah, mate. I'm blaming Trump for shutting down a significant chunk of the US government. Wilfully and deliberately. You could point a finger at the Democrats for not ponying up the cash for The Wall, but they only loaded the gun - Trump pulled the trigger. Pretty sure that Obama was responsible for neither of these actions (although I'm confident I know what side of the argument he's on). In the end, the blame falls to Trump. After all, if you're going to drag ex-presidents into it, as Harry Truman said "The buck stops here."

Anyway, I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic to give much of a shit about US Federal Budgets. We've got our own troupe of baboons trying to fuck our country. I'm just pointing out that Trump very much has a hand in how quickly this is investigated and sorted.

/me wishing very much that the USA could go back to being a little cooperative between Democrats and Republicans, because then one-track idiots wouldn't play the "the guy I voted for could beat up the guy you voted for" bullshit card - it's so fucking draining.

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Well, if Trump allows the government to get back to work then they can at least figure out where they stand. Whilst he sits on his hands, the staff that could be working out how to fix it are basically forced to sit on theirs too.

Would be a shame if they couldn't get it back on its proverbial feet, though.

Steamer closets, flying cars, robot boxers, smart-mock-cock ban hypocrisy – yes, it's the worst of CES this year

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Re: Steamer Closet

I shit in your cupboard. Sorry.

Who cracked El Chapo's encrypted chats and brought down the Mexican drug kingpin? Er, his IT manager

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Re: The FBI paid him back in return for his services

Yeah - the Yellow Pages ads, remember?

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

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Re: A file so large...

Bear in mind that back in Days of Yore, a PST was limited to 2GB, and would throw a bit strop when it hit that wall, in much the same way as a car will throw a big strop when it races into a wall... I suspect the IT folks were trying to shield themselves from that kind of horror, without realising that they'd made it 1.5GB more likely.

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Like leaving documents on top of the bin

My dad did that once with a whole bunch of weekly progress reports for a petrochemical construction project, as it was the only available surface. Wasn't best pleased when the cleaners disposed of it... Luckily you could look out of the window to see the progress, and it wasn't something signed off by the client. But then he's managed to be a fairly lucky chap when it's counted. Could fall into the Clyde and come out with a salmon...

New side-channel leak: Boffins bash operating system page caches until they spill secrets

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Re: I'm curious...

This, and entirely this.

I'm just having a jibe at the people who are blaming Intel and Microsoft like they're the lizard people from the centre of the Earth, deliberately tainting everything with bugs, and demanding that everything is fixed entirely before downside money again. As you say, it'll never be fixed entirely. There'll always be another rock to look under.

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I'm curious...

Are all of those people putting off their CPU purchases also going to put off VM deployments until the paying system is fixed?

You're right. These problems all need fixed, but the world has to keep turning in the meantime.

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

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Re: holograraphic love dungeon layout

Holographic Love Dungeon for Workgroups?

Found yet another plastic nostalgia knock-off under the tree? You, sir, need an emulator

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Re: From the back of the room

Me too. We can sit at the back of the room and smugly point to our 32-bit machines that could do in software almost anything the Amiga could do in hardware. And then lament the way it took ages for games to be ported.

Speedball 2, anyone?

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Compatibility was equally impressive

Well, it's UAE underneath - you'd expect it to be spot-on.

I remember (vaguely - it was between 10 and 15 years ago, I think) one of the then-owners (or perhaps not since there's been so much dispute) made a formal decree that UAE was "officially" an Amiga, and software could not be described as Amiga-compatible unless it ran correctly on it.

So, it turns out that your emulated Amiga isn't an emulated Amiga - it's a real Amiga.

(Still something nice about using original hardware, though - cracking out Virtua Fighter on a 32X, for example, is much better than using NeoGenesis.)

Google-whisperers beat reCaptcha voice challenge with 90% success rate

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Coat

Re: idiots like this

Mean while, they could at least make the dam images interesting.

Select all of the boxes that show images of dams.

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Audio Captcha? Bloody hell!

Last time I tried one of these I couldn't figure it out on three separate tries. And they can get a single website to beat it 90% of the time? I must suck!

Millennium Buggery: When things that shouldn't be shut down, shut down

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Coffee/keyboard

Putting off the updates for every whim basically now means that you don't get the option to put off the updates. Ever.

If it's really as farcical as you say, get out. Get your CV all polished up and move on. They'll just keep expecting you to pull miracles out of your arse every time. I've been there. I've done it. You're totally overlooked and unappreciated if they overrule you each and every time you schedule work on your own time. That's just toxic, and you'll never change it. And when a problem inevitably happens, it'll all be your fault.

I've been that guy performing an in-place upgrade of Exchange Server on a Wednesday night because the boss didn't want to use a VPN to pick up his email, and neither did his mate in Dubai. I've been the guy reinstalling the Linux boxes over Christmas via the iLOs from home. I've been the guy dealing with one group of people moaning that the backups are interrupting their work at midnight and you can't possibly do work on the servers in the evening, and another group starting at 8am, 4 timezones ahead of you. Nobody cares, and the best you'll get is some arse going "I don't care what everyone says - you're alright. <arf arf>". Looking back on it, I should have been out there a lot sooner.

Fuck 'em. Go. Run. Only look back from a safe distance to watch the flames. Good luck!

Icon for ESCAPE!!

Racing at the speed of light, Sage superhero bursts through the door...

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Re: Not me...

Worked about 5 hours extra, but managed to get to work the following morning, only about 10 minutes late.

I've been that guy. I'm sure we've all been that guy at some point, but I was that guy who watched the multi-site Active Directory fall to bits one Thursday, spent from noon until about 9:30am Friday trying to fix it, got home, napped for a half-hour, went to the airport and flew to the other site, worked there until 10pm, <hotel>, back onsite at 7am Saturday, worked until 9pm and had by then found the cause of the problems and fixed it, <hotel>, back onsite at 9am Sunday, worked through until about 3 getting everything tidied up at that end, back home, back into the first site around 7pm, worked through until 9:30am Monday, made sure that everyone could get logged in and everything was nice and stable, grabbed my coat and headed to the door to get an earful from a senior member of staff asking where I thought I was going.

Would have been nice to get an apology...

Also would have been nice if Bulldog hadn't spuriously broken the MTU on the SDSL at the remote site, which was the reason that domain replication traffic, file transfers and emails had suddenly gone to rat-shit, but pings were absolutely fine across the VPN...

I never realised I could function with so little rest. Good practice for kids!

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Deeply concerned about staff downtime

Nothing generates staff downtime quite like rushing a job. One mistake is all it takes.

Not blaming the individual doing the work, but his management should have been prepared to swallow a little idle time to get it done safely.

Also, if you're running around the office fast enough to tear your shirt off, you're running too fast in an office. That's my Health and Safety announcement for the day.

Staff sacked after security sees 'suspect surfer' script of shame

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Re: Perhaps they should apply the same rules on PCs on the Parliamentary Estate

If you can think of it, the ancient Greeks had a word for it.

Rule 34, isn't it?

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Mid 1990s at a solicitor

They had Netware 3, so it was an IPX network. Then there was an IPX->IP gateway, which (of course) logged website access. One of the senior partners was flagged in the logs on gay porn sites (interesting because he was married with kids), during office hours, and frequenting the subscription areas (which were paid with his company card).

We passed it up the chain as an external IT provider. The Managing Partner mentioned porn browsing (at the time she didn't know it was gay subscription whatever blah blah), and half the room went very pink and quiet, apparently.

Yeah - we use WebTitan these day - MITM for HTTPS. The cert is deployed by GPO. Fun, fun, fun...

Merry Christmas!

Techie basks in praise for restoring workforce email (by stopping his scripting sh!tshow)

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Re: I learnt to test my WHERE clauses on a DELETE with a SELECT first

I tend to favour select count(id), so I just get the number of records. Usually that's enough to give me a good indication of whether I'm about to set fire to the week.

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Beware recursion

It has the ability (and knack) to make fools of us all...

Introducing 'Happy Quit', where Chinese smokers are text-spammed into nicotine abstinence

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Re: "which of the two habits is more antisocial"

I have smoked duck

I read 'dick'. Shit, I need a holiday.

Dev's telnet tinkering lands him on out-of-hour conference call with CEO, CTO, MD

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In Soviet Russia, Internet browses you!

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Re: Backing off

One of our clients used to use a Mac email application named after a bird you'd send down a mine to check the air.

Whenever his password expired, it would try to authenticate over 100 times a second. And that's across the internet - not even locally. His account would be locked in an instant...

We told him to stop using it, once the devs didn't seem to bothered about fixing it.

Roll a diplomacy check to win the election: Vote tie resolved by a D20

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Re: Check the die

then throw the die a bazillion times

Sadly by that point you have a tiny, smooth sphere and no markings left.

Peak tech! Bacon vending machine signals apex of human invention

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Re: Strangely enough ...

Dark chocolate dipped streaky bacon

Not remotely surprising. I remember reading about a delicacy in Georgia (think Tbilisi, not Atlanta) which was cooked pork fat covered in really dark chocolate. First impression was "eww", and after a minute "oooh". Bacon can't be that different.

Also, The Simpsons came up with bacon and fudge, which sounds amazing.

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With a side helping of strawberries?

Which will be treated as garnish and left, given the last time I saw Americans eating bacon...