Posts by Nick Kew

The elbow is sharper than the arse, and is given to shoving off anyone who asks embarrassing questions.

Payee Mc PayeeFace

I think I'd've gone for a halfway house.

Admit, "sorry, yes, we got a bit carried away". But point out that this was about morale: having a bit of a laugh being an antidote to tedium and depression. And that, as you say, noone knew it had any consequence.

Not that I'd've gone sweary in the first place. My imagination would more likely have veered off into nature or literature or fantasy worlds for inspiration.

Re: Shadows....

It might, if it's seen such examples in training.

I've seen several individuals with startlingly mismatched eyes. Dogs, not humans. Perhaps because humans frown upon incest for ourselves but inflict monstrous in-breeding on dogs.

Re: Computer sound is on in an open space ?

Around 1991 our sparcstations were particularly loquacious, powered by pranks like

cat very-silly-fragment.wav > remote:/dev/audio

By the mid-90s that was all gone, as remote sounds were disabled by default, along with opening applications on a remote machine's display.

Re: institutionally autistic

Was that addressed to me? Institutionally autistic is a play on the phrase "institutionally racist", which entered the language here in Blighty after a high-profile report used the phrase to describe London's police. And a 600-page book - in a context that indicates it's one of many - suggests a staggering lack of empathy for the poor buggers expected to abide by the contents.

Re: chortle

Like the time I had a conference presentation to give, only to find that my laptop was incompatible with the conference's OHP? I actually tried very hard to test that in advance (and fix as necessary), but was thwarted by the perfectly legitimate claims of earlier speakers from the moment the room was opened.

After that I took to uploading material to the 'net[1] ahead of time for maximal alternative access methods.

[1] The term "cloud" wasn't yet in use. Can't remember how widely-available wifi was at the time.

Talking of Pallas ...

Does springing whole from Zeus' head count as a descendant for these purposes?

Not that one would want to relegate Athene to a mere moon.

Re: Who cares?

The time it takes you to load a webpage is not necessarily down to the speed of your 'net connection.

My 'net connection has been 4G for the past year, and it's a huge improvement on Virgin cable (which was fine when it worked, but all-too-often didn't). I'm not looking for more speed, but if 5G improves other things (I understand capacity is a core objective), that sounds like a good reason for it.

Re: Watch out for geological samples

There was a story floating around in the 1970s about a consignment of luminous watches that was due to be disposed of at Windscale/Sellafield, before someone pointed out that the radiation levels were higher than they could legally handle. They had to be sent to Aldermaston instead.

Around that time my schoolboy self inherited a luminous watch from my grandfather. On dark nights, it could be the brightest thing around, and occasionally served as a torch on the country lanes where for a mad year or two I used to jog.

Re: This is really very easy

Have you read the actual Amazon figures? I haven't: I've only read the story here.

El Reg clearly call the number a profit. The one use of the words "net income" is very loose, and I wouldn't read anything into it unless I had some external reason to suppose it was not in fact a profit as reported.

As for investing sufficient to avoid tax, I've done that myself for quite a few years. Not on Amazon's scale of course, but I've had some big tax rebates (the biggest in five figures UK£) and my tax-free dividend income roughly speaking pays the rent.

Re: turtle-fodder

That's a slander! Why on Earthin Space would Great A'tuin home in on a dunghill?

Re: We found an easy solution...

Mastiffs are far too friendly, even when very hungry.

But then, perhaps that's just what I see. I interact with real animals, not virtual ones, when out and about.

Re: The private sector ? Act with fairness ? Have you heard of Facebook ?

Seems to me that what is at issue here is that the liberal elite are getting all huffed up that somebody other than their political organisations might be able to influence.

Agreed, this is democratisation they're worrying about. Echoes of the Establishment reaction to Gutenberg, and many other historic events.

But I'm not convinced by your describing the likes of Rupert Murdoch as a "Liberal" elite!

Re: Iomega

Guess I was fortunate my iomega drive died before it had acquired anything more than a bit of test data.

What a total waste of money. Or in this context, what a rip-off.

Re: Looking at the source code is nice and all

Bugs can lurk.

But would you try to slip something deliberate in to an open codebase where every commit goes out immediately to a bunch of active developers, as well as of course being on public display to security researchers and AI tools? That's an altogether different proposition!

Compare the amount of (hostile) scrutiny Huawei is getting to any of its rivals, and tell us which is the safer bet?

With (say) Cisco, you have all the same risks as Huawei, plus the additional risk that someone is smuggling in a backdoor (NSA made them an offer they can't refuse) invisible to anyone outside a small team within the company. That makes the hurdles to finding it thousands of times higher: you need a Snowden instead.

Re: So Lynch lied

Evidence previously reported on El Reg tells us at least two existing-or-former HP directors were among those to say the deal was mad and vastly overpriced.

As did others, like Oracle.

I think I said at the time, this looks like an ill-judged MeToo from HP, trying to play with IBM and Oracle (who had recently acquired hardware capability in the form of Sun) in high-end enterprise stuff.

Turtles all the way down

Who decides what is 'terrorist' ...

Well, if they view the material to make that decision, then they won't want to incriminate themselves. So they'll have to make it in complete ignorance.

Unless we outsource it outside plod's jurisdiction? Have Kim Jong Trump's minions decide?

Re: Kasperskaya and ruexit

Indeed, but being cut off from (one imagines) a big part of the team would surely hurt. They'd no doubt make ruexit provisions - probably without even the kind of fiasco we've seen with non-ferry-companies or lorry parks - but that might not be how a sufficiently-bitter divorcee thinks about it.

Other Russian-centred projects - like nginx - are of course heavily reliant on connectivity, as much as Russian users of worldwide stuff.

By assaulting a sales office when support is bad, you are punishing the wrong people.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

You're also putting pressure on the company, by what may be the only means available to you. Especially when a company has gone to great lengths to make it impossible to contact support.

Re: What about IMAP?

Imap accesses individual accounts. So

(a) you need credentials to access an account.

(b) you're accessing something personally identifiable and private.

Well and truly out of any kind of grey area of using a corpus for, say, linguistic research.

Re: utterly evil corporation MS was 20 years ago

You may have a point. But noone forces you to use windoze 10: indeed, I haven't used any windoze since about 2000.

What I meant with Utterly Evil was their actions that blighted the 'net as a whole, not just their own users. As in, breaking MIME, thus releasing the first wave of email viruses (Melissa, Lovebug) on their own users, but also breaking standards-compliant systems and stifling innovation on the 'net.

One casualty of that was my own web-based office software (think google docs for the idea), that relied on MIME standards and broke in MSIE. Mail-by-web where MSIE would do its own random thing with attachments, and miscellaneous documents that MSIE might try to load in $random-app.