Posts by jake

"Of particular concern is the sheer number of ex- Prime Ministers who must now have nuclear launch codes too."

I'm absolutely certain that's not an issue.

Re: We can only hope for beheading, just the other way around

You know what they say about stopped clocks.

Re: We can only hope for beheading, just the other way around

Put that on Pay Per View and solve all of the UK's financial problems in one swell foop.

Re: Export please!

Time flies like and arrow, and all that?

Re: Face like thunder

Perhaps the Ministers (including the Prime Minister) should be made to serve salads to poor people one day per month, as a reminder that once elected they are supposed to leave their Salad Days behind them.

_{Might as well do something with that old lettuce ...}

Re: seeing how things work (or don't) over there...

The problem with removing Orange Idiot in Chief early was that his replacement, that fucking nutcase Pence, was/is so bad that not even the conservative ultra-right old guard wanted him in the oval office, not even for a couple of months ...

Why do you think Cheeto hired him for the job? Made his spot in the White House bullet-proof for four years.

Re: Free speech, duh

I still use "groovy" occasionally :-)

Re: Free speech, duh

"Or is that only Silicon Valley startups?"

What, you don't have one?

Shirley you didn't waste 2 years of Covid lockdown by not learning to brew your own beer?

Re: Free speech, duh

I'm just surprised at the lack of "Conservative Party tries to fix hernia with Truss, fails miserably. Nausea, vomiting and fever continue throughout the Party." or words to that effect.

Re: Please help me here

Lis, welcome to Bootnotes.

ElReg is a RedTop, they have to publish this kind of thing once in a while or they get kicked out of the guild. Thus, Bootnotes.

_{Besides, all work and no play makes for a dull Vulture.}

Re: "something only 15 percent of boomers and 31 percent of Gen X admitted to"

"They can't survive without auto-correct and predictive text"

From what I've seen, most of the people who rely on such things can't survive WITH it.

Re: EY did not define ranges for the four generations included in the report.

"pretty much every treasure hunting documentary"

Consider the source. It's not like the producers, actors, script-writers and intended targets are the sharpest tools in the shed.

For the record, I've only heard it called "cache" by the vast majority of the population (the Jr. High set has just discovered geo caching ... ).

Re: Rapper Ye – formerly known as Kanye West –

Probably a mispleling of the redneck "yee".

_{Would make about as much sense as any of the rest of this nonsense ...}

Re: ::yawns::

I suggest you dig a little deeper into the FCC. It's about more than your silly little backyard station, country or otherwise.

Re: ::yawns::

Did you not see "such as it is"?

It should be obvious to the meanest of intelligence that "left" and "right" are just labels that make it a trifle easier to discuss politics here in the US. If this confuses you, may I suggest you sit quietly and observe until you understand what is going on?

_{Wingnuts. I'm surrounded by wingnuts ...}

Re: ::yawns::

Both the "left" and "right" (such as they are here in the US) have been co-opted by extremists who use the most ignorant of the GreatUnwashed to do their dirty work. It's time the vast majority of us in the Center re-take politics.

And no, the Greens aren't the answer, they hate actual people doing people stuff and are even more radical than the established extremists. The Independents are a joke. The rest are ignorable single-issue also-rans, and always will be.

What we need is a modern equivalent of the Bull Moose Party. Perhaps we could start by agitating to split up the EPA and the FCC, just to get normal people used to working together again? Here in the Western US, splitting up the BLM[0] would help ...

[0] That's the Bureau of Land Management, put away your rope, lefty.

Re: Perceived ant-semitic posts?

Wait a sec ... Did he really write "death con three"?

::hits DDG::

Why yes, yes he did. I guess he's even more ignorant than I thought. That's difficult.

The one inviolate rule in such shared computer resource spaces is and was "No gaming if people are waiting!".

I would have (and have, and no doubt will again) reached over and turned off the machine.

Re: point of order

If he was ofloading the code to be compiled on another machine, it probably wasn't MS Fortran.

Re: When I were a lad

Luxury!

We toggled switches and read Blinkenlights ... and we liked it!

The "640K" quote is often falsely attributed to Bill Gates, implying it was a DOS issue. Actually, it was a hardware issue with the original IBM PC. In all reality, when configured properly (and with an add-in card) MS-DOS running on the original 5150 would happily access around 760K of "low" RAM (if you could afford it!).

The real "should be enough" quote was from Steve Jobs, when demoing the original Apple Macintosh at the Home Brew Computer Club, a couple weeks before the official unveiling. He said "128K should be more than enough for home users" ... and he had a point. We had flight simulators running in 64K of RAM back then.

Re: Suspected of playing games?

Why bother ... by 1987, almost all DOS machines that were doing serious work had a pirated copy of Norton Commander on them. Failing that, it would have been on a floppy somewhere within easy reach. Took almost no time to manually eyeball a 10 meg hard drive.

_{Not that I endorse pirating software, mind ... just telling it like it was.}

Re: point of order

Oh, please. Nobody used edlin for much of anything in 1987 ... or the fiveish years prior, for that matter. It was one of the first things that people wrote replacements for on DOS.

MicroEMACS was available from 1985, and a lot of people stuck with writing Fortran on a PC used it. At least around here (Unis and assorted proto-SillyConValley companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, SLAC, LLNL & etc.). By the time of this story, there were at least half a dozen other decent editors for DOS to choose from in the free/shareware BBS archives (or even FTP sites, if you knew how). I used my own full-screen editor that used a subset of the vi keybindings, which I ingeniously called vi.

Trust me, I wrote plenty of code in FORTRN77 on a DOS machine before offloading it to the compiler, usually running on a DEC box of one description or another. Still do, occasionally. Lots of money maintaining the old shit.

_{Where there's muck there's brass ...}

"But what to expect from the UI designers of Windows 8.0 and Windows 11..."

That wasn't Designers, that was Marketers.

Re: To be fair

"Windows didn't support networking back then"

DOS had internal networking ability starting with PC-DOS 3.1, released in March of '85. The DOS shell called "Windows 1.0" was released to manufacturing in November of '95. DOS networking worked just fine while Windows was running from the year dot (not that anybody cared in the early days).

"They could have and should have deprecated it _{(executables embedded in documents)} long ago."

I'd say it should never have been done in the first place. The obvious security headache is obvious.

"So what if it offer absolutely no advantages over the phone I had 5 years ago."

My desk telephone is about 70 years old. It's a 1950s Western Electric Model 500. It does everything I need a telephone in that location to do, except DTMF, which was easily rectified with a little circuitry and a couple switches and buttons. (My telco still supports pulse dialing, the DTMF option is handy for accessing voice-mail torture devices "helpfully" provided by third parties.)

Re: Does no-one read science fiction any more?

No cocaine and hookers?

Re: Call me old fashioned

"he fatal flaw with books is they can't stuff adverts down your throat"

Some cheap paperbacks had adverts in them back in the '70s and early '80s. Prior to that, ACE (especially their "ACE Double" line) often had adverts in them in the 1950s. In the Great Depression (1930s (ish)), some book publishers managed to help stay afloat by inserting ads in books. I have a bible from this era, printed in Wisconsin, with ads (and recipes) for Gold Medal Flour and milk, cream, butter and eggs of a local dairy bound in. The mind boggles ...

We're past overdue for a new wave of adverts in books ... but that's probably because today's kids can't read and thus have no use for books.

Re: Call me old fashioned

"The images are better and I don't get eye strain or motion sickness."

Indeed. And the concept translates nicely to the online world ...

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

Re: Canal locks

Assuming the lock cycled constantly, day and night, you'd get, what, about 240 times more power if you roofed it with solar panels.

Well, maybe a trifle less in dear old Blighty.

Re: Magic Energy?

"As always, California may be the Special Case. Not only do they need the energy more, they have the large-drop water systems rushing down the mountains to the sea."

We've been using that large drop to generate electricity since the year dot. As an extreme example, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir supplies not only water, but also electricity, to the City of San Francisco (and a few other cities along the way who had the foresight to pay into the project in the late teens and early '20s). Until we build more damns, we're about tapped out. (Auburn, anyone?)

Likewise, we've had wind turbines for a long time. All the profitable places are taken ... except along the Coast. The California Coastal Commission will not approve any, so once again California is about tapped out.

We need to build nuclear plants. Lots of 'em. And we need to start building 'em forty or fifty years ago.

_{No, California's not out of flat land. We just use most of it to feed the rest of the nation. Different, tho' related, issue.}