Posts by The Serpent
183 posts • joined Wednesday 11th June 2008 13:37 GMT
Re: Rockall Times
The shenanigans following that escape are still hidden on the web, accessible by a bit of googling. I must admit from the tone of those conversations I'm surprised to see this article. I suppose what happens on Rockall, stays on Rockall. I do wonder what happened to 'exciteable office girl Jemma' though, I rather like the sound of her!
As an earlier poster wrote, "The bloke has none of the skills necessary to make this happen, and no intention to get the rights to make something that even looks like the machine he want to emulate."
So, a career in marketing middle management awaits. The earnings would be determined by how much of a slimy backstabber he can bring himself to be.
The SAP licence site
is the worst thing I have ever used. I used to be a Business Objects admin a few years ago and when it came to re-licensing the installed products each year, well, I think it would be quicker to be beaten to death with a balloon on the end of a stick.
Their descriptions of the various bits of Business Objects didn't match those in the software, the number of licences they had on record was always different to the number we had bought, almost every new page demanded you sign in again and if you happened to stumble on a likely looking combo, the licence key was generated by a member of staff who emailed it to you - so what was the point in the website? Why couldn't I just contact the staff directly? SAP don't allow you to do that unless there is a technical issue or complaint. The site being unfit for purpose isn't viewed as a technical issue.
The one time they did try and help me, they told me our product combination was impossible and so it couldn't be licensed - despite the fact it was unchanged from the previous year and they were able to do so then! In many ways I miss Business Objects, but I don't miss SAP!
Posted in Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness
Re: The largely unsuccessful - but rather good - Star Trek: The Motion Picture
That always jarred me about the criticism of Star Trek The Motion Picture. 2001is credited for its lengthy, majestic space scenes with classical music score. Star Trek The Motion Picture is deplored for its lengthy, majestic space scenes with classical music score.
A previous poster was right in that it could have done with being shorter - half an hour would have been fine, but then I think that about 2001 as well.
As for 'The Motion Picture' in the title, judge it by the eyes of the audience of the time who were not so used to the 'successful TV show jumps straight to film' formula.
I like blink
It reminds me of teletext. Now press reveal.
Re: "Most influential tech-tweet of 2011" title on the tweeter's site
Once I particularly enjoyed the hatchet-faced dwarf's explanation of how eating green plants is good because their cholorphyll oxygenates your blood.
I'm sure I could hear Herr Krebs cycling in his grave.
Why not? I suppose it depends on your real aims. It's almost certainly how government think tanks keep on the gravy train when working out things like demand for air travel.
Re: "balls to do it under his real name"
A well-pitched bitch, sir
Re: @Nvidia vs. AMD
That has been my experience too. I can recall hours jiggling nvidia stuff, often in vain hope (mobile chipsets in particular), but no real problems with ATI/AMD
Re: Nice upgrade but.......
One the one hand... "I have Nvidia on other machines because their Linux support is brilliant"
On the other hand... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/18/torvalds_curses_nvidia/
Re: I want one!
Although I'm sure everyone would appreciate it if they changed the design from that of Johnny 5 - specifically so the tools don't look like are stored in his cock
Re: Silicon-based life
"As a result, all life in the universe is either carbon-based, or is artificial 'life' "
That's so corporealcist! Won't someone think of the organised energy patterns?!
Re: Not sure why downvoted?
You must be new here
Re: well hold on there pardner...
Make that a 20 year old OS - I just tried those things in a Win 3.11 VM I forgot I had.
Win+r didn't do much though..!
Re: well hold on there pardner...
Glad you find it to be better than expected. However I think your examples are, if anything, illustrating the point that many people put forward - namely that 'Metro' is an unnecessary step in the proceedings on a non-touchscreen computer.
Win+r works on my XP machine, cmd has given me a command prompt since NT4 days and I'm not sure how those examples are relevant as they aren't Windows 8 features. Neither is the easy location of and handling of documents - that's a bread and butter task for any OS. You didn't need two user interfaces to accomplish those tasks.
Any of those things work fine on a 11 year old operating system (XP) and, if you drop the requirement to press Win+r and allow 'command' instead of 'cmd', you can get the same results from Win 95. (For all I know, Win+r might work there too)
Posted in Reg readers brew up the ultimate cuppa
Re: It all depends on the water!
"I drink old women's piss nowadays"...
Posted in SimCity 2000
Re: It needed extra stuff on Amiga too
Later memory expansions had more than just 512K on board. An Amiga 500+ is supposed to have 1MB (but Commodore didn't always agree..!) so with one of the later expansions that would be (barely) enough. But the 500+ was just a warmed over version of the 1987 original - SC2000 was released in 1994, so expecting a fundamentally 7 year old design to keep up is asking a bit much. Commodore did have the solution though - it was called the Amiga 1200 (or the 3000 or 4000 if you had money to burn)
Posted in SimCity 2000
I also played this perfectly well on my 486 DX4 100, but it did also have a Vesa Local Bus graphics card with a whole 256KB of dedicated memory. A mate of mine ran it on a 486 DX66 but with a better S3 Virge card to make up for it. The game itself ran the same, the difference was in the scrolling speed as your moved around the map.
Re: Older Couple
I didn't say they would lack imagination of any kind, just that they might be less inclined as a group to play zero g football with their lunch. Military/academic life encourages a disciplined outlook which ought to make for safer capsule inhabitants than sitting any other random bugger in the driving couch
Re: Radiation roulette with the goolies?
Ah, the first fuckwit raises their head. At what point do you expect the a male human to be beyond child-bearing age? Downvote for a gaping hole in your supposed intellect? Wouldn't bother as I hate the upvote/downvote system
I admit I am assuming the couple will either be a male and a female, or two males. Men can remove themselves from the gene pool at any time up to death and are therefore candidates for a Darwin Award for life unless they remove or disable their nads.
Posted in SimCity 2000
I sunk so much enjoyable time into SC2000. I've been known to play it long after 'the day', but not done so for a while.
I noticed the comments about hydro power earlier - they are excellent at first as they are available fairly early on but the difference between them and any other power station is that they don't need renewing. Build a hydro and it lasts forever. However you do need a lot of them and they are quickly outclassed in cost efficiency by the later power tech.
I also saw something about not hitting the 120K population for arcologies. Unfortunately in that regard you are rewarded by having the least interesting city - stick to absolutely nothing but completely flat land with a wall to wall grid of roads at 90 degree angles which mark out 6x6 spaces for your zones. That gives maximum density for the most part of the game while you building population and money. Once the 8x8 arcos are available they don't fit the grid well, but they don't have to as it has already done its job of getting you to the endgame.
I rather enjoyed the use of the newspaper as a means of communication by the game. A lot of the Miss Sim stories were quite amusing - I remember the one where someone wrote in and said they were worried by a dream they had where nothing was real and they were just living in a computer game..!
Re: Radiation roulette with the goolies?
3 thumbs down? Either some people have odd sensibilities for me to offend, or they are fuckwits who don't understand how the Darwin Awards work
Re: Older Couple
I've long held the belief that almost anyone who can climb into a rocket and sit down can go into space with no trouble whatsoever. The reason they use people from academic and military backgrounds with half a dozen degrees and a doctorate or two is that those people are inclined to do as they are told, and unlikely to have the imagination to break stuff doing the things you or I would wonder about doing in zero G
Radiation roulette with the goolies?
Sounds like a chance for the most ambitious Darwin Award ever
Re: not any more...
An even better place for the 'word' "snuck"
Looks to me like a scheme to try and get people onto the most profitable network more often. I wouldn't trust it at all unless there is an option in the O/S similar to the 'avoid toll roads' one in sat navs
I'm led to believe that the general (i.e. almost utterly unfounded) agreement is that Vulcan is an as yet unobserved planet orbiting 40 Eridani A
I suggest that is where we send the 'word' "snuck"
This is what Sauron must feel like most of the time.
Prize for the first find of a Google-mobile!
I think I saw Julian Assange having a shit
They used to have him on the Big Breakfast in the shed, back when it was a brilliant show in the Jonny Vaughn era. Presumably Locak Kepper's Cottages is now item #18 on the London Legacy Development Corporation tourist trail.
Re: Obi Wan...
Hokey operating systems and ancient interfaces are no match for a good mouse at your side, kid
Posted in El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa
A former colleague once told me how his Dad (formerly of the Royal Army Medical Corps) and his mates made tea. Take one billy can, lay 12 tea bags in bottom of can and fill almost to top with water. Boil for 20 minutes. Pour in 1 tin of condensed milk. Serve.
Re: Was anybody else...
HAIL MING!
Re: signature capture ?
"I make a point of always making the signature as illegible as possible, so I can deny it later, if required :-)"
I once worked for a fella who would sign absolutely anything because no one knew that what passed for his signature was supposed to be a signature - it looked exactly like a 'personal hair' lying on the page
"If it was my server, I'd continue to use it as rename it to "Lazarus""
diskdoctor df0:
Lifetime lack of achievement?
Can we have such an award for Martin Freeman, because I hate the bastard? He cannot act, he only play-acts - always portraying an awareness of the fact that he is pretending to be someone else.
And that fucking trick he thinks he gets away with of 'accidentally' looking into the camera for half a second while doing one of his uncalled-for stares around the room is poor beyond piss.
Posted in Review: Lego Lord of the Rings game
Re: "However, she never managed The Silmarillion."
Have done so many a time, even though it can be bloody hard work making your way through all the woe - most of the stories within it verge in to Pyrrhic victory territory in my opinion . Back in the day I could have given you a good verbal tour of it all though, these days I've filled my head with far less entertaining stuff so I can't tell my Hurin from my Turin, nor my Huor from my Tuor.
On occasions it is still useful to be able to use the creation of the world stuff to explain things like why Gandalf doesn't seem to age (or indeed Tom Bombadil, if the books are being discussed) or why the elves are obsessed with getting on ships and sailing west.
Re: Back to the 1990s
I remember having that inflicted on me in 1998/1999 when one day my Nokia 2110 portable ear cancer unit suddenly became another extension of the office phone system.
The stupid thing was I could use the four digit codes for our desk based phones (not much good since I rarely needed to talk to staff back at the office until I was there in person) but for the other staff mobiles and for all outside numbers I had to use the international dialling code. This meant changing every stored number to have +44 in front of it, which (I presume) meant it was routed differently and the caller ID was stripped off in transit - the phone couldn't identify contacts in its own memory when a call was incoming.
Not a great problem as you can always press the button and say, "Hello" but it was a pian when texts came in as you had to look through the contacts to see who was bored and had just charmingly questioned your parentage.
Apparently it saved the company money as what looked like international calls were billed as local or national (or indeed international) as appropriate by BT and the pseudo office extension/inter mobile calls were "free". Liberal use of the word free there..
Much nicer these days with software emulated handsets so all you need to do is log your phone number in after connecting via the corporate vpn
Re: Excite eXtreme
Ironically, www.excite.com just supplied me this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9x5us4ZM4
Needless to say, it never ran like that in real life and it was a UI disaster with the same potential as Metro (or whatever) except that Excite had the sense not to inflict it on everyone
Excite eXtreme
I seem to recall a rather pointless prettification of Excite where the text front end was replaced by some kind of 3d-ish rotating in-browser animation which ran like utter crap on every PC I ever tried it on.
Also, I remember when Infoseek didn't have that slick 'i in a circle' logo and favoured an earwax yellow approach
Re: Shome mishtake, surely?
""...For the first ten years [Elk Cleaner] was a non event..." Elk Cloner"
See what you mean, but just dismissed 'Elk Cleaner' as the name of the removal tool
Re: Molecular beam epitaxy
Nice one
Re: "require CSPs to retain web logs up to the first "/"."
That happens everywhere. I'm sure they all think they understand these computery things because all computery things are just like the one they have at home, just.. bigger. Somehow.
This whole affair just goes to show that the old war time spy hunting listening to conversations at bus stops hysteria is alive and well
Re: Alternatively...
There is huge merit in making the most of what you've got. The megahertz wars were like the UK housing market - people were too dazzled by the embiggening of numbers and superficial gains to see the multitude of sins being hidden by them. I still think there is going to be a big market for 'good-enough', single board, very cheap PCs in the near future.
Molecular beam epitaxy
For a second there I thought we'd accidentally got a bit of a Star Trek: Voyager script pasted in.
Can I have an upvote for Seven please?
@Dick Kennedy
You obviously failed to see the much repeated BBC obituary items where Heather Couper showed her letter which Sir Patrick wrote to her about her question as to whether sexism was a problem in astronomy. The reply was, "Let me reassure you on one point. Being a girl is no handicap at all".
You are also presumably unaware that many broadcasters cultivate an exaggerated version of their own personalities as an image tool. Some admit to it, others don't. Sir Patrick also had far longer than most to add to his on-screen persona.
Either cite your 'sources' or continue being as close-minded as the man you purport to have disliked.
