* Posts by jake

26584 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

jake Silver badge

Re: 3 out of 10 for trying

But they didn't "travel to far off places", they "visited other parts of the British Empire". In their tiny little minds, they never left home. And such a crying shame all those foreigners lived on that good British soil, what?

jake Silver badge

Re: looks horrible

"Could someone possibly provide a precise definition of "cool" in this context?"

Cool in this context means, roughly, Because my friend(s) have one (or do it, or whatever) so ME TOO!!!1! (I'm afraid of thinking for myself)

jake Silver badge

Re: 3 out of 10 for trying

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness ..." --SLC

jake Silver badge

Re: Cost saving?

I see how silly we look to people who only look at the bits the media tell them to look at, yes. Frankly, I feel very, very sorry for them. The world is a much nicer place when you look beyond DearOldTelly.

jake Silver badge

Re: 6.5 foot bed?

For the trip in that post, I drove 320 miles to pick up two horses, loaded them, and drove back. Not only do I have two more clients for my Wife's barn, I also collected a decent transportation fee. Not bad for a day's work. A couple days earlier, a friend and I drove ~400 miles, picked up a 33kW Kubota generator and delivered it to the off-grid house he is building. Then we came home. Total trip: 930 miles, one day.

Some of us don't spend our entire lives within a day's walk.

How was your week?

jake Silver badge

One I forgot ... from 1970.

The Lancia Stratos Zero.

jake Silver badge

Re: looks horrible

"Meanwhile, I'll spend my money on a Polestar"

The coupe looks like an early '90s Ford T-bird gussied up for SEMA, the sedan looks like the Ford Five Hundred slated for 2008, but cancelled when they brought back the Taurus.

jake Silver badge

Re: won't have to worry about it's paint quality.

A friend used to make quite the living doing body work on DeLoreans. He reports that the biggest single problem wasn't dents ... it was getting rid of the millions of little rust streaks after clueless owners washed their car with a brillo pad.

jake Silver badge

Re: Cost saving?

"Americans are the the type"

Painting 330,000,000 people with a single brush? Really? Do you know just how silly that makes you look?

jake Silver badge

Re: 6.5 foot bed?

Last I looked, stainless is about 2.5% denser than mild steel. That doesn't make any kind of steel lightweight, though, now does it?

jake Silver badge

Re: 0-60 times

::sighs:: Not true.

Except the plywood thing, and even then you only got it partially right. For one thing, a sofa/couch/whatevernameyouuseinyourjurisdiction is usually 8 feet. When you have a truck, you are often asked to help move them. And refrigerators. Etc. As an experienced truck owner, I would recommend always having an excuse handy ... "I'm sorry, I'm moving sheets of plywood this weekend" will work nicely.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go pickup a load of fence posts. 8 footers.

jake Silver badge

Re: 3 out of 10 for trying

Just remember that a very small percentage of 330,000,000 is "many" ... so yes, "many" US citizens have a bad case of Woo. However, I rather suspect the on a percentage basis it's the same per population as any other developed country. Direct observation over the years corroborates my suspicion.

jake Silver badge

Re: looks horrible

"For cars we watch (American) movies"

So you lot can't tell the difference between entertainment and real life? That would explain lots.

"for the remainder we depend on ridiculous judgments in stupid court cases which make the news here."

Perhaps it would do one well to understand that "makes the news", by definition, means "completely out of the norm".

You live where you live ... and ex-SAP boss Bill McDermott lives in a house like this

jake Silver badge

Re: It's not about the zip code

Don't be silly. The people in Atherton don't know their neighbors.

jake Silver badge

Re: What is this article?

He could have had a similar house across Hwy 280 in Portola Valley, on 15 (or more!) acres, with a view of the South Bay (or Inversion Layer, weather depending) for less than half that. And his commute would have been roughly the same. Atherton is the single most expensive zipcode (94027) in the United States. Go North one block (Redwood City), or South one block (Menlo Park) and the property values plummet. I don't know about you, but to me a zipcode on my mailbox will never be worth millions of dollars.

jake Silver badge

Re: The nursery comes with a pre-built lemonade stand

The people in Atherton wouldn't allow passing riff-raff on the street. Nor would they allow such a thing as a Lemonade Stand to exist within city limits. In fact, I rather suspect that children in Atherton are highly frowned upon unless they are kept behind closed, sound-proofed doors.

As pressure builds over .org sell-off, internet governance bodies fall back into familiar pattern: Silence

jake Silver badge

Re: “our Yosemite,”

Nope, I'm not mixing up anything. The Long Valley caldera, a couple miles South West of Yosemite, has a threat potential of "Very High". Yellowstone only has a "High" threat potential. Note that this is according to the USGS, not wiki.

https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/long_valley/

https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/

jake Silver badge

Re: Indeed

Vint Cerf put a stop to us attempting to build privacy and security into the early Internet. Seems that the .mil of the day told him that was a no-no for civilians.

jake Silver badge

Re: “our Yosemite,”

"Doesn't Yosemite have a supefvolcano under it?"

No. That would be Long Valley, several miles to the South East.

jake Silver badge

Re: Indeed

"VMS was, and always will be, better than Unix."

Nah. Not even Ken Olsen could convince me of that.

jake Silver badge

Re: Indeed

Cerf sold out ten years ago, when he accepted his pieces of silver from google.

Internet Society's Vint 'father of the 'net' Cerf dodges dot-org sell-off during public Q&A

jake Silver badge

Re: Excellent reporting!

"it's strictly true. RFC1591 defined .org"

Absolutely untrue. RFC 1591 defines nothing.

jake Silver badge

Re: But don't you realise

"Morals? They've heard of it."

In fact, they had some with their Chateaubriand last night.

jake Silver badge

Re: RFC 1591

Have you read RFC 1591 for content? It quite clearly states that it does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Second sentence of the first paragraph.

https://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc?rfc=1591

jake Silver badge

"Is ISOC 'severely harming' its reputation"

Why yes. Yes they are.

Not that they give a crap, there are billions to be fleeced.

You're drinking morning coffee in 2019. These eggheads are in 2119 landing drones on their arms like robo-falconers

jake Silver badge

I believe the phrase many of us are reaching for is ...

... Ohhh-kayyy. Moving on ...

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: South Western Railway

"What have I written that deserves 2 downvotes?"

In all likelihood, both of the union door-openers that know how to read think you are mocking their highly intellectual career choice. Either laugh it off, or allow it to devastate you as the 'orrible indictment on your character that it obviously is.

Or you could just ignore it, relax, and have a homebrew.

jake Silver badge

Re: For some reason this reminds me of...

"All I can say is ABEND"

Did you properly fill out your SYSABEND and SYSDUMP data definition cards? Sounds like you need to allocate more direct access space. Increase the SPACE parameter.

jake Silver badge

Re: I had a routine called 'Call ambulance'

"I wrote an entire Cobol program that read as a narrative of an attempt to seduce Debby Harry in the backseat of a car."

Thus neatly dating yourself (probably).

Have I mentioned I like COBOL? I'll leave my opinion of the inimitable Deborah as an exercise for the reader.

jake Silver badge

Re: True multitasking didn't exist ...

Sorry, Boss. My parser must have glitched; for some reason I thought it was Theo's observation.

You gotta admit this kind of thing sparks a lively sub-thread, though ;-)

jake Silver badge

Re: Assume the worst

Considering that in the early '90s Windows was just a shell on top of DOS, I fail to see your point.

jake Silver badge

Re: Landlines

For junk telephone calls, I just ask 'em if their mommy knows what they do for a living, and if she's proud of them. Sometimes the swearing from the other end is quite gratifying.

jake Silver badge

Re: Assume the worst

And then close your eyes, click your heels together three times while repeating "there's no place like home" ...

jake Silver badge

Re: writing a variable twice.

Hey! Some of us actually liked 6502 assembler! (The PET, on the other hand, should never have been used outside a learning environment ... learning "this thing is a piece of shit", that is.)

"Fortunately our leaders then procured the very first IBM PCs"

For debatable values of "fortunately" ...

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

jake Silver badge

Re: I was the guy who lobbied long and hard ...

I do silence them. I have no idea if anybody has even bothered contacting me that way in years. Couldn't care too much less, either. Totally fucking useless technology ... I have several telephones, call me if you need to chat. If you prefer text, you know my email address.

Everybody who needs to get ahold of me knows how ... and many of those people are also shunning SMS and the like these days.

jake Silver badge

Re: X11R5 jolly japes...

"If you were in JCMB at 8am, you were either"

Never done time in JCMB (either of them), but from experience elsewhere: or grabbing some machine time while the undergrads slept it off.

jake Silver badge

Re: Oh, the joys

Old ladies wear merkins? Post pics or .... wait. Never mind.

jake Silver badge

Re: Oh, the joys

Probably a spotty teenager who doesn't realize or care that sending such messages isn't "fun" to the receiving party.

jake Silver badge

Re: Xroach - such fun we had.

::heh::

Options are always good:

-squish

Enables roach squishing. Point and shoot with any mouse button.

-rgc roach_gut_color

Sets color of the guts that spill out of squished roaches. We recommend yellowgreen.

jake Silver badge

Re: Ah the good old days

"we used to call them DIP switches, can't remember why"

That was "dual in-line package". We still call them that, so far as I know ... I can't remember ever hearing them called DIL. But then I can't remember anybody talking about them at all, outside of us old fogies.

jake Silver badge

I was the guy who lobbied long and hard ...

... to keep the network-aware version of talk out of 4.2BSD, to the point of getting kicked out of a couple so-called "steering committee" meetings. I failed, alas. So I simply nuked it on every machine that I had root on (which in those days was a lot of 'em ...). Made a few folks mad, but surprisingly few ... and that went away after a couple weeks.

I have always hated the incessant, interrupting awfulness of instant messaging. To this day I refuse to use SMS and the like.

It woz The Reg wot won it! Big Blue iron relics make it back to Blighty

jake Silver badge

Re: Too bad India Business Machine has gotten rid of anyone

Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Seriously, there are plenty of folks still around who know how to wrangle a 20. Including a couple of the folks involved in the project under discussion. 55 ain't old.

jake Silver badge

Talk to your local Uni, Dr.S ... most of them have access to that kind of hardware, and will be willing to share if they are allowed to have a copy of that kind of thing.

jake Silver badge

Re: Congrats!

I know folks who would consider such a collection of hardware pornography all by itself. Shit, people drool & get all sweaty over my aging Sun 3/470 ... and that's just watching the Sun logo screensaver bounce around!

jake Silver badge
Pint

Dancing rodents all around.

The world needs to see more of this kind of thing.

jake Silver badge

Re: Hats off to you chaps

No, but porting ADVENT to it would teach you a lot about programming it :-)

We don't usually sugar-coat the news but... Alien sugars found in Earth-bound meteorites

jake Silver badge

Re: Best petri dish

" Dunkin donuts exist on earth, but I doubt they exist elsewhere in the universe."

It's probably not called "dunkin dobuts" ... but when you look at the chemistry involved, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that there is a dunkin-like high-fat, high-sugar confectionery-esque item that can be traded for in one way or another elsewhere in the universe,

Think about it. How do you make a doughnut? Start with the grain that gets milled into flour. How likely is it that elsewhere in the Universe there are plants that produce seeds with a carbohydrate energy storage mechanism? How likely is it that intelligent life somewhere other than here has figured out how to mill it? Etc.

I'd go as far as to say that given intelligent life and time, something like dunkin donuts is inevitable.

jake Silver badge

We ARE proof of that. But so are the dinosaurs chickens.

jake Silver badge

Re: Sugar's a start

Thanks, Muscleguy. We never would have known without your help.

No wonder cops are so keen on Ring – they can slurp your doorbell footage with few limits, US senators complain

jake Silver badge

Re: Expectation of Privacy: That's a Consituional Right in the USA

"YES, YOU DO have a right to privacy!"

However, here in the US you do NOT have the right to not be photographed by anybody with a camera when you are in a public space. Which is kind of what we are discussing at the moment.

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