Posts by Stevie

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Onward into the 1940s!

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What a shame this didn't arrive a year ago when we were looking at going the Netezza route.

Then again, if Oracle had been more forthcoming about the strategic future of Sparc and Solaris in the first six months after the acquisition we wouldn't have IBM power 7xx stacks towering over a room full of sun gear.

Foot, shotgun.

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But everything we learned from Snowden's leak was that the intelligence agencies cooperate to subvert provisions specifcally written into law to protect the people from unreasonable oversight.

I think the major features of this speech were that so-called smart people actually sat through it and that the speaker managed to keep a straight face throughout.

Explain once more how listening to my phone calls combats terrorism.

Then explain how we may employ sheep's bladders in the prevention of earthquakes.

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I suppose it's their money. It just feels like the mighty have been brought a bit low by this thing.

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Curious that Eastern European computers are not targeted by this dastardly software.

This Means Something.

But what?

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Where's the link to the leaked video of the dimwit being made to run round the car park in his underwear while his colleagues beat him black and blue with whiffle bats?

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Oh my Gaaaaaahd, you people are like so negative. Well just don't act all surprised and like "no way" when y'all get told so in y' Peeple profile, losers.

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I think I see the plan dimly ... next up, Microsoft ports Linux to Windows.

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I believe this is a parable on how it is pointless for just some of us to use cryptography for our e-goings on, or for us to only use it in certain cases.

But then, Bob never sent me his public key.

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First of all, the calls made by iPhone owners have been traced at the metadata level by the NSA. There is no need to crack the phone to establish a web of contactees.

Second, e-transactions are recorded by the credit card banks who can and will pony up records at the drop of a hat, sometimes even to people who are not from countries once behind the Iron Curtain.

As for these Sherrifs, have them return poroperty pirated under the amazingly loose "booty" confiscation laws before giving them any more freecom to act unilaterally.

Nope. I'm. Law-abiding bloke whose e-comms have been raped in the interests of "national security" and enough is enough. If the FBI needs data owned by the NSA, have the DHS go get it - that's why the god-damned agency was created in the first place.

It occurs to me to ask why, on a work phone not actually the said terrorist's property, this is even a thing. How could the owners be locked out of their own hardware? Notwithstanding the FBI uckfup that put them in the courtroom with their collective thumbs up their asses in the first place, of course.

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I've never understood why Gibson is revered by the computing cognoscenti. A glance at his "explanation" of the term "Count Zero Interrupt" would show otherwise. Total gibberish.

In the late 80s, while attending I-Con, I was flabbergasted to hear a "knowledgable" critic on a panel quote from Neuromancer and describe what he'd read as a "completely new narrative technique". Replace the throwaway tech references with acid-trip observations on the scenery and you'd be reading from The Einstein Intersection, which Samuel R Delany wrote twenty years earlier.

Gibson was rntertaining for a while, but absent the cyberspace idea (an admittedly brilliant re-tread of the Land of Fairie/limbo/Hades way of suspending the laws of Physics) there's not much staying power in the stories from where I sit, typing on my Ono Sendai deck.

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Dabbs, you speak to something deep in me - an abiding hatred of "design for persistent internet connection" thinking.

Every time I go through Ye Lyst Of Unnecessaree Updayte Checkyng Services I coin new, highly corrosive and therefore health-damaging swear words to describe the self-agrandizing "software architects" who think it is vital to keep the iTunes or OpenOffice dll libraries accurate to the microsecond.

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Texan scientists have been storing energy in tanks of liquid since the early 1900s.

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Yes, a local NY news station was blithering about this and pointed out that everyone knows about sonic booms because Concorde flew in and out of JFK.

The IQ brigade had obviously done nil research because the Americans wouldn't let Concorde land in the USA until an agreement never to cross the sound barrier over US land had been hammered out. No one in NY ever heard Concorde break the sound barrier.

What they did hear, assuming their eardrums survived first contact, was the earsplitting sound of the engines on takeoff.

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The activist investor is not at all interested in what the company does, he is interested in maximizing shareholder value. In point of fact, since he represents some sort of fund he probably has a vested interest in just bouncing the share price enough to flog it on.

Fund managers love market volatility. Shareholders usually don't. Companies definitely don't.

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See my worst security nightmare is that technology obsessed politicians and policemen spend so much time dithering over how to guard against nebulous threats they let someone fly an airliner into my office window.

My worst technology nightmare is the hacked google car cruise missile.

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A clear case of misidentification. This is quite obviously not a garaged Flying Car, but more likely a Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle in which the proper garaging instructions have been misread by the building minder.

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What a great use of public money.

Well, I feel safer.

Then again, I'm in New York (where you needed a permit to erect a tripod even before 9/11).

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[MODE=CLEESE_HOLDING_DEAD_PARROT] Held for a boat downrange?????

Where in the constitution does it say "Ye peeple shalle be free to goe abowt theyr lives and shalle e'en tayke to ye sees in bowts withowt being clonked on ye bonce wyth sundrie rocket parts?"

Nanny state. Wouldn't have happened in my day. Fought on the beaches etc etc.

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I once was almost the cause of a strike when I replaced a busted fuse in my supervisor's electric fire.

She had requested someone from the electrician's department come and do the job, but no-one had moved since India crashed into Asia so I thought I'd do what was needed.

The electrician who came by the next morning replaced my fuse with one of his own supply and promptly called his supervisor and union shop steward.

I was called into the office and dressed down by my pointy haired boss (could have been used as the model for the Dilbert version, haircut and all) in front of the chief electrician, who then made a dreadful mistake by telling me that my actions were potentially dangerous because I wasn't a licensed electrician and more importantly, not in the electrician's union.

I rose up to my full height, mentally said "goodbye job", then said "Don't lecture me on electrical safety. My father is a chartered electrical engineer and taught me how to properly fuse an appliance before I left school. If you care to look at the fuse you're electrician removed, you'll see I fused the device at three amperes, which is exactly the safe amount for that electric fire. The fuse he put in to replace my "unsafe" one was a 13 ampere fuse that stands a decent chance of allowing my supervisor to be killed and setting the factory on fire before it does its job."

I was about to go on but my PHB grabbed me, pushed me out of his office in mid rant and sat down to placate the red-faced chief bodger. It was never mentioned again, and I kept my job.

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Prediction: Microsoft Office user certification.

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At least Cablevision were honest when they told me they were no longer supporting copper and would have to put up a codec device in my house so my landline would work again.

Naturally this consumes electricity at my cost ...

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So we can rapidly access and cross index pages of blither (see wikipedia page on mechanical stress), impenetrable technobabble (see wikipedia page on, say, transendental numbers), "creative writing" (see wikipedia page on Long Island Railroad) and pokemon?

Fab.

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They say Spain is pretty, though I've never been.

Daniel says it's the best place he's ever been shot in the spleen.

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Wouldn't these protests be more effective outside FBI offices?

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Did the fiendish Australian screws deploy the dreaded "Banana Method" of internally stowed swag recovery?

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French satellites are powered by hypergolic mushrooms?

How high can you get on one tankful?

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"In other words, what Apple has said repeatedly – that agreeing to create a version of its mobile operating system that can be used to bypass its phones' security would serve as a precedent for law enforcement to gain access to future phones – does appear to be true."

Coo, stap moi, never saw that coming.

Oh wait, yes I did, and said so.

I don't understand how others can be so bloody naive as to fall for the "just this once, eh?" line. I mean, haven't we all learned that a Utility is a One-off Job on its second or subsequent run? The thinking is endemic to the IT trade. You'd think people in the biz could spot it a mile away.

And then there're the Anti-Terrorist statutes that seem to be being a tad over-enthusiastically employed by the Five-Oh.

And then ther're the overly broad Sexual Offender laws that get misused in the same way.

And, of course, the RICO statutes. Intended as an emergency measure to dismantle otherwise untouchable organized criminal gangs, now used all over the place at the drop of a hat.

People are joking about who would vote for Trump, but the same thinking that puts Donald on the throne is in play every time someone says "well, it's just this one time, and very narrow circumstances".

We live in the age of overreach, and I'm beginning to think it will only stop when an exchange of EMP makes it impossible to communicate electronically.

What we need is Jorg X McKie and BuSab.

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Oi, "Daniel", watch who you are bad-mouthing!

I can't be the only former Fortran and Cobol programmer who went on to bigger things and now shakes his head at what he sees the Bright Young Things with fresh CS degrees perpetrating, secure in their knowledge that computers were invented in 1986 so what would that old fart know?

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We hates the bandwidth thief Microsoft so we does my precious!

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Let's hope the three screens are better in rockets than the one screen in the center dash of a modern car has proved in my locale. I have to dig one screen-equipped car out of my front lawn about every two years. I don't want to be dodging incoming spaceships too.

For the record: there are good reasons why actual switches are a good idea in a car. I dare say the same holds true for rockets.

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Well, I for one am convinced. Bill 640K Gates has a history of steely-eyed prediction on this sort of thing.

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Good, about time someone put balls back into the Eurovision Song Contest and picked up the torch first raised by Cliff Richard when he sang that rousing protest against social injustice "Long Live Love".

Though I predict the namby-pamby judges will go all "nool pwan" when it comes down to choosing sides.

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1000 hours on jets? So, still working to the military test pilot model then. Just like in 1960.

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Show me the questions asked in that P.R. poll so I can properly assess the worth of the conclusions P. R. drew.

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Makes you all warm inside when you think about how windows 10 gets maintained, dunnit?

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WoC still haven't fully understood the pdf model. Their 5th ed books are beginning to be aviailable as pdfs - locked pdfs that cannot be annotated which makes them all-but useless in play.

Paizo, on the other hand, not only sells unlocked pdfs, they sell 'em for a reasonable price. Ditto PEG. Even Chaosium doesn't lock their overpriced, unindexed pdfs.

IBM locked down all the pdfs on a recent training course and provided no paper copies. So when we had to make inevitable changes to the text, we couldn't.

I have a policy now, after amessing a very large library of both tech and gaming e-books: If the pdf is locked, I won't buy it.

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Back in the late 70s I saw a study that concluded computer users' perception of the wait time increased dramatically over the real delay once the nine second point was reached.

Six seconds? Pfft!

Latency was real latency in my day.

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Using electric motors as brakes isn't revolutionary, it's been done for decades on diesel locomotives for one, but attempting to use the electricity will reduce the braking effect considerably. Presumably the mass of the vehicle is such that this isn't important.

I'm surprised that the blurb doesn't point out that such braking is, thanks to the laws of Physics, anti-lock off the shelf.

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C'mon, Clive, build a new Sinclair Scientific with a reliable keypad and clear last entry infrastructure and you'll get my money.

This is just noodling.