* Posts by AlgernonFlowers4

163 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jul 2009

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NASA solar sail tech is ready – now who's up to use it in a mission?

AlgernonFlowers4

Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?

In order to reduce the risk of the sun probe melting, wouldn't it be better to send it at night? Do Light Sails work in the dark?

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

AlgernonFlowers4

Building software is easy.....

... With the My Easy Software Development Methodology (TM, Pat. Pending etc, etc).

Step 1: Collect Underpants

Step 3: Deliver Successful Project

Just need to work out Step 2 and ..............

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Love/Hate

If you can run with Microdrives and keep your data,

Or walk with Microdrives —nor lose the database;

If neither load errors nor successful updates can hurt you;

If all data bytes count, but none too much;

If you can recover the unforgiving minute data lost

With sixty seconds’ worth of tape looped run—

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Backup Man, my son!

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

AlgernonFlowers4

Paper Tigers

Back in the day the main user interface for Computers was paper. So a document printed on a business system (£500 pc + £200 matrix printer), was inferior to the Spectrum version (£200 pc + £500 matrix printer), even the user could see that!

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

AlgernonFlowers4

Three New Starships

To save humanity from the consequences of climate change, Elon Musk anounces the construction of three different Starships.

Starship A will be for the thinkers and leaders, C will be for the workers, people who do useful stuff and Starship B will be for sanitiser middlemen, telephone sanitisers, hand sanitiser executives, management consultants etc. Starship B will be the first to launch to ready Mars for colonisation.

Unfortunately after successful launch, Human Swine Flu H1N2 begins to spread uncontrontallably because the remainers didn't grok the need to sanitise and thus perished those who do not believe in Sanity Clause!

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

AlgernonFlowers4
Facepalm

Bing Knows

Sent message. Does this imply Microsoft do not understand what today means?

I’m not sure why the Microsoft Rewards dashboard uses the term “today’s points” instead of “total points”. However, it is possible that the term “today’s points” refers to the number of points you have earned today, rather than the total number of points you have earned.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Sent message. Does microsoft understand english?

I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience.

CAPSTONE mission is Moon-bound, after less rocketry than expected

AlgernonFlowers4

Touching Cloth?

What exactly is a near rectum liner hello orbit?

China is trolling rare-earth miners online and the Pentagon isn't happy

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: The Pentagon

It was all set out in a documentary film called In the Loop and the Pentagon laid the blame on some guy called Malcolm Tucker.

Malcolm Tucker: Yeah. Now do excuse me, I've got work to do. [pause] Don't ever call me fucking English again.

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

AlgernonFlowers4
Thumb Up

Programmatic Automation Always Rocked!

Back in the 1980s we had SCL running programmatic automation on ICL VME systems.

The long gap between then and Powershell on Windows was far too long for my liking. So well done Mr Snover for standing up to the naysayers.

Programmatic Automation Rocks!

Chinese boffins suggest launching nuclear Neptune orbiter in 2030

AlgernonFlowers4
Joke

Roundworld

Archchancellor Ridcully: Rincewind, these Agateans want to put a nuclear bomb round Uranus!

Rincewind: Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!

(With apologies to Sir Terry Pratchett)

Big Tech falls in line with Euro demands to fight bots, deepfakes, disinformation

AlgernonFlowers4
Paris Hilton

Guards! Guards!

Quis custodiet custard?

US fears China may have ten exascale systems by 2025

AlgernonFlowers4
Paris Hilton

Re: Yup...Graphene Innit!

Graphene has been produced in small quantities for centuries, ever since Pencils were used to draw graphs!

Robo-Shinkansen rolls slowly – for now – across 5km of Japan

AlgernonFlowers4

Wilford Industries

Automating trains easy. Just put everyone on a 16km train with 1001 cars (30 cars for growing food) running on an endless loop. As everyone is already on the train, no need to stop or worry about crashing into another train!

UK.gov wants mobile makers to declare death dates for their new devices from launch

AlgernonFlowers4

Mobile Intergalactic Liberation Front!

Siliconia is going to be a cold lonely places if mobiles are stopped from going to landfill.

Won't no-one think of the Mobile Intergalactic Liberation Front?

Microsoft welcomes 'raddest' and most 'feature-dense' Kubernetes release to AKS, shows 1.17 the door

AlgernonFlowers4
Joke

Re: Hello fellow kids

As the uncool kid pretending to be a Gradian of the Galaxy every time I tried to say 1 radian was 63.66198 gradians it just came out as I am groot

Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave

AlgernonFlowers4
Joke

Re: Hirsute Hippo?

My Wily in the right circumstances, at the sound of a wolf whistle transforms itself into a mighty beast which has led people of the opposite gender to exclaim Is that Wily Werewolf or are you just pleased to see me!

Travel agent leaked customer data by – this is embarrassing – giving it away in a hackathon

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Dummy Data

Better than the real thing! Not using unreal data as dummy data to test, only results in you looking like a dummy when the system crashes because unexpected items were found in the real world inputs.

Elon Musk's ancient April Fools' gag about 'Tesla Tequila' made real in lightning-shaped bottle

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Coming Soon

May Tesla never be forgotten

Nvidia unveils $59 Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB mini AI board, machine learning that slashes vid-chat data by 90%, and new super for Britain

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Wrong!

Are you talking about Jeffrey or Sterling?

USA seeks Moon and Mars nuke power plant designs ready to fly in 2027

AlgernonFlowers4

SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon cleared to hoist real live American astronauts into space

AlgernonFlowers4
Paris Hilton

Free Falling Paris River

What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?

Sky Broadband is not the UK's cheapest, growls ad watchdog

AlgernonFlowers4

Is it man made?

'And people would rather buy chap shit than expensive shit'

Bye, Russia: NASA wheels out astronauts, describes plan for first all-American manned launch into orbit since 2011

AlgernonFlowers4
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Way Cool...

From Space.com

NASA will likely pay about $90 million for each astronaut who flies aboard Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule on International Space Station (ISS) missions, the report estimated. The per-seat cost for SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, meanwhile, will be around $55 million, according to the OIG's calculations.

To put those costs into perspective: NASA currently pays about $86 million for each seat aboard Russia's three-person Soyuz spacecraft,

CFAA latest: Supremes to tackle old chestnut of what 'authorized use' of a computer really means in America

AlgernonFlowers4

Book 'em Danno!

'He was charged with two cases: committing computer fraud for financial gain (violating the CPAA) and honest services fraud and violating the CFAA. '

Three 'and' clauses do not make 2 cases or am I reading it wrong?

Academic showdown as boffins biff-baff over when Version 1.0 of Earth's magnetic core was released

AlgernonFlowers4
Mushroom

Unobtainium

Shouldn’t they be looking for Unobtainium? A ship made of Zircon would have melted long before it got to the centre of the Earth and they wouldn’t have been able to start The Core spinning in the first place to generate the magnetic field!

Ethernet standards group leaves its name in the dust as it details new 800Gbps spec

AlgernonFlowers4

Insane Speed

Oh goody, soon a lie will be able go round the world several times while truth is pulling its boots on.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

AlgernonFlowers4

Cursed to Live in Interesting Times

Wasn’t one of Blind Io’s commandments that thou shalt use bcc or be cursed to live in interesting times!

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

AlgernonFlowers4

The Road to Bohemia is paved with good intentions!

(Galileo) Galileo.

(Galileo) Galileo,

Galileo Figaro

Magnifico-o-o-o-o.

Oh oh oh oh

No, no, no, no, no, no, no

Oh, mama mia, mama mia (Mama mia, let me go.)

Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me.

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

AlgernonFlowers4

Days of Future Past - Cobol

In the 1980's, I remember Cobol as the programming language for writing real-time client server applications running on Virtual Machines with IDMSX databases, where validation rules and data definitions were held in Data Dictionaries (define once and reuse) but this was a long, long time ago.

Dark matter's such a pushover: Baby stars can shove weird stuff around dwarf galaxies

AlgernonFlowers4

Matter of fact, it's all dark!

By the way, which one's Pink?

The 'roid in Spain drills mainly on the plain: Plucky Brit Mars robot laps up sun, sand and, er, simulated science

AlgernonFlowers4
Alien

Make Mars Great Again!

This is the voice of the Mysterons. We know that you can hear us Earthmen. It will be useless for you to resist for we have discovered the secret of reversing matter and we are going to build a wall to stop your robotic rovers from crossing our borders and attacking our shrubberies. Make Mars Great Again!

It's big, it's blue, and it'll be raining down on you – it's 3200 Phaethon

AlgernonFlowers4

Monty Phaethon?

Is it Norwegian Blue? Does it prefers keepin' on it's back! Is it PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!?

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

AlgernonFlowers4

Barium Meal?

When they said come and have a barium meal, I was expecting fish’n’chips!

NASA to celebrate 55th anniversary of first Moon landing by, er, deciding how to land humans on the Moon again

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: "real possibility of no US astronauts being present aboard the ISS"

We're all living in Amerika

Amerika ist wunderbar

We're all living in Amerika

Amerika, Amerika

We're all living in Amerika

Amerika ist wunderbar

We're all living in Amerika

Flying to Mars will be so rad, dude: Year-long trip may dump 60% lifetime dose of radiation on you

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Anti-ageism

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids

£1 in every fiver that UK biz, public sector spent on software in 2017 went to *drumroll* Microsoft

AlgernonFlowers4
FAIL

Money for Nothing!

Having seen at first hand, it is all to easy for large organisations to carry on paying Microsoft for CALs for users who never logon or have stopped using the system. It took a while to get the message across but let's only pay for accounts that have authenticated on Active Directory in the last quarter and stop giving away money for nothing!

Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China

AlgernonFlowers4

Gov.UK to make its lovely HTML exportable as parlous PDFs

AlgernonFlowers4

Print to PDF

On webpage press Ctrl-P to Print, Select PDF as target printer and save as a file (.pdf)

Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Lost In Space

Even virgin trains let you pick if you want to sit in a quiet carriage or not, so why the downvotes against the right to choose?

AlgernonFlowers4

Lost In Space

Divide the office into quiet zones and noisy zones. Allow people to sit in their zone of choice and let battle commence.

USA! USA! We're No.1! And we want to keep it that way – in spaaaace

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Isn’t NASA announcing life/water found on Mars tomorrow?

Nasa announcement video footage https://youtu.be/DngcYImh0-Q

Is your smart device a bit thick? It's about to get a lot worse

AlgernonFlowers4

Only Women Bleed?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/men-may-not-bleed-but-heres-why-they-have-periods

NASA demos little nuclear power plant to help find little green men

AlgernonFlowers4

Advanced Power Unit

Is it available from all good Kwik-E-Mart stores?

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

AlgernonFlowers4

We'll do you proud

Yorkshire pudding pizza served with live eels stuffed inside a large snake, giant beetles and chilled monkey brains with rhubarb cricket bats for starters

Total recog: British AI makes universal speech breakthrough

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Looking good!

Yes it can definitely say that’s language that is

You'll get a kick out of this: Qualcomm patents the 'Internet of Shoes'

AlgernonFlowers4
Coat

Not So Smart Shoes

Shoes: User Error - Wrong Feet Detected!

Me: These are the only feet I've got!

India to world+dog: Go ahead, please hack our elections ... if you can

AlgernonFlowers4
Devil

PokeMan GO

Just troll and spread fake news, so much easier to hack people instead.

Intelligent robots can walk the walk – but if they can't talk the talk, we can't get along

AlgernonFlowers4

Re: Great...

All they have to do is learn how to tweet 'fake news' in response to anything and they will have won

Boeing details 'Deep Space Gateway' for Mars mission staging

AlgernonFlowers4
Thumb Up

Trump Tower 2026

On the moon with a wall!

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