* Posts by Gerry Doyle 1

97 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2009

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Lord of the Dance set to deliver high kicks at Trump’s big ball

Gerry Doyle 1

He's a Yank

Despite appearances, Flatley isn't Irish.

Either way, he's dead to us now.

Today's Facebook fury: Coppertone-like baby pic ban baffles US mom

Gerry Doyle 1

Surely -

"This is a crucial point that really isn't well understood yet: the internet is subject to the laws of where it is looked at, *AS WELL AS* where it is created" ?

Red-faced LOHAN team 'fesses up in blown SPEARS fuse fiasco

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Fuse Blown - I can fix that

No need for any other tools - simply insert one leg of the Euro plug into the earth hole to open the shield, then plug the other leg into the live hole.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Friday is Pi Day

Gerry Doyle 1

Happy 3rd of Quattordecember!

Or not.

Is this the first ever web page? If not, CERN would like to know

Gerry Doyle 1
FAIL

ERROR: connection refused.

info.cern.ch refused to accept connection on port 80

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While trying to retrieve the URL: info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

PEAK APPLE: Fondleslab giant no longer world's biggest biz

Gerry Doyle 1

'Flaptop' surely.

Nobody is ever going to say 'fondleslab' out loud, but 'flaptop' - that works.

Tennessee bloke quits job over satanic wage slip

Gerry Doyle 1
Devil

Re: 664

A friend of mine lives in a number 664 and is indeed the neighbour of the beast - not only is the house number 666, but the house is occupied by the parish priest and named St. Anne, which is pretty much a neighbour of an anagram for your man...

The reg on the car my other half drives ends with 30666, which is pretty cool.

Half of all app store revenue goes to just 25 developers

Gerry Doyle 1

Crack - craic

Both correct, but 'crack' is more so. People have been using the word in that context for a lot longer in the North of England than they have in Ireland, and longer in Northern Ireland than elsewhere there - 'craic' is just a fakey back translation for people who think it's only an Irish idiom.

4GEE data marketing campaign accidentally gets Irishmen salivating

Gerry Doyle 1

Units

Indeed, and in horse racing 'to win by a GH' would be needed when 'a nose' wouldn't be fine enough.

Gerry Doyle 1

Deprecated

It's a fairly old word, perhaps not used so much when there are so many newer alternatives. Common enough where I was from.

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Must be a West-Brit Dub thing

You couldn't be more wrong.

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Great!

We sniggered in school at Guy de Maupassant, and it's making me laugh even now. Can't watch 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg' without a grin every time she says the blokes name.

Come to think of it, the way we pronounce the word 'can't' often raises an eyebrow in the UK...

So you want an office of Apple Macs - here's a survival guide

Gerry Doyle 1

...open up a decent Unix command line without having to install cygwin?

Telnet?

Yale finds second diamond planet

Gerry Doyle 1

Old news...

Hawkwind Log Book, 1971 - http://www.starfarer.net/HWLog.pdf

RIP Harry Harrison: Stainless Steel Rat scurries no more

Gerry Doyle 1

Make Room! Make Room! is not Soylent Green

'Soylent Green' had about as much or as little to do with 'Make Room' as, say, 'Blade Runner' had to do with 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'. It makes me wonder why film makers choose novels to film if they dislike them so much that they have to change them entirely.

Harrison hated Soylent Green so much that he had his name removed from all credits and who would blame him.

A nice bloke, sorry to hear he's gone, an important part of my teens was reading just about any novel, short story or anthology with his name on it. He would turn up at the Dublin SF meetings when there would only be a few of us sitting around a table in a pub basement and just talk and talk...

Neal Stephenson on swordplay, space and depressing SF

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Sci-fi 'tech'

The most glaring examples tended to be where the hero would take out his slide rule and star charts, labouriously/skillfully plot a course and *then* feed it into the computer...

CO2 warms Earth FASTER than previously thought

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: CO2 likely lagged the increase in regional Antarctic temperature

"In nature, CO2 increases always come after warming..."

Indeed it does, but this isn't a natural increase in CO2.

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Hang on a second... @ AC

"Solar activity is at its highest for 1,000 years" sez he. Well stop the lights, alert the IPCC.

How many times do I have to say this - "We have not seen *corresponding* changes in solar activity in the same period **that could account for current temperature changes**, nor have we found any other cause that could account for this rise in temperatures."

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Hang on a second...

We have not seen corresponding changes in solar activity in the same period *that could account for current temperature changes*, nor have we found any other cause that could account for this rise in temperatures.

Yes, really Armando.

All that money spent on all that disinformation. Worth every cent - and the best bit is that the dupes think that they are the skeptics.

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Hang on a second...

Climate change happens, but it doesn't just happen, it always has to have a cause. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, its effects are measurable and predictable in terms of solar radiation received and absorbed versus reflected out again.

In the distant past, we have seen how rising temperatures due to natural causes have themselves caused a corresponding rise in CO2. That's the natural way it seems.

In the present however, we have seen a rise in CO2. We have also seen a corresponding rise in temperatures that closely parallels this rise in CO2. We have not seen a change in solar radiation in the same period, nor have we found any other reason for this rise in temperatures. The rise in CO2 is not natural either, being caused by human activities, the normal processes of climate change are not responsible.

Ice core records show how climate changed in the past, when natural forces alone held sway.

Things are different now.

In the very recent past it was actual US government policy to discredit findings on climate change due to human activities and large energy corporations have spent untold billions on enforcing that policy. It has to be said that they got their money's worth.

1 in 6 Windows PCs naked as a jaybird online

Gerry Doyle 1

"In over 15 years, I haven't had a virus and I don't run antivirus"

Me too, me neither, and it's now over 19 years, and for the same reasons.

Corny conversations prove plants 'talk'

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: Plants can talk actual words

Well that's a turnip for the books...

Gerry Doyle 1

That'll be the ears of corn then.

Wait until it strikes her that potatoes have eyes.

Course she'd want to be careful around sentient corn - she could end up being stalked.

Digitech iPB-10 guitar effects pedalboard for iPad

Gerry Doyle 1

Why the iPad?

Considering that to use this machine, you would need to have forked out a thousand quid between it and the iPad, why didn't they just build in some cheapie Archos type thing as the GUI and then everyone could use it?

Lucy in 3.4 million-year-old cross-species cave tryst

Gerry Doyle 1

A legend in someone else's lifetime.

Leg end?

My coat's in the car.

Horny VIKING MICE raped and pillaged Euro pipsqueaks

Gerry Doyle 1

Genetic 'purity'?

I'm sure you meant homogeneity.

Amid iPad frenzy, Apple staff say 'Remember the workers'

Gerry Doyle 1

Re: No need for a union if peole recognize a few facts:

In other words, take what you're given?

Gerry Doyle 1

"...why a monopoly is bad unless it's a union"?

El Reg does not have to explain - you only have to ask an employer whether they would like to deal with a plethora of unions or just one.

By all means start up your own union if you aren't happy with the one you have - but it won't be the trades union movement that you will have to convince to have it recognised.

Windows 8: Sugar coating on Microsoft's hard-to-swallow tablet

Gerry Doyle 1

Odd numbered releases were always the ones

Compare DOS 3 and 5 to 4 and 6 - twas ever so.

Gerry Doyle 1

'Kiosk mode ... doesn't give you this freedom.'

The clue is in the name.

Gerry Doyle 1

Desktop is 'now an app'?

Wasn't it always?

Gerry Doyle 1

Did you not know...

That Internet Explorer has always had a 'kiosk' mode and that the easiest way to try it is to press F11?

Spacemen urge NASA to build nuke ship for Mars trip

Gerry Doyle 1
Linux

Charity begins at home...

Until we can make a living in the comparatively benign environment of Antarctica with its oxygen thrown in for free, hoping to hack it on Mars seems more than a little over-optimistic.

Reg hack cops a licking from the bosun's cat

Gerry Doyle 1

Probably not actually ironic

@jake - Had I been quoting from Hamlet you might have been right, but I wasn't. By the same token, if that's what you are referencing, then you might need to look it up yourself.

Mine's a pint of water with a dash of blackcurrant, thanks.

Gerry Doyle 1

Doh!

Hoisted by my own petard, guilty as charged. Sorry stu!

Gerry Doyle 1

so much for 'smart' people

From naval slang to rhyming slang might be a bit too much of a jump for some!

Anyway - there is CANOE - the Campaign to Attribute Nautical Origins to Everything...

US doctors demand right to advise on gun ownership

Gerry Doyle 1

You calling me a statistician, pal?

Pretty much everybody's got a bathroom, and there's not many unaffected by gravity so it's no surprise that there are quite a lot of accidents involving such things, but still rather few proportionate to the whole.

On the other hand, how the comparatively fewer amounts of people who own guns are killed and injured at similar numbers does show the relatively higher dangers inherent in guns than bathrooms.

Apple trains store bosses to ignore deal with unions

Gerry Doyle 1

So one bloke, allegedly, didn't do his job and the whole organisation and concept is condemned? There were reasons why workers organised unions in the first place, and the more people who leave the more likely we are to find out those reasons...

Gerry Doyle 1

So you ignore unions for years, then turn up when you're in trouble, signing up for a month expecting the union to sort you out? Not a bit surprised they didn't help you.

Apple shouldn't bother with TV...

Gerry Doyle 1

Also fixed car stereos, good and proper.

Also fixed the massive inconvenience of bunging any old mp3 player, USB key, mobile phone you want straight into your car stereo USB slot with, oh, what was that super convenient chain of AUX cables, FM transmitters, chargers and batteries for the transmitter, connecting to the cigarette lighter, tuning radio to transmitter, charging ipod, ipod holders and the downright not dangerous in any way handiness of no display or control from the head unit?

Gerry Doyle 1

Let's not pretend

The old pretence of Windows complexity to justify the cost of Apple products is alive and well.

Of course Windows Explorer is hideously difficult to use, and it's absolutely criminal the way that it doesn't allow you to group your Country Funk seperately from your Disco Folk, but good grief - Right-click, Send To, end of. No drivers required.

Gerry Doyle 1

The reason that PCs sell even better?

Is what?

Windows XP and iPod: A tale of two birthdays

Gerry Doyle 1

Indeed.

I had my doubts about Vista until I saw its recovery process in action and it stayed my hand. The sort of tiny boot file corruption that would kill XP stone dead was detected and repaired with no intervention required.

Admittedly you had to slap it around a bit when you got it first to make it behave itself but who doesn't like doing that to computers?

IBM chips in with '60s Golfball anniversary

Gerry Doyle 1
Thumb Up

They haven't gone away...

Still got a grand big line printer here, can do over 20 lines a second, for hours on end, but sounds like a demented knitting machine.

Sunspot decline could mean decades of cold UK winters

Gerry Doyle 1
FAIL

Gods be with the days

when IT people were clever people too.

The line "... many professional climate scientists do not believe that variations in the Sun have any significant effect on the Earth's climate..."

should read

"...professional climate scientists do not believe that variations in the Sun have had any significant effect on the recent changes in the Earth's climate..."

Big difference.

Nokia E6 smartphone

Gerry Doyle 1

What, no torch?

Looks like I'll be sticking to my E63 then, the best, most reliable, most useful phone I've ever seen.

Death threats against 'worst song ever' YouTube teen

Gerry Doyle 1

A then a small boy tugged his father's sleeve -

and said 'dad, it's just a song, dad, it's just a song'.

Woke up, fell out of bed,

Dragged a comb across my head...

German prangs dad's £275k supercar

Gerry Doyle 1

Same here, only no supercars...

Same long slide, but in a 1985 Corolla hatchback, same very low speed impact, though out of the corner of my eye I could see herself bouncing forward in the seatbelt and the kids in the back doing the same. Anyway, the bonnet crumpled up as it should do, in overly dramatic fashion, wing and headlight went in too, and it was the Garda that 'helped' bend things back that did for the radiator with a crowbar.

The car in front seemed to have little other than a kink where I had hit it.

I cobbled mine back for 250 quid, bonnet, lights, washer bottle, radiator, wing while the other one claimed off her insurance and charged 2,500 to my insurance company.

Boys will be boys though - when I was in school a friend 'borrowed' his brother's Fiat 500 and it was only when I questioned his driving ability that he admitted he had never driven before. I let myself out at that point - once he managed to stop. I heard later he drove it into his front door trying to park it - those brake and gas pedals are so close together on a tiny Fiat and when you combine that with big wide 70s brogues...

While we still don't know what befell the German kid, your man's brother kicked the living shit out of him.

Antarctic ice breakup makes ocean absorb more CO2

Gerry Doyle 1

You never really could see them, but -

...they haven't gone away you know.

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