Posts by MyffyW

Re: Yeah right

The one I find most amusing is the advert for the car I already drive. Not accessories, or servicing, but encouraging me to buy another. Because you totally do that on a whim...

Re: Is it just me

Some of my friends did get me listening to Alice Cooper in my formative years - does that count as heavy metal contamination?

you're poison running through my veins!

Yes, my dramatic story arc had already predicted fun and games with differential earths. Remembering fondly (sort of) the "earth" we had at one plant which registered about 100V. Well it kept you on your toes ....

Re: Letter

yeah ... it's the insanely long office leases. Maybe flogging off our HQ building and signing up to a faustian pact with a property management company wasn't such good business after all. Who knew!

That is a truly awesome - and humbling - XKCD.

ty

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

Canada Geese can be viscous, it's true,

Comes out when they go to the loo.

[The writer is now receiving treatment for PTSD after a flashback to visits to IBM North Harbour and the "landscaped" lakes and gardens]

Re: Grok

Grok is definitely the answer, if the question is "how can I further enshitten the platform formerly known as Twitter?".

Re: It does

For those of a certain age in tech our incomes will have increased by a large multiple over the last couple of decades, however that has nothing to do with long hours, and a lot to do with education, training and realising the benefits of working well with others.

Over a long enough period of time long hours achieve nothing in and of themselves. And billionaires bring precisely zero insights to the discussion: their experience is as divorced from the argument as that of the low-caste "manual scavengers" that die in their sewers.

Re: Safe

Kahn's "stop the proles from travelling" cameras are bad not a thing

They might be describable as "stop the proles from choking to death", but I would prefer to avoid hyperbole and stick to the facts.

Re: Gorgeous aircraft

Watched it coming into land at Manchester a few times, so graceful. And one dark evening I remember it going over our house (a good twenty miles downrange from the airport) with the landing gear stuck and having to fly at low altitude - my goodness! What a noise!

Re: Spaceship

Well ... Nixon also curtailed the Apollo programme, which given it's experimental nature (and if left to run for long enough) would possibly have had further casualties. Space is dangerous. Nixon was an autocratic old fsck who was rightly removed from high office. But his culpability in Astronaut-hazing is not quite so clear cut.

Re: Is the minivan an approved Reg unit of volume?

Agree, I think somebody at the El Reg eyrie needs to check their Maths. 9000m3 is positively roomy :-)

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

Likewise, and whilst I suspect I know which particular berry, just checking in case you are still an Apricot user?

Re: Why

Sure, it sucks to employ them, or be employed by them. But, being Prime Minister isn't the well paid gig you think it is. You need a spouse with Infosys-wealth just to heat a swimming pool in North Yorkshire these days.

Re: Imagine the powerhouse $$INSERT_NAME_HERE$$ would become

Yes, oh for the statecraft of a Brezhnev or Deng Xiaoping.

I'll be honest I was confused by the "Loan starts from $180, payments as low as $1.33". By my Maths (and forgetting about interest rates for just one sec) that's a touch over 135 installments. Are repayments made daily? Or weekly? Doesn't sound like that much of a short time period.

Just hope they shop around for their $180 device on which they make their Google Pay payments

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

I would love to see an emulated "digital twin" of Voyager. I'm imagining this as something like SAL 9000, even though I know it's probably closer to a ZX81.

SAL-9000: Will I dream?

Dr. Chandra: Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL...just as I often do.

Re: What would George think

Well it might be something like:

"My case against [Musk] is that [he] writes mentally dishonest propaganda and degrades literary criticism to mutual arse-licking."

Re: ASPI

The survey is very likely a propaganda exercise, the El Regarticle, not so much.

Unfortunately they were only insured for third party, fire and brimstone

Whataboutery is soooo last year, hun.

Re: New Reg unit?

Strictly speaking, I think it's 1 Éire

[says the half-Welsh girl with an incomplete command of her own mother tongue]

Re: The use of generative AI

'twas also my thoughts, I suspect you might be right @Dr_Who.

I suspect human civilisation is a massive chunk of not-quite-beta-release-quality code on some nerdy teenagers computing platform in a dimension that is unimaginable to us. Somewhere around 2014 - 2016 said teenager decided to make a crazy mod pack (code name: ORANGE-VLAD-SHITGIBBON) to see if it would break the sim. I'm still unconvinced as to whether it will crash and burn.

Re: Cats and Vultures

Just imagine those first few years after the extiniction-level event that killed the Dinosaurs ... all that rotting dino-meat lying around for the proto-mice and rats and cats to eat.

Now really picture that putrefying, scurrying melee and you pretty much have ex-Twitter / Xitter of today.

Re: At some point...

Starship will continue to explode, to the gleeful delight of onlookers, until it eventually doesn't

Upvote for that beautifully crafted sentence, sir. Made me giggle.

Re: nxworld

Just saw your reference to Taylor Series and had a traumatic flashback to second year Engineering Maths [shudder]

11

....but these ones go to 11

It's one louder, isn't it?

Re: £4bn here, £4bn there...

I think £4bn would get you 8 miles of HS2 (approximately) although almost certainly not the final 8 miles into Euston.

Re: This is where capitalism has failed.

It embarrasses me to say, but in the last decade I'm not sure we're even as classy as dancing round our handbag

Cause and Effect

Council tries to deploy Oracle. Council files for bankruptcy. Larry still laughing all the way to the bank.

If the Saudis eventually tire of Musk, he might be well advised to steer clear of the ambassadors reception. My mate Jamal got a lot more than a Ferrero Rocher for his troubles.

Re: Interesting

All of this load shifting stuff is utter bollocks.

You are entitled to your opinions and beliefs, but a career working in the process industries has informed my knowledge that demand shifting is something that heavy industry users do plan for, and did even before renewables were a significant portion of the energy mix.

Re: Pi on the moon

I cannot recommend watching The Green Mile for imaginative use of a Moon Pie. But It does appear I might have mentioned it, all the same.

It's a good job that eco-fanatics aren't pushing us into a brave new world of having an unreliable power supply then, isn't it?

sigh ... or indeed that continued burning of fossil fuels isn't driving more and more extreme weather events.