Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Re: wasting taxpayers' cash

I've learned my lesson about trying to run a rack server at home

Make sure that you have an acoustic rack so that you don't get kept awake at night?

Or is that just me?

(Rack currently has an old Dell 2950 in the bottom acting only as a shelf that the successor sits on.. )

Re: wasting taxpayers' cash

So he'll be paying much more for plane tickets

One place I worked, they changed the rules about 2 years into my stay so that we could only fly economy. Being somewhat taller than average that really, really didn't work for me..

Now I used to fly to remote offices around Europe once I had stacked up enough jobs there to make it worthwhile. However, the length of my stay was variable - I could have ten jobs queued up and it would only take me two days to clear or I could have five jobs and it would take me five days. So, rather than waste money on a fixed flight that I then couldn't necessarily catch, I managed to get permission to get a flexible ticket, which was slightly more expensive..

Finance were not amused when they discovered that those were business-class tickets. However, my manager was and it was done with his permission so, while there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, they couldn't actually do anything about it.

Or, as I put it at the time - a win-win. I got to travel in comfort and Finance got annoyed.

Re: Not only Military

why it was separated deity only knows

Different budgets - hardware depreciates but software doesn't...

Re: Sorry, but...

field of human conflict has such a useless POS been deployed

I dunno - some of the early Soviet WW2-era anti-tank devices were pretty dangerous - to the user and anyone standing near them..

(Soviet military policy at that time being "there are a lot more of us than them so who cares if we have a 20:1 combat loss ratio?". Includes the use of penal batallions to clear minefields by charging over them..)

Re: Sorry, but...

hyper masculine hard drinking sexist twats, or dim posh boy thicko twats

The two are not mutually exclusive y'know..

(The two most Cluefull[TM] ex-Army types I've worked with were both ex-Warrant Officers..)

Re: Sorry, but...

sitting on it, dropping it

Driving an AFV over it, poking buttons at random to "see what they do", spilling tea all down it, covering it in mud..

Re: Sorry, but...

but expected (by the average attendee) to implode (briefly) & explode (violently)

Many, many, many years ago, my oldest brother was working at a plant nursery near London. At the end of the day they sometimes had a bonfire to burn up all the bits of cellulose-based rubbish (cardboard boxes, pallettes expired plants et. al.).

Being a bunch of teenagers unaquainted with basic physics, they one day decided to chuck a few empty insecticide pressuries spray canisters on to see what happened..

The inevitable happened - the spray-nozzle mechanism failed catastophically, turning said spray-cans in unguided missiles. The plant nursery owner was deeply unimpressed to have to replace quite a few panes of glass that now had very large holes in them. Said teenagers were suitably chastened.

Re: It seems lying is hard coded into Facebook’s DNA

Eventually, I expect the shareholders will expect Zuckerberg to go

They'll have a probelm since he directly controls more than 50% of the voting stock. It would take legal action by the US Government to force him to step down - at which point (under more ethical management) Facebook would wither and die.

Re: No No

18% where adolescents, the rest where children

You are (I'm sure) aware that, legally, they are the same thing?

(And you can't know the effort I went to to supress my ObPedant comment about 'where/were'..)

Re: Its all about trust

Trust is earned and lost on a 1:100 ratio..

Re: Facebook (inc Messenger), Google (inc Alexa, Android, Chrome and Youtube) and Twitter..

Actually - Android is only free to the end-user - OEMs have to pay for the privelige..

Re: Arrgh!

We are not as bright as we think we are

Oh dear. Having worked in support for most of my working life I have a pretty low estimate of the luminosity of regular people..

Can that brightness be a negative value?

Re: Warning!

Could that be called a "badge of pride"?

No - that one has *far* more colours on it..

Re: Warning!

up on the "BOLO" list

Crushed by a sentient, self-repairing AFV?

close to the sludge at the bottom

Au contraire - the sludge at the bottom of swamps and streams (and fish tanks) has a useful biological fuction - that's where the bacteria live that digest waste and convert it to nutrients for the surrounding environment.

Which is why I won't let my wife use the vacuum-device to clean out the gravel in the fish tank - last time she did that the water quality dramatically nosedived.. (even ignoring the 'lets not release toxins from the substrate' effect it was pretty bad and we lost a number of fish after the tank was cleaned. Even the 14" pleco was agitated and it *loves* less-than-clean water..

Re: Wow

also the slight problem of FANGS

They infect their victims with psionic worms that gradually eat their victims brains?

Re: brexit

in the hands of social science graduates

Well - the poor luvvies have to work somewhere and there's only so many jobs at fast-food outlets and coffee shops..

Re: Not guns, bin bags

Heinlein was a bit of an enigma, his politics moved around a lot.

Early stuff was OK - then he started getting a little bit too interested in girls' first periods and Libertarianism and I kind of lost interest..

The MOD will have accounted for that, right?

Different budget, no my problem..

Re: Lather, rinse, repeat

even in the days of sail proper sailors had to be rather skilled

Which is why people picked up by the Press that already had sailing skills tended to get rated much higher than the Landmen.

And having a situation where a disgruntled 13-year old middie could make you kiss the gunners' daughter[1] tended to make you learn the Navy Way pretty sharpish.

[1] ie - get bent over a gun and beaten solidly with either a rattan cane or weighted rope. Not pleasant. And lets not forget proper officers could assign even worse punishment up to and including the death penalty with no appeal.

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

Fortunately caffeine sends me to sleep...

Tea has far more theobromine than caffeine - theobromine is the same stuff that is found in chocolate (which is why you need to be very careful how much tea dogs have - they can't metabolise theobromine well and it takes time to clear out from their system).

One of my previous cats was partial to tea dregs.. (and now, finally, our eleventh cat that we've had during our married life is normal.. as in, has no odd habits..)

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

South Wales we get the loveliest soft water to make it with

Tea made with soft water just tastes wrong to me - although this might well have to do with living most of my life in areas with very hard water..

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

Yorkshire tea. Accept no substitutes

This. Especially as they do a loose tea mix that also tastes good. (for many and various reasons we rarely use tea bags. I also have a standard leaf tea mix[1] that I use..)

[1] 3 parts Licorice tea[2], two parts Darjeeling and one part Lapsang Souchong. Truely wonderful - fragrant, smoky with a bit of sweetness.

[2] Essentially normal black tea with some licorice flavouring and flowers. Tastes more aniseedy that licoricey. Available from J. Atkinson & Co of Lancaster.

Re: Berk

was allowed to go on "early retirement" grounds

In which case he won't get his ful pension..

(If he's on the same Government scheme as me anyway..)

Re: Cheer up, what's the worst that could happen?

a woad decorated kilty army surges south for revenge

Did the Picts use much woad? I'd have thought that it was too cold up there to run around semi-naked..

(Mind you, I've been in Newcastle[1] city centre on a crisp weekend night so maybe not.. )

[1] Yes, yes - Newcastle != Scotland (although it once was part of Scotland)

Re: Depends on house structure...

The whole WiFi marketing campaign has been blown out of all proportion

Say it ain't so! Marketing blowing stuff out of proportion? Not being truthful? I just can't believe it!

flimsy house with interior walls made of wood or other light materials, WiFi can propagate fairly well

Although copper pipes and electrical cabling can disrupt that quite badly. Which is why I ended up doing a mini-mesh using Ubuiqti APs - it was the only reliable way of getting decent wifi bandwidth over to the right side of the house.

And if you think that getting it to work in a modern house, just try to get it working in a historic building or castle. I believe the word 'no' was mentioned a lot in that conversation..

(Along with 'yes, we can do it, but only with an AP in every room, however small. And this is how much that it's going to cost... Why have you gone green?)

length of string is faster than Sky "Broadband".

I suspect that, were I to lower my standards sufficiently to buy broadband from Sky I would get a really, really good connection. I ought to anyway (absent throttling/BW sharing) since there's a Sky fibre cab on the pavement about 4 metres from my house. (elderly dogs favourite 'start of walk' pee spot - I really hope that their cab designers have 'dog pee proof' as part of their design spec..)

Re: A Watchdog with no BiTe.......useless.

we have a watchdog. He doesn't bite, he barks at strange sounds

We have one of those too. Mind you, at 15, he's getting a bit deaf and his eyesight isn't what it used to be (and he now limps on his front right shoulder) so he sometimes barks at stuff he thought he saw and sometimes chases one of our cats because he didn't see them clearly enough.

But at least he doesn't pee in the house like our last elderly dogs did (I'm dreading replacing the hall carpet - might need to replace some of the floorboards underneath to get rid of the consequences..)

emit the most Orgone energy

Maximus Hawkwindius..

(Not really a band I liked - I tried to a couple of times but they, quite frankly, bored the pants off me. Maybe my blood THC level wasn't high enough..)

BT could always be telling the truth

Some things are difficult and some things are impossible. This is one of the latter.

Re: 400-bit FHD display

a revelatory separation of instruments

Have you been taking lessons from AManFromMars?

Or (horror of horrors) could you both be Marketing types?

(Sorry to other commentards for suggesting that someone from M*arketing might be sullying these hallowed pages..)

Re: 13.3" display in a 12" chassis

Adobe were notably slow, for example

In just about every measurable way..

Re: "Criminal charges" ?

for sale for a long time, but not to Johnny Foreigner

Except the Saudis. Or the Russians. Or anyone else that can afford the prices asked by sleazy politicians.

Re: @Graham Before people get in to a panic...

It isn't about ripping-off someone else's product. It is about re-implementing it to do the same thing

In much the same way as MIcrosoft did with the OS/2 API calls - they essentially duplicated them (same parameters and all) and just changed the names slightly.

(And yes, I know that Microsoft worked with IBM on OS/2 until the toy-cot-ejection but the API stuff happened well afterwards. Our OS/2 devs at the time had an incredibly easy job to convert OS/2 code over to NT code - essentially just use sed/awk to change the API names..)