Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Re: That's what they want you to think...

Has your wife met my wife? I think they'd get on very well together...

I think it must be a Universal Property of wives[1] since mine also does that. Which is why I'm not allowed to watch pseudo-science stuff with her..

[1] Or maybe the subset of 'wives of people who read El Reg'.

Re: That's what they want you to think...42

We need far more serious research into this important subject

Remember, it all, in the end, comes down to a really hot cup of tea.

electromagnetic fields release the excess magic energy

And thus produce octarine..

Re: It was aliens wot did it

they weren't cut out by aliens with space lasers.

Aha! That's what the aliens[1] *wanted* you to think! It took them *ages* to work out how to make their lasers look like primitive chisel marks!

[1] Were the lasers built into their heads? Were they alien space sharks?

Re: It was aliens wot did it

we still have no idea what they were actually built for

Other than burial monuments of course..

Re: It was aliens wot did it

refuse to thank Uri Geller

To be fair to Mr. Geller though - he was pretty adept at one particular form of magic.. the science and magic of separating fools from their money.

Re: It was aliens wot did it

Alien Cat

I think at leat 6 of my 7 cats qualify. Why do I always get the odd ones?

(No pointing and laughing you at the back. Yes - you laddie!)

Re: Exceptional HW & incompatibility?

there was an MS OS/2 which included MS LAN Manager

Which was itself a clone of the IBM OS/2 LAN Manager (we used that as our file server back in the old token-ring days).

It worked quite well (for those days) and only fell over twice in about 5 years - once when the aircon broke and the room it was in hit 55C and the second time when I hit the power button by mistake.. (the monitor was on top of the server and had exactly the same power button, just 4 CM away from the server power button. While going out the door, I pushed what I thought was the monitor power button but, before I took my finger off, realised that the texture my other fingers were on wasn't the monitor. I stood there for an age while by colleagues went around the office telling people to save their work. I think they did it as slowly as possible in order to teach me a lesson. We taped over the server power button after that.)

And of course OS/2 had REXX.

Which started out on their mainframes - I remember using Rexx in VM/CMS back well before OS/2..

And it's now available on Linux.

Re: 25 years and the clustering is still not as good as VMS...

I know ZFS is very clever but shadow copy

ZFS isn't available on Windows.. I think you mean NTFS (or possibly VFS)

Re: NT4

Were they really prepared to compromise the stability of a server OS to keep the GUI running

After all, why does a server need a GUI? Everything is done via a CLI!

(Unless you use point 'n drool)

Re: "OS/2 Warp"

Warp came on a CD too I got it that way - although IIRC it required still five-six floppy to boot before it could read the CD

Two floppies were all that you needed unless you had some *really* exotic hardware..

(My copy of OS/2 Warp came bundled with a SB16 sound card and a CD-Rom drive to hook up to it).

Re: " because by the time the hardware became capable enough to support one"

As soon as you have similar needs, the hardware is more or less the same

My last place, we had a number of webservers - two linux boxes (main and failover) and one IIS box. The IIS box cost 4 times more than the linux boxes because of the spec 'required' to run IIS rather than Apache & OpenCMS..

Re: 16MB?

Makes you wish OS/2 Warp won, doesn't it?

It does indeed - except for one thing - I strongly doubt that IBM would have been any more pleasant to deal with than Microsoft. After all, just look how they treated OS/2 once they finally decided they couldn't be bothered with it - they didn't let anyone else have it for *years*

And even then, they charged so much for it that all the follow-ons (ecomstation et. al.) have been unaffordable.

Powershell is trying

Indeed. Very, very trying. As in "trying to be a unix shell but failing miserably".

Sure, it's an elegant concept but it's utterly inconsistent in usage.

And dont get me started on the network stack

I think they eventually re-wrote it, using code stolen^W 'inspired by' BSD..

And on the HAL front - that's something OS/2 also did. In fact, OS/2 effectively took over the whole BIOS too - which is why there were so many odd errors early on - the IBM programmers expected manufacturers to actually design their hardware and BIOS according to the spec..

Re: CARS!

If you want that sticker there you can pay me a fee for the life expectancy of the car

Having just bought a new car[1], I can confirm that proper dealerships confine their advertising to the small print on the bottom of the license plate.

[1] Toyota C-HR. Driving a proper hybrid is very odd )but growing on me!). It also has lotsa toys :-)

Re: A bit late

Ian Dury was a London humoured poet/philosopher/ rock'n'roller of the highest calibre

The last song he ever did was a collaboration with Madness called "Drip fed Fred". Worth listening to..

Re: The Indy can't be as bad as the Liverpool Echo

The things in unreadable and blocks your adblocker.

Presumably that can be solved by using something like NoScript?

Unless it's one of those abominations that *require* Javascript enabled in order to show you articles..

Re: Advertising from mobile 'phones

I have no idea if it is possible for them to tickle a setting to not put this in.

It is.

But that would require them to a) care and b) spend 5 minutes of their lives working out how to and then do it.

So very very few of them do.

Re: They Live....

polarized lenses cause the electronic advertising boards at the many bus stops to fade into darkness

Which is an issue for me - I wear glasses and recently got some that self-darken in sunlight and come with a spiffy set of polarisied magnetically-clip-on sunglasses for use when behind glass (such as in the car).

The issue is that, with said clipon sunglasses in place, I now can't read the in-car displays. Sure - the speedometer is old-fashioned analogue but pretty much everything else is displayed on one screen or another - all of which seem to get mostly blocked by the polarised sunglasses attachment.

So, ot's a choice of "drive with my eyes mostly screwed up"[1] or "drive without all the fancy stuff". Being a techie I, of course, selected the first option.

[1] Acute myopia seems to have made my eyes much, much more sensitive to bright light. It does have the plus side of enabling me to see well in the dark though.

Re: One move and we shoot

aka sacking, meaning retirement benefits are void

In a civilised society, that can't happen except for gross indecency or criminality..

Re: Timing is everything

We didn't get laid off though.

I did - from a company that produced RTOS'es, later aquired by Intel. I was the EU network and Solaris admin and worked with my counterpart in California to keep things running.

One day in 2001/2002 (can't remember the exact date) I rode into work and saw that my boss[1] was sitting in the HR office[2]. At that point I knew that either myself or my Windows-side colleage were surplus to requirements[3].

It turned out to be me - on the basis that "my colleague in the US" would look after the EU stuff.

Amusingly, he quit about a month after I was made redundant.. Apparently, things went a bit haywire for a while since no-one knew anything much about the network[4] and how to herd YP to add new users.

[1] A thoroughly nice bloke, usually resident in Paris. Which meant that I got to go there at regular intervals to meet him. Not the worst job in the world :-)

[2] He had always promised that, were any of us to be made redundant, that he would always come in person to give us the bad news and he stuck to his promises. That guy taught me more than anyone else how to be a good manager. He was also happy for me to tidy stuff up off my desktop and not have me marched off-site immediately since he trusted us.

[3] Our regular HR person was away at the time so the finicky details (money and the like) were all handled by HR in Germany. When she got back, she blew a fuse and changed things so that I ended up with several thousand more in redundancy pay, all tax-free. She might have been about as non-technical as you could be, but she was one of the (very few) good and compassionate HR people I've ever known. That was a good company to work for, except for the brief period when it was run by the usual MBA-psychopath types.

[4] Good old packet-switched stuff. I think we had a 10Mbit Frame-Relay PVC over to our EU headquarters and several shadow-PVCs that could come in if we needed more bandwidth or the main one fell over. One month our bandwidth usage shot up and we discovered that one of the programmers had started listening to BBC Radio 1 over the Internet. Given that we paid by the MB, it was costing us a fortune. Since I had a Packeteer to manage bandwidth, after my first request for him to stop was ignored, the bandwidth allocated to Internet streaming media 'accidentally' got reduced to a max of 500 bytes/sec. Just enough to give some sound but very, very long skips and pauses. He got the hint.

Re: "notoriously difficult language"

Dutch is a category I language for English speakers, i.e. easiest to learn

I have a few issues with that site - they list Spanish, Italian and French (amongst others) as easy to learn because they are "closely related to English".

Well, they are related - but certainly not closely. They are Indo-European languages (unlike Finnish and Hungarian) and that's where the relationship ends - they are Latinate languages, English is a Germanic language. From completely separate strands of Indo-European.. There are pleanty of loan-words from those languages in English but then that also applies to Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Hindi.

What they are are languages spoken geographically close to us and that are taught in our schools (I started French in primary school which is probably why I remember so much..).

Re: "notoriously difficult language"

English on the other hand...

Is well known as a language that's very easy to communicate in, but very difficult to learn properly.

As can be seen from the standard of English in everyday use.

Why do the people who can get unlimited free money, want your money?

Because it's lower risk than actually ripping off the ATM yourself.

Other than that I fully agree - it's a bit like attending those "Make MILLIONS in just two hours" seminars. Often given by people in cheap suits and driving crappy cars. If they really knew how to make money, they wouldn't be making a pittance selling stuff to credulous morons..

Re: Not unwelcome

But the hipsters have no clue about cataracts

Except in the "Niagra Falls" sense. Some of the ones I've met would definately be improved by a trip over NF - either in or out of a barrel.

Re: Here we go again

Well it is at least faster and uses less memory than Chrome.

I'd like to say that it steals less user information than Chrome but we all know that isn't so, eh boys and girls?

(I'll stick to Firefox thankyouverymuch. It might not be the best browser out there but at least I can customise it and it doesn't insist on sending all my data to it's slave-handler..)

Re: Green screens making a comeback?

black background with amber text.

Or, in my case, green lettering on a black background. Using EBCIDIC. And a right-hand CTRL key that acted as a Return key.

Re: "White paper is cheap"

your eyes may switch to low light, low resolution receptors

As in "In the dark, all cats be gray"[1] stylee?

[1] Which is, obviously, nonsense. White cats glow as they reflect what little light there is, torties are even better camoflauged than usual, gingers are in their usual place by the foodbowl and black cats are even more the negation of all good things than usual.

Re: Not a good idea for me.

And it's easy to read. I guess.

Unless you have dyslexia of course..

Re: Not a good idea for me.

Windows around 1989 I've always set the background to grey

Likewise. Except, in my case, a very dark purple.

On top of which the carosel of cat pictures continues..

Re: Optimistic

It seems you can hardly expect US federal regulators to do anything about big corporations these days

Of course they'll do something - they'll make lots of noise and huff and puff until the usual brown envelopes and/or quiet promises of future lucrative non-executive posts/political bribes are given.

At which point, victory will be announced along with a purely cosmetic press release from the company concerned that basically says "we've learnt our lesson, we'll be good now. Honest guv'.

Nothing else will change other than some regulators will get richer.